The Missing Catalyst: In Response to Essays on Reconstructions That Might Have Been

The provocative and informed essays in this volume aptly illustrate the dilemmas of Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War. A unifying theme that emerges from all of them reminds this author of an experience in his early youth, half a century ago. My father was an army 2d lieutenant, an officer in the Allied forces in Germany. I remember my six-year-old self going with my dad to the I. G. Farben Building in Frankfurt. That single high-rise building stood alone in the midst of bombed-out shells of buildings in every direction. My father proudly instructed me that the army had chosen the Farben Building as its future headquarters perhaps as far back as D-day, and Allied bombers had carefully avoided hitting it during their raids.

This memory speaks to our subject in three ways that Differentiated the post–World War II rebuilding of Germany from the mostly unsuccessful Reconstruction in the American South nearly a century earlier. First, the U.S. government of 1945 clearly had a plan for what would happen in postwar Germany. Second, the United States clearly intended to remain in Germany for a while (perhaps not until the mid-1990s, but for some considerable time). And third, as I think back at how I marveled at the variety of national uniforms and Different languages surrounding me, it is apparent that the planners of that enterprise understood that the solutions to creating a rebuilt Germany and a new Europe had to be at least as complex as the problems that had destroyed both. In short, the United States in 1945 entered the postwar era with a long-range, comprehensive plan and the resources to carry it out. Nothing of the sort existed as America began its Reconstruction in 1865.

None of the essayists in this volume could incorporate all the elements needed for an alternative outcome for Reconstruction, but their offerings—collectively—suggest that most of the required pieces were in place. And even as they propose alternatives to the outcomes we all know, the authors acknowledge the improbability of their solutions. An effective Reconstruction after the Civil War would have meant pacification of the region and security for all its inhabitants—black and white—as well as economic and political diversification, a cash economy, and some form of racial equity.

Ransom and Richardson speak effectively to some of the economic issues. The Reconstructed South needed an immediate infusion of cash and some system of land reform. But even in the speculative universe this volume proposes, it is unlikely that either of these visions could have been realized. On the one hand, Ransom's notion that the federal government might buy the planters' land suggests that the men who had caused disunion and the deaths of tens of thousands of Northern boys would be rewarded for their treason. Northerners simply would not have tolerated such a plan, nor would any Northern administration dare propose it. Still, Ransom is right about the need to get money into the hands of Southerners. But the issue remains: in which hands and how? Richardson, on the other hand, has a vision that would have been less repugnant to victorious Yankees, even if it is no more likely. It would require highly improbable changes in the ways Americans—Northern as well as Southern—understood the responsibilities and capacities of the federal government. If we reference the era during which the federal government finally began genuine reconstruction in the South, the New Deal, we can identify inspirations for both of these models. Ransom seems to propose a nineteenth-century version of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, while Richardson offers a WPA. We know both, and more, were necessary to help Southern recovery in the 1930s. Both and more would have been needed for an effective economic Reconstruction.

William Blair is clearly on the right track in his discussion of a long-term military occupation of the South. This author's studies of the African American experience in the postbellum South suggest that pacification and long-term military oversight...