Writing Reconstruction: Race and "Visualist Ideology" in Whitelaw Reid's After the War

Writing Reconstruction: Race and "Visualist Ideology" in Whitelaw Reid's After the War Lori Robison In May of 1865, war correspondent Whitelaw Reid began a tour of the South with Chief Justice Chase and other members of the Johnson administration in order to "learn as much as possible, from actual observation, of the true condition of the [South]" (xxiii). After completing this official tour, Reid continued to travel through and record his observations of the region, and in May of the following year he published After the War: A Tour of the Southern States 1865-1866, one of the most famous—perhaps because of its official nature—of many journalistic accounts of Reconstruction .1 This almost six-hundred-page document describes Reid's year of travel and offers political commentary along the way. Intended for a Northern audience that knew very little about the region, Reid's text was produced to aid the nation as it determined the fitness of the newly freed slaves for the duties of citizenship and as it determined the terms under which the South could re-establish its membership in the nation. While Reid's text has continued to be read as a source of information about the post-war South, my interest is in reading After the War as a narrative. Like fiction, ethnography, and travel-writing, this text is constructed through specific rhetorical conventions—rhetorical conventions that betray ideoJNT : Journal of Narrative Theory 29.1 (Winter 1999): 85-109. Copyright© 1999 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 86 JNT logical commitments. If we do not approach Reid's account merely as a straight-forward record of the condition of the post-war South, if instead we approach it as a text that actively participates in the creation of its culture and in the debates surrounding race, region, and Reconstruction, I believe that we can learn a great deal about the manner in which nineteenthcentury America approached racial difference. Thus by focusing here on the discursive strategies Reid employs, I am interested, ultimately, in uncovering the extent to which narrative conventions from this historical period served, and in fact produced, the institutionalized racism that marked the post-Reconstruction period. The period of national Reconstruction was, as historian Eric Foner has recently pointed out, a critical, productive, and even revolutionary period in American political life. Reconstruction witnessed the "emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and a new set of purposes , including an unprecedented commitment to the ideal of a national citizenship whose equal rights belonged to all Americans regardless of race" (Foner xxvi). This promise of an expanded "ideal of national citizenship " diminished, however, very quickly and was in fact completely dismantled by the last decade of the nineteenth century. In 1883 the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, insisting that African Americans must, in the words of Joseph P. Bradley's majority opinion, "cease to be the special favorite of the laws" (qtd. in Foner 587). By the time Plessy v. Ferguson was decided and the doctrine of "separate but equal" established, "segregation had been written into the laws of every Southern state except the Carolinas and Virginia" (Ayers 144). Remarkably, within twenty years Reconstruction's social and political reforms had been reversed. The mechanisms for this reversal are revealed through the popular culture of the time.2 Novels, plays, and stories told narratives that depicted and precipitated regional reconciliation: Northern and Southern characters were married through romance plots, and nostalgic stories set in an aristocratic antebellum South took hold of the national imagination. But these narratives also contained racial hegemony. As narratives depicting a romantic, antebellum South represented African Americans as happy servants who neither desired nor deserved freedom, the rights of African Americans were sacrificed to national reunification. Increasingly too, the egalitarian goals and gains of Reconstruction itself were obscured by popular representations of the period. Reconstruction, Writing Reconstruction 87 through traditional historical research as well as through popular culture, was revised into a "sordid period" of "unscrupulous 'carpetbaggers' from the North, unprincipled Southern white 'scalawags,' and ignorant freedmen " (Foner xii).3 This well-known narrative, of a post-war white South beleaguered by a vengeful...