Southern Reconstruction by Philip Leigh (review)

Imagine that we had forgotten who ruled Germany before the end of World War II. In that case, neo-Nazi scholarship might easily cast the victorious occupying power that tried to plant democracy there as despotic and vengeful because externally imposed regime change always is chaotic and unpredictable and requires force. But we have never forgotten who was ultimately to blame for the hardships of the German people, and we have been mostly impervious to mischievous narratives suggesting otherwise. Pangs of guilt do not rack our democratic conscience because Yankee bayonets remain there even today. Rather we believe that the German nation is better and happier because American bayonets arrived and stayed.

Yet in the United States, we have lost sight of the most crucial circumstances of our most important war and its aftermath. As a result, our fundamental sense of ourselves as a nation is still badly defective. The most significant problem in our scholarly and popular understandings of the Civil War and Reconstruction since the end of Reconstruction is that we have forgotten precisely who ruled the antebellum South, how they ruled, and how to study regime change. These lapses in historical memory and political analysis explain why the neo-Confederate apologetics found in Philip Leigh's Southern Reconstruction are still taken seriously. Leigh writes from the principled perspective of free trade and libertarianism, which merits no scholarly criticism, but he apparently finds his libertarian paradise in the antebellum South, which does. The proud rulers of the antebellum South were no friends of popular liberty and would have crushed Leigh's gullible audience underfoot. Hence, Leigh's analysis of southern Reconstruction proceeds from a major error of omission, mortally wounding his argument from the start.

Leigh's interpretation of Reconstruction is faithful to the Dunning school, updated for our times. The book's thesis is that the greedy, corrupt, and power-hungry Republican managers of "carpetbag Reconstruction" ruined the South (p. 59). The thirteen chapters are chronologically divided, each often emphasizing a different form of rapacity: "Carpetbagged" (chapter 5), "Railroaded" (chapter 6), and "Corrupted" (chapter 7). We hear that Abraham Lincoln intended to be lenient and that he was no principled friend of emancipation or civil rights; that Andrew Johnson intended to faithfully continue Lincoln's policy and hewed closely to the Constitution, and that both did their best to oppose the constitutionally unmoored malefactors in Congress; and that carpetbag governments ransacked southern treasuries, misled the emancipated, and used the tax power to seize land.

The author complains that modern histories of Reconstruction "concentrate almost exclusively on race" (p. ix). But he seems to want to say quite a bit about race himself, including a jarring defense of the infamous Black Codes. Sometimes he deflects the anticipated charge of postbellum southern racism by pointing out that the North or the whole nation was racist, too. White southerners are never seen as the blatant instigators of the massacres in New Orleans, Hamburg, South Carolina, Memphis, Tennessee, or Colfax, Louisiana, despite lopsided body counts. Black Union Leagues prompted the formation of the Ku Klux Klan. The two organizations hardly differed, this book contends.

Such problems mar an excellent analysis of postbellum monetary, fiscal, and trade policies that do seem to have done little to help the South. But we cannot understand the postbellum South, even in the economic dimension, or the rationale behind those national policies unless we first pin down the fundamental political character of the South before the war and how the managers of Reconstruction aimed to change that character.

Leigh mostly uses older scholarly literature and a surprising number of blogs. This does no injury. The major findings of the last thirty years are not useful to his argument.