An Alternative to the Tragic Era: Applying the Virtues of Bureaucracy to the Reconstruction Dilemma

Congress's program for reconstructing the South intended to promote a future characterized by racial harmony and economic advancement, but it ended up failing miserably. Although historians have found innumerable faults in the way Congress handled Reconstruction, the essential problem has long been recognized: the ferocious racism of Southern whites.¹ Any program that did not address white racism was doomed to failure. Because whites were a majority in all but two Southern states, they would be able to control politics and, by either state laws or county regulations or local judicial decisions, they could have undone any land redistribution schemes, free labor programs, or white political disfranchisement. Only one way existed to control white racial prejudice: bureaucracy was the only hope for a Reconstruction that promised any future justice to both the black South and the white South. And contemporaries had actually stumbled upon this solution—the Freedmen's Bureau.

African Americans and their Republican allies confronted the social legacy of slavery, and probably Northern Republicans misjudged the legacy's strength. Since at least the 1830s, and probably starting in the 1780s, white Southerners had justified slavery primarily on the basis of the alleged racial inferiority of Africans. For decades, white Southerners had racial ideas drummed into them that Africans were a degraded people who would not work unless coerced and who could not live responsibly in freedom. The question of the origins of these attitudes is not important for Reconstruction history; by 1865 these racial views had become a dominant power in politics and society from which whites obtained economic benefits and psychological rewards. They were not going to disappear because of a land redistribution scheme or any program that offered them simple pecuniary benefits.²

Political Economy and Racial Prejudice

There are many ways to justify the establishment of a bureaucracy to solve an intractable racial problem, but perhaps one of the more potent is to draw out certain implications from the neoclassical economic model. That interpretation of the good society posits the existence of a government that only enforces contracts, secures property rights, and protects the lives of its citizens—the "negative" state. The society maintains itself without undue friction because of the existence of uncoerced trading—that is, the only exchanges made are those in which both participants improve their position (the famous win-win scenario of economics, Pareto optimality.)³

That classical and neoclassical liberalism required some state at all—a police function—is an admission by the theory's formulators that not everyone would obey the central rule of a free market: all trades must be uncoerced for all participants to obtain optimum benefit. Some would violate this criterion by following self-interest to the point of coercing others to make gains for themselves, regardless of coercion's effect on other members in society (and thereby on the overall effectiveness of the economy). To stop those willing to make gains from the use of violence (theft, murder, deceit, etc.), and thereby corrode the effectiveness of the free market, classicals and neoclassicals conceded the need for a bureaucracy—a police force.⁴

Extending this analysis a little further demonstrates that a basic assumption about human beings in general governs the neoclassical view of bureaucracy. First, the proposition that the negative state is a viable framework for society derives from the neoclassicals' faith that the mechanism of uncoerced exchanges will satisfy the material desires of the vast majority of any society's population, so that resort to criminal activity carries too much risk to be attempted. Thus a small bureaucracy may be necessary to contain the few misfits that any large population will produce; but the police function should never grow large enough to endanger political and economic freedom because the vast majority will live in the sunshine of Pareto optimality. But the analysis proceeds from...