Wars for the American South: The First and Second Reconstructions Considered as Insurgencies

The Civil War did not end when the guns fell silent at Appomattox and Durham Station. It continued, in a different guise, for another decade. True, white southerners had abandoned their attempt to sustain an independent Confederacy, but the Confederacy had been only marginally the creature of a preexisting southern nationalism. Its component states separated from the Union primarily to protect themselves from northern encroachments, especially those that threatened the institution of slavery.¹ The Confederacy was therefore just one of several mechanisms by which white southerners, at various times in the American experience, sought to enact what historian Ulrich B. Phillips would later term “the central theme of Southern history”; that it “shall be and remain a white man’s country.”² Earlier attempts to maintain the South as a white man’s country had played out politically in efforts to shield slavery from challenge—in the debates on the Constitution, in the attempt to balance slave and free states, in efforts to create a selective, self-serving theory of states’ rights, and most dramatically in secession.³ If the Confederacy perished, the determination to maintain white supremacy did not. It would survive for at least another century. Vestiges of that determination linger even to this day.

Although military defeat meant the destruction of slavery, it also meant the genesis of a post-emancipation order whose contours even the victors could not agree upon. Emboldened by divisions in the North, southern conservative whites struggled to gain control over the contours of that order.⁴ The struggle was conducted in the political and economic arenas, but it was also waged through political violence so extensive that historians have begun to view Reconstruction as a “second civil war.”⁵

In this second war, conservative whites prevailed. For the next century they removed black southerners from meaningful participation in political life. They created and remorselessly enforced a system of racial apartheid. And they used violence—sometimes extensive violence—to maintain iron control over the African American labor force. They throttled all significant attempts by black southerners to organize and to carve out for themselves any enclave of economic independence.

It took a second insurgency, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, to end this system. Just as white southerners destroyed the biracial state governments of the Reconstruction era, civil rights activists destroyed the segregationist state governments of the Jim Crow era. The century after Appomattox can therefore be seen as a protracted war for the American South, pitting the forces of white supremacy against those of black liberation.

Both the First and Second Reconstructions were instances of insurgencies hiding in plain sight. But partly because of popular misconceptions about Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement, and partly because of overly constricted conceptions of war, this reality has long gone unrecognized. Only in recent decades have historians begun to see the conservative white “Redemption” of the South as an example of insurgency. The present essay is one of the first attempts to argue that the Civil Rights Movement was also an insurgency. Yet, thanks to the vast and still growing literature on the Civil Rights era, the case for the movement as an insurgency is tacitly already being made. To clinch that case, one need only draw out the implications of that literature.

The concept of war employed in this essay utilizes the idea of revolutionary crisis. The tenets of revolutionary crisis maintain that under ordinary circumstances, a state holds an unchallenged monopoly on the instruments of administration, justice, and military force. Within the state there is an accepted rule set that determines who holds political power (and by extension, economic and social power) and how that power is utilized. The population within the state need not give voluntary assent to this rule set. The key issue is not consent, but obedience.

The power system of even despotic states may allow for incremental modi fications of the rule set within the realm of ordinary politics. Within the American democracy, the scope for such modifications has generally been much larger...