Vol. 80/No. 40      October 24, 2016

 
(Books of the Month column)

Overthrow of Radical Reconstruction secured
capitalist rule

 
The excerpt below is from “Two Lessons of Reconstruction,” a chapter in America’s Revolutionary Heritage, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for October. In it George Novack discusses the shifting class alliances in the Civil War — the Second American Revolution — which defeated the slavocracy in the South, and the ensuing counterrevolution against Radical Reconstruction that was necessary to consolidate capitalist rule in the United States. Karl Marx wrote in 1877 that the resistance of Blacks to the overthrow of Reconstruction and of western farmers to being driven off the land, along with national strikes of rail workers pointed to the bloc of class forces that will make a proletarian revolution in the U.S. Copyright © 1971 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY GEORGE NOVACK  
Following Lee’s surrender to Grant early in 1865, it was easily possible to proceed to a thoroughgoing renovation of the South along democratic lines. The former slaveholding potentates had been militarily beaten, economically and politically dispossessed, and were so disgraced and demoralized they could offer no serious political or physical resistance.

At that juncture there were only two real powers in the South. First and foremost was the federal government headed by the Republican Party and controlled by the industrial capitalists. They were the conquerors and the directors of the occupying forces. They had not only the military power but, what was more important, the confidence and allegiance of the progressive forces throughout the country.

The other power was the might of the aroused masses headed by the four million ex-slaves with their allies among the small farmers and poor whites. If these two powers had marched along together down freedom’s road, they would have constituted an invincible combination.

But something quite different resulted. What started out, at the close of the Civil War, as an alliance between the northern men of means and the black and white plebeians of the South against the landed aristocracy terminated in 1876 with a union between the capitalist magnates and the planters against the southern masses and their Negro vanguard.

The eleven years of Reconstruction fall into three main stages: (1) the years 1865–66, when the revolution in the South was arrested by the conservative northern bourgeoisie, marked time, and missed its most favorable opportunities; (2) the years of revolutionary resurgence from 1867 to the early 1870s, when the Radical Republicans gained full command of the situation at Washington and joined with the Negro masses and their white allies to institute through armed force the first and only democratic regime in the South; (3) the years of revolutionary recession ending with 1876, when northern capitalism definitively broke with the southern masses, threw its decisive weight against their struggles, and finally concluded a pact with the planters which sealed the fate of the revolution and reestablished the white supremacists in the South.

The various elements in the antislavery coalition were animated by different and at times conflicting interests and purposes. The main driving force of the revolutionary movement emanated from the four million former slaves in the South. They wanted relief from age-old oppression and insufferable exploitation. They desired land, jobs, a decent living, civil rights and political power as represented by the vote, legal and racial equality, educational and cultural opportunities. These demands were eloquently voiced during the canvass for the Constitutional Convention of 1867 by a Negro voter at Selma, Alabama, who held up a red (Radical) ticket and shouted: “Forty acres of land! A mule! Freedom! Votes! Equal of white man!”

These measures necessitated turning the entire structure of the old South upside down. The confiscation of the land owned by the big proprietors, its partition and distribution among the landless laborers, meant an agrarian revolution. The ballot and freedom of organization meant the transference of political power into Negro hands, especially in states where they were the majority. Ex-slaves on an equal footing with their former owners and taskmasters meant undermining the pyramid of class rule and privilege.

The northern rulers had different aims, now that they had been lifted to the top by the antislavery movement. The triumphant capitalists wanted to perpetuate their grip upon the national government, increase their control over industry and agriculture, and grab the natural resources. In order to promote this program their political representatives had to maneuver with the other forces in the country. On the right, they had to prevent the revival of the political influence of the southern planters and their northern accomplice, the Democratic Party. On the left, they had to curb the demands of the lower classes, North or South. The Republican bourgeoisie was willing to use any of these other classes as tools in the furtherance of its own aims, but was determined to keep them all in a subordinate position.

Most of the Republican leaders had been reluctant to emancipate the slaves; during the Civil War they had tried to keep Negroes in the background and even out of the Union army. Now that the menace of the Confederacy had been eliminated, the Republican bourgeoisie sought to hold the Negroes on a leash, lest they overstep the bounds of bourgeois proprieties. …

While the Republicans debated how much — or how little — liberty they could safely extend to them, the Negroes voiced demands, not only for themselves but for the whole people, for free public education, correction of criminal codes, and many other reforms which far outstripped the ideas and intentions of the northern overlords. Throughout the South, Negroes took the lead in establishing and extending the power of the masses and instituting democratic forms of administration.

As they became more independent and formidable, determined to carry democratization to its limits, they not only terrified the planters but alienated their northern patrons. Just as the northern capitalists held down the industrial workers and small producers in the North and West, so they strove to keep in their place the black agricultural toilers of the South.  
 
 
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