Eric Foner

Eric Foner writes brilliant nonfiction focused on the era of Civil War and Reconstruction in America. As a professor at Columbia University, his writing is scholarly, smart, focused, and researched. In this book, he focuses on Abraham Lincoln's personal and political journey in addressing slavery. This was fascinating to me and revealed Lincoln in a new way. As Americans, we are all used to revering Lincoln as the man who brought down slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation (which freed show more the enslaved in the rebellious confederate states) and the 13th Amendment (abolishing slavery everywhere in America), but this book firmly grounds Lincoln as a human being whose personal opinions grew over time and whose political views sometimes took a front seat over his personal beliefs.

Lincoln was always personally against slavery, but this does not mean he didn't espouse some of the racist views of his times. For instance, for a large part of his life, he couldn't envision Blacks having any sort of equality with white Americans. He was very intrigued with the idea of recolonizing all Blacks, freed and the currently enslaved, to a new home country in Africa or Central America. I also learned that many of his policies, especially during his early political career and first term as President, were heavily influenced by the desire to keep the country together. He supported gradual emancipation, envisioning a system of apprenticeship for freed slaves and having the U.S. government reimburse slave-owners (no thought of reimbursing the enslaved, of course). During the Civil War, the border states, who had a high percentage of slaves and slave-owners but who did not secede from the Union, were appeased over and over. Those enslaved were not included in the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln really wanted each state to provide its own plan for freeing the enslaved. Like the vast majority of the rest of the country, though, he continued to have a hard time envisioning Blacks as full citizens. He believed they were entitled to the basic rights outlined in the Declaration of Independence, but likely was only starting to see a path to true equality when he was assassinated.

What I loved about this book is that Foner presents Lincoln's views in a balanced manner. He doesn't revere Lincoln blindly. He shows that Lincoln was ahead of his time in terms of the will to end slavery and the belief that slavery was a great wrong, but that Lincoln was also a product of his times and we shouldn't assume that he had a 21st century idea of equality. What is so impressive about Lincoln, a quality that shines through in this book, is his ability to change and grow his ideas. Lincoln was a thinker and a listener. He surrounded himself with people who would challenge him in both political directions, forcing him to truly think through his beliefs and how to best act on them. These are the reasons to respect and, yes, revere, Lincoln. This book does an impressive job of showing how his beliefs grew over time and make it even more depressing that he wasn't the one to lead our country through Reconstruction. If he had been the guiding voice, I wonder how different our country would be today. I feel strongly that it would be wildly different and for the better.

This is a book to read after you already know a bit about the history of the era. I highly recommend it. I highlighted many passages and learned so much. show less

My idea of a perfect dinner party would be to have Eric Foner there. Just him alone would be fine. And I wouldn’t have to say a word, I would just ask him to talk. This book is the next-best thing; in fact, it’s better, because you don’t even have to cook! You can just open it and read his thoughts on a variety of important topics.

Eric Foner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, and the leading historian of America’s Reconstruction Era. He is also intellectually dazzling, and both show more wise and endlessly interesting. I have read all his books, taken his courses online, and now am delighted to read this collection of essays by him that are reprinted from “The Nation” Magazine, and that were published from 1977 to 2017. Even though I was familiar with many of them, he is so excellent that one can just never read him too much or too often.

The book begins with an introduction by Randall Kennedy, the renowned Harvard intellectual, who summarizes much of Foner’s more salient insights on both the politics of history and the politics of race.

Foner reminds us that historical accounts and representations of the past, such as those curated in museums, stake a claim in a very contested terrain, because what we remember about our history helps form our ideas about who we are as a people. Furthermore, the selection of which documents, pictures, statues or other representations of our past are displayed and which are omitted are critically important to that process.

It is ironic that museums have been regarded as “neutral” or “value-free” reflections of cultural heritage, because in fact, they are anything but.

Objects and ideas are selected to sustain certain myths and ideologies, valorizing them over those that are ignored. They in turn generate a cultural consciousness: this is what we “remember” and this is what we take to be “historical truth.” The form and structures of these remembrances are simultaneously a deliberate designation of what we choose to forget.

As Foner avers, “[u]ltimately, public monuments are built by those with sufficient power to determine which parts of history are worth commemorating and what vision of history ought to be conveyed.”

Foner rails against “the amnesia, evasions and misrepresentations” of popular history, particularly in the area of racial conflict. He notes that “[t]hroughout our history, contemporary political problems and commitments have shaped the questions Americans asked about their past and the answers they found.”

He looks not only at museums but also at the docudrama, observing astutely that “the fact that individual action is highlighted and collective action ignored is not simply a consequence of the small screen. Even more, one suspects, it reflects the persistent hold of that peculiarly American strand of individualism on the writers.”

Here he is making the point that a story of individual initiative is one of the ways in which a more threatening narrative of a social movement (especially one that is minority-led) is watered down to conform to the myth of the American Dream, in which any hard-working, courageous person has an equal chance to make a difference and/or to succeed in the American society and economy.

But, as he points out that the intellectual Eric Hobsbawm warned, “studies of the agency of ordinary people, so important in expanding the cast of historical characters, must be placed in the broader context of how social and political power is exercised.”

The fact that these stories rarely are put into a broader social and economic context offers a “meta” lesson about the political ends of carefully shaped narratives couched as “histories.” In addition to telling a story about a specific person, they subtly confer a certain authority or legitimacy upon what is actually a specific set of values, norms, and perspectives that in turn affects popular reactions to events.

In his essay reviewing the work of James W. Loewen (author of books such as “Lies My Teacher Told Me and “Teaching What Really Happened”) Foner singles out tours of historic plantations as a good example of selective memory. He argues that they “ignore or sugarcoat the lives of slaves. No whips, chains or other artifacts of discipline are on display, and presentations by guides focus on the furniture, gardens and architecture rather than the role of slave labor in creating the wealth they represent.” [We found this to be true on a recent tour of George Washington’s Mt. Vernon, where Washington’s slaves were described as Washington’s “servants.”]

Not only is slavery elided whenever possible, he charges, but also the slave trade, “a central element of the pre-Civil War Southern economy,” is generally omitted from public histories. And most germane to Foner’s primary field of study, “Reconstruction …is almost invisible in America’s public history.” To the extent it is covered, it is done so in a way that twists the truth. The history often told (“a time of rampant corruption presided over by unscrupulous Northern carpetbaggers and former slaves unprepared of the freedom that had been thrust upon them”) is an erroneous one that “helped to justify the subsequent policies of segregation and black disfranchisement in the South and the North’s prolonged indifference to white Southerner’s nullification of the federal Constitution.”

He holds that opponents of equality changed the narrative to one of a federal bureaucracy trampling on the rights of white citizens in favor of those who were lazy, incompetent, and bent on defiling white women. (Here Foner laments the irony of that canard, when so many slave women were sexually assaulted by their white masters. Nevertheless, in the South, as he charges, the accusation of rape of a white woman by a black man, rarely substantiated, was enough to motivate a lynching.)

What Foner wants readers to know is that whiteness has an economic value, and that value has underlaid much of the history of race in America, albeit in an unacknowledged way.

Similarly, he emphasizes, “American radicalism is generally excised from public history.” He cites historian Charles Beard, who taught that American history had been shaped by the struggle of competing economic groups. But you don’t read about that in most history books. He applauds Bernie Sanders for bringing back a recognition of the importance of economic structures for the exercise of power in politics, but regrets that Sanders draws upon the experience of European socialists more than that of homegrown American radicals.

Other topics include social Darwinism (remarkably persistent, and especially popular now among the Alt-Right), affirmative action, the Electoral college, Lincoln and his personal growth on the issue of slavery, the uses of the memory of Lincoln, the 14th Amendment, a particularly astute analysis of Barack Obama and his presidency, and September 11 and the anti-Arab, “clash of civilizations” mentality that has gained so much popularity, and according to which western civilization is superior. (He reminds us: “The definition of ‘Western civilization’ is highly selective - it includes the Enlightenment but not the Inquisition, liberalism but not the Holocaust, Charles Darwin but not the Salem witch trials.”)

He concludes: “History does inform the present, and it should. That’s what I mean by a useable past: a historical consciousness that can enable us to address the problems of society today in an intelligent manner.”

Evaluation: Anyone not already familiar with the breadth and depth of Foner’s ideas will get an excellent overview from this wonderful and all-too-brief collection of essays. They have been chosen well: even the older essays remain relevant and important in light of current events. show less

A buddy read with my dad. This definitely felt like the definitive work on the subject that we were looking for -- thorough but focused, careful and methodical. Its only drawback is just that the period is SO DAMN DEPRESSING. Especially toward the end when Republicans' best intentions started falling apart and shifted to hopelessness or victim blaming instead.

It's really not just the fuckheads out there putting on the white hoods, but the Governors and legislators saying "but look how much show more they (the KKK) do for their communities!" And the moderates saying the Enforcement laws were uncalled for, that the problems of the South should be fixed by the South. The folks in DC who got tired of hearing about the Klan every week, "We passed the 15th amendment! They should vote themselves out of the problem!"

Of course all of it would be less painful to read if it didn't still have so much to say about today. About leaders who talk about "very fine people" in crowds of violent white supremacists, refusing to denounce their violence. About an entire political party that is all too willing to associate itself with a belief in the illegitimacy of government itself. About the limited capacity of ALL OF US to stay engaged with a crisis long term. To get to a point where, rather than just taking a break to refill our cups, we say "WE HAVE DONE ENOUGH. I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT RACE EVER AGAIN."

Ahem. In short, an incredibly important and depressingly still timely read. show less

Short summary:
Scholarly, essential reading for the period of 1863-1877 in America, a time of extraordinary liberal progress, but which was met with inevitable backlash and thus an “unfinished revolution,” as author Eric Foner puts it. The shameful Jim Crow period which followed lasted for nearly a century, until the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s, and there are many elements of the struggle described here around racism and voter suppression that are still highly relevant in 2022. show more Particularly insidious were southern revisionist historians rewriting history as part of the mythology of the “lost cause,” a rare instance when the losers of a war wrote the history, and describing the period of Reconstruction as a disaster because African-Americans were voted into office and incompetent, when the reality was opposite. The value of this book being published in 1988 can’t be underestimated as it began setting the record straight, and it did so in a factual, balanced way.

Details:
It was thrilling to read of the brilliant string of progressivism after the war: the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments (dealing with slavery, due process, and male suffrage), the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Reconstruction Act of 1867, and the Enforcement Acts of 1870-71. The advances during this period (much of which was taken away) is astonishing – blacks dominating the legislature in South Carolina, black chiefs of police in Tallahassee and Little Rock, the intermingling of the races in New Orleans, and Texas barring railroads from segregating passengers. I found that heroes in Charles Sumner (Senator, Mass.), Thaddeus Stevens (Congressman, Penn.), and Lyman Trumbull (Senator, Ill.) for pushing ideas that were considered radical in their day. I also found heroes in black elected representatives like Benjamin S. Turner (Congressman, Alabama), Robert Smalls (Congressman, South Carolina, and Civil War hero), and Robert Elliott (Congressman, South Carolina). Foner did a great job of describing the struggle and politicking between parties and within each party to get progressive legislation passed. He wrote:

“Biracial democratic government, a thing unknown in American history, was functioning effectively in many parts of the South. Men only recently released from bondage cast ballots and sat on juries, and, in the Deep South, enjoyed an increasing share of authority at the State level, while the conservative oligarchy that had dominated Southern government from colonial times to 1867 found itself largely excluded from power. Public facilities had been rebuilt and expanded, school systems established, and tax codes modernized. … Reconstruction had nipped in the bud the attempt to substitute a legalized system of labor discipline for the coercion of slavery, and enhanced blacks’ bargaining power on the plantations.”

He notes the dramatic expansion of the federal government in this period, and in a great insight “that freedom stood in greater danger of abridgement from local than national authority (a startling reversal of the founding fathers’ belief, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that centralized power posed the major threat to individual liberties.” And yet, the founders did not consider the rights of non-white men. Still, it’s hard to fathom the shift, from a time when most functions of the government were handled at a state or local level, and the federal government was “in a state of impotence.”

It was of course equally disheartening to read in great detail the backlash to this progress and the ugly racism that accompanied it. The level of violence and terrorism from white people was incredible. Excerpts could be extracted by the dozen, but to Foner’s credit, he refrained from making these events the sole focus of his book or sensationalizing them. Just a couple of examples:

“Texas courts indicted some 500 white men for the murder of blacks in 1865 and 1866, but not one was convicted. ‘No white man in that state has been punished for murder since it revolted from Mexico,’ commented a Northern visitor. ‘Murder is considered one of their inalienable state rights.’”

“The basic problem, concluded Col. Samuel Thomas, who directed the [Freedmen’s] Bureau in Mississippi in 1865, was that white public opinion could not “conceive of the negro having any rights at all”: “Men, who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors, will cheat a negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor; to kill a negro they do not deem murder; to debauch a negro woman they do not think fornication; to take property away from a negro they do not deem robbery… They still have the ingrained feeling that the black people at large belong to the white people.”

In the antithesis of the American Revolution and the principle of democracy, North Carolina Governor Worth said that “Universal suffrage – government by mere numbers – I regard as undermining civilization,” and all political mattes were trivial compared to the overriding question: “Shall this country be ruled by the whites or the niggers?”

The section on the Ku Klux Klan, who spread a “wave of counterrevolutionary terror” that “lacked a counterpart either in the American experience or in that of the other Western Hemisphere societies that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century” is particularly strong. “To blacks, indeed, the violence seemed an irrefutable denial of the white South’s much-trumpeted claims to superior morality and higher civilization. ‘Pray tell me,’ asked Robert B. Elliott, ‘who is the barbarian here?’”

Foner also makes this insightful comment, based on the data:
"Contemporary Democrats [at that time], echoed by subsequent scholars, often attributed the Klan’s sadistic campaign of terror to the fears and prejudices of poorer whites. … The evidence, however, will not sustain such an interpretation. … Usually, the Klan crossed class lines. If ordinary farmers and laborers constituted the bulk of the membership, and energetic ‘young bloods’ were more likely to conduct midnight raids than middle-aged planters and lawyers, ‘respectable citizens’ chose the targets and often participated in the brutality.”

This included extraordinary levels of violence at the polls, necessary in some places to ensure Democratic victory, and which plunged black voting levels from their post-war highs of 90+%, causing one writer to comment that “a revolution has taken place – by force of arms – and a race are disenfranchised – they are to be returned to condition of serfdom – an era of second slavery.”

Balance:
Such a read is invaluable not only because it bears witness and fleshes out details, but also because it gives us the nuances in views throughout the country, both North and South. Only five states, all in New England, allowed blacks to vote on the same terms as whites prior to the 13th Amendment, and “the majority of Republicans were not Radicals but moderates and conservatives who resented the ‘element that seem to have the negro on the brain all the time.’” It threatened to divide the party. Meanwhile, residents of the mountainous country of the south, wrote one Unionist, were not “afraid of negro equality,” if “rebel superiority” was the alternative.

Rather than laud the role African-Americans had played in building the wealth of the country, and give them land plots as a form of retribution (out of 850,000 acres of abandoned land the Freedman’s Bureau had its disposal, or Thaddeus Stevens’ call to seize 400,000,000 acres belonging to the wealthiest 10% of Southerners and distribute it), most complained of their indolence and “Few Northerners involved in black education could rise above the conviction that slavery had produced a “degraded” people, in dire need of instruction in frugality, temperance, honesty, and the dignity of labor. Rare indeed was ‘The Freedman’s Book,’ a primer written by abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, that sought to develop a sense of racial pride through brief biographies of black figures from Benjamin Banneker and Frederick Douglass to Toussaint L’Ouverture.”

The North is certainly not presented in a rosy light here, and Foner devotes time to explaining how big business and its “Indian policy” was essentially to “surrender most of their land and cease to be Indians,” the Dominican Republican was annexed in a very unsavory manner, and massive corruption reigned, along with the bane of democracy – lobbyists. “The Supreme Court repeatedly prevented municipalities from repudiating railroad-aid bonds even when evidence came to light that bribery accounted for their being issued,” Foner writes, and “Blacks could not help noting the contrast between such largesse [100 million acres of land and millions of dollars of aid to support railroad construction] and failure to provide freedmen with land.”

There was great debate over stronger and weaker versions of the 15th Amendment, with the result being one that it did not prohibit literacy tests, and did not break with the idea that voting was a privilege. In the South, Democrats were ascending and violently pushing back on Reconstruction, while in the North, politicians wanted to retain their own local qualifications, and in the West, Chinese-Americans could not vote – to say nothing of women, who were denied entirely. How regrettable was it to read that feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton voiced racist and elitist bile while arguing for women’s suffrage during this period!

Meanwhile, in Foner’s view, President Johnson also made the “most blatantly racist pronouncement ever to appear in an official state paper of an American President,” when in his December, 1867 annual message to Congress, he insisted that black people possessed less “capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.”

The Supreme Court was retrograde in this period as well – and viewed today much as how the current one will be viewed by history. One example is the 1876 decision in U.S. v Cruikshank, which arose from the Colfax massacre, which “rendered national prosecution of crimes against blacks virtually impossible, and gave a green light to acts of terror where local officials either could not or would not enforce the law.” As a small criticism, it seemed like Foner could have devoted more time to explaining how this 3rd branch of American power had come to be assembled, as he does with the Congressional and Presidential elections.

Some parallels to today:
Keep in mind for all of them that the parties have swapped relative to progressivism; the Democrats in this period are the Republicans of today, and vice-versa:

- On presidential behavior: the polar opposite of Lincoln in personality, Andrew Johnson made decisions in isolation and had little sensitivity to the views of others. Ala Donald Trump, when a heckler yelled “hang Jeff Davis” at a political rally, Johnson replied, “Why not hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips?” He also “indulged his unique blend of self-aggrandizement and self-pity. On one occasion, he intimated that Providence had removed Lincoln to elevate Johnson himself to the White House. At St. Louis, he blamed Congress for instigating the New Orleans riot and unleashed a ‘muddled tirade’ against his opponents: “I have been traduced, I have been slandered, I have been maligned….” If that doesn’t sound like President #45, I don’t know what does.

- On fake news, ala Fox: “Southern newspapers consistently misinformed their readers about Northern politics, overestimating the strength of the National Union movement, portraying Johnson’s opponents as a band of Radical fanatics who lacked broad popular support, and predicting Congress could not possibly do the things it then proceeded to do.”

- On a bitterly divided political climate: “Democracy, it has been said, functions best when politics does not directly mirror deep social divisions, and each side can accept the victory of the other because both share many values and defeat does not imply ‘a fatal surrender of…vital interests.’ This was the situation in the North, where an Alabama Republican observed, ‘it matters not who is elected.’ But too much was at stake in Reconstruction for ‘normal politics’ to prevail.” And sadly, while a former Confederate officer shrewdly observed, it was precisely the Klan’s objective “to defy the reconstructed State Governments, to treat them with contempt, and show that they have no real existence,” acting as if conducting a revolution, “Republicans typically sought stability through conciliation,” which was a mistake morally as well as politically.

- On the rich avoiding taxes, and income disparity: There were heavy poll taxes on freedmen, and extremely low taxes on property owners in the south. Meanwhile, in the north, “Despite widespread prosperity, the unprecedented fortunes accumulated by the nation’s captains of commerce and industry helped create one of the highest levels of income inequality in all of American history.” … “Even Rochester railroad president Isaac Butts identified the concentration of wealth ‘in fewer and fewer hands’ as the nations’ most serious problem.” … something the periodical The Nation called “the great curse of the Old World – the division of society into classes.” Gee, doesn’t that sound familiar.

- On public education and charter schools: “…the governor [of North Carolina] feared that if white children were educated at public expense, ‘we will be required to educate the negroes in like manner.’ To avoid having to expend public monies on black education, Worth and his legislature authorized localities to establish tax-supported private academies, risking, as one ally warned, ‘the entire alienation of the poorer class’ of whites, and destroying the South’s only extensive system of public education.” The connection to the charter schools of today is uncanny. Schooling became a “major casualty” of Democratic rule, with Virginia being an exception.

- On blacks being taken for granted by their party: “Already, blacks confronted a political dilemma that would plague them throughout Reconstruction – their very unanimity as Republicans meant their ballots could be taken for granted by party leaders seeking the white vote.” – which is still true today.

- On controlling the vote: gerrymandering “ensured Democratic control, reduced the number of polling places in black precincts, empowered the legislature to appoint local governments, and barred from voting all those who had failed to pay a poll tax or been convicted of petty larceny,” precisely the same techniques we see to this day.

- On originalism and fear mongering: the Democratic party was “a party of negations,” with a “potent cry of white supremacy,” and called to originalism even though it implied a system of apartheid in the country, despite the good in the revolutionary documents. “The Union as It Is – the Constitution as It Was,” was the Democratic slogan. Fear mongering over black men raping white women and miscegenation, replacing “pure blood” and changing the racial dynamic of the country abounded, similar to a country whose conservatives now fear the inevitable day when its white populace will be in the minority. One of the best responses to this incessant fear of racial mingling was from a black delegate in Georgia, who pointing out that the “purity of blood” lauded by their opponents had “already been somewhat interfered with” by planters assaulting or cohabitating with female slaves.”

- On reaction to economic crisis: The original “Great Depression” was a downturn that started with the Panic of 1873 and lasted nearly to the end of the century (and the 65 months of contraction before it hit bottom in 1878 remains the longest uninterrupted such period in American history). The results were predictable, and mirror other such periods (such as our own), with the progressive side calling for socialistic reform, and business interests (often controlling newspapers) calling for union busting and even having the gall to view the Depression as “not an unmixed evil, since it promised to lower wages, discipline labor, and curb the power of unions.” Meanwhile, voters reacted to hard times by turning against the party in power.

- On the wrong kind of reparations: the insane idea that slaveholders should be compensated for the liberation of the people they had kept as property, an idea that persists in far-right circles to this day, to which radical Henry Winter Davis of Maryland said “Their compensation is the cleared lands of all Southern Maryland, where everything that smiles and blossoms is the work of the Negro that they tore from Africa.”

- On “good people on both sides”: Foner points out that aside from direct participation in the Ku Klux Klan from all classes in the south, it had tacit approval from those who remained silent and spoke of the “good” the organization accomplished despite its “excesses,” strongly opposing Federal intervention, which reminded me of the position Trump took in response to Charlottesville.

Wrapping up:
In addition to the thorough research and his devotion to the unbiased truth, a part of what makes Foner such a great historian is that he takes the broader view of these events. He makes observations like “liberal reformers were increasingly obsessed by the same dilemma with which men like Madison had wrestled a century earlier – how to reconcile private property with political democracy.” There is wisdom in his analysis of the Emancipation Proclamation, that it was Lincoln’s attempt to find a middle ground and not alienate Southern Unionists, but at the same time, initiate the emancipation process in a way that was “legally unassailable,” which may answer modern criticisms of Lincoln’s morality. He says quite simply and factually that the Democratic Party was devoted to two things: white supremacy and labor control, and it’s a history that must be confronted.

As a criticism, sometimes it seems the nuggets of gold and key takeaways are buried within the text, instead of being highlighted by Foner. This is quite a tome at 600+ pages and extremely detailed, which may be intimidating for those who want to learn about this time period outside of a college history course.

A good companion reader would be James Lowen’s “The Confederate Reader,” which contains documents in the form of speeches, articles, and laws in this period which make it clear that slavery was the reason for secession, and after losing the war, white supremacy the goal in the Jim Crow south. A fictional work that makes for a good companion read is W.E.B. Du Bois’ “The Quest of the Sliver Fleece,” as it deals well with the political and economic forces of the period, in addition to prevailing social attitudes. show less