Helen Andrews's Revisionism of Du Bois's Black Reconstruction
How Helen Andrews completely and astonishingly misses the point of Black Reconstruction
Recently a friend forwarded me Helen Andrews’s recent essay on W.E.B Du Bois’s seminal Black Reconstruction. I was curious to learn of the charges of which Andrews accuses Du Bois. After all, calling Du Bois’s classic a “farrago of distortions” is a powerful indictment.
Sadly, all I found was a partisan shriek in the wind, not even on the level of the monographs published by the Lost Cause historians in opposition to Du Bois. Andrews’s essay only superficially engages with Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and misses its main thesis and point so completely that she may not have even read the book.
First, Andrews charges that Black Reconstruction “is not the sort of book any scholar would want as the foundation of a new interpretive school” because, according to Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis, “[Du Bois] only consulted limited sources and did no archival research, an omission that ‘disturbed many scholars.’”1 This charge stood as among the most egregious considering that there is scant historical material from the perspective of the Reconstruction black freedman, Du Bois’s main historical subject. As Du Bois writes, “Little effort has been made to preserve the records of Negro effort and speeches, actions, work and wages, homes and families. Nearly all this has gone down beneath a mass of ridicule and caricature, deliberate omission and misstatement… The loss today is irreparable, and this present study limps and gropes in darkness, lacking most essentials to a complete picture…”2. And what primary sources from the freedman’s perspective that still remained were inaccessible. Du Bois’s lack of access to primary sources is corroborated by the experiences of black historians similarly interested in the experiences of Black Americans during reconstruction:
“As the experiences of John Hope Franklin, Margaret Rowley, and Helen Edmunds, among many professional African-American historians of the South, attest, before the Civil Rights Era it was rarely possible for them to gain access to such records. When they did, the circumstances were unique and the conditions of access segregated and usually deplorable. It is hard to imagine Du Bois motoring from ‘white’ court house to campus entreating entry of red-faced custodians or even, should he even be admitted, agreeing to remain out of sight in small, windowless back rooms pouring over records.”3
It is surprising that Andrews omits Lewis’s critical passage about the immense difficulties of black historians to find primary sources while still quoting him on how disturbed many scholars were by Du Bois’s alleged lack of primary sources — especially considering both the passage and the quote are not only in the same essay, but only a page apart.
Therefore, Du Bois had to rely on many second-hand sources in order to gain a sufficient understanding of the black worker’s role within Reconstruction. Though this fact should not indict him of laziness or recklessness with respect to historical scholarship. Du Bois made strong use of “government reports, proceedings of state constitutional conventions, unpublished dissertations, and virtually every relevant published monograph.”4 And he made exhaustive use of what sources he could find. For instance, in several of Du Bois’s chapters are exhaustive accounts of state-wide political conventions and their proceedings, votes, and debates. For instance, the South Carolina chapter has an exhaustive account of one of these conventions where topics like debt collection, compulsory education, and land confiscation are discussed.5 Du Bois even requested and received an additional five hundred dollars for help in “mak[ing] the book sufficiently error-proof to withstand ‘a great deal of criticism’” and that “every lapse or mistake as to fact and every date” 6 must be caught and corrected.
Furthermore, to accuse Du Bois of shoddy scholarship because he did not make use of every last primary source, of which few were available from the black freedmen’s perspective during the 1930s, is to fundamentally misunderstand the goal of his historical project. Du Bois was not out to do original research, but interpretation. Du Bois sought to reinterpret the historical literature in the face of a culture that at that point had became completely hostile to the goal of Reconstruction and black emancipation. On the level of historical scholarship, the early-20th century was dominated by the Dunning School of history. Led by Columbia University professor William Dunning and his students, the Dunning School was exceptionally critical of Reconstruction, reserving the harshest critique for Radical Republicans like Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner and gentle sympathy for the conservative elements such as the planter elite, who stood against the machinations of the unholy political alliance between black freedmen and northern carpetbaggers. For thirty years, from around 1900 to 1930, the Dunning School dominated historical discourse surrounding American Reconstruction, orienting American scholars against the attempt towards political and economic enfranchisement for freedmen.
But as Civil War historian Matthew Karp emphasizes, the Dunning School was only an extension of a wider cultural era movement of reinterpreting the Civil War as not a “revolutionary clash of nations but as a somber battle between brothers.”7 Indeed, the decades after the close of Reconstruction in 1876 and 1935 witnessed a blossoming of the Lost Cause narrative, of an underdog South valiantly fighting for its agrarian way of life against a rich and industrial North aiming to impose its industrial “way of life” onto the former. In December of 1890, weeks before Du Bois was to give his commencement speech at Harvard, the city of Richmond unveiled a “sixty-foot equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee”.8 As historian David Blight recounts, highbrow late-19th century magazines such as Century “published hundreds of articles lavishly illustrated with engravings, drawings (many made from photographs), and maps” in the 1880s and 1890s to tell the stories of soldiers who fought but also more broadly to “shape a culture of reunion” between brothers while the slave over whom they fought, faded more and more into the background.9
This reinterpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction did not confine itself to just print. Movies such as 1915’s The Birth of a Nation valorized southern white terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. Far from going down in obscurity, Birth of a Nation proved so popular that it revived the Ku Klux Klan, which proceeded to continue its predecessors’ reign of terror against blacks and their white allies throughout the South for the next half-century.
I have to mention this because Helen Andrews does not. Astonishingly, there are zero references to the Dunning School to whom Du Bois was primarily responding. There are zero mentions of the great many difficulties that Du Bois and his contemporary black historians had attempting to access primary sources regarding freedmen during Reconstruction. And there are zero allusions to the Lost Cause mythology which obscured the very purpose of the Civil War, mystified the role of blacks in Reconstruction, and captured the nation’s imagination for three-quarters of a century. Andrews accuses Du Bois’s historical project as being motivated by political ends, and yet completely ignores the political ends of the mountain of propaganda spewn forth by late-19th century and early-20th century historians, politicians, and writers justifying the subversion of what still stands as the greatest attempt at including Black Americans into American Democracy in our nation’s history.
The reason why Andrews decontextualizes Black Reconstruction is because it makes her job of maligning Du Bois far easier. It is easy for Andrews to admonish Du Bois for “downplaying” the corruption of Reconstruction state governments when she fails to acknowledge the breathtaking omissions by Dunning School historians of the incredible corruption and waste of Antebellum state governments. But even when Andrews lowers the bar to the floor, she still manages to trip through the doorway. Even though she quotes Du Bois as saying “The increase of debts under the Reconstruction regime was not large… There can be no possible proof that all of this increased indebtedness represented theft; nor is there any adequate reason for believing that most of it did… There is nothing on the face of the figures that proves unusual theft” to allege that the goal of Du Bois’s project was to minimize the corruption of Reconstruction governments — she completely ignores the many points at which Du Bois admits to the corruption of Reconstruction. Not only is the book replete with passages testifying to the wastefulness and corruption of many Reconstruction state governments, but also in every state there being black political leaders leading the charge against the corruption.
For instance:
“[The Northern financiers] flaunted the chances of quick and easy money before the faces of ruined planters, small Northern investors, and the few Negroes who had some little capital. The result was widespread graft, debt and corruption in South Carolina and North Carolina, in Florida and Georgia, in Louisiana, and in other states.”10
“On the other hand, both the poor whites and the Negroes were not only poverty-stricken, but, for that reason, peculiarly susceptible to petty graft and bribery. Economically, they had always been stripped bare; a little cash was a curiosity, and a few dollars a fortune. The sale of their votes and political influence was therefore, from the first, simply a matter of their knowledge and conception of what the vote was for and what it could procure.”11
“It was said that the [South Carolina] legislative sessions were unduly prolonged; that unnecessary clerks were employed; that a liquor saloon was maintained, and that under the head of supplies, all sorts of personal things were furnished individual members of the legislature, and charged to the state.”12
It is therefore incredible that Andrews would take Du Bois’s passage out of context and allege that he set out to “refute one of the major accusations against the Reconstruction state legislatures, that they were profligate and corrupt.” Andrews fundamentally misunderstands Du Bois’s mission. He is not out to downplay or sweep under the rug the many instances of corruption committed by both white and black political participants of Reconstruction. He instead means to do what any good historian does: contextualize them.
Reconstruction took place between 1865-1876. This was the beginning of what would later be called by Mark Twain the Gilded Age. The intensity and duration of the Civil War transformed American political and economic society, significantly enlarging the federal government and facilitating the explosive growth of American corporations. This was a time of incredible corruption where the corruption of Reconstruction state governments was the norm, not the exception.
“An almost unprecedented scramble for this new power, new wealth and new income ensued. It broke down old standards of wealth distribution, old standards of thrift and honesty. It led to the anarchy of thieves, grafters, and highwaymen. It threatened the orderly processes of production as well as government and morals. The governments, federal, state and local, had paid three-fifths of the cost of the railroads and handed them over to individuals and corporations to use for their profit.”13
“The slime of this era of theft and corruption, which engulfed the nation, did not pass by the South. Legislators and public officials were bribed. Black men and white men were eager to get rich. In every Southern state white members of the old planting aristocracy were part and parcel of the new thieving and grafting…”14
Once again though, Andrews fails to do the task of the historian and contextualize these individual acts of profligacy into a wider, near-universal era of American political corruption, instead accusing Du Bois of drawing “a false equivalence between carpetbag governments and their corrupt northern contemporaries” despite Du Bois repeatedly admitting that black politicians did in fact participate in corruption. Yet again, Andrews fails to understand De Bois’s goal, which is to respond to the staggering number of claims made by white propagandists singling out blacks for corruption when in fact nearly every person of political means, white and black, took part in the graft.
Above all, the main reason why Du Bois bothers to mention at numerous points the degree to which blacks were involved in corruption is to demonstrate that the black freedman was not a passive subject in history, as characterized by those in the Dunning School. Blacks during Reconstruction were just as much reformers as opportunists. They were crusaders as well as profiteers. “There was not a single reform movement, a single step toward protest, a single experiment for betterment in which Negroes were not found in varying numbers. The protest against corruption and inefficiency in South Carolina had in every case Negro adherents and in many cases Negro leaders.”15 Du Bois aspired to rebuke the many hundreds of essays, books, and monographs alleging that blacks were either only villains or passive animals. The point that Du Bois makes over and over again throughout Black Reconstruction, which Andrews somehow misses, is that the black man is just like the white man in his propensity for virtue and vice; selflessness as well as selfishness; and to govern as well as be governed. Far from absolving the black freedman of responsibility and painting him as a flawless hero, Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction aims to do what any good piece of historical scholarship does: to make the historical Black American an active participant in the making of history
Andrews implicitly casts herself as merely telling “the plain truth… that Reconstruction was bad, objectively bad… The only possible reason for lionizing this traumatic episode would be if you had an ulterior political reason to do so.” But anyone who has read the first couple chapters of Black Reconstruction could tell you the same thing, because Du Bois does not hide the flaws of Reconstruction. He in fact goes to great lengths to document the many shortcomings of Reconstruction state governments and the Freedman’s Bureau. But for Du Bois, unlike Andrews, the great tragedy of Reconstruction is not its wasteful corruption — it is its unrealized possibilities. Du Bois was above all a small-d democrat. To him, slavery turned America from “a vision of democratic self-government: the domination of political life by the intelligent decision of free and self-sustaining men” into one of “Roman Imperialism and Fascism; it restored caste and oligarchy; it replaced freedom with slavery and withdrew the name of humanity from the vast majority of human beings.”16 Du Bois called Reconstruction the greatest experiment in democratic self-governance the world had ever seen because governments once commanded by masters were now ruled by the masterless. Freed slaves finally had the opportunity to prove that they possessed the capability for self-governance as any other race. One should be astonished that former slaves, who only a couple years before were slaving away in cotton fields, were now ruling in the highest offices of state governments. It is in Reconstruction where one had slaves with no formal education, slaves as illiterate as the Russian serf, the Italian peasant, and the English wage laborer, attempt a democratic experiment with few resources and even fewer supporters beyond those visionaries in the North like Frederick Douglass and Benjamin Butler.
These black freedmen, for all their flaws, were anything but passive subjects of history. They strove towards not just political and economic emancipation but also enlightenment as well. Public schools were of the highest priority for Reconstruction state governments. Despite being reduced to beasts of burden, the black freedmen “were consumed with desire for schools. The uprising of the black man, and the pouring of himself into organized effort for education, in those years between 1861 and 1871, was one of the marvelous occurrences of the modern world; almost without parallel in the history of civilization.”17 Where no general public education system existed even for poor whites, there sprang hundreds of school houses throughout the Lower South, and especially in states where freedmen were given the most opportunity to govern like in South Carolina. And when funds could not be provided by state governments battling former planters who refused to be taxed and politicians who participated in the corrupt practices of the day, freedmen and private citizens made up the fiscal difference.
But Andrews does not speak about any of this. She spends more time hemming about Du Bois’s communist affiliations than she does the valiant efforts of both poor blacks and whites as well as their allies in founding one of the most ambitious democratic experiments the West had ever seen. She ironically makes the same accusation towards Du Bois that Southern sympathizers made towards the Radical Republicans: that they were totalitarian Reds wishing to line the poor, innocent planters up for the guillotine. But Andrews does not acknowledge the decade-long screech of the planters’ newspapers against the Reconstructionist governments. How these governments had to govern under the sabotage of intransigent planter class, the terror of white terrorist organizations, and the libelous claims of regional newspapers. These men fought with every ounce of strength to deny the newly freed slave an economic stake in the new democracy. The tragedy is that after a decade-long struggle, the black freedman, so close to true emancipation, was once again shuffled back into slavery. All because the planter class was able to consolidate itself and ignite the counter-revolution of property. In the face of the deep and fierce resistance to economic and political emancipation by the planter class, it’s bizarre that Andrews would shame Du Bois for arguing that a military dictatorship was probably necessary to break the power of the planter elites and thus allow Black Americans to finally be recognized as full citizens of American Democracy.
But Andrews does not care about the plight of the freedman. She spills no ink for the tremendous struggle fought by freedmen, Northern abolitionists, and even the some of the poor southern whites to finally fulfill the promise of American Democracy. She cares more about accusing Du Bois of rewriting history so that “good is bad, heroes are villains, and the solution to every problem no matter the circumstances is to give money and power to racial minorities.” To reduce the whole of Du Bois’s whole project, that of mourning the tragic, unfulfilled possibility of True Democracy finally coming to America, a Democracy buttressed by political and economic emancipation where both black and white may coexist and co-govern peacefully and confidently, to “giv[ing] money and power to racial minorities” is more than disgraceful. It is disgraceful of Andrews to position herself as a mere seeker of truth where she is the one who unmoors Du Bois’s political project from history. It is shameful that she so willingly defames Du Bois despite the most superficial engagement with his work for the sake of cheap, political points. It is scandalous of Andrews to accuse Du Bois of partisanship when the whole academic, historical, and cultural environment to which he was responding aimed towards erasing the democratic objective of Reconstruction and casting the Redeemers and the Klan as the maligned heroes and the black freedmen the villains. Not just the motive, but the careless means through which she accomplishes her goal would make even reactionary historians like Dunning shake their head in shame.
There is nothing more I can say that Du Bois hasn’t said more eloquently or persuasively. I therefore leave the reader with one of the most beautiful passages of Black Reconstruction. A passage that not only perfectly summarizes Du Bois’s 730-page history, but fills the reader with the same fury and sorrow that the American Promise continues to go unfulfilled even today for the many millions of black, brown, and even white Americans who are cast out to the margins of society which Du Bois must’ve felt while researching and writing his magnum opus.
“One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell; and after its whirlwind a teacher sits in academic halls, learned in the tradition of its elms and its elders. He looks into the upturned face of youth and in him youth sees the gowned shape of wisdom and hears the voice of God. Cynically he sneers at ‘chinks’ and ‘niggers.’ He says that the nation ‘has changed its views in regard to the political relation of races and has at last virtually accepted the ideas of the South upon that subject. The white men of the South need now have no further fear that the Republican party, or Republican Administrations, will ever again give themselves over to the vain imagination of the political equality of man.’”
“Immediately in Africa, a black back runs red with the blood of the lash; in India, a brown girl is raped; in China, a coolie starves; in Alabama, seven darkies are more than lynched; while in London, the white limbs of a prostitute are hung with jewels and silk. Flames of jealous murder sweep the earth, while brains of little children smear the hills.”
“This is education in the Nineteen Hundred and Thirty-fifth year of the Christ; this is modern and exact social science; this is the university course in “History 12” set down by the Senatus academicus; ad quos hae literae pervenerint: Salutem in Domino, sempeternam!”18
But Andrews, sadly, never mentioned this.
David Levering Lewis, introduction to Black Reconstruction in America, by W.E.B Du Bois (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998) x.
Du Bois, 383.
ibid, x.
ibid, x.
ibid, 393.
ibid, xi.
Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 252.
Karp, 251.
David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 175.
Du Bois, 309.
Ibid, 411.
Ibid, 369.
Ibid, 532.
Ibid, 542.
Ibid, 357.
Ibid, 31.
Ibid, 71.
Ibid, 728/