Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

RECONSTRUCTION AND LABOR FERMENT
In the post–Civil War era, the recently reunited United States 
was the most dynamic and soon the largest capitalist state in the 
world. No country illustrated Marx’s ideas with greater precision 
and purity. Great railroads spanned the continent, and vast facto-
ries sprouted up, producing steel, agricultural machinery, sewing 
machines. Th
  e emancipation of four million slaves, the demobili-
zation of three million soldiers, and the arrival of a stream of new 
immigrants swelled the size of the most diverse laboring class in 
the world. Marx predicted that capitalist conditions would gener-
ate class confl ict as workers were brought into contact with one 
another and discovered their common condition. Th
 ough they 
might at fi rst follow their employers, their attempts to acquire 
security and improved pay or conditions would repeatedly bring 
them into confl ict with them. Th
  is would teach the workers the 
need to organize and seek political representation. And since capi-
talism would create wealth at one pole and misery at another, and 
since it would be gripped by recurrent crises, the workers would be 
drawn to support increasingly radical measures. Th
  e Gilded Age 
served as a laboratory test of such ideas, and with its robber-baron 
capitalists and titanic labor confl icts, it vindicated many of them.
95
 
But despite several attempts, no broad-based working-class party 
emerged in the United States, and the country proved a laggard in 
developing a welfare state. In these respects much greater progress 
was made in Europe, especially in Marx’s native Germany, where 
the rise of a Social Democratic Party inspired by Marx’s ideas per-
suaded Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to begin construction of a 
social security system.
Marx had observed that labor in the white skin would not be truly 
free so long as labor in the black skin was in chains. Th
  is should be 
understood as a complex sociological proposition as much as a sim-
ple moral statement. In 1865, the Th
  irteenth Amendment, which 
abolished slavery in the United States, ended a formal legal sta-
tus that was already crumbling because of massive slave desertions, 
the Emancipation Proclamation, and deep, disruptive inroads by 
the Union armies. Th
  e greater part of the Confederate forces had 
95 Matthew 
Josephson, 
Th
  e Robber Barons, New York 1934.
introduction  61

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melted away and the planter class was reeling from its spectacular 
defeat. But, paradoxically, local white power emerged in some ways 
stronger than before. Alarmed at the sight of free black people, 
former Confederate offi
  cers and men formed militia and patrols 
designed to defend white families from luridly imagined threats 
and to deny land and hunting rights to the freemen, to ensure that 
they were still available for work. Union offi
  cers enforced a ban on 
the whip, but they could not be everywhere. Moreover, the coercion 
applied to the freed people was increasingly economic rather than 
physical. Many were obliged to enter very lopsided contracts, with 
minimal pay until the crop had been sold and with wages paid in 
“checks” that could only be redeemed at the local store. 
Th
 e new president in Washington condoned and shared the 
Southern whites’ reaction to black freedom. Johnson urged white-
only Southern assemblies to endorse the Th
 irteenth Amendment, 
saying that if they did their states could then reenter the Union. He 
was angered by the continuing demands of the Radical Republicans 
and the actions of some Union offi
  cers who had taken over prop-
erties abandoned by Confederate offi
  cials and begun distributing 
land to the freedmen. Johnson believed that the freedmen now 
needed to be taught their place. He sympathized with the actions 
of all-white assemblies who enacted strict new labor codes, obliging 
the freedmen to accept work where it was off ered and penalizing 
“vagrants.” Leading Southern gentlemen and ladies paid court to 
Johnson in the White House, hailing him as the harbinger of rec-
onciliation and the savior of his country. So although Johnson did 
press Southerners to accept the Th
  irteenth Amendment, he did 
so while assuring them that their acceptance would smooth their 
state’s path to rapid reentry into the Union. Th
  e idea that the origi-
nal secessions had been illegal, null, and void potentially opened 
the way to arguing that the seceders could now simply return. Th
 e 
Republicans insisted that it should fall to Congress to set out the 
terms of “Reconstruction.” Th
  ey passed resolutions stripping former 
Confederate offi
  cials and offi
  cers of their political rights and lay-
ing down procedures for fi nes and confi scations. But the president 
found ways to frustrate them.
Using his presidential power, Johnson issued thousands of par-
dons to Confederate military and civilian offi
  cials. He also issued a 
62  an unfinished revolution

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decree halting the distribution of land to the freedmen (of course 
the estates of whites who had been pardoned could not be seized 
anyway). Th
 e Republican Radicals were able to pass a series of 
Reconstruction Acts by margins large enough to make the meas-
ures immune to presidential veto. In 1866 the Republicans had 
shied away from giving the freedmen the vote, but the confl ict with 
Johnson and their own plans for Reconstruction persuaded them 
that only extending the franchise could bring about the election of 
genuinely loyal assemblies in the Southern states. Th
  e presence of 
an occupying Union Army certainly helped, but the Republicans 
also needed to mobilize as much political support as possible in the 
states undergoing Reconstruction. 
Th
  e Republicans failed (by a narrow margin) to impeach Johnson 
for treason, but nevertheless were able to impose much of their own 
vision of Reconstruction on the former slave states, thanks to the 
presence of Union troops and to the emergence of Union Leagues 
drawing support from the freedmen and from Southern whites who 
resented the power of the planters. But the Republican leaders set 
too much store by the ballot, underestimating the need for meas-
ures to tackle the severe economic problems of the South. So long 
as Union troops were on hand, the freedmen braved intimidation 
and went out to vote, but occupation was not a long-term solution. 
Returning Confederate soldiery lurked in the shadows and bided 
their time.
96
As the Northern public became aware of the new President’s 
gross indulgence of traitors and of the planters’ resort to violence 
in their attempt to rebuild a coercive labor regime, support for the 
Radicals grew. Northern outrage at the presidential pardons and 
at the vicious racial revanchism of the Ku Klux Klan and kindred 
groups led the Congressional Republican majority to support 
more radical measures and to propose extending the vote to the 
freedmen of the South. Th
  e Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 pro-
moted the enfranchisement of black males. In 1866–8 the Radical 
Republicans had the wind in their sails and managed to overrule 
the president on key issues. But the momentum of the Radicals was 
96 Foner, Reconstruction,  pp. 228–81, and William McKee Evans, Open 
Wound: the Long View of Race in America, Urbana 2009, pp. 147–74. See also 
David Roediger, How Race Survived US History, New York 2009.
introduction  63

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