Away from antebellum history and became a contemporary historian. Because you cant compete with people like him. But eventually, i came back to antebellum history and slavery and since then, i have relied on many of erics more than 20 books. I would read you the list, but we do not have that much time. I do want to say, though, and this is always the fun of introducing a speaker, looking at his selected publications, i notice he has written a book called dance for the city 50 years of the new york city ballet, and i can think of no better preparation for giving a talk today, at this moment, on reconstruction and the radical republicans who helped reconstruct the nation than somebody who knows how to move quickly on his feet. [laughter] and with that, i would like to introduce my good friend, somebody who i admire enormously, the winner of the lincoln prize, the pulitzer prize, and i think every other prize that is available, eric foner. [applause] thank you, Paul Finkelman, for that. Thank you all for braving the elements, finding this place. This is obviously an audience that is very dedicated to hearing about history. And thanks also to lauren and the others who organized this conference. So effectively. I should say, paul, in the interest of fairness and the stability of my marriage, my garafola, is actually a scholar of dance history, and that book did have my name on it, but really only as a kibitzer. It is really her book. It shows you something about our society. The publisher insisted my name had to be on it, because it would sell more books. Ven though i just kibitzed she was annoyed about it, honestly. That aside. Not much to do with reconstruction. After i am finished tonight, i am happy to answer questions for a while. Please feel free, after i am done, to raise questions, comments, whatever. There will be a couple of microphones passed around for people who are doing that. The that will be in a while. So what is reconstruction anyway . By the way, one of the things for Paul Finkelman, we now the younger scholars are talking about a long reconstruction. It didnt really end in 1877. Some people are taking it all the way up to 1900. So you will have many, many opportunities to celebrate the 150th anniversary of reconstruction, all the way up to 2050. So be prepared for those conferences. Anyway, reconstruction is a time period of American History, usually dated 1865 to 1877. But there is a lot of flexibility. Maybe more important, it is a historical process. One might say the process by which the United States tried to come to terms with the consequences of the civil war, the two most important of which were the preservation of the nation and the destruction of the institution of slavery. If you view reconstruction that way, you might also say we are still trying to work out the consequences of the end of slavery in american life, and therefore, reconstruction never quite ended. I have devoted a lot of my career to studying reconstruction. I have written books on the period, created a museum exhibition, but i have to admit, most americans know very, very little about the reconstruction period. In fact, some while ago, the department of education did a survey of graduating seniors from american high schools, 15,000 of them, about what they knew about American History. They gave them a list of things to see if they could identify them. Most of them could identify things like the dropping of the first atomic bomb or the westward movement, but at the bottom of the list, only, like, 15 could say anything intelligible about reconstruction. Now i had recently published a 600page book on reconstruction, so i found this disheartening. [laughter] but the fact is that even though we do not know much about it, many people do not, many of the key questions facing our society right now, today, have their origins in some way in reconstruction, or at least you cant understand them without knowing something about that period 150 years ago. Issues on our agenda today are reconstruction issues. Who is entitled to american citizenship . That is a reconstruction question. Who should have the right to vote . Thats a reconstruction question. And still very much alive today. The relationship between the federal government and the states, in terms of respective powers. Thats a reconstruction question. How to deal with terrorism is a reconstruction question. Not terrorism from abroad, but homegrown american terrorism, the ku klux klan and kindred organizations, which were founded in reconstruction. What is the relationship between political democracy and economic democracy . That is a reconstruction question, which is still may be being debated more now than it has for a while in our country. One other thing before i get into the actual history of reconstruction. This era is also a prime example of what we sometimes called the politics of history. Im not talking about whether a historian is a republican or a democrat. What i mean is the way that historical interpretation both reflects and helps to shape the politics of the present. In other words, the politics of the time the historian is writing. Writing about reconstruction often tells us as much about the moment the historian is writing in as about that historical period. As many of you know, for most of the 20 century, what we call the old or the standard or Dunning School view of reconstruction, after my predecessor at Columbia University a long, long time ago, william a. Dunning, who taught the civil war era there the Dunning School view dominated historical writing. And popular images of reconstruction. And in a nutshell, in that view, reconstruction was the lowest point in the whole saga of american democracy. According to that interpretation, president abraham lincoln, at the end of the civil war, wanted to bring the defeated south back into the lenient,a quick, forgiving manner. After his assassination, his policy was continued, according to this view, by his successor, president Andrew Johnson. Johnson was thwarted by the villains of the story, the radical republicans in congress. Depending on which historian you read, they were motivated by irrational hatred of the south or the desire to fasten the grip of northern capitalism on the self, or simply by the desire to keep the Republican Party in power. But for whatever reason, they overthrew johnsons lenient plan and imposed blacks suffrage that is the vote for black men, since women did not vote in any state at that time. Nearly all of them, of course, were newly freed slaves in the defeated south. The crux of the dunning view is black people are incapable of taking part in political democracy. They just lacked the foresight, lacked the rationality, selfdiscipline. Whatever it is, they were incapable. As a result, what followed was an orgy of corruption and misgovernment, presided by carpetbaggers. Carpetbaggers, that is northerners, who supposedly came down to the south to reap the coffers. Scalawags, who were white southerners who abandoned the race to join up with blacks and cover baggers in the reconstruction governments and the africanamericans themselves. The result, as they say, were corruption, abuse of power, and eventually patriotic groups like the klan organized to overthrow this reconstruction and restore what was politely called home rule, or really what we should call White Supremacy in the Southern States. This interpretation not only dominated historical scholarship, but it reached a mass audience through films like birth of a nation, which many of you know of, which had its premiere in Woodrow Wilsons white house and glorified the ku klux klan. And the bestseller of the 1920s by the journalist Claude Bowers called the tragic era. What do i mean by the politics of history . Why did this interpretation have such amazing longevity . Historians make their living overturning what previous historians have said. To remain the standard view for 60 or 70 years is unprecedented. I cant think of another view it would be as if people in the 1980s were still adhering to charles beards interpretation of the american constitution. That does not happen. But it happened in this case. Why . The explanation is the dunning view harmonized with the racial reality of the United States, the racial system, we call it jim crow in the shorthand, of the United States from, lets say, 1900 up to the civil rights revolution. The political lessons of this view of reconstruction were very clear. One, it was a mistake to give black people the right to vote. Therefore, the white south was justified in taking away that every Southern State did between 1890 and 1908, and if you gave blacks back the right to vote, the horrors of reconstruction would be repeated again. Secondly, reconstruction was imposed on the south by outsiders, by northerners. Maybe some of them were even dogooders, with humanitarian motivations. But the evidence, then, is that outsiders do not understand southern race relations, and therefore, the white south should resist outside calls for change. Whenever people thought of criticizing the race system in the south, you always heard about the horrors of reconstruction if any change took place. And the third lesson of this review, which is a little arcane today, is it is a pillar of the solid democratic south, as it used to be called. Reconstruction was created by the Republican Party, and if southerners, white southerners, were tempted to vote republican, you would have another period of reconstruction. Claude bowers, who i mentioned, who wrote the tragic era, which is a lurid work of historical fiction masquerading as history it was published in 1929. Why . In 1928, for the First Time Since reconstruction, republicans had carried a number of Southern States in the president ial election. Herbert hoover. Why . Democraticsmith, the candidate, was a catholic, and roman many evangelical voters in the south did not want to vote for a catholic. Others werend alarmed by the inroads hoover had made in the southern vote, and his lurid book was a warning of what might happen if southerners turned to the Republican Party. Well, then the civil rights revolution took place. The pillars of the old view fell to the ground. You could no longer argue that black people are inherently incapable of taking part in political democracy. And the historians completely revised their view of the period. Today, i would say most historians see reconstruction as a noble, if unsuccessful, effort to establish, for the first time in American History, an interracial democracy, a democracy with the participation of both africanamericans and whites at the same time, which had never existed in the United States before the civil war. And if reconstruction was tragic, we now would say it was not because it attempted, but because it failed. That was the tragedy. And that it left to future generations this very difficult problem of Racial Justice in american society. Now to understand how radical reconstruction was and how, despite its immediate failure, it reshaped American History in significant ways, we have to very quickly remind ourselves of what this country look like in 1860. On the eve of the civil war. There were 4 million slaves in the United States, black people, slaves in 1860. Slavery was, by far, the countrys most important economic institutions. Slaveowners pretty much owned of the federal government from the conversation up to the civil war, with a few exceptions, but mostly they did. Slavery was powerful, thriving, and expanding. It was not going anywhere. It was not dying out or going away. There were more slaves in the United States in 1860 than there had been at any point in our history, and there was no reason to think that expansion of slavery, growth of slavery would not continue. The power of slavery shaped the definition of american nationality or citizenship before the civil war, giving it a powerful racial overtone. As you know, im sure, on the eve of the war in 1857, the Supreme Court, in the dred scott decision, ruled that no black person could be a citizen of the United States. Blacks, it said, were aliens, even if they were born in the United States. Even if their ancestors had been here for generations. It did not matter. States could make black people citizens back then, citizenship was defined in peculiar ways, as we will hear, probably, tomorrow but a state could make a black person a citizen, like massachusetts did, but other states did not have to recognize that. A clause of the constitution says each state has to treat equally the citizens of other states, does not apply to black people, says the Supreme Court. And the federal government certainly does not have to recognize them as citizens of the United States. Tomphasize all this mostly draw attention to the remarkable change that came about as a result of the civil war and thenstruction in what writer Benedict Anderson once called the imagined community. A nation, anderson wrote, provocatively, is not just a physical space on a map. It exists in the imagination. People think who is an american . What does it mean to be an american . Who can be an american . That imagined america was fundamentally changed during reconstruction. Before the civil war, the only people who really put forward the idea of an american nation beyond the tyranny of race was the Abolitionist Movement, who insisted not only that black people be freed, but that they be absorbed as equal members of the society and the polity. But that is what came about as a result of reconstruction a concept of citizenship, which is still in our laws today, no matter how often violated, severed from racial definition. The most important thing that put the question of black citizenship on the national agenda, of course, was the end of slavery, but more immediately, actually, the service of 200,000 black men in the union army and navy during the civil war sort of staked a claim to american citizenship. Abraham lincoln himself, who had never supported Political Rights for black americans before the civil war although he was deeply opposed to slavery at the end of the war was advocating that some africanamerican men be given the right to vote. Who . He singled out what he called the very intelligent, that is the free blacks who had some education, and those who served nobly in our ranks. That is, the former soldiers. They had earned the right to vote, said lincoln. Now, that was not universal suffrage. It was not universal manhood suffrage. But at that point, lincoln was considerably ahead of the curve. At that point, only five northern states, all in new england with very small black populations, allowed black men to vote on the same basis as white, and lincoln is not pushing that direction. Of course, lincoln was killed before you had the opportunity to preside over reconstruction. His successor, Andrew Johnson, was once lionized in the old literature as a heroic defender of the constitution against radical republicans. Historians, we play this game sometimes where we rank the president s. Lincoln is always up there, fdr, George Washington the top ones. And then Richard Nixon and a few others are at the bottom. Most of them are kind of somewhere in the middle. Andrew johnson used to be up there with the greats. When i was in school, he would be number 7, 8, 9. He was considered a really significant president. Today, i think, johnson has a strong claim to being considered the worst president in u. S. History. There is competition for that ranking [laughter] prof. Foner you know. But johnson is a strong contender, anyway. Johnson lacked all of the elements of greatness that lincoln possessed. He was incorrigably racist. He lacked basic competence. He had no sense of northern Public Opinion. No compassion for the former slaves. Connection to the Republican Party. And the inability to work with congress. Johnson was a unionist democrat from tennessee. He had remained in the senate when his state seceded from the union. He had to come become military governor of tennessee under lincoln. And he was seen as someone who could appeal he was put on the ticket as Vice President not because anyone thought he would become president. Lincoln was a pretty young guy. He was in his early 50s. Nobody expected him to die in office, although lincoln himself was pretty morbid and had dreams about his own death. But he did not think about it that much. If he would have thought seriously, he would have thought i cannot put johnson as president. But johnson basically felt the africanamericans are free, no question, absolutely. They should now go back to work on the plantations and leave public issues to white americans. He set up, in 1865, new governments in the south completely controlled by whites with blacks having no Political Rights whatsoever. These government enacted a series of laws known as the black codes to sort of regulate the condition of these former slaves. And basically, they put them into a position of second class or third class citizenship. Basically the black codes tried to use the power of the state governments to push africanamericans back to work on the plantations. They gave blacks certain rights, like their marriages would now be recognize under law, which they werent under slavery, of course. Made it legal to own property except mississippi. Mississippi made it illegal for black people to own pr