The French edition of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for April. The chapter, “Radical Reconstruction: Its conquests and the consequences of its defeat,” shows how, for another decade, the Second American Revolution continued and why its bloody overturn was a defeat for the working class. It is excerpted below. Copyright © 2010 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
The Second American Revolution did not come to an end in 1865 with the Union triumph over the slaveholders. No, it continued for more than a decade, through the rise of Radical Reconstruction. By 1870 the fight to get the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution adopted had been won, and Blacks and other toilers had begun breathing life into these hard-won rights to emancipation, citizenship, and suffrage. …
Between 1863 and 1870, when the Fifteenth Amendment was adopted, proposals to enfranchise Blacks were defeated in more than fifteen northern states and territories! Outside the South only Iowa and Minnesota had adopted universal male suffrage. In fact, when the Fifteenth Amendment was submitted to the states for ratification in early 1869, it was initially rejected by the legislatures in New York, New Jersey, Ohio, California, and Delaware, among others. …
The most advanced of these Radical Reconstruction regimes, such as those in South Carolina and Mississippi, adopted immediate and democratic demands in the interests of working people. This progressive social legislation included the barring of racial discrimination; universal suffrage for males regardless of race; property taxes that fell heaviest on plantation owners and the moneyed classes; the first free public schools in the South (including desegregated and tuition-free university education in South Carolina); public hospitals and medical care for the poor; public-relief systems; the elimination of whipping and other cruel and inhuman punishments; and expanded grounds on which a woman could obtain a divorce.
Working farmers and artisans who were white faced the same exploiters as the freed slaves. Many of them had opposed secession from the Union, hated the privileged slavocracy that ruled the Confederacy, and supported emancipation. During the Civil War, Marx and Engels closely followed reports in the southern press of resistance by farmers and small-town and city working people against conscription and taxation. Substantial numbers of these toilers welcomed the measures carried out during Radical Reconstruction and joined in defending them.
None of the Reconstruction governments, however, had both the will and the power to enforce an expropriation of the big plantation owners that could have made possible a radical land reform, since the appointed Union Army commanders in each state held effective veto power over legislation and its enforcement. While some of these officers were more radical than others, none were willing to countenance a broadside attack on the landholdings of the southern property owners.
Even in South Carolina, where legislation to meet the land hunger of the freed slaves went the furthest, it never went beyond a homestead law allotting relatively meager funds to purchase land for distribution, together with property tax laws that did result in some big landholdings being forfeited to the state government by defaulting planters.
By and large, however, most freed slaves did not get any land, and were instead forced into sharecropping, tenant farming, and wage labor in the fields and towns. Often they worked under conditions of virtual debt peonage for large plantation owners. Of the white farmers and the few Black farmers who did have their own small acreage, many fell deeper and deeper into debt bondage. They often lost their land and ended up in the same situation as the majority of freed slaves and poorest whites.
The aspirations of the liberated and proletarianized Blacks, and their allies among southern white working people, were blocked by the growing power of the U.S. capitalist class, which during those same postwar years was landing significant blows against the working class and young labor movement. The final defeat of Radical Reconstruction required a bloody counterrevolution. The deal between the Democratic and Republican parties to withdraw Union troops from the South in 1877 accelerated a reign of terror by the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, and other racist gangs beholden to the interests of the exploiters. …
This defeat was suffered not only because the freed slaves, who aspired to get land in order to become working farmers, were betrayed by the bourgeoisie and both capitalist political parties. It also occurred because the U.S. working class and its organizations were as yet still too weak and politically inexperienced to provide a labor leadership for the kind of class-struggle social movement that could have made possible a massive expropriation and redistribution of land to the freed slaves.
The defeat of Radical Reconstruction was devastating for prospects to build a fighting alliance of workers and farmers, Black and white, in this country. …
Marx [wrote to Engels] that the decision of newly elected Republican president Rutherford Hayes to withdraw Union troops defending Reconstruction governments in the South “will turn the Negroes into allies of the workers, and the large expropriations of land (especially fertile land) in favour of railway, mining, etc., companies will convert the peasants of the West, who are already very disenchanted, into allies of the workers.”
But this was not to be. The economic and political reserves of the rising U.S. industrial bourgeoisie were far from exhausted, and thus the class-collaborationist illusions among working people still had deep taproots. …
Nonetheless, Marx could not have been more correct about the alliance of social forces that would have to be at the center of a successful revolution in the United States — the working class, toilers who are Black, and exploited farmers.