Perhaps the most important distinction between the study of history and that of science is that history is cyclical. Eric Foner’s book “Nothing but Freedom” uses Marxist and comparative approaches to the American Reconstruction to argue that American blacks, after gaining immense politico-economic influence under Radical Reconstruction were left with nothing but their freedom at the end of Reconstruction in 1876.
Foner reiterates, in many ways, the key thesis of Crane Brinton in “The Anatomy of Revolution”: revolution necessarily prompts a conservative backlash that negates many of the radical changes undertaken during the original upheaval. In the case of the post-Emancipation South, Foner argues that the Radical Reconstruction was both a legal and economic revolution that enfranchised ex-slaves. The Redemption governments, analogous to the Thermidorian Reaction in France or Jamaica’s forfeit of Home Rule in 1865, ended Reconstruction’s socio-economic gains for freedmen. Redemption governments –the return of Democrats into the state executive and legislature — reversed many of the progressive legal decrees enacted during Reconstruction and returned the social balance-of-power to the white planters.
Foner highlights the main thrust of the Redemption governments as a “concerted legal offensive for the protection of the cotton planters”. (59) After emancipation, planters and northerners alike wished to regain a docile and obedient labor source that was robbed of them during Reconstruction. The Redemption governments’ main goal was to restore white supremacy both socially and economically. These two sectors, however, highly overlapped. By forcing new freedmen back onto the plantation as wage laborers, the white planter class was guaranteed a labor source. Earlier during Reconstruction freedmen fled the plantation system to create small homesteads to engage in subsistence agriculture. During Redemption, states like Alabama passed laws that prohibited the sale of seed cotton and sometimes all agricultural products in black-belt counties and “limiting the economic alternatives available to them.” (61) Essentially it gave white planters a legal monopoly on cotton production. Redemption governments also passed a series of “fence laws”. These “fence laws” were designed to fence in plantations as to prevent black yeomen from grazing livestock on common ground. As corollaries to the fence laws, Redeemer governments revoked or enforced existing laws that restricted freedmen’s right to hunt and fish on private lands. The cotton monopoly, fence laws, and hunting restrictions together “discouraged men…from getting ‘something to eat’ without plantation labor.” They forced the freedmen to become dependent on the planter class again for survival. (Foner, 67)
Furthermore, the Redeemer governments changed the tax codes to thrust freedmen into poverty. Foner writes “The parsimony of the Redeemer regimes is notorious.” (70) They sharply reduced taxes, but most importantly expenditures on public services. The Redeemers lowered property taxes on the large [white] landholders who did not pass these savings along to their black tenants. They also implemented highly regressive taxes. Foner writes “blacks now paid taxes on virtually every piece of property they owned…while while larger farmers had several thousand dollars exempted from levy.” (70) Redeemer governments did all in their power to impoverish the black community whilst not violating the Constitution. All of the actions outlined above, were all planned with the prevailing psychology that an impoverished working class will be docile and disciplined. As one Georgian wrote “The [Negro], when poverty stricken…will work for you—but as soon as he begins to be prosperous, he becomes impudent and unmanageable.” (72)
Eric Foner ends his book with a case study of general strikes during Reconstruction in the Lowcountry rice plantations of South Carolina. In tracing the outcomes of these strikes, the true legacy of Redemption can be seen. During Reconstruction, the government was keenly aware of the freedman’s vote and was reluctant to use state resources to put down the laborer’s strikes. The freedmen were able to use collective bargaining to gain better wages and escape the check àplantation store futile cycle. In some cases, arrested strike-leaders were let free without a trial. On the other hand, when Redeemer governments came to power, Foner writes, “the possibility of collective action by rural laborers was all but eliminated.” (106) These governments ruthlessly suppressed black labor agitation. In Louisiana, a strike for higher wages under a Redeemer gov. led to a massacre of over one hundred blacks but the white militia and vigilantes. Similarly, a strike in Arkansas ended in the lynching of nine freedmen without trial. (Foner, 106)
Although, Foner admits that the gains of Reconstruction were not completely erased by Redeemer governments, the brutality of these responses to black agitation clearly shows that the Redeemers’ greatest legacy was to reintroduce and enforce the antebellum societal structure to the South. Even though the laborers were now politically free, they lived in a society that had regained its racial stratification by suppressing freedmen’s economic freedom and forcing them back onto the plantation as sharecroppers or wage-laborers.