What Reconstruction-Era Laws Can Teach Our Democracy

it's unfortunate that this review chose to omit analysis of the greatest remaining legal blight of that era. The Slaughter- House decision of 1876 gutted the Privileges and Immunities clause of the 14th Amendment, essentially ruling that the US Constitution's Bill of Rights does not apply to residents of the States, and that the only Federal rights enjoyed by State residents barely exceeded the right to a passport. in the 143 years since, Slaughter-House has only been partially overruled, in regards to the 1st Amendment (1901, involving the NYTimes IIRC), and the 2nd Amendment (McDonald 2010). the entire decision must be overturned...even the Times opined as much back in 2010.

Griffith's film "Birth of a Nation" (originally titled - more appropriately- "the klansman") could not have been made without the monumental historical disaster of the failure of Reconstruction. But its title is also apt, though not necessarily in the way one might initially think. Indeed, the nation as we find its woeful state at present, was, indeed, that nation founded upon Reconstruction's disastrous failure. It is not the nation born after the Constitutional Convention. That existed until the Civil War. But it also died there. What emerged from the killing fields of that civil conflict was a society incapable of addressing its past in all its horrible inhumane features. That was not what Lincoln envisaged, but it is what his murder enabled. Until there is much more widespread understanding how the contemporary society's schisms are based upon what happened (as compared to what should have occurred) between 1865 and, say, 1915, we will never figure out, nor even want to figure out, how to be a unified nation with a commonly understood vision that seeks the betterment of all its citizens. Central to this is secondary school education and a long engaged discussion at the local level, instigated by religious and socially oriented and other educational organizations. We cannot count upon national media to do this.

I am wondering...if the radical Republicans would have focused more on Reconstrution substance, and the day to day maintenance of what was happening on the ground; instead of exerting their limited energy on Johnson's impeachment, would America be in a better place today? (Same question today for our Democrats, with Trump; Republicans with Obama/Clinton. )

I have read some of Foner's other work and consider it first rate. So I don't know if the omission of land reform is made in the book or in the article. Northern ambivalence to crack down on ex-Confederate violence against blacks, along with Johnson's complete indifference to the plight of freed slaves, combined to return Confederate lands confiscated during the war back to the previous owners. (The legal argument for claiming Confederate lands could be its own conversation.) Freed slaves were thus deprived any shot at owning their own land, re-enslaving them via sharecropping to their previous owners. All this talk about the Constitutional rights is important, especially as they were used more than 100 years later to win civil rights, but land is power, indistinguishable from political power, and freed blacks were granted none of it.

The biggest failure of Reconstruction was to allow the ethos of the South to live on. It is probably the only instance in history where a rebellious army was completely defeated, but allowed to continue to fly its flag. The Stars and Bars should have been outlawed.