The problem of American slavery was intractable. The great historian Shelby Foote insisted that slavery was the worst thing that happened to black Americans but that emancipation was the second worse. That may not make sense at first – but the question slavery posed to men of a certain mind was “How can you free people who have no property?” ~Michael Brendan Dougherty

When Michael says that Foner is “miles better than Howard Zinn,” I would normally take that as damning with faint praise, but he seems to be doing more than that. In any event, the Foote reference is helpful, and I agree with the late, great historian of the War. It seems to me that the question was not so much how to free people who have no property (which is the emancipators’ problem), but how people with no property can actually be free (which seems to be the more significant problem). Liberty and independence require a man or a man and his family to be largely self-sufficient. Dependence on others will breed political servility.

But paternalism (which assuredly has a far worse name than it deserves) is not something that any elite simply desires to take upon itself or invents to enhance its own status–it is something that is expected, requested, indeed demanded from its subjects. Even the ready provision of the means of future independence deprives those means of their significance–there are always conditions and obligations that attend any patronage, even when the patron flatters himself for his sheer generosity and pretends to claim nothing in return.

Foner happens to be right that Reconstruction was a repudiation of American practises over the previous seven decades, but it is significant that in his own view the (attempted) revolution of Reconstruction was a very good and necessary thing and the return of the Redeemers a disaster. The promised social revolution did not follow the political upheaval of the War, and he regards this, if I remember correctly, as a calamity. Foner made his name as a revisionist of Reconstruction, attacking the late 19th and early 20th century Southern historiography that depicted it as what I believe it was: a tyrannical military occupation dedicated to principles no more noble than “bottom rail on top” and the exploitation of the occupation zone by Northern opportunists and their hangers-on. That is the ‘traditional’ view, more or less, that Foner set out to dismantle, and after having read his history of Reconstruction in college I was not very much persuaded by his arguments. But give credit to Foner for being at least a bit more honest in his assessment than Jaffa and his followers, for whom the Declaration of Independence and specifically its reference to equality are as fundamental to the national character as their false prophet Lincoln held them to be.

But Foner’s view of Reconstruction, while marginally better in this respect, is still premised on his contempt for at least the foregoing ninety years of American history. The Jaffaites stress continuity and so completely distort what the Founders intended to serve a similar egalitarian turn, while Foner would in all likelihood simply write off antebellum America as an unfortunate and awful period of history. The message of Foner’s revisionism here is to abandon any fond feelings for the Old Republic, because it in no way embodied the sort of politics that Reconstruction did and, I think he is arguing, modern America either does or should now embody.