On Wednesday, November 9, after the presidential victory by Donald Trump and the Republican’s sweep of both houses of Congress, Paul Ryan said that “to heal the divisions of a long campaign … [t]his needs to be a time of redemption.” Historically literate Americans felt it a curious choice of words. Redemption was the term used by white-supremacist Democrats in the 1870s to refer to the reversal of Reconstruction, a process that was perhaps the most violent and anti-democratic campaign in American history.
It stands as a frightening comparison for Americans committed to more inclusive, equalitarian democracy because Trump and his administration have the real opportunity to reshape the nation’s political structures to perpetuate racial, religious, sexual, and economic oppression in virtually unprecedented ways.
After the Civil War, Southern states were quickly returned to the Union with many of the same leaders who had participated in the Confederacy. President Andrew Johnson, inaugurated after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, began conciliating former Confederates and alienating Republicans — his own party and the party of anti-slavery and Union. Tensions between Johnson and Congress, and between the Southern states and the federal government, escalated to the point that congressional Republicans impeached Johnson and passed the Military Reconstruction Acts in March 1867.
These acts enabled the enfranchisement of black men in the South, led to the drafting of newly democratized Southern state constitutions, and helped secure the ratification of the Reconstruction amendments. The 14th Amendment established birthright citizenship for all Americans and guaranteed equal protection and due process; then the 15th Amendment prohibited racial restrictions when voting.
A brief, hopeful period of biracial cooperation
1868 was the high-water mark of Reconstruction. Biracial coalitions of black and white Republicans swept to power across the South. They funded public education, turned local appointed offices into elected ones — dismantling a patronage system — granted women independent property rights, built railroads, bridges, and poorhouses, and even, in some places, decriminalized interracial marriage.
African Americans reunited with families torn apart by slavery, negotiated for more favorable labor contracts, and established churches, political organizations, and militias. There was a significant limit, however, to Reconstruction’s impact upon the lives of millions of people struggling in the war’s aftermath, black and white alike, radical though that impact was. There was no real redistribution of land to former slaves, and both state and federal governments proved incapable of effectively addressing widespread hunger and health crises. Women were not granted the rights to vote and hold office. Still, unlike any time before in American history, federal and state governments were led by, and responsive to, both black and white men from across the economic spectrum.
Conservative white Southerners organized in response both formally through the Democratic Party — at the time an explicitly racist party whose economic policies rewarded the rich while mobilizing a rhetoric about the importance of the common farmer—and through an unprecedented campaign of racist vigilante violence. Vigilantes assassinated, whipped, or threatened thousands of Republicans; most of their victims were black, though many were white. Many vigilantes were part of the newly created Ku Klux Klan, a loose network rather than a single organization of racial terror, though hundreds of black and white Republicans were also killed by impromptu mobs. Republican voters were intimidated, ballots were destroyed, and dozens of Republican politicians were assassinated.
One by one, state governments were “redeemed” by explicitly white supremacist Democrats who declared that they were restoring “a white man’s government.” Once Democrats retook a state government, they ensured that Republicans would not get control again. They quickly called constitutional conventions that reversed the democratizing changes of 1868. By 1876, only three Southern states still had Republican control.
The 1876 presidential campaign was marked by more fraud and violence, committed not by disguised Klansmen but openly defiant rifle clubs and groups that called themselves Red Shirts. The Democratic nominee Samuel Tilden won the popular vote — though that may have been the result of violence and intimidation. But a disputed electoral vote led to a bargain wherein Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican nominee, would get the presidency, and the last remaining federal troops — too few in number to prevent the violence, in any case — were removed from the South. “Redemption” thus ended Reconstruction.
There is a common misconception that 1877 marked the end of black political life in the South, but the end of Reconstruction did not lead immediately to segregation. Though Democrats controlled Southern legislatures, 1876 to 1900 was a quarter-century period when some black men could still vote in the South — depending upon state laws and local levels of intimidation — and viable biracial political coalitions occasionally arose to challenge Democratic hegemony.
As C. Vann Woodward most famously proved, Jim Crow segregation was not secured until the late 1890s and early 1900s. Racial oppression in Jim Crow was achieved through legal, political, and extralegal mechanism. These included the constant threat of mob violence in the form of lynching; the Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that twisted the purpose of the 14th Amendment and legalized intentionally discriminatory laws in housing, public accommodations, education; and voter disfranchisement in the form of literacy tests and poll taxes.
These efforts led to the so-called “Solid South” wherein the Republican Party essentially ceased to exist. They were also aided by the national Republican Party’s retreat from both black civil rights and the economic concerns of everyday farmers. When faced with the threat of a political insurgency from the original Populists — who sought to make the nation’s economy more equitable by expanding the money supply and establishing policies friendly to common farmers — Republicans ceded no ground, affirming the banking and industrial interests in the Northeast and embracing imperialism abroad. White Republicans acquiesced to Democrats’ usurpation of power in the South in order to continue to compete as a national party.
Jim Crow was finally dismantled by the achievements of the civil rights movement, which were so vast that the period has sometimes been called a Second Reconstruction. In particular, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act re-opened Southern, and by extension, American, politics to both white and black voters.
The Democratic Party in the North had been cautiously embracing civil rights for African Americans since at least the 1930s, leading many white Southerners to switch to the Republican Party, precipitating the dismantling of the Solid South. The Second Reconstruction also proved broader than the first. Social Security was expanded to all Americans, and the creation of Medicare and the War on Poverty led to a more effective welfare state. Public schools were desegregated. Women gained radical new opportunities to participate in the workplace, sports, and education. Our understandings of human sexuality were radically expanded through the gay rights movement. For another quarter century, American politics saw a system where both political parties were competitive in almost every state.
The second Reconstruction also resulted in a backlash
As in the case of the original Reconstruction, the accomplishments of the Second Reconstruction were also slowly chipped away. This occurred less through legislative prohibitions on political participation than a slow disintegration of our national commitment to civil rights and integration. School desegregation was protested and abandoned; the so-called “war on crime” led to the imprisonment and disfranchisement of millions of African-American men; and deregulation of the national economy resulted in both soaring inequality and soaring corporate profits.
But there were marked differences between the efforts to reverse the first and second Reconstructions. Conservative campaigns in the 19th century had harnessed vigilante violence as well as local, federal, and state governments to erect explicit discriminatory policies and sustained patterns of economic oppression against African Americans. By contrast, American conservatism in the second half of the 20th century and into the first parts of the 21st — the ideologies of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush — let unfettered corporate capitalism function as the chief agent of inequality. This was couched in the language and genuine ideology of small government; “Government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan declared in his 1981 inaugural address.
This ideology of conservatism arguably did more harm through inaction and deregulation than through explicitly discriminatory federal policies. Late 20th-century conservatives increased budget deficits, defanged government regulators, and used the mechanisms of mass incarceration to plunder the poor and stifle mobility, but they rhetorically resisted outright discrimination on the basis of race — particularly in George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” in the early 2000s. Conservatives tried to demolish protections against discrimination like affirmative action, but with the notable exceptions of mass incarceration and bans on gay marriage, the state itself was not really the chief agent of oppression against American minorities. Until the Tea Party.
A third Reconstruction?
The trends that led to Obama’s presidency have sometimes been called a Third Reconstruction. The label was applied not only because the nation elected its first black president, but because the Obama coalition was a broad and diverse group committed to inclusive and rational political solutions to America’s problems.
Today, the efforts to reverse what this third Reconstruction accomplished seem more like the redemption of the 19th century than conservative responses to the New Deal and the civil rights movement — and not just in the superficial way Trump supporters’ red hats echo the Red Shirts. Unlike the conservatism espoused by Reagan and Bush, the Tea Party and now the Trump administration propose adding the teeth of explicit racial and sexual discrimination to the small-government model of corporate plunder. Trump campaigned on promises to create a federal registry of American Muslims, discriminate against transgender people, stop almost all immigration, increase deportation of undocumented people, criminalize women’s reproductive choices, punish dissidents and political opponents, and restrict access to the ballot.
There is much less deadly political violence now than the 19th-century redeemers committed, but Trump put violence and vigilantism at the center of his presidential campaign. He was endorsed by resurgent white supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan and has only given pro forma denunciations of them. Many of his supporters took it upon themselves to threaten or commit political violence. Everyday conservatives had begun bringing guns to protest health care reform town halls in 2009, and the open display of arms, including assault rifles, became a common feature at conservative rallies.
Trump subtly and not so subtly encouraged his crowds to beat up protesters. He capitalized on the murder of 50 LGBTQ people in Orlando to justify his calls for banning Muslim immigration. He suggested that if Hillary Clinton won, “Second Amendment people” might assassinate her. He used rhetorical violence against our electoral system by declaring that he would only accept the outcome of the election if he won.
Racist and sexist violence erupted in the aftermath of his victory. The Southern Poverty Law Center has tracked over 700 pro-Trump hate crimes in the immediate aftermath of the election, with the most common being attacks against immigrants — and most commonly occurring in K-12 schools.
Just as redeemers focused on solidifying control on a state-by-state basis, Tea Party Republicans have also concentrated on taking over state house legislatures. They have succeeded to the point that although the majority of Americans identify as Democrats, after the 2016 election Republicans control both houses of state legislatures in at least 32 of the 50 states. Republicans would only need to take over six more states to be able to ratify any constitutional amendment of their choice.
Those legislatures have redrawn both state and congressional districts to radically depress representation by Democrats. This has happened nationally, but most egregiously in the South. According to a report by the Institute for Southern Studies, in 2012 41 percent of Southerners voted for Democrats to represent them in Congress, but only 29 percent of the elected representatives from the South were Democrats. As a result, it is nearly impossible for Democrats to take control of either a majority of state legislatures or the US House of Representatives.
The new “redeemers” also want to take away voting rights
Trump and Tea Party Republicans are also engaging in a widespread attack on the very methods by which our representative democracy functions. They have refused to approve qualified judicial nominations by President Obama. They disdain constitutional protections for religious freedom and equal protection.
The most awful, but under-reported, of their efforts is voter suppression. Republican-controlled legislatures have passed voter ID laws that we should recognize violate the letter and spirit of the 14th and 15th Amendments. State and county electoral boards have limited voting sites, cut voting hours, and purged voters from their rolls — often improperly and always with undue impact on racial minorities. Though these efforts are not considered to be a decisive reason for Trump’s Electoral College victory, it is impossible to know how many thousands of Democratic voters were dissuaded from voting in Republican-controlled battleground states like Florida, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.
Political, social, and technological trends are driving Americans toward more entrenched residential and social segregation. Supposedly color-blind education policies encouraged school resegregation during the 1990s and 2000s. The echo chambers of social media — including Facebook, which recently admitted its algorithm has no mechanism to control for the spread of verifiably fake news reports — means that tech corporations are profiting off of Americans’ inability to talk to each other across political divides. Trump’s efforts to incite Americans against each other was aided by preexisting trends from the dismantling of the second Reconstruction that prevented suburban and rural white people from encountering nonwhite folks in equitable day-to-day interactions. Most of Trump’s electoral gains over Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign occurred in places that are overwhelmingly white.
Though markedly different in both intention and the scale of violence, Trump’s campaign and the wider Tea Party that fueled it echoed the redeemers’ campaigns of vigilantism and intimidation, state-by-state legislative triumphs, neighborhood and educational segregation, and the perversion of American democracy through the political suppression of poor and nonwhite people.
Don’t be paranoid — but remain alert for accounts of racial discrimination
What, then, can Reconstruction and redemption teach Americans eager to restore an inclusive democracy to political power? Historians are not good prognosticators of the future, nor are we trained in political coalition building. Our commitments to an accurate understanding of the past and the importance of teaching all our students also means it is both difficult and unwise for us to make many suggestions for the present without both skewing our understanding of the past and alienating people who politically disagree with us. I offer the following not as a historical prescription, nor as campaign strategy, nor because of my affinity for a particular political party, but out of my desire to see an effective response to the political trends that trouble me because of their historical echoes.
One lesson is the importance of rejecting paranoia but listening to testimonies of terror. Paranoia gripped many Americans throughout Reconstruction. People feared that Andrew Johnson would set himself up as a king; that Ulysses S. Grant would orchestrate a military coup; that foreign powers would invade the United States. Almost none of these wild fears had any basis in fact. But everyday white Americans, especially in the North, chose to turn a blind eye to the real violence that was happening to African Americans.
Many white people actively denied that the Ku Klux Klan was even a real thing. Northern newspapers were as likely to joke about Ku Klux Klan members as to critique the violence they were committing. When Major Lewis Merrill of the US Seventh Cavalry arrived in South Carolina in 1871 on orders to investigate and stop the racist violence, he came with the belief that “the stories in circulation [about violence] were enormous exaggerations, and that the newspaper stories were incredible.” He found the opposite to be true. “I am now of the opinion,” he testified to a congressional committee, “that I never conceived of such a state of social disorganization being possible in any civilized community as exists in this country now.” Merrill’s investigation resulted in the arrests of hundreds of Klansmen and the effective dissolution of the Klan by late 1871, but it did not prevent the eventual reversal of Reconstruction.
Today we should be wary that our worst fears are as likely to be stoked by the echo chamber of social media as they are to be real. But we should absolutely listen with open ears and anxious hearts to the stories of violence committed against people of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ people by Americans who supported Donald Trump.
These stories are especially worrisome because the federal government will now be led by the very man who incited this violence. During Reconstruction, the federal government used congressional investigations, the fledgling Department of Justice, and even the US Army in attempts to secure voting rights for black men. During the New Deal and the civil rights movement, too, federal courts and the federal government proved essential allies for labor and civil rights. But the federal government might no longer function as a check to discrimination by individual states during the Trump administration.
It is difficult to predict the extent to which the Trump administration will follow through on its campaign promises to register and track American Muslims, ban immigration from the Middle East, increase the deportation programs of the Obama administration, limit access to reproductive health for women, and jail political opponents. Trump’s declaration that he would not pursue charges against Hillary Clinton conveniently ignored the practice that the president does not directly control the investigations of the Department of Justice. Trump and his surrogates have given conflicting statements about the creation of a registry for Muslim Americans. But if implemented, any one of these efforts would fundamentally reshape the relationship between the federal government and American citizens.
Another chief lesson of Reconstruction is the importance that Democrats ought to place upon regaining representation in state legislatures. During Reconstruction, national Republicans failed to safeguard the control of state legislatures they briefly achieved. Our system of federalism still delegates considerable power to state legislatures ranging from education to health care to the electoral franchise. State legislatures controlled by Republicans today ensure their continued dominance through redistricting and voting rules just as Democrats did during Redemption. Democrats should focus on regaining power at the state level both to safeguard their future as a national party and to ensure that they can implement policies that will positively help Americans at the local level.
Though Reconstruction was reversed, the constitutional amendments that radically expanded the rights of American citizens remained in the letter of the law; they continued to inspire, and they served as a latent source of political power. In hindsight it seems that the Obama administration achieved few accomplishments that cannot be undone by a Republican Congress and a Trump presidency. The Affordable Care Act seems likely to be dismantled, as does much of the social safety net, including hallmarks of the Second Reconstruction like Medicare and the expansion of Social Security. The Supreme Court’s ruling for marriage equality should stand as a substantial step forward for LGBTQ people, but the Obama administration achieved no substantial expansion of employment or housing protections for ordinary LGBTQ folks (aside from federal employees and the military).
Many states have already passed bills that erode existing discrimination protections on the grounds of so-called “religious liberty” or that explicitly discriminate against transgender people. Most significantly, the Obama administration did little to curtail the power of the executive branch. Indeed, the administration expanded executive privilege because of congressional intransigence and gave to it increased surveillance and police powers. Cyber-spying, data-mining, and assassinations by drone-strikes against American citizens are now at Trump’s fingertips. There were no new constitutional protections for women’s reproductive rights or gender discrimination, and no constitutional or substantive legislative efforts to protect the right to vote, despite Obama’s declaration that “we have to fix” long voting lines in his 2012 victory speech.
Reconstruction teaches us the critical importance of open access to the ballot. Expanding voting rights will be a difficult task, and not only because of the lack of power the Democratic Party has in most states. Unfortunately, many Americans support voter ID laws, even though there is astoundingly little in-person electoral fraud. Even more frustratingly, our national television media gave insufficient coverage of voter suppression during this election. Virtually no election night coverage mentioned that Wisconsin — which Trump won by fewer than 28,000 votes — had passed a voter ID law requiring identification that 300,000 voters in Wisconsin did not have.
Most Americans take for granted that citizens convicted of felonies lose their right to vote, but the intersections of these prohibitions with mass incarceration have radically reshaped the voting population of states like Florida. Though the current mechanisms of voter suppression are more difficult to notice or discuss than the clear fraud and intimidation of Reconstruction, Democrats must assert that there is a positive right to vote that many Republicans are intentionally denying to American citizens.
Like the redeemers, Trump’s campaign was a direct assault upon the ideals of a diverse, functional representative democracy that values the political and economic inclusion of all of its citizens. It strikes me that those of us who want a nation made up of Americans who think, look, pray, work, and love differently need to assert clearly that we want such diversity to be at the heart of the opposition to Trump’s presidency.
American leftists are currently debating the ways post-election post-mortems should prioritize singular economic, gender, or racial factors that led to Trump’s victory, with some advocating that identity politics be entirely abandoned. That feels misguided precisely because the oppression Trump and his supporters seek cuts across multiple identities; they seek an intersectional oppression. Trump and his supporters intertwined narratives of racial, sexual, and economic grievances they claimed had been done by people who were not true Americans, women who advocated for equal pay for equal work, undocumented workers, free-trade politicians (if they were Democrats), Black Lives Matters protestors, Muslim refugees.
White moderates and liberals must not abandon the project of protecting minority rights. During Reconstruction, an increasingly polarized white electorate rejected black political activism rather than racist violence. Republicans in the 19th century preserved their party but lost the heart of American democracy by giving up on minority rights and a fledgling commitment to economic equality. Reconstruction failed because it was under direct assault in the South, but moderate white folks in the North could have committed to defending it for far longer than they did. This history ought to inform conversations among Democrats about the need to work with the Trump administration to appeal to the white working class. Democrats will likely find both electoral defeat and great moral failure if appeals to white voters jeopardize the inclusion and political rights of racial and sexual minorities.
Perhaps Americans opposed to Trump and the Tea Party can regain political power by explicitly intertwining economic and identity concerns with a positive fight for the institutions of American democracy at local, state, and federal levels. After all, Trump won by stoking the basest fears of a minority of Americans in opposition to a political system he called rigged. Though his message was effective in the Electoral College, it did not capture the votes of the majority of American voters. Over 2 million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump.
In response, Americans opposed to Trump’s political vision might embrace a commitment to fostering diverse, inclusive communities at all levels in ways that can channel rather than silence intra-party disagreement. Some scholars of the civil rights movement have described the disagreements that arose among differing goals, tactics, and organizations of the second Reconstruction as a productive tension. A similar ethos today might be useful in the face of the existential threat of a federal government controlled by people eager to use the power of the state to dismantle multicultural democracy.
Whether such an abstract approach would prove electorally successful is of course unknowable; that it would articulate a coherent opposition to Trump’s politics feels certain. Democrats ought to resist the temptation to seek out race- and gender-blind appeals to centrist white voters or to trot out new focus-group-tested and major-donor-approved slogans. The Democrats cannot claim inclusivity without incorporating it into our political economy. Unlike the Republicans facing the reversal of Reconstruction, people today opposed to Trump’s vision of America might choose to actively embrace a broad mobilization that champions the ways that different kinds of Americans in different kinds of communities can be together committed to the idea that all Americans’ voices count. Let us seek to make our nation more politically, economically, and socially equitable. Redemption — the campaign to reverse Reconstruction — stands as a stark lesson about the long-term damage that can come to our democracy from insufficiently inclusive political action.
Bradley Proctor is the Cassius M. Clay Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of history at Yale University.
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