I don't think anyone would have put the same pre-war folks back in power, but neither could they expect to purge everyone who touched the Confederacy. Just as Germany couldn't be run without former Nazi Party members after the war, Eastern Europe can't be run without former Communists, and Iraq can't be run without former members of the Ba'ath Party.
Corruption was also a factor in the distaste for Reconstruction. It was a real problem, but I don't think one can argue that it was intended by the Republicans to punish the South.
I think there's a credible argument that the Radical Republicans turned a blind eye to the corruption in the occupation, based on their belief that the people being screwed had it coming.
When I talk about the vindictiveness of Reconstruction, I'm not talking about loyalty oaths or civil rights for blacks. Those were bitter pills for Southerners to swallow, but could have been managed had the occupiers not been so thoroughly corrupt. And it would not have been so corrupt had the U.S. government insisted on "malice toward none, charity for all" as Lincoln called for.
Southerners could not expect the protection of the Union army, could not expect fair treatment in Reconstruction courts, and could expect broad latitude given to Union officers in charge, who would do things like raise property taxes in order to seize property which they could then sell to carpetbaggers at a profit.
And rather than address those grievances -- rather than make any serious effort at reconstructing -- the occupiers just tried to put out fires and then left abruptly without having addressed the serious issues in the region. What happened when Reconstruction ended in 1877 is analogous to what would happen if we cut and run from Iraq today -- the old bad guys, because they're better organized than the fractious opposition would slither back into power.
In retrospect the Reconstruction of 1865 to 1877 does look flawed, awkward, and wrong-headed from today's point of view. But that's because we've learned and experienced so much since then. We know now how important economics and actual, physical rebuilding are, and how necessary it is to avoid ill-feeling. That's because we saw how Reconstruction and the Versailles Treaty ending the First World War failed, and how successful the Marshall Plan was after the Second World War was. So in the Middle East today we won't make the same mistakes that Congress made then.
Several valid points there. Gen. Lucius Clay, the commander of the American-occupied zone in Germany, was a native of Marietta, Georgia; he had grown up hearing tales of Reconstruction from his grandparents. Some historians believe that is why the reconstruction of Germany was such a screaming success; Clay knew from childhood anecdote how not to run an occupation.
Of course, it also helped that the Soviets pulled the boneheaded moves of blockading West Berlin, which led to the airlift, and of building the wall. It only took a few years for Germans to stop seeing Americans (and, of course, Brits, and maybe even the French) as their conquerors and start seeing them as their protectors.
I certainly wouldn't judge, in a moral sense, 19th century politicians for failing to heed the lessons of 20th century history. In fact, I think that European arrogance kept them from learning by America's example, and that's why World War I was as terrible as it was; the Civil War was a beta test for trench warfare, and if the Europeans had glanced across the pond, they might have known better what to expect from modern combat.
Reconstruction and Versailles failed for the same reasons. They attempted to punish recent enemies, to force them to submit, and folks don't like that. If you beat someone in a fist fight, you don't keep kicking him when he's down. You offer him a hand up and buy him a beer. That way, instead of having a bitter enemy who'll sucker-punch you the minute you turn your back, you have someone who, with time and care, you might actually trust to cover your back.
I wouldn't call Reconstruction-era Yankees wrong or stupid for not knowing what we know now. I will judge their efforts a failure, which is pretty much empirical fact. I'm much more interested in learning the lessons than in calling out people who are long dead and few of whom are remembered at all.
I don't buy the argument that the Republicans were the liberals of the 1860s and the Democrats the conservatives, so the Democrats were automatically right.
I'm with you on this. On the opposite side of the coin are the folks who try to blame the Democrats for all the ills of the Civil War and Reconstruction, because they're so wedded to the "go, team!" approach to politics that they can't let it go.
In multi-parti democracies, governments are formed by coalitions of parties. In a two-party democracy like ours, each party *is* a coalition. If you define "liberal" as "favoring change" and "conservative" as "favoring the status quo or a return to tradition," the parties have switched sides several times over the years.
In the 1860s, the Republicans were the liberal party on the question of slavery. In the 1890s and early 1900s, the Teddy Roosevelt Republicans were the liberal party. both in terms of internal government power (the National Park Service) and projection of force abroad (the "Great White Fleet").
By the time Woodrow Wilson came to office, the Democrats had co-opted much of the Progressive Party's agenda, and had become the party of the center-left. By the time Franklin Roosevelt came to office, the left-right lines were drawn essentially as we still know them today, with exceptions as new issues arise.
In 1876, the GOP regained some seats, but the Dems still had a majority in the House (53%), and by many accounts, actually won the popular and even the electoral vote in the Presidential elections of that year.
I don't think there's much controversy that Tilden actually won that election. The deal struck in the smoke-filled back room was that the Democrats would endorse Hayes in exchange for an abrupt end to Reconstruction. When Hayes took office, that's exactly what happened, and Southern whites had to find slightly more subtle means to keep Southern blacks servile.
Once again, the lesson as projected into our own time is clear: if you pull out troops because of a political deal rather than based on the achievement of clear goals, clearly stated, bad things happen.
One theory of the failure of Reconstruction is that working-class whites and blacks got along reasonably well during the Reconstruction years; but once the Union troops were withdrawn, the monied classes were able to drive a wedge between them and win the votes of whites to regain their power base.
I don't buy into that entirely -- it smacks of a Marxist class-based interpretation of history -- but it was a factor. White sharecroppers and black sharecroppers, despite having everything but skin color in common, were in opposition to each other in the Jim Crow South, with the whites voting for the folks who exploited them.
The Republicans really haven't changed their positions much more over the years, whereas the Scumocrats have pretty much flipped 180 degrees on race and ethnicity since the 1860s, manly because of public opinion. The 19th century Dems openly supported treating blacks as 2nd class citizens, the 21st century Dems openly support treating whites as 2nd class citizens. Go figure.
The GOP has always been the party of those naughty "coroporations", the party of tax breaks, the party of traditional morals and values. The RATs have always been party of "labor", the party of the plantations, the party that favors feel-good ideas over moral principles. The Dems today make the same case about abortion that their equivilents made in the 1860s about slavery. The more "moderate" northern Dems of the 1860s said "well, I'm PERSONALLY opposed to slavery, I'd never own one, but I'm not gonna enforce my views on other people because they have a constuttion right to decide to do what they want their property", and the more radical Dems actually argued slavery was a good systemd and ranted and raved about the evil Republicans trying to outlaw slavery.
The only place where the 1860's GOP veered significantly from today's GOP is Lincoln and the civil-war era Republicans were defintiely left-wing on immigrats and amnesty, but since the late 19th century (1880s or so), the Republicans have favored less immigration and support deporting illlegals... so that changed in a mere 20 years, not the 1960s.
The Dems of the 1890s were the left-wing party for the most part, especially in big cities. Illinois Governor Altgeld, for instance, was considered one of the biggest socialist nuts on the planet. Dem presidential nominee William J. Bryan was a hard-core left-wing populist. McKinley called him a socialist. (the election of 1900 was descibed by the Dems as being an election between the working-class masses and the evil, wealthy Republican corporations)
Teddy Roosevelt was a "progressive" Republcian (who would be a New England Olympia Snowe type today), but even he was not as far-left as Wilson. Both he and Taft described Wilson's railroad policy as "rank socialism". An election between Taft, TR, and Wilson would be like an election between Sam Brownback as a Republican, Arlen Specter as an "Independant", and Russ Feingold as leftist nut.
It's true that were lots of solid conservatives in the south who were Dems in those days, due to the south being a one-party system where you HAD to be a Democrat simply to be elected. As a result, southern conservatives prior to the 1960s and 70s would put a "D" next to their name if they wanted to have any type of power and influence in the south. This certainly does NOT mean the Dem party as a whole was "conservatiev" prior to the 1970s. It has been overrun with socialists since the 19th century.
Finally, it's clear "The south" as a whole, was not the hard-core states right crowd that opposed govermment expansion. Some neo-confederates watn to pretend the south has always been that way and the Dems they voted for were always "Conservatiev" Dems, but if that were true, "The south" wouldn't have given Woody Wilson, FDR, and Jimmy Carter landslide "mandates" in election after election.
A lot of the discontent with Reconstruction had to do with the destruction and poverty that the war brought, with the indignities that Whites percieved in Black empowerment, and with opposition to the sort of measures that one would expect to follow a war. If Washington had bent over backwards to satisfy Southern demands it's not likely that the results would have beem pleasing to the freedmen. To some degree Reconstruction, carpetbaggers and corruption were scapegoats for post-Reconstruction governments that did what ex-Confederates had intended since 1865.
With hindsight things could very well have been differently. We both agree that we learned things from the Civil War and WWI. Civil wars, though, are more emotional and divisive than other wars. And with really emotional and destructive wars between nations, when one nation or coalition defeats another after years of war, the result has more often been like 1919 than 1945. The exhaustion of the Germans after two wars, the generosity and magnanimity of the Americans, whose cities hadn't been bombed, and the necessity of uniting against the Soviet threat, made the aftermath of WWII untypical among great, destructive wars.
Given the racial attitudes of the time, it's hard to see that anything could have worked to both put the country back together and guarantee the rights of the ex-slaves. I'm not sure that we disagree that much, though. It was a real tragedy. The alternatives that we've had in rebuilding after other wars weren't there.