In Sunday's NYTimes Book Review, historian Carl Degler had some interesting
comments about Virginia in the second paragraph of a letter to the editor
commenting on an earlier book review published on May 18th :

Kevin Boyle's review of "The Colfax Massacre" and "The Day Freedom Died"
(May 18) details one of the truly infamous terrorist attacks during
Reconstruction. "Reconstruction was dead," Boyle wrote, within a year after
the perpetrators of the massacre were freed. Furthermore, "the United States
began its descent into a systematic segregation so powerful it would endure
for almost 100 years." This interpretation, however, underestimates the full
character of the post-Civil-War Reconstruction. Reconstruction was in fact
revolutionary. At its center was a valiant struggle by both Southern and
Northern white men (Scalawags and Carpetbaggers) defending the
constitutionally based civil rights of Southern black men against
conservative Southern white men like the perpetrators of the Colfax
massacre.

That struggle, however, did not die with Reconstruction, as Boyle suggests,
since thousands of white Southern men (by then Republicans) voted together
with black Southern men in defense of civil rights. During the 1880s,
Republicans captured a third of the counties in upper Southern states like
Tennessee and North Carolina. Yet the most successful persistence of the
spirit of revolutionary Reconstruction was the establishment, from 1880 to
1883, of the black and white Readjuster government of Virginia. The
Readjusters, led by William Mahone, a Confederate major general who had
accepted Appomattox, transformed Virginia both politically and socially.
They developed mental hospitals separately for blacks and whites, as well as
public schools. They abolished whipping posts and the poll tax, lowered
taxes for farmers of both races and enabled blacks as well as whites to
serve on juries, work in state offices and serve as policemen and prison
guards. As happened in Reconstruction, the Readjusters were defeated by
vicious and fraudulent appeals to white superemacy, ending in the Danville
riot in 1883. Further successful examples of Reconstruction also include the
black and white supporters of the Southern wing of the Populist Party.

Carl N. Degler
Stanford, Calif.

The writer is the emeritus Margaret Byrne professor of American history at
Stanford University and the author of "The Other South."



-- 
Jon Kukla
www.JonKukla.com

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