Michael Chesson offers the following thoughtful, and
thought-provoking, comment.

When I read the documents of early reconstruction in Virginia
(I am thinking here, among other things, of the super
documentary collection published by the Freedmen and Southern
Society Project, now under the editorial direction of Dr.
Leslie Rowland), I am struck by the resonance between
Republican Free Labor ideology and the Southern pro-slavery
argument.  As an aside, I have found the introduction to the
pro-slavery argument produced by Paul Finkelman for Bedford
St. Martin to be an especially powerful and intelligent
analysis.  Its commendably short, the documents are well
selected, and Finkelman's introductory front matter is
elegantly written and incisive.  Its not the kind of
scholarship for which most of us get much credit, but I've
learned as much from reading works like Finkelman's than I
have from a good many of the over-hasty monographs produced
under the pressures of the tenure process.

Both Republican military officers over seeing the occupation
of Virginia, and the paternalist, unrepentent former slave
owners among the occupied, could agree that the former slaves
were ill-suited for citizenship.  They disagreed about *why*
the former slaves could not be trusted with self-government.
For the Republican officers, the character of the former
slaves had been corrupted by the exigencies of the institution
itself.  Slavery, they argued, created the wrong kind of
incentives to instill the deep work ethic that undergirded the
"Free Labor" ideology and, they thought, produced the good
citizen.  For all too many of the former slave owners, it was
not the institution of slavery that debilitated the character
of the former slaves, but rather their natural racial essence.
 But either way, whether one emphasized nature or nurture,
both could agree that in the short run, the former slaves
required the superintending intervention of benevolent whites.
 And too, faced with the obstinate recalcitrance of some
former slaves, that superintending benevolence just might
require due application of coercive force.  For their own
good, of course.  Of course.

To read the situation as I am suggesting above does tend to
deflate the heroism of just about everybody involved.  I'd
submit that it even colors the interpretations of some former
slaves--take a look, for example, at the Virignia chapters of
Booker T. Washington's UP FROM SLAVERY (granted, Washington
was writing for a particular audience, and with a particular
rhetorical agenad.)  Given the anti-heroic nature of the
historical narratives that this historical situation permits,
I suppose its not too surprising that we have so few dramatic
works of the kind that Lemann has given us.

All best,
Kevin

>What I was getting at is not the way in which ex-Rebels
regrouped and managed
>to defeat Reconstruction, drive out the carpetbaggers and
scalawags, and
>terrorize blacks; but why they got away with it.  Why were
southern whites allowed
>to do what they did?  Yes, many books have been written about
this question
>and Reconstruction generally, as another poster suggested,
but like Lemann's
>Redemption all too often the focus is on racist, violent,
embittered,
>unreconstructed Southern whites.  Who were, and some still
are, if you've read Tony
>Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic, all of those things.
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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