Tad Stoermer is a public historian and teacher in the mold of Howard Zinn with TikTok and YouTube. One of Stoermer’s latest videos discusses Reconstruction and how the South’s defeat in the war created a sliver of space for Radical Republicans to push through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. I liked Stoermer’s video — found here — and wanted to share it with you all.
On the same day that I watched Stoermer’s video, I came across this quote from W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) in the third chapter of Manisha Sinha’s The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic.
The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau is the heavy heritage of this generation. Today, when new and vaster problems are destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully?
Du Bois lived an impressive 95 years. Born in Massachusetts in February 1868, he was just shy of seven months old when Thaddeus Stevens died that August, seven when Charles Sumner passed, and already a full-grown man by the time Thomas Wentworth Higginson left the Earth in 1911.
He was three days old when the 15th Amendment was passed by Congress, five months old when then president Andrew Johnson was acquitted on impeachment charges by one vote in the Senate, nearly ten when the Compromise of 1877 saw the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South, and 15 in 1883, when the Supreme Court effectively overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875 by ruling that “equal protection of the laws” did not apply to private citizens or entities.
Du Bois lived through the end of the First Reconstruction and the start of the civil rights movement (the Second Reconstruction), which many historians date to the ruling in Brown v. Board in 1954 and subsequent attempts to integrate public schools. When he finally died in 1963, Martin Luther King had just five more years to live.
Du Bois’s quote about the “heavy heritage of this generation” strikes the reader as painfully relevant. More than a century since it was written, America has yet to achieve the promise of universal and equal rights fought for by thousands of recognized — and millions of unknown — men and women.
As Stoermer notes, Radical Republicans like Stevens and Sumner — a minority of the Republican Party — fought to implement their democratic agenda despite never having complete state power. The door opened slightly — something that never would have happened if not for the South’s exclusion from Congress — and then slammed shut again. That slam was aided by the failed impeachment of Johnson, largely due to the vague language of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and the demanding supermajority needed in the Senate. Johnson was acquitted of impeachment by one vote, with 35 Senators voting in favor and 18 against.
For nearly the next century, and most of Du Bois’s life, the South used the Supreme Court and the Senate — primarily the Senate, as detailed in the first 100 pages of Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate — to undo Reconstruction and rule the country, leaving thousands of bodies behind.
The Radical Republicans didn’t try to change the hardwired aspects of the Constitution. That wouldn’t have worked because there was no mass support for abolishing the Electoral College (something Sumner wanted), strengthening the power of Congress (something Stevens wanted), or writing a new founding document (considering that the framers’ creation had just led the country into a Civil War, more than a few people were thinking about it).
The Reconstruction Amendments were passed, but the hardwired elements of the Constitution remained. Terrorism, along with only a halfhearted effort from the North, facilitated the South’s “redemption.” Today, Congress continues to kill progressive legislation like the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and the Supreme Court has decimated the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the hallmark bill of the civil rights movement — and has its eyes on the 14th Amendment.
A heavy heritage, indeed.
