The Union League and Radical Reconstruction

Eric Foner, who has been described as a “noted Marxist historian”, observes that “there exists more than one legitimate way of recounting past events.” His own recounting of the Reconstruction Era is one that strongly reflects his Marxist leanings and his “utopian, progressive mind.” He sees the role of the state in reconstruction as benign, its purpose being to create racial, social, and economic equality. One striking example is his depiction of the black militia in the Reconstruction Era as units formed for “self defense” against the opponents of Reconstruction, while he depicts white militia as “sinister” and “violent” attempts to thwart Reconstruction. Why the double standards? Is violence not always to be condemned as the wrong path to progress?

As a matter of principle, violence on all sides is always to be abhorred. The depiction of violence as only wrong when white people do it is a skewed reading of history that has, wrongly, been relied on to construct the simplistic message of “critical race theory” that whites are always the “oppressors” and blacks are always the “oppressed.” From that, it follows that when violence erupts, it must all be blamed on the participants who are white, while the blacks must always be viewed as “victims” of violence. An example in recent weeks illustrates the point: a black teenager who allegedly stabbed a white teenager at a high school sports meet was widely depicted by his supporters as the true “victim” of the crime. His family argued that prosecutors were wrong to charge him with murder:

The 17-year-old’s fundraiser, which was posted on GiveSendGo, says he’s been wrongfully charged with murder.

As of Tuesday morning, the fundraiser had brought in more than $230,000 in donations. The goal has been set at $300,000.

“The narrative being spread is false, unjust and harmful,” the description says. “As a family of faith, we are deeply grateful for all of your support during this trying period. Your prayers and assistance mean more to us now more than ever.”

It is telling that the family does not contest the facts, what they contest is “the narrative” that depicts their son as being in any way responsible for his own actions in stabbing another boy. Everyone is just supposed to accept their preferred “narrative”, namely that in any violent altercation between black and white, the white person is the aggressor, and the black person is the victim. But all violence only tends to beget more violence, regardless of the identity of the violent group. Depicting all violent altercations as “racism” by whites against blacks only ensures that violence becomes a mere “talking point” in political debates, rather than being seen as abhorrent and every effort made to discourage it. Thus, violence perpetrated by whites provokes widespread riots and burning down of cities, while violence perpetrated by blacks barely makes the news.

These double standards also dominate the “narrative” about the Reconstruction Era. Establishment historians declare that all the violence of that era was perpetrated by white racists. Little is said about black militia, or about the role of the government in either fomenting violence or failing to do anything to contain it. The stated aim of the authorities, in their military occupation of the South, was to transform the relationship between white and black from master and slave to political equals. Once slavery was abolished, the focus of the Republican administration shifted to dismantling the social and economic power of former slave owners to ensure that the South would fall in line with the new Radical vision of Republican politicians like Thaddeus Stevens. They did this by encouraging black people to vote for the Republican Party and by advising them of their labor “rights” so that they would not be exploited by their former masters, now turned new employers.

Attempts to “reconstruct” the South in what Foner calls “the world the war made” followed the same destructive path as the war of aggression that preceded it. One important avenue for this reconstruction was the Union League. Foner, in his book “Reconstruction: 1863-1877”, describes the League as “the political voice of impoverished freedmen.” The rationale behind the League was that it would support black people participating in the new democratic dispensation. It would also help them to campaign for fair terms and conditions at work. In reality, the League was not the disinterested and benevolent organization that many may assume – it was the enforcement wing of the Radical Republicans. Getting freedmen involved in politics was intended not merely to support their right to vote, but specifically to encourage them to vote for the Republican Party. For example, in Alabama,

“In the Reconstruction Era, the league shifted its focus to securing the black vote for the Republican Party. In Alabama and other Southern states, the league, run locally by Freedmen’s Bureau agents and various pro-Union groups, mobilized labor protests and promoted voter registration. The Union League helped create the Reconstruction movement, and it established a tradition of black voting for the Republicans that lasted well into the twentieth century.”

Foner is at pains to depict these events in a favorable and positive light. As he sees it, the Radicals heralded a new and fairer dawn across the South. He certainly does not see any reason why the activities of the League should have been regarded by white Southerners with mounting unease and resentment. Foner reports that in North Carolina the League would meet “in old fields, or in some out of the way house, and elect candidates to be received into their body.” He adds that they often met “in woods or fields” in remote locations which lent a further layer of secrecy to their activities. The Leagues were so popular with black people, that “by the end of 1867, it seemed, virtually every black voter in the South had enrolled in the Union League or some equivalent local political organization.” The League was depicted as merely an important platform for political organization and democratic participation:

“Although this secrecy alarmed many white landowners, it also allowed freed blacks to discuss Reconstruction and its implications. Such newfound freedoms led to a massive politicization of rural freed blacks during the summer and fall of 1867.”

Foner shows no awareness that enrolling the entire black population in secret oath-taking ceremonies, deep in the woods under cover of darkness, may not have been the best approach to forging race relations based on mutual respect. He is just happy that they got the right to vote and the opportunity to have secret meetings to discuss politics. He blithely reports that League meetings had explicit religious and revolutionary overtones, without recognizing that this casts doubt on whether political and civic participation was really the purpose of these meetings. Foner observes that:

“Usually, a Bible, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and an anvil or some other emblem of labor lay on the table, a minister opened the meeting with a prayer, new members took an initiation oath, and pledges followed to uphold the Republican party and the principle of equal rights, and ‘to stick to one another’”.

In their pledge to “stick to one another”, they all voted as a bloc for the Republican Party. In his excitement over the League’s pledge to support “the principle of equal rights”, Foner fails to mention the disenfranchisement of white Democratic Party supporters. Moreover, it was no coincidence that the anvil was the emblem of choice for the League. They taught the freedmen that workers were the “true” owners of the plantations on which they worked, and that they had an important role to play in the workers’ revolution. Many black leaders, inspired by the revolutionary abolitionists, adhered to Marxist interpretations of their historical role. This is seen as commendable by Foner, given his own Marxist sympathies.

Significantly, the League members were armed. Foner notes that in South Carolina, “Armed black sentinels – ‘a thing unheard of in South Carolina history,’ according to one alarmed white – guarded many meetings.” Nor were the official League meetings the only growing platform for armed revolution. Foner describes how further “informal, self-defense organizations sprang up around the leagues and reports of blacks drilling with weapons, sometimes under men with self-appointed ‘military titles,’ aroused considerable white apprehension.”

Again, none of this strikes Foner as alarming in the slightest. It was for “self-defense”, after all, so as he sees it there was no cause for whites to be apprehensive. He observes that black leaders, who were the early form of social justice warriors, attended these meetings to explain the goals of the “land struggles” in the South:

“A mass meeting in Savannah, attended by armed low country freedmen, heard Aaron A. Bradley call for the division among black families of lands belonging to ‘rich whites’. Having grown to adulthood as a slave before escaping to Boston, Bradley merged as one of the few black leaders from the North to become actively involved in the freedmen’s land struggles.”

In this context “land struggles” is a phrase meaning seizing land from whites to give to blacks. Nor was Savannah an exceptional case. Foner also gives further examples:

“In Alabama, freedmen delivered ‘inflammatory’ speeches asserting that all the wealth of the white man had been made by negro labor, and that the negroes were entitled to their fair share of all these accumulations.’”

Thus arose the doctrine of the entitlement to a “fair share” of what other people own. To Foner, this is a welcome development, as it aimed to encourage blacks to participate in the wealth from which they had been excluded for centuries. But doubt is cast on this worthy motive by the fact that no attempt was ever made to give black people land or wealth in the North, and indeed black people still did not have the right to vote in most states of the North. Curiously, it was only in the South that the Republican Party deemed it to be such a high priority for black people to be able to vote and acquire wealth. For example in Connecticut black people only got the right to vote in 1870:

“In 1870, the state [of Connecticut] ratified the 15th Amendment which stated that no one could be denied the opportunity to vote based on their race or previous servitude. Still, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and other means of disenfranchising African Americans remained in place. It wasn’t until 1965, with the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act, that many of these restrictive measures were legally abolished.”

It is revealing that Thaddeus Stevens, in fulminating about the need to seize property from whites to give it to blacks, focused on using this as a form of punishment for the “rebels”. Stevens, ignoring the fact that Lincoln had needlessly waged this war, and ignoring all General Sherman’s war crimes, said property seizure would be levied on Southerners as a “fine” to punish them for starting the war:

“It is also important to the delinquents whose property it takes as a fine — a punishment for the great crime of making war to destroy the Republic, and for prosecuting the war in violation of all the rules of civilized warfare”

It is no surprise that Radical Republicans were entirely unconcerned by the undertones of secrecy and violence with which the League became associated. The League was their ally in the “punishment” they deemed appropriate for the South. Stevens justified the activities of the black militia by arguing, in a Congressional speech, that if blacks were not armed, they were certain to be exterminated by whites and buried in secret graves:

“The guardianship of the Freedmen’s Bureau, that benevolent institution, cannot be expected long to protect them. It encounters the hostility of the old slaveholders, whether in official or private station, because it deprives these dethroned tyrants of the luxury of despotism. In its nature it is not calculated for a permanent institution. Withdraw that protection and leave them a prey to the legislation and treatment of their former masters, and the evidence already furnished shows that they will soon become extinct, or driven to defend themselves by civil war. Withhold from them all their rights, and leave them destitute of the means of earning a livelihood, the victims of the hatred or cupidity of the rebels whom they helped to conquer, and it seems probable that the war of races might ensue which the President feared would arise from kind treatment and restoration of their rights. I doubt not that hundreds of thousands would annually be deposited in secret, unknown graves. Such is already the course of their rebel murderers; and it is done with impunity.”

This was blatant propaganda designed to create the impression that only the Radical Republicans could keep black people safe in the South. This is why, when white groups started to form to defend the interests of white Southerners, this was regarded as unnecessary and indeed inexplicable. The federal authorities failed to recognize that the activities of the Union League had played an instrumental role in giving rise to this violence in the first place. As Phillip Leigh observed:

“The Union League is one of the most cryptic of Civil War and Reconstruction era topics even though it was a wellspring of tyranny. Together with the Loyal League identical twin, Southern chapters prompted the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to evolve from an obscure social club into a violent anti-Republican, and therefore anti-black, vigilante group.”

Yet Foner describes it as “sinister” for white people to form organizations of the same kind as the Union League. Why is having secret meetings in the woods at night perfectly fine when blacks do it, but “sinister” when whites do it? No explanation is given for these double standards. Foner places the entire responsibility for introducing violence into race relations on whites.

History has important lessons for those who wish to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, and one lesson to be drawn from the history of violence during the Reconstruction Era is the hazards of such double standards, treating violence from black people as entirely benign, while a violent response from white people is denounced as “racism”. Peace and harmony require that the same rules and standards be applied to all in the same way, regardless of race. Violence is never the answer to political disputes. Lincoln failed to observe this principle, and his deadly war on the South was followed by further tragedy in the violence of “reconstruction”.

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.

Wanjiru Njoya

Dr. Wanjiru Njoya is the Walter E. Williams Research Fellow at the Mises Institute. She is the author of Economic Freedom and Social Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Redressing Historical Injustice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, with David Gordon) and “A Critique of Equality Legislation in Liberal Market Economies” (Journal of Libertarian Studies, 2021).

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