Phil Leigh on Reconstruction

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. Today is a special edition of the podcast because we're going to talk about something we don't normally talk about. Actually, we're going to go over something that was filmed about a year ago for a documentary Last Day in Studios put out last year called American Monument.

I did three of the interviews for that documentary. And two of them, I did extended interviews with the people we were interviewing. And I saved them. And I haven't shared them. And I had the thought, well, I'll do like a Civil War week or in a Revolutionary War week.

And I didn't know how far I'd get with other wars maybe, but I'll just have some history content. And I didn't get very far. Time got away from me and I thought, you know what? I'm not going to keep sitting on this.

I'm going to release it. So I did release one of the episodes that Brian McClanahan and I did together where we talked about the Civil War, but we traced through American history kind of what led to it.

And then afterward, how the battle lines are still drawn. And I think I called it the unending Civil War. We're still in it in a way. It's never really ended in one way. And so you can go check that out.

And by the way, if you haven't seen American Monument, you need to check that out. Go to YouTube, go to actually the best place to go is lastdayinstudios .org. And you can find the Rumble link, the YouTube link and the Facebook link.

It's being shadow banned on Facebook and YouTube has put in age restrictions. But go see what they don't want you to see.

There you go.

But anyway, this next interview I want to share with you is from a gentleman who's, in my opinion, just a phenomenal writer, very clear. He's an independent historian, mostly writes about Civil War, reconstruction, biographies.

He did a great one on Ulysses S. Grant. He is someone who's written for the New York Times. I mean, that's how good he is. And he's not a progressive, but he doesn't have the academic accolades in history that would get you mainstream approval in the historical disciplines or anything.

He's an independent historian, which honestly today, those are the best kind. And I talked to him about reconstruction. And so it's a short interview, but I think a very informative one. And I'm glad I was able to do it.

So look forward to you seeing it and put in the comments what you think. And more content coming later in the week.

Enjoy.

Grant’s Presidency and the Corruption of Reconstruction

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. This is another edition of the Civil War Week special. And I have a special guest with me today, Phil Lee. Thank you for joining me, Phil. Phil has written for the New York Times.

He has a number of books on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Walk us through some of your books.

Well, I have one book about Grant's presidency. Because he's been, people put a halo around General Grant and also President Grant, but they lose sight of the fact that his administration was crooked.

Yeah, that's kind of the origins of the deep state, right? In some ways, you could trace some of it back to Grant.

Well, I think that certainly there was a lot of corruption. And I mean, for example, he set an example. He may not have broken any laws, but he set an example for conduct that is unbecoming. He was given four houses after the Civil War.

He was given one in Galena, Illinois, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Washington, D .C., and Long Branch, New Jersey, which was a so-called 27-room cottage in Long Branch, New Jersey. Now, the guy that helped him, the guy that led the donations for that ended up being assigned to Collector of Customs at New York City.

That was the largest port in the United States at the time, still is probably, but it was also, tariffs were the major federal tax revenue at the time, and about 2 3rds to 3 4ths of the tariffs were collected in New York City, and the money tended to stick to the fingers of the collector.

Okay, well, he had a few, I think he had one more house than Bernie Sanders,.

So that, yeah, that's pretty.

Yeah.

The Economic Devastation of the South Under Reconstruction

So, we wanna talk today, though, a little bit about a topic that doesn't often get covered, in my opinion, when talking about the Civil War, and that's Reconstruction, because, I mean, history is sequential.

Obviously, everything's related to something that came before it and something that will come after it, and I know from my study of Reconstruction, it seems to me that modern academia portrays it as this was the time, the phrase you'll often hear is that the North won the war, but the South won the peace, and that they were able to establish white supremacy in the South, and it was just, it was basically a horrible place, akin to Nazi Germany, and they reasserted the dominance that had been there before the war and slavery by a new name.

So, I wanna hear from you. What's the truth about Reconstruction, that whole era? What were the conditions like in the South? Some of the policies that the government put down, what were those, and what effect did they have?

Well, commonly what you'll hear from academics is, well, you know, the antebellum South was the King Cotton because they had slave labor, which made them the low-cost producer of cotton throughout the world, and, well, if you look after the Civil War, when there was no more slavery, the South was still the world's low-cost producer of cotton, the dominant producer of cotton well into the 20th century, perhaps 1930 and beyond.

The difference was everybody in the South was impoverished, not just the slaves. The Northern victors impoverished everybody. The per capita income in the South, 35 years after the war had ended, was half of the US average, which means that the region outside the North, outside the South, had per capita income more than twice the South, and it stayed.

The per capita income in the South did not get back to its previous below-average 73rd percentile until 1950, which was 90 years after the 1860 census, which was just before the Civil War.

So what contributed to this? I know you said the Northern captives, the people that won the war, but what policies did they enact that contributed to this? Why were the conditions so dismal?

Well, one of them was the high tariffs were designed to promote manufacturing industries, and the manufacturing industries were primarily in the North, and one of the things that's chiefly understood about high tariffs is they tend to promote monopolies, and so the manufactured goods that were monopolized that were produced in the North became essentially the sole source for people throughout the country.

They could import, but what's the point with high tariffs? For example, after the end of the Civil War, the South needed to rebuild its railroads desperately. Railroad iron was $80 a ton in Pennsylvania and $35 a ton in Liverpool.

The difference was tariffs, and so it essentially became a monopoly.

I see.

Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, and Corrupt Reconstruction Governments

So if you watch some of the older, more popular movies or read some of the books from, I'd say, pre -1960, like Gone with the Wind, you'll read about certain classes of people like carpetbaggers and scalawags, which sometimes even you'll hear that today in political discourse, oh, that person's a carpetbagger.

They're coming up from the city to a more outlying area, they're trying to take advantage or something like that. What, you know, I've heard in academia, in academic circles today, that a lot of that's just a myth, you know, like as if that didn't happen.

So did that happen? What was that like?

Yes, it did. Yes, it did happen, and you're right. The academics of today minimize it, beginning with Eric Foner, perhaps in the late 1980s, even earlier with his less popular works. But yes, that is a myth.

The carpetbagger, we did have misrule during the Reconstruction era. The governments were corrupt, and the taxes were much higher. If you look at the constitutions, they had some nice objectives in there, public education, all this sort of thing, but the only people that could pay for them were impoverished landowners.

Impoverished landowners just couldn't afford it. So the scene in Gone with the Wind about losing tariff for lack of property taxes, or unable to pay property taxes, that was a reality. That was a reality for the southern landowners after the Civil War.

Many of them did lose their homes, and many of them were frightened of losing their homes, and the problem is that left generations of resentment against the misrule. And as I pointed out, and I think in an interview we did at another time, if you examine what happened after the Civil War in terms of the spread of the demographics, blacks stayed quarantined in the south for well over a century after the Civil War.

The 22 states that joined the United States, all the way through Alaska and Hawaii, after Texas joined in 1845, 20 of the 22 states that joined had about 1 black population. The two exceptions were West Virginia and Oklahoma, which were about 5%.

Black Suffrage, Northern Racism, and Racial Adjustment

Why is that? Because I'm sure that academia wouldn't want to put out the, give the impression that it was so good in the south that they wanted to stay there. So was it policies in the north? I mean, I know in, I think the title of the book.

Is escaping me,.

The Curious Case of Jim Crow by C. Van Woodward. He talks about that the Jim Crow laws actually started in the north. Is that the reason? Because there were barriers to going to the north?

The academics will make, will put halos around abolitionists, particularly in Massachusetts. And one of the ones, one of the prominent leaders was Charles Sumner, Senator Charles Sumner, who promoted the 18th, the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

He, there was. The Freedmen's Bureau was set up right after the Civil War to take care of the blacks in the south. The original bill was written with amendments to enable the Freedmen's Bureau to send blacks, surplus blacks to the northern states.

Those amendments failed. And both Massachusetts senators, Wilson and Sumner, both of them voted against that amendment, even though they were great abolitionists.

So let me just get this straight, because you never hear about this. The narrative today that, after the war, the north financed and 40 acres and a mule and tried to help black people in the south, that there's somewhat of a myth to that, because they actually did not want people in the south who were black coming up north into their states.

And to help, so it's kind of like the immigration crisis. They, hey, we're for illegal migration, but we don't want them in our house, right? That sounds like a similar.

It's exactly the same. Abraham Lincoln in 1854 said, we want the Western territories for free white people, direct quote. He's not the only one. His secretary, his future secretary of state, William Seward, had similar views.

Even Horace Greeley, go west, young man, go west. Yeah, that was for white people. He owned the New York Tribune, which was the most prominent newspaper at the time. He said the same thing. We want the Western territories for whites.

And we want, yeah, he wanted the farms in the south confiscated in order that the blacks could be given the land to stay in the south, Horace Greeley.

The Politics of Blame and the Scapegoating of the South

So I have a question then. Why this vilification and distorting kind of the narrative? Because, I mean, it used to be that, I mean, I'm old enough to remember, even though I'm not that old, when there was kind of a sympathy for the people that were victims of the Dust Bowl, let's say, or people in the south, whether white or black, that they had some kind of a poverty, and now that's just, that's gone.

You can't have any sympathy for anyone, especially if someone's white and they live in the south. That's, they're the villains. They're kind of, you know, they're the problem. And some of the, what you've just been mentioning, a lot of this is ignored.

What do you attribute that to? I know we had talked about that previously in another interview, but, you know, maybe you could shine some light on that for people.

Cancel. Culture is all about virtue signaling. Signaling that I am morally superior to all of you. That's what this is all about. But there's no truth in it.

So you're saying that to blame the sins of the nation or the sins of America on this specific class is convenient. To say that they're the ones that are the source of racism and other evils, perhaps, gets you kind of off the hook, because you don't have to be responsible for that.

It's ancient, the scapegoat, right? It's ancient. And there's a misconception that if I can blame other people, if I can point out how inferior other people are, it makes me superior. But I guess right now you can fool people some of the time, and maybe they're fooling people right now.

But, you know, over the long run, people see through that.

Jim Crow, Reconstruction Misrule, and the Poisoning of Race Relations

I have another question for you, because here's, I think one of the things that is true, it seems to be, is that, especially in urban areas in the South, after the war, maybe, I don't know, after the Redeemer governments had come in, if I'm not mistaken, that's when some of these policies, segregation, et cetera, started being passed.

And I know it was more severe in urban areas than it was rural areas. And that would be something I think we would say that's wrong, that shouldn't have happened. Why did it happen?

The biggest thing that needs to be kept in mind is that 40 of the population of the 11 Confederate states was black. The states that were organically Republican, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, New England, about 1 was black.

So the racial adjustment was going to be profound in the South, not in the North. Even during, I think in 1862, the month before Lincoln announced his Emancipation Proclamation, Illinois voted about 2 1⁄2 to one to block Negro suffrage, black suffrage.

And they had 0 .4 of their population was black, only 0 .4%, which is four blacks per 1 ,000 people. And they voted over 2 1⁄2 to one to disallow black suffrage.

Wow.

You don't think that would have affected much anyway.

That's Lincoln's home state. That's the month before he announced the Emancipation Proclamation. So there's a lot of hypocrisy, and there was bound to be racial adjustment. If Lincoln said it, if Horace Greeley said it, if William Seward said it, and other prominent abolitionists, we want the Western territories and the Northern states for free white people.

Clearly, there was an aversion to blacks at that time. That was gonna require adjustment. It's a much bigger adjustment to reconcile a situation where the blacks are 1 as opposed to 40%. Is racism wrong?

Of course it is. Nobody that wants to remember their Confederate ancestors today would agree that racism is good or that slavery was good. That's a canard.

Right, right.

But the counterfeit virtue, I think, is it's important to not put all the sins on this one class of people, but that actually the attitudes were similar in the North, if not maybe more aggressively against black people.

Well, the racism in the North was probably equal to what it was in the South. They just didn't have as big a problem because there were not that many blacks there. Again, I'll go back to the point. Look at how the statistics show.

22 states joined the United States after Texas in 1845. 20 of them had about 1 population black. The other two were Oklahoma, West Virginia, with about 5%.

Black Political Power, Jim Crow, and the Timing of Southern Backlash

Now, let me ask you this. Was there maybe some resentment that played a role in passing some of the Jim Crow laws that maybe the Freedmen's Bureau has, I'm not sure exactly, the Union League, some of these organizations, maybe you can make the connections better than me, but that they had manipulated the vote?

Because I remember seeing something that it was a picture, I think it was the Mississippi legislature during Reconstruction, and it was almost entirely made up of black people. And I thought, well, I don't know if that represented the population of the time.

And were there efforts to maybe get black people to vote Republican in an illegitimate way, paying them for votes? I've heard this kind of stuff. Is it true?

Is it?

It's not reported, but incidentally, the illustration you're thinking of is probably South Carolina, because they had an even larger percentage of it.

I thought it was Mississippi, but okay.

But Mississippi did have a lot of, over 50 black as well, in terms of population. Yes, this is something that is ignored, is the blacks, the northern states repeatedly voted against black suffrage before the Civil War, and even after the Civil War.

They didn't want them voting, even though they were a tiny percentage of the electorate. So the South, to change the electorate to the point where the blacks and their allies, their white allies, were a majority of the voters that could then control the government, was an invitation to misrule.

And we did get misruled. Those were corrupt regimes. That, unfortunately, and the men at the time admitted it, there was white hostility toward the black, but it was even greater toward the carpetbaggers.

They held the carpetbaggers more responsible for this manipulation of the black vote than they did the blacks. But unfortunately, the blacks wore the brunt of the hostility. It really didn't appear until the 1890s, however, because that's when the Jim Crow era really began.

Up until about 1890, the blacks could get elected into the legislature.

The Long Arc of Race Relations from Reconstruction to Black Lives Matter

So if you look at this sequentially, just as a historian, I mean, sequences are really important to me. And here's the narrative that is put out there in the popular media. You have this legacy of slavery that creates Jim Crow in the South that then creates police abuse today, and that's what murdered George Floyd.

That's kind of the trajectory, that there's this systemic racism, that it always changes forms, it never goes away. But it seems like what you're saying is that actually, it wasn't like immediately after the Civil War, all of a sudden, everyone's like, let's get some Jim Crow laws in here.

There's actually a little bit of a gap there, or this organically kind of formed over time. As a result, perhaps the problem with race relations that did exist was more attributed to the way that that whole conflict was handled in the aftermath more than maybe slavery itself, or at least that's a contributing factor.

Is that fair?

Yeah, it was the misrule during the Reconstruction era that led to the hostility.

That poisoned race relations.

Yeah, it poisoned, that's a good term. It poisoned race relations. Brazil, for example, freed slaves, I think, in around 1885. You didn't have that kind of problem, because you didn't have somebody giving them the vote and imposing new governments in the regions of Brazil, or in the states, or whatever they had.

So there was much more harmonious race relation adjustment down there. But that, Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute, a great man, he admitted, he said that all this white Reconstruction, or the Reconstruction era of carpetbaggers, that was really a manipulation of my race.

And he said, I thought so at the time, and of course, it's turned out to be worse than he thought.

Of course, he's blacklisted now, kind of. At least you don't hear about him much during Black History Month.

Well, he may be blacklisted, but if you read Webb Du Bois, who is sort of the Malcolm X of that era, he also said that blacks also had to take responsibility for the situation, in terms of getting themselves out of poverty.

Obama, Sharecropping, and the Politics of Victimhood

So today, where we are right now, in 2021, we're talking about the past, obviously, history. We're the beneficiaries, and sometimes, in some sense, we bear the brunt of mistakes that were made in the past.

But it seems to me, I've lived in the South for a few years, in North Carolina and Virginia, that a lot of the problems that did exist have been pretty much eradicated in most areas. And those hurt feelings and resentments that seemed to exist were kind of going away until, this is my opinion, until the Black Lives Matter movement started going.

And now, all of a sudden, we're seeing a lot of this resentment come up again. And they're using a certain narrative of history to try to promote this kind of resentment. Where do you, what are your thoughts on that?

Where do you think, where do you think this is going? The historical discipline, the politicalization of the historical discipline, do you think that will continue? Do you think, do you think that it's a problem that the current narrative places so much blame for all the country's sins on one class of people?

I think it's a significant problem. And I agree with you. Unfortunately, it may well lead to a backlash. Most of the memorials to the Civil Rights era are in the South. I think if you compare the number of streets and avenues and schools named for Martin Luther King in the South and compare them to those in the North, there's a great, there's a much greater tendency for them to be in the South.

I mean, for example, I think Mississippi has, I can't remember the statistics, but it has four times as many MLK streets and avenues as does Ohio with, no, it has twice, yeah, it has twice the MLK streets and avenues as does Ohio, but it has only 1 1⁄4 of the population.

Wow.

That's typical.

Wow.

The South was making great adjustment. In my opinion, as I look back on it, I think the real problem was Obama. Obama could have been a great force for racial reconciliation, but he chose to divide and divide and divide.

For example, I mean, just to take off the race issue for a moment, he's a promoter of, an advocate of doing something to address climate change, yet he and his wife just bought a home on, well, not just, but in the last few years, they bought a home on Martha's Vineyard.

If the waters of the ocean were gonna rise, Martha's Vineyard is not land you wanna own.

They didn't believe what he's saying.

That's right. Believe, watch what people do, not what they say, what they do, and another misconception I'd like to clear up is that as late as 1938, half, fully half of the sharecroppers were white, not black, and many people overlooked that, and they typically earned about 25 cents a day, seven, between 15 and 25 cents a day.

So they were perfect candidates for victim status in today's intersectional kind of paradigm.

Except for the immutable characteristic of their skin. That doesn't matter to you or me. Or, it really shouldn't matter to anyone, but that's where the political power seems to be today, but anybody that is perpetually dissatisfied is going to make changes, but unless they can get some satisfaction out of what they're doing, they're never gonna be happy.

Yeah, well, thank you for sharing your thoughts, because this has been very enlightening, I think, to a lot of people, because you're kind of poking a hole in some of the narratives that are out there and showing maybe the government has some responsibility or a part to play in the policy during Reconstruction.

As Reagan would say, the government is the problem, sometimes, and that poisoned race relations, and that led to some of the problems that did exist. And blaming this one class of people, only putting them under the microscope, has been not only dishonest, but had a detrimental effect.

And so I appreciate you taking your time to talk to me. Where can people find out more about your books? And maybe you can recommend a book. I know you wrote one on Reconstruction for them to read if they wanna know more about this.

Thank you, Southern Reconstruction by Philip Lee. And the last name is spelled L-E-I-G-H, Southern Reconstruction, or U .S. Grant's Failed Presidency. Both of them are good on Reconstruction, so thank you for that.

Yeah, and you can go to Amazon.

Where would you?

Amazon, Barnes Noble, as they say, all fine bookstores.

And I know you have a YouTube channel, you have a blog, Civil War Chat, right?

That's right, Civil War Chat is my blog, and I have a YouTube channel, which I'm not sure what the name of it is, but it's easy.

We'll link it, we'll put it in the info section. I'll find it.

But yeah, thank you for the opportunity to express my thoughts.

Yeah, well, my pleasure, Phil. You're welcome back anytime, God bless.

God bless.