Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Jonathan Yardley, washingtonpost.com, January 27, 2008

Review of THE BLOODY SHIRT: Terror After Appomattox, By Stephen Budiansky.Viking. 322 pp. $27.95

The decade-long period known as Reconstruction, which began shortly after the Civil War and ended with the presidential election of 1876, probably has been subjected to more misinterpretation, misunderstanding and outright factual distortion than any other time in American history. For a variety of reasons, including white Southern mythologizing and national indifference to the desperate situation of the former slaves, beginning in the late 19th century fictions about Reconstruction gained not merely wide popular acceptance but also the endorsement of many prominent historians, who gave them legitimacy and staying power.

These fictions presented the white South not as instigator, perpetuator and defender of black slavery, but as the victim of politically motivated mistreatment by “carpetbaggers” and other outsiders dispatched by Radical Republicans in Washington to wreak vengeance on the South. By contrast with the rapacious industrial North, the South was portrayed as — in the words of one historian — “a garden for the cultivation of all that was grand in oratory, true in science, sublime and beautiful in poetry and sentiment, and enlightened and profound in law and statesmanship.” Slavery metamorphosed from a “peculiar” institution into a benevolent one, and it was argued that only the South could hope to help the former slaves because “the Southern white man is the only man on earth who understands the Negro character.” If only the North had left the South to settle its own problem, the fictions contended, everything would have been fine. If Reconstruction failed, the fault lay solely with the North.

I remember all too well being force-fed this poppycock in the late 1950s at the University of North Carolina by a distinguished old professor who so ardently embraced the anti-Reconstruction argument that he might as well have been waving the bloody shirt, a time-honored phrase employed by political demagogues to accuse their opponents of association with violence. As Stephen Budiansky notes at the outset of this book, “the fiction that Northerners were given to making fetishes of bloodstained tokens of their victimhood at Southern hands” was just that — a fiction — but it gained wide currency in the white South during Reconstruction as a metaphor for what was seen as the cruelty, cowardice and hypocrisy of the Northern conquerors. Obviously, there was no such thing as a monolithic “white South,” and opinion on these matters was scarcely unanimous, but “distorted memories of Reconstruction” were more the rule than the exception, even among many white Southerners who were more open to sectional reconciliation than were the diehards.