The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage labor in South Carolina, 1860-1870.

A half-century of constructive "revisionism" in the study of Reconstruction has arrived at an impasse. Following the path blazed by W. E. B. DuBois, historians overthrew the Dunning School's pro-southern apologetics and white-supremist assumptions, and, in the event, the black experience finally got the attention and respect it deserved, as did the more admirable side of the performance of the Radical Republicans. Decades of strong monographic work received learned and intellectually acute syntheses in such fine interpretive works as John Hope Franklin's Reconstruction in the South and Kenneth M. Stampp's Reconstruction.

It is no disrespect to DuBois, Franklin, Stampp, and the others who did the necessary work of overthrowing the Dunning School to suggest that they carried an alternate viewpoint as far as it could go and that we must now pose fresh questions and prepare to build on the strength of both of the contending schools. The gains that revisionism brought with it came at a price, as such gains always do. For the Dunning school made invaluable contributions to political and constitutional history that have been shunted aside but will doubtless resurface when we finally get the new effort we need. A fresh work of synthesis that fails to take careful account of the positive side of the work of the Dunning School and of E. M. Coulter's subsequent South during Reconstruction may make good propaganda for the ideology that now reigns in Academia, but it will not stand the test of time as good history.

Since the work of Franklin and Stampp appeared we have gained many more valuable monographs, the best of which, at least implicitly, have suggested new directions. It is enough to recall Willie Lee Rose's Rehearsal for Reconstruction, Barbara Jeanne Fields' Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, and Gerald Jaynes Branches without Roots. And we have seen excellent works that do not purport to be histories of Reconstruction but have nonetheless set the stage for a new departure: notably, Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Capital, Richard Weaver's Southern Tradition at Bay, C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South, and Lewis F. Simpson's Mind and the American Civil War.

Julie Saville's The Work of Reconstruction, notwithstanding its limited focus on the reorganization of the agricultural labor force in South Carolina, provides an outstanding model for the work that needs to be done, for it is as theoretically pregnant as it is empirically well grounded. Saville refuses to cotton to the rage for "theory," as postmodernist blather is pompously labeled, but she has a fine theoretical mind, and she writes in English, not elitist jargon. Among her finest accomplishments in this impressive book, she integrates political economy with social and political developments in a manner that only a widely read intellectual could. If I am reading her correctly, she has especially drawn on Marx's political economy, separating what remains powerful in Capital from its errors and rigidities. Thus she impressively criticizes the "forty acres slogan" for obscuring "values that are foreign to the idea of land as a commodity." It is a rare pleasure to read an American Marxist historian who has actually studied Marx and who knows how to separate Marx the social scientist of genius from Marx the mischievous and often jejune romantic philosopher. In consequence, Saville pays close attention to "race, class, and gender" without distorting the empirical record and making a damned fool of herself.

Saville stresses the "grassroots" efforts of the freedmen to assert themselves and defend their own interests in what amounted to a two-front war: on the one side, against the encroachments of northern capital and its complacent free-labor ideology; on the other side, against a battered and desperate planter class that wanted to retain the power and privilege that accompanied its antebellum paternalism and simultaneously to beat the Yankees at their own game of ruthless manipulation of the market. Along the way, she sheds light on the deep transformation that was taking place in the planter class despite the partial persistence of its personnel. Saville makes a good job of it. She might have done even better had she paid more attention to the collapse of southern conservatism, penetratingly delineated in Weaver's Southern Tradition at Bay, and if she had widened her net to include a consideration of the sea-change in the theology, social thought, and institutional practice of the white churches, which had a significant if largely unstudied impact on the course of the postbellum South.

Saville takes us through the puzzling complexities of the struggles to enforce wage-labor contracts and the ins-and-outs of various forms of tenancy and share-cropping. The freedmen, she shows, did indeed believe that they were entitled to the land they had worked as slaves, considered their own, and thought they had been promised. They did bitterly oppose the efforts of their former masters to reclaim it, but they no less bitterly opposed the Yankees who were settling in as landowners and trying to turn them into rural proletarians. The Yankees, for their part, were appalled at the "ingratitude" of the people they had so nobly liberated. The implications and ramifications of the attempt to impose a free-labor ideology on the freedmen have been well discussed by others, but no one has overmatched Saville's performance. Saville illuminates the different kinds of struggles that took place on small farms and plantations, and she is especially good in her discussion of the tensions between the blacks' strong sense of family and the explosion of their long pent-up individualistic impulses. She then proceeds to a careful dissection of the blacks' tendency to plan their economic life according to a principle of equality among families rather than individuals - a tendency that brought them into collision with the interests of the planters, southerners and carpetbaggers alike. This rich book illuminates many other subjects of capital importance: for example, relations between blacks and poor whites and the conflicts between old planters and Yankee settlers.

Saville's sympathy for the blacks' struggle for autonomy and justice is unmistakable, but she keeps a healthy distance from romantic slush and has no patience with conspiracy theories or glib generalizations about racist and exploitative motivations. She understands markets and distinguishes between the landowners' greed and their inability to resist the pressure of an evolving economic system they could not control. Similarly, she provides an unsparing account of the betrayal of the freedmen by their Republican benefactors and offers plausible analyses of the economic circumstances and ideology that shaped their course.

The Work of Reconstruction thus provides firm building blocks for a new synthesis, but it also suggests problems that continue to receive inadequate attention. Saville ably discusses Lincoln's emphasis on the superiority of labor over capital and his anachronistic vision of an open society in which every worker could aspire to rise into the artisanate if not the bourgeoisie. In her own terms, she delineates the basically Jacobin politics that flowed from it, but she leaves hanging the indictment filed by a long line of conservative critics, most recently and effectively M. E. Bradford, that Lincoln thereby paved the way for a Leviathan state dominated by big capital. Her analysis may well provide more support for those critics than she would feel comfortable with.

Then too, she traces in depth the extraordinary initiative shown by the freedmen in fighting for their own interests, most notably their effort to reconstitute themselves as a peasantry - as Sidney Mintz has styled it in his studies of the Caribbean - and simultaneously to become producers for the market on their own terms. Her account of the freedmen's attempt to establish their own militias in the teeth of the hostility of the Republican establishment as well as the Democratic opposition is especially telling, and, unlike too many others, she does not pretend that the whites had a monopoly on extralegal violence. But I do wish she had pondered more deeply the implications of Machiavelli's warning on the fate of "unarmed prophets."

Saville's unfeigned modesty has its charms but also its frustrations. In The Work of Reconstruction she displays the theoretical depth, the penchant for indefatigable research, and the eye for big questions that make her a prime candidate for the authorship of the big book on Reconstruction we badly need. She is not alone among scholars of her generation in that respect. One - or more - of them will have to do it if the impasse at which we have arrived is to be transcended, and I for one hope she finishes what she has so splendidly started.

Eugene D. Genovese Atlanta, GA