Successes and Failures of Reconstruction Hold Many Lessons

Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University, is the author of many works on American history, including "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution" and, most recently, "Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad."

Updated May 26, 2015, 6:47 AM

Reconstruction was an effort to reunite a nation shattered by civil war, build a new society in the South on the ashes of slavery, and bring into being for the first time in our history an interracial democracy. Yet this remarkable moment barely exists in Americans’ historical memory.

Reconstruction and its aftermath remind us that rights in the Constitution are not self-enforcing, and that our liberties can never be taken for granted.

The successes and failures of Reconstruction hold many lessons for our own time. The era reminds us that the liberation of four million people from bondage did not suddenly erase the deep racial prejudices born of slavery, nor assure lasting political or economic equality for the former slaves. Yet Reconstruction also points to the possibility of moving beyond racism toward a more just society. That white Republicans, many of whom shared their society’s racial prejudices, nonetheless rewrote the nation’s laws and Constitution to incorporate the ideal of equal citizenship should be inspiring in our own fraught times. And the mobilization of former slaves to demand their rights as Americans is an example of how ordinary people can help to change history.

Reconstruction poses a challenge to Americans’ historical understanding because we prefer stories with happy endings. Unfortunately, the overthrow of the South’s biracial governments, accomplished in part by terrorist violence, was followed by a long period of legally enforced white supremacy. Yet this itself offers a timely lesson – that there is nothing inevitable or predetermined in the onward march of freedom and equality. Reconstruction and its aftermath remind us that rights in the Constitution are not self-enforcing, and that our liberties can never be taken for granted.

Reconstruction has long been misrepresented, or simply neglected, in our schools, and unlike Confederate generals and founders of the Ku Klux Klan, few if any monuments exist to the black and white leaders of that era. Fortunately, the National Park Service has just announced an initiative to identify ways of bringing attention to Reconstruction in its historical sites. This is an important first step in making Reconstruction part of Americans’ historical self-consciousness.