Reconstruction Through Propaganda

By Wanjiru Njoya, Mises Wire | February 10, 2025

In his book, When in the Course of Human Events, Charles Adams cautions against humiliating one’s opponents at the end of a war, as doing so only makes it more likely that conflict will erupt once more. The importance of this caution is well illustrated by the “Reconstruction” of the South.

It was a time of great social upheaval, as would be expected after four years of war. The occupying federal troops and the Freedmen’s Bureau met with resentment and hostility from the majority of Southerners, which was no more than would be expected in the circumstances. But, rather than seeing this as an entirely explicable reaction to the challenges facing the South in the aftermath of war, Radical Republicans treated outbreaks of trouble as evidence that the “rebels” needed to be forced into total submission. The Radical spirit was not so much one of reconciliation and rebuilding, but of humiliation and retribution.

William Dunning, in his book Reconstruction, explains that the South, for its part, regarded the overwrought Radical interpretations of the political situation as malicious, being willfully exaggerated by self-aggrandizing politicians to justify their power grab:

The much-exploited outrages on freedmen and Unionists were declared [by southerners] to be exaggerated or distorted reports of incidents which any time of social tension must produce among the criminal classes.… the southerners felt that the policy of Congress had no real cause save the purpose of radical politicians to prolong and extend their party power by means of negro suffrage. This and this alone was the purpose for which major-generals had been empowered to remodel the state governments at their will…

Southern incredulity as to whether the Radical Republicans were genuinely motivated by a desire to be “white allies” to emancipated slaves is easily understood, when it is recalled that Massachusetts—home of the Radical Republicans—was the origin of racial segregation in the US. The journalist Steve Luxenberg has argued that, “Jim Crow did not originate in the South… It was the free but conflicted North that gave birth to separation, in different places and different forms, at the dawn of the railroad age in the late 1830s.” Moreover, Northern states such as Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Iowa had “Black Codes” before the war, laws prohibiting the settlement of black people and banning racial intermarriage. Viewed in that light, it is no surprise that Southerners regarded the Radical championing of black interests with the same “hatred and contempt” with which they had historically regarded puritanical hypocrisy.

Evaluating the different perspectives presented by North and South necessarily involves making value judgments concerning these events, and it is unlikely that complete objectivity can be attained by any observer of the historical record many years after the events in question. While facts can be objectively verified, evaluating the significance of those facts calls for analysis, and different analysts are prone to exaggerating or minimizing the significance of specific events. The best way to mitigate that risk is to consider as wide a range of factors as possible, enabling a more informed evaluation of the significance of the historical record. It is in that context that the influence of post-war propaganda should be understood.

Propaganda certainly played a notable role in fueling racial conflict in the post-war years. Dunning explains:

From the Union soldiers, from the northern missionaries and school-teachers, and from bureau agents of every grade the freedmen had heard proclaimed for years now, in all the changes from mysterious allusion to intemperate asseveration, the virtues of the Union and Republican party which controlled the North, and the vices and heresies of the Democrats which had brought ruin to the South.

Instrumental in peddling this propaganda were the “Union or Loyal Leagues,” described by Dunning as “predominantly negro” secret societies organized and funded by the Radical Republicans. They were “secret and oath-bound organizations, with awe-inspiring rites and ceremonial” whose aim was to ensure that “new voters were duly trained for their political activity.” Also instrumental in promoting the narrative of the day were Northern politicians described as “carpetbaggers.” Samuel W. Mitcham explains: “To control the South politically, the Carpetbaggers practiced the old political practice of ‘divide and rule.’ They deliberately pitted black Southerners against white Southerners, a tactic which kept them in power for a number of years.”

Rather than being treated as an opportunity for reconciliation between North and South, the Reconstruction process was treated as an opportunity for self-serving race craft. The ulterior motive behind this was self-enrichment: “They used their time in office to enrich themselves, loot the defeated Southern states, and poison race relations in the South for decades.” Mitcham further explains that:

…the Union League and Northern politicians sowed the seeds of divisiveness between the races, in order to enrich themselves. And enrich themselves they did. Using the power of the government they controlled, they issued bonds which they purchased for as little as one cent on the dollar. The South had to redeem these bonds later at their full face value, yielding a huge profit for the Carpetbagger. The city debt of Vicksburg, for example, grew from $13,000 to $1,400,000 in just five years of Republican rule.

The Union League and carpetbaggers were instrumental in creating social and political division. This goes a long way in explaining why thousands of black people who previously supported the Confederate cause—even remaining in their positions after emancipation—turned so dramatically against their white compatriots during Reconstruction. Dunning recounts how white Southerners attempted in vain to find common cause with their black counterparts: “In some localities systematic attempts were made to persuade the blacks that their best interest lay in harmony with the native [i.e., Southern] whites; but the results were pathetically insignificant.”

While part of the failure in unifying black and white Southerners around a common interest in the prosperity of their homeland can be explained by the circumstances of slavery and emancipation, the discord was not entirely due to a desire by black people to align with members of their own oppressed race. After all, the Radical Republicans with whom they aligned were white too, and, as described earlier, they were clearly no less “racist” than anyone else at the time. The antagonistic situation reflects, not simply the tempests of social upheaval that one would expect in the aftermath of war, but also the self-serving attempts by politicians to line their own pockets and entrench the power of their political party.

Dr. Wanjiru Njoya is the Walter E. Williams Research Fellow for 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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