Societal Consensus: Howard Zinn and Irwin Unger’s Accounts of the Failure of Reconstruction

Historians Howard Zinn and Irwin Unger amass powerful historical evidence to explain how Reconstruction failed to secure equal civil rights for blacks in the American South after the Civil War. Both historians agree that the North had the legislative and military power to create and enforce these rights in the South, and both contend that the North’s actions, instead of securing black equality, produced a near-reversion to the racist Southern status quo: freedmen and freedwomen were not quite slaves but yet not quite free. Though factually consistent, the two accounts nonetheless differ concerning who was responsible for Reconstruction’s failure and, by extension, whether the failure was inevitable. In A People’s History of the United States, Zinn portrays the events of Reconstruction as the result of a top-down process. Controlled by white elites and designed to achieve only moderate post-bellum goals that benefited the rich classes, Reconstruction’s outcome was pre-determined.

Blacks’ rights were not on the agenda of the rich, and the rich held the power, so it was inevitable that these rights never received more than a trivial recognition on paper. Unger’s These United States, by contrast, holds a much wider section of the American population responsible for Reconstruction’s failure: Northerners and Southerners, businessmen and politicians, elites and average voters, scalawags and Klu Klux Klan members, conservatives and even radicals were all blameworthy to some degree for the fact that black independence never progressed significantly beyond the bare-bones legal enforcement of Emancipation. Unlike Zinn, Unger sees no master narrative by which one dominant group controlled the direction of Reconstruction and forced its inevitable outcome; each of these groups had power – albeit some more than others – and each may be held partially responsible for the failure of Reconstruction.

Though Zinn and Unger concur that Reconstruction was an overall failure, we must examine the criteria they use to make this judgement in order to understand in what respect it failed. Indeed, it appears that though the failure was significant, neither historian argues that it was complete. In areas not directly related to black independence and rights, both historians point to groups of Americans that benefited from Reconstruction. Unger refers to the reparation of physical devastation, Southern states’ re-establishment in the Union, and even the doubling price of cotton as evidence of Reconstruction’s success in some areas. Zinn, too, points out that Reconstruction was a “profitable” period for some whites. Even with respect to black rights, Zinn and Unger acknowledge that Reconstruction was not a complete failure.