Bad History

In “I’m Hoping Bush Can Finish What Lincoln Started,” an article in the Washington Post‘s Outlook section today, Sophia Nelson writes:

As an American who’s also black and a Republican, I’ve grown increasingly uneasy lately about our public discourse on race.

Ms. Nelson likes what she’s been hearing from President Bush because she sees him as Lincoln’s heir.

If he can follow through on his suggested programs for the Gulf Coast, he will be doing something quite historic. He will truly be finishing the original Reconstruction envisioned by Abraham Lincoln and the Radical Republican Congress of the 1860s and ’70s, which sought to give newly freed slaves access to education, land and a stake in the American economy that had been denied them for 200 years. And, despite the divisive voices in the party, he will be giving the GOP a chance to reclaim some of its historical greatness as the party of civil rights and social justice.

I joined the Republican Party as a college student in 1988, when George H.W. Bush ran on a promise of a “kinder, gentler America.” I support the party’s positions on a strong national defense, lower taxes, family values, religious freedom and economic entrepreneurship. Where I part company with the GOP is on its position on civil rights. I believe this country is still deeply divided over race….

After the Civil War, Lincoln launched the Reconstruction era, which lasted from about 1865 to 1885, to help the South get back on track economically and to help freed slaves become successfully integrated into American society. But when Andrew Johnson, a former senator from Tennessee, became president after Lincoln’s assassination, he granted pardons to thousands of ex-Confederates, many of whom were later elected to Congress and supported segregationist policies. In states such as Louisiana — and specifically in New Orleans — civic leaders delayed adopting integration policies and granting rights to blacks as required in order to receive federal support until after they had fallen irrevocably behind the rest of the “New South.”

Because the country is still “divided over race,” with poverty rooted in historical discrimination, Ms. Nelson believes “affirmative action in education, contracting and employment are still needed in modern-day America.”

That, of course, is her privilege. Many people favor racial preferences today as compensation for racial discrimination in the past. But Ms. Nelson’s foray into history as justification for her policy views is woefully, almost embarrassingly, inadequate:

• Reconstruction did not last until 1885. The last federal troops were withdrawn from the last three southern states to have them in 1876, but Reconstruction as a serious effort to reform the South, if indeed it had ever been that serious, was over well before that.

• It was never the intent of the North, radical or otherwise, to impose “integration policies” on the South, or anywhere else.

• Anti-miscegenation laws were widely established well before Reconstruction, and not just in the South.

Ms. Nelson sees President Bush as completing the work of Reconstruction, but if she’s right that work is not what she thinks. Bush, unfortunately, does have a good deal in common with the leading Republicans of the Reconstruction era, but, obviously unknown to Ms. Nelson, those leaders were not the “Radical Republicans” she admires. The Radicals lost the fight to write a colorblind standard into the 14th Amendment.

As I wrote here:

It is one of the many ironies in the strange career of racial equality that in order to defend racial preferences liberals [and even Republicans like Ms. Nelson] today rely on purposefully ambiguous language resulting from the desire of the framers of the 14th Amendment to preserve segregation and states rights, while the critics of racial preferences, who are usually viewed as conservatives, echo the radicals who wanted to proscribe all racial distinctions. Today … these “conservatives” are much more likely than liberals to honor Justice John Marshall Harlan’s eloquent assertion in his Plessy v. Ferguson dissent that “our Constitution is colorblind.”

Ms. Nelson is free to choose whatever policies she prefers, but she’s not free to choose an imaginary history for support.

Say What?