armaments stuffed into a carpetbag, propped up by bluecoated soldiers of
occupation. Two new textbooks do ask students to interpret the cartoon. The
new edition of Pageant merely refers to “the carpetbags and bayonets of the
Grant administration” as though they were fact. The other four textbooks
merely use the drawing to illustrate Reconstruction: “The South’s heavy
burden,” captions Triumph of the American Nation.
Attacking education was an important element of the white supremacists’
program. “The opposition to Negro education made itself felt everywhere in a
combination not to allow the freedmen any room or building in which a school
might be taught,” said Gen. O. O. Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau. “In
1865, 1866, and 1867 mobs of the baser classes at intervals and in all parts of
the South occasionally burned school buildings and churches used as schools,
flogged teachers or drove them away, and in a number of instances murdered
them.”^68
Almost all textbooks include at least a paragraph on white violence during
Reconstruction. Most tell how that violence, coupled with failure by the United
States to implement civil rights laws, played a major role in ending
Republican state governments in the South, thus ending Reconstruction. But,
overall, textbook treatments of Reconstruction still miss the point: the problem
of Reconstruction was integrating Confederates, not African Americans, into
the new order. As soon as the federal government stopped addressing the
problem of racist whites, Reconstruction ended. Since textbooks find it hard to
say anything really damaging about white people, their treatments of why
Reconstruction failed still lack clarity.
Into the 1990s, American history textbooks still presented the end of
Reconstruction as a failure of African Americans. Triumph in 1990 explained,
“Other northerners grew weary of the problems of black southerners and less
willing to help them learn their new roles as citizens.” The American
Adventure echoed: “Millions of ex-slaves could not be converted in ten years
into literate voters, or successful politicians, farmers, and businessmen.”
Actually, black voters voted more wisely than most white voters. To vote
Republican during Reconstruction was in their clear interest, and most African
Americans did, but some were willing to vote for those white Democrats who
made sincere efforts to win their support. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of
white Southerners blindly voted for white Democrats simply because they
stood for white supremacy.