Eric Foner

But that's not really true.

Scholars still debate the actual number, but the historian Eric Foner estimates that between 1830 and 1860, some thirty thousand fugitives were at some stage part of the Underground Railroad.

But other scholars believe that the number was closer to fifty thousand, and some think it was twice that many.

So compared to the millions of people who were enslaved throughout America's history, tens of thousands doesn't seem like that much.

If you're running a city, for the city, whatever.

And we got this idea, and historian Eric Foner talked about it, that authority was the enemy of individual freedom.

And so people lost the authori- people in institutions lost the authority to make moral choices, who's...

A- a- and, and choices about standards, who's, who's cooperating and who's not, and all that.

Right.

And, but, but they didn't want any more abuses of authority, so they did away with authority.

And Eric Foner wrote a, historian-

Mm

Because, you know, some people we talked to at the very beginning of our journey and others we talked to at the end of the journey.

And I think as we spent more time with more people, I mean, can you imagine sitting with Dr. Foner and Dr. Blight for hours? It was mesmerizing, you know?

If you're a nerd like us-

Mesmerizing.

Many of these newly elected Black politicians had been soldiers in the Union Army.

According to historian Eric Foner, for Black soldiers, military service meant more than the opportunity to help save the Union, more even than their freedom and the destruction of slavery as an institution.

For men of talent and ambition, the Army flung open the door to advancement and respectability.

One of the main subjects of conversation among new Black politicians surrounded the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and whether there was room for women in politics.

But...

And actually since Du Bois and then Foner and now a lot of s- other social historians has, have been trying to figure out really what happened.

I think we're just beginning to get a handle on the significance of the federal pullback, uh, in '74 when they basically got clay feet and really did not defend against the White Line.

I think this would be a good time, if, if you wouldn't mind, telling the story that you tell in your book about the election day in 1874.

Let me give you just one little example.

I don't think Foner really even mentions this.

Again, South Carolina, which had a black majority of its legislature for about five years during Reconstruction.

This was a political revolution, and you can see why white Southerners were organizing against it.

There are many other examples.

Amos T. Ackerman in Georgia, among others.

Look up him and Foner, if you like.

I guess the only other thing I want to say about that is, there were carpetbag governors.

It's clear, and even in their own writings, that many of the justices just wanted to get rid of Reconstruction and leave it to the South.

It's signaled now, most importantly, and Foner makes this point in the one little paragraph he gives you on the Cruikshank Case, it's signaled now that the federal government was, in effect, exiting Reconstruction.

Certainly, the Supreme Court was.

And as Foner says, "Terror was given a green light anywhere that a state government was unwilling to enforce the law or protect people." Now, why was Radicalism waning in the 1870s or even at the beginning of the 1870s? What is abou- about the Grant years, especially the second Grant administration, that leads, you know, that just pa- practically paves these roads to a Southern redemption, a Southern counterrevolution? Well, there are many factors, and let me kinda run through them and then focus especially on the scandals for a moment, and then on this larger question of, of violence, in case you haven't heard enough about violence.

I mean, first of all, there's the panic of 1873, um, which set in in the spring of 1873, a major economic depression.

It hit the country, eventually the entire country.

Benjamin Wade is g- long gone as a senator from Ohio.

The, the old leadership of the Radicals is really no longer there by 1874 when the Democrats are gonna throw the Republicans out of the leadership of the Congress anyway.

I love any book that takes a theme or subject that we think that we know well and gives us a new kind of angle from which to understand it.

And there's obviously been thousands and thousands and thousands of books on Abraham Lincoln that But Eric Foner's blurb here says that you've managed to find something genuinely new about Lincoln, and I would have to agree.

So let's get into it, starting from the very beginning of his career.

How did Lincoln come to enter politics, and what seems to have drawn him into it in the first place?

And I said, it'd be an honor to come down and talk.

And so I was on a panel, spent the day there, had a bit of a back and forth with Eric Foner, One of the deans of African-American scholarship writes about Reconstruction.

We had to have a conversation about this question of civil rights and whiteness being preserved in the law.

And he thought, you know, no, it's going to be whiteness has been, you know, after the Civil War amendments, they made us say no, no, no, no, no.

When you say colorblind, what you're saying is white is the standard.

And I said, when you see, when you read the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and it says that black people have the right to be treated as a white man, you've created an extra legal, a super whiteness that sits above that.

Of course, he didn't have an answer for it because, I mean, Philip Foner don't, I mean, Eric Foner don't know me from painting as we were having a conversation that morning at breakfast before.

He's sitting there by himself.