What I intend to do here, then, is focus on two historiographically influential works that have been founded in comparative hi

#63, May 27th, 2005

American Freedom, American Freedom

Either poverty must use democracy to destroy the power of property, or property in fear of poverty will destroy democracy.

– Aneurin Bevan[1]

Eric Foner’s Nothing But Freedom (1983) was a deeply informed and informative work, representative of the best of the Americanist comparative genre.[2] It was historiographically very significant, the author deploying comparative analysis to reshape the writing of the history of Reconstruction. However, in the same moment that the work introduced the global into analysis of American history, it also effected its erasure. Foner highlighted the connections between American history and other societies’ histories, filling a lacuna left by many previous historians of Reconstruction, but he nonetheless confirmed the boundaries of American history in the process. It is worth considering this book at length as it has been very influential in shaping the process of “internationalizing American history” – or, as I have said elsewhere, making the world safe for it. Moreover, developing a critique of some of its main premises may help us to recognize how we might begin to rethink the period of Reconstruction moving it away from some of the historical trajectories into which it was incorporated. This will also make it possible to consider, at a later date, how the kind of analysis that has been offered for Trinidad and British Guiana since the publication of Nothing But Freedom might also be applicable in the United States as well.[3]

Radical Reconstruction?

In Nothing But Freedom, Foner argues that Reconstruction was a radical period in American history, its radicalism in large part arising from the significance of freedom alone. Such freedom gave African Americans the chance to move away from places of oppression thereby manipulating the ensuing labor shortage to their own advantage. Backed up by Radical Republicans, at least at the outset, they could establish certain conditions and set certain processes in train that together would constitute a revolution (albeit one that was “unfinished” and which would need to be taken up again during the Civil Rights era).

Arguing against post-revisionist historians who had maintained that Reconstruction did not change much, that, indeed, continuity characterized the history of the South, Foner emphasized the changes occurring during this period. While Leon Litwack might ask skeptically, “How Free is Free?” Foner remained certain that freedom meant something.[4] While the earlier revisionists, like Kenneth Stampp might bemoan the Republicans’ failure to provide land for the freedpeople, Foner argued that such things ought indeed to have been more plentiful, but that these too could be a “hollow victory.”[5] And the soundness of this point is found in the fact that it echoes W.E.B. Du Bois’s critique of Booker T. Washington: without some kind of political power, acquired land and wealth could be taken from African Americans.[6]

The strengths of Foner’s analysis, carrying over into his larger study of Reconstruction, were many.[7] He highlighted the need to understand the people and events on their own terms. For many African Americans freedom meant something, and whatever the level of social oppression they faced after emancipation, few would trade their freedom for a return to enslavement. Another of the book’s strengths lay in its realization that Reconstruction needed to be understood in a comparative framework that examined the phenomenon of emancipation more broadly. In particular, Foner argued, correctly I think, that we need to know how ideas were carried over from other emancipation experiences, especially ideas emerging from those generated in the British empire following emancipation in 1832.

But one of the weaknesses of Foner’s study would emerge out of this comparative analysis. There was, after all, a distinctly exceptionalist aspect to his analysis.[8] While he emphasized the need to see local variations within the South, yet he seemed to want to characterize the overall Reconstruction experience as more radical than emancipation experiences elsewhere. After all, he suggested, it was the degree to which African Americans were given some political power in the United States that made the American experience with emancipation unique. The fact that he also revealed that there were clear differences between the experiences of African Americans on either side of the Savannah River did not deter him from this view.

For Foner, the fact that freedom is given somewhere in the United States seems to mean that the possibility for its extension exists everywhere within the nation’s boundaries – so the fact that the North was able through the Civil War and Reconstruction to ensure that slavery and other forms of peonage did not spread beyond the South was certainly one of the accomplishments of the period, as it would be from the North that freedom would spread again to the South (whether through federal interventions in the South or through African Americans’ continued empowerment – a consequence of the migration that freedom enabled). But then the idea of individual emancipation or even statewide emancipation had been found earlier within the northern states, and for the individual Free Negro living in the South, so, we might ask, why should we confine our sense of the revolutionary experience of freedom to the period of Reconstruction? Or, put another way, at what point does the mark of freedom become so extensive that it is indelible? When, on the other hand, is it so circumscribed, by the existence of slavery, segregation, or poverty, that it no longer can be seen as revolutionary? What are its points of hibernation, and do the people who live in these dark ages see improvement around the corner? Is history really teleological, moving along a path towards freedom?

Perhaps if we could remove the boundaries placed around Foner’s freedom – the manner in which it was connected to the American experience – then we might feel more comfortable, especially with the possibilities of global changes occurring. Then, with W.E.B. Du Bois, we might say that the period of Reconstruction carried over into other forms of nationalism and anti-colonialism (or at least the retrenchment against Reconstruction had its analogs elsewhere, and so also contributed to the process of freedom). But we would then, once again, be moving away from the American-ness of American Reconstruction.

Labor Shortage

Part of the uniqueness and radicalism of American Reconstruction as it is described in Nothing but Freedom lies in Foner’s understanding of the labor shortage, so we need to explore this point briefly. According to the labor shortage perspective, the limits of a subordinate group’s advance toward freedom depends upon the degree to which capitalists are able to satisfy their insatiable need for labor – as if these are constant and unchanging. Because capitalists in the British system were allowed by their government to turn to indentured laborers, which they secured from India and China, the emancipation experience in the British Caribbean would be curtailed, Afro-Caribbean peoples would be remain largely powerless, and race and racism would again hold sway. By contrast, in the United States the Northern Republican hostility to Southern planters was such that there was no chance that labor shortage claims of Southern planters would be met with the search for new laborers to recruit. The Southern landowners were told that they would have to deal with the labor they had. Instead of using this fact to question the notion of a labor shortage (divorced as it has been from the political influences), Foner merely made this the basis for his argument about Reconstruction’s radicalism. The labor shortage was taken care of in the British Caribbean by recruiting new labor so the freedpeople made few advances, while in the American South it remained real and African Americans were able to exploit this to their limited benefit.

There are two potential problems with this: first, the labor shortage may be shown to be a fiction with regard to the British Empire; second, as suggested, the experience in the United States may be used to help in establishing that labor shortage ideas constituted a political fiction functional to the needs of capital (e.g., while one response might be the introduction of indentured laborers, the failure to do this would not necessarily mean that capitalists were unable to influence government in other ways). We will take these two points in turn, as we move towards an alternative suggestion that, in fact, whether or not the American Reconstruction was radical is in fact the wrong question and needs to be rethought.

First, we will consider the nature of labor shortage in the British Empire. There may be cases where labor shortage has been real, but its formulation in the aftermath of emancipation was a particular response to a political predicament rather than an objective assessment of the ratio of land to labor as its advocates contended. These advocates argued that where there was a great deal of available land, ex-slaves would not work and would need to be replaced or supplemented; where there was little land available for them to establish themselves as peasant farmers they would remain available to the planters as a labor force. One becomes suspicious of this theory immediately when one takes into consideration the fact that the main sources for the argument were former slave owners and plantation capitalists, in addition to sympathetic government officials who recorded their opinions in their reports. Further, the labor shortage argument was not a primary consideration, but rather it followed on from an earlier argument about what the nature of the economy should be (whose interests it should serve) which had already been won, largely, by the capitalist elite. Once it had been decided that certain crops should be produced, at a particular price (one that metropolitan consumers were willing to pay), and that this would be done in competition with a particular established group of producers (other Caribbean and Brazilian slave owners), then the labor shortage argument could be seen as persuasive. But once this train of logic has been set in motion the potential empowerment of the freed slave has become so divorced from the purpose of government that to say that the labor shortage has any effect on their well-being and freedom is specious at best. When all this is recognized the fact that Southern planters and merchants did not have their labor shortages taken care of while other planters did is not really so momentous.

Two examples may be given where the radical implications of labor shortage need to be reconsidered in the Southern case. The first is in the period of the oft-called “rehearsal” for Reconstruction. During the Port Royal experiments most of the problems that were going to appear in the ensuing years throughout the South were confronted at a time when white abolitionists were at their most dominant and northern opinion was more favorably disposed to the freed people than at almost any point. Moreover, the planter elite was completely absent owing to the fact that its members had fled from the Sea Islands as soon as the Union troops arrived. Yet, what is clear from Willie Lee Rose’s account is that even here restraints were placed upon African American freedoms, and, in all the experiments none were built around the parceling out of land in small plots to the freedpeople for subsistence farming on the homestead model. Instead, the imperatives of the moment, the need to produce cotton and to do so more profitably and cheaply than had been possible under slavery (in order to show the superiority, or greater efficiency of “free” labor) led to severe restrictions on the rights of the freed men and women. All the while, though, the idea that the northerners were uplifting and improving their charges was sustained. The Port Royal experiments took the form of early development projects.

Given this experience during and immediately after the Civil War and the manner in which black rights were circumscribed by economic imperatives, we can begin to ask different questions about Reconstruction than those Foner asks. For in Foner’s case the Port Royal experiment and the fact that Reconstruction began early in the State of South Carolina, meant that this was a particularly radical emancipation experience among other radical experiences. Thus, the Georgia experience across the Savannah river was less radical, but would perhaps still be considered more fruitful for freedom than what occurred in Alabama (where Reconstruction started later and finished earlier), or than what occurred during the emancipation years in the British West Indies. But instead of asking about the degree to which one experience was radical, which implies that all historical trajectories are moving towards freedom and the success of emancipation should be evaluated on the basis of how far it went along this road, we should be wondering what methods were used in different places to reestablish forms of control in a context of uncertainty engendered by emancipation, and when the old route (slavery) of requiring labor without anything in return (a wage or uplift) was no longer politically feasible. When seen in this light, we begin to recognize that perhaps more significant for the emergence of modern political economies, and for the American economy in particular, Reconstruction coincided with a restructuring of power relations in the Southern economy from the planter to the new merchant. That, under these circumstances, certain spaces opened up for some African Americans for a brief period is not surprising, but it doesn’t necessarily change the degree to which certain notions of governmentality – or what has been called the systems of empire in relation to Trinidad and British Guiana – were being established in the context of late 19^th-century liberalism.[9] Also, focusing on manifestations of freedom, which is Foner’s main concern, diverts our attention from the ways that new elites could manipulate those categories of freedom and servitude to their advantage, making the one mean the other and profiting all the while.

Our other example of the problems that this focus on the radicalism of Reconstruction creates relates to gender. Connected to the labor shortage idea is the notion that African Americans, motivated by certain propriety, began to withdraw the labor of women, and so exacerbated the labor problem. Thus, a situation, the meaning of which is clearly open to debate, is recorded as an example of African American agency and the possibilities of freedom. First of all, though, it is important to note that the ideas of women fulfilling certain roles outside of the paid labor force, conforming to the ideas of separate spheres, is most clearly in accord with the professions of the missionaries who were working among them. In other words, it fit with the ideas missionaries were suggesting about the freedpeople, that they needed to be uplifted from their current state to the more elevated station of responsible citizen. If slavery was everything that they had said it was prior to its abolition, then surely the impact on the slaves’ development must have been considerable and it would take education, not just in reading, writing and arithmetic, to fulfill the missionary goals. With regard to gender, in particular, this meant teaching women their “proper” places and creating male-headed and male-supported families.

But if the missionaries had trouble achieving this goal (and why would they not have had such difficulties, as women slaves may not have wished to place themselves in subordinate positions to men, however much they may have detested hard field labor), their efforts may not have gone unrewarded. For, as far as the planters were concerned the missionary argument about uplifting the freedpeople meshed almost exactly with their need to claim that they faced a labor shortage. Their claims about the inadequacy of the freedpeople as laborers (without the restraints of slavery) and their claims that the withdrawal of women’s labor was hurting them brought them into close alignment with their political adversaries. One might think it too Machiavellian of them to have exacerbated this problem by further encouraging this withdrawal of labor, but in many instances they showed that the end of slavery also brought an end to their need to act with any responsibility (based upon paternalism, perhaps) toward the laboring population and in particular toward its least productive. In addition, given that a significant proportion of the productive capacity of women was devoted to the reproduction of the labor force, something that was now beyond the control of the former masters, the explanation for the withdrawal of labor may have had little to do with withdrawal from the fields, and more to do with redundancy of certain traditional functions associated with some of the women. Whatever may actually be the case, it is clear that historians dealing with this issue have primarily relied on two sources for this argument, the missionaries and the planters, both of whom had vested interests in making the claims about the labor force that they made.

In the process, a number of alternative arguments about women’s experiences and gender get lost because of a refusal to consider the bias in these sources. Firstly, to what degree is the notion of freedom discussed by Foner and others one derived almost entirely from male notions of freedom – drawn therefore from a connection to independence, and so almost inevitably excluding the experiences of women who are tied by links of dependency. Of course, the slave’s experience would also be one of dependence, so at what point did the slave learn to connect freedom with independence? Did he, in fact? And, if he did, was this something that he took with him from his experience in slavery, along with his notions of the “proper” roles for women, gleaned from observing the white man and the woman on the pedestal beside him? This seems rather unlikely, at least in the uniform way that is suggested by those who argue for a desire among freedmen to have their wives (once they had had this status for “their” women confirmed in their own minds and certified in the eyes of the law) withdraw from field labor.[10]

Secondly, given the fact that slavery has often been connected historiographically with the idea of emasculation, to what degree does the revelation about sources of the discussion about women’s withdrawal of labor allow us to reconfigure such debates? Are these debates also driven by the kinds of sources that produced them, both during slavery and after, where the crisis of masculinity has been superimposed upon the slaves by those who felt this crisis most keenly, status-anxious whites (contemporaries and their descendents in the historical profession)? For it seems to me that, after recognizing the kinds of diversity that existed in the social conditions established under slavery, we can say only that we do not know what kind of impact the experience of servitude had on the gender assumptions of the slaves. What we can suggest, given that the roles of women became such a big issue for some of the most influential participants in the Reconstruction saga, as it had elsewhere also, is that notions of masculinity would become extremely important. Since black women may well have wondered about the reality of an advance in their position that saw them remove one master only to have him replaced by another, we can suggest at the very least that the nature of freedom was a very contentious issue for many African Americans. We can also suggest, moreover, that one of the ways race would gain purchase in proving both to the planters’ and the missionaries’ satisfaction that African Americans were not “ready” for freedom and full citizenship rights, was in what would come to be known as the “cultural deficit” or the “problem of pathology.” Since this was something that had been introduced by those who wished to manage freedom for a free-labor American economy, this can be put down perhaps to one of the achievements of post-emancipation, rather than one of its failings (even if, of course, we find this achievement to be one that we would not wish to endorse).

Thirdly, and connected to the previous comments, the labor withdrawal thesis seems to describe a transformation occurring without conflict between members of families, between members of the different sexes. Since it has been made clear that such conflict was present on the plantation, causing competition among men for women, and among women for men, and frequent disrespect for the members of the other sex, or for those who could not or sometimes would not reproduce, it is a wonder why such an important transformation would have occurred in which the “race” was in a way establishing its intent to act in a particular way, without any real substantial conflict occurring. If it did, then obviously this contributed to a potential crisis of masculinity and femininity just mentioned. And, if conflict was present in families to the degree that it has been witnessed in families living at or near the poverty level, then it certainly raises questions about the meaning of freedom for those who were involved in such conflict. [The Jimi Hendrix song, Hey Joe, wafts into the room as I write, “I shot the woman down.”]

Eighteenth Brumaire

Foner pays homage to W.E.B. Du Bois at the beginning of Nothing but Freedom, in part because he sees himself taking up the mantle of Du Bois, especially with regard to seeing the period of Reconstruction as a period of radical potential. With this in mind, a comparison between Foner’s work and that of Du Bois is important as it reveals the two historians’ differences in understanding of the importance of events outside the United States. It also helps us to set the stage for the claim that it is necessary to reconfigure the debate, moving it from the Revolution/Counter-revolution dichotomy to narratives that focus on imperial machinations and governmentality.

Actually, Foner incorporated the revolutionary aspects of Du Bois, but downplayed the counter-revolution, the pulling back of the story into line with other world historical experiences. In short, Foner ignored the degree to which Black Reconstruction in America is also Du Bois’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, a point I have made elsewhere in histrionics.(#14). Where Foner looked to the exceptional aspect of American Reconstruction, Du Bois concentrated his attention on the commonality of oppression from China, through Africa, on through Europe, to the United States. This perhaps is the measure of Du Bois’s Marxism, that he was endeavoring to locate a proletariat in the South, while Foner keeps a safe distance from any connection that might exist between freedpeople and a larger “proletariat.” They are Americans after all.

Thus, while Foner had his eye firmly set on the Civil Rights experience coming down the pike, Du Bois saw Reconstruction setting the stage for the gilded age binge of the 1880s and global imperialism (though Foner does acknowledge these things in his view of the “rightward” shift in American politics in the aftermath of Reconstruction). Incidentally, neither Foner nor Du Bois deals with the West and the wars with American Indians, and these must surely be important given that the Civil War conflict resulted in part from the opening frontier, so that the limits of Reconstruction reform would also be constrained by the imperialist expansion that was the western frontier, and which would provide unbounded opportunities for redefining the meanings of labor (beyond the slave/free duality) after the Indians were removed. Once Chinese indentured labor in the West is added to the story, along with the slaughter of the Indians on-going during the period, the idea of a comparatively radical Reconstruction in America becomes a somewhat jaded one at best.

We can still go along with some revolutionary aspects of American Reconstruction (provided we can accept them for emancipation in the British Empire also), but only so long as we can accept the presence of a counter-revolution, which put many genies back in the bottle, if not all of them. In the end, the problem lies with Foner’s belief that there is something American about American freedom. This derives in part from a focus on the “political creed” of the American Revolution, as though there was indeed a single revolutionary ideology that somehow transcended the presence of slavery. Thus, the creed is always present even when it is contradicted in practice; it is not that the creed means something other than what the liberal wants it to mean, but rather that people (Americans) are failing to live up to it. In such a view a liberal teleology is established which allows for the evolution towards greater freedom, with the creed enabling more rights to extend to previously excluded groups, slaves, women, workers, etc. Indeed, this teleology is a powerful force for change: it is much easier to get people to jump onto a bandwagon that seems to be moving somewhere, than to have them get on only to have to decide in what direction they should move. But just because this is sometimes a useful device for advocates for change, does not mean that it is good history, or that it is anything other than flattery of the self. History becomes “we”, as in when we brought freedom to the slaves, or when we shared our ideas of freedom with the radicals at Tienanmen Square, or now as we democratize the Middle East.

The antithesis of slavery and freedom (dependent opposites) presented so beautifully by Edmund Morgan in American Slavery, American Freedom, needs to be remembered. The political creed of freedom as it emerged in Virginia developed in the way that it did in part because it was created by slaveowners. Absolute freedoms for all people created equally would have been unthinkable – slaves and women need not apply. Those who had tendencies in this direction, those who could see beyond the partial nature of freedom given to planters and yeomen, would quickly resort to racism (and sexism) to solve the problem. This is why the order of the chapters in Morgan’s book, goes from “Towards Slavery”, to “Towards Racism,” to, finally, “Towards a Republic.” Foner’s book seems to push this trajectory aside, with his American thesis of living up to the creed. He writes of the Reconstruction period:

Over a century ago, prodded by the demands of four million men and women just emerging from slavery, Americans made their first attempt to live up to the noble professions of their political creed – something few societies have ever done. The effort produced a sweeping redefinition of the nation’s public life and a violent reaction that ultimately destroyed much, but by no means all, of what had been accomplished. From the enforcement of the rights of citizens to the stubborn problems of economic and racial justice, the issues central to Reconstruction are as old as the American republic, and as contemporary as the inequalities that still inflict our society.

The issues central to Reconstruction, a reading of Morgan would remind us, were as old as slavery in the colonies, and as poverty in England. They were global issues from the beginning – as one can see in The Many-Headed Hydra – hijacked by Americans in Reconstruction to be given a local political dimension, which would both allow for the radical solution (if only temporary) of some of its dimensions, along with the simultaneous reactionary management of others. Reconstruction itself, then, was the simultaneous expression of the global alongside its erasure. American republicans would, as David Montgomery suggested, give up on black laborers, not so much because of race and racism (though there was plenty of racial antipathy), but because of their desire for cheap labor. That desire has fed the migration of labor and capital ever since, with sometimes positive results for those who are lucky enough to reap the benefits of the expansion of global capitalism, but the continued and repeated stories of lives of deprivation and poverty for those who constitute the cheap labor force (wherever they might be located). In that regard, the genie is very much still in the bottle. Or, in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois:

I]n Africa, a black back runs red with the blood of the lash; in India, a brown girl is raped; in China, a coolie starves; in Alabama, seven darkies are more than lynched; while in London, the white limbs of a prostitute are hung with jewels and silk. Flames of jealous murder sweep the earth, while brains of little children smear the hills.[11]

To make this contrast clearer between Du Bois and Foner we should turn to the latter’s larger work on Reconstruction to see how he deals with this “counter-revolution” there. While Du Bois discusses India, China, Alabama, and London, and in Tolkeinesque fashion has the whole of middle earth under shadow, Foner restricts his commentary to the United States. Shadow may have fallen, but since it is the United States, and there is that American creed lurking in the breast of every American ready to spring back to life at the earliest opportunity, the darkness cannot shut out the light altogether.

For Foner, there was still tragedy in the failure of Reconstruction, but this was a great deal less than had been the case for the likes of U.B. Phillips and Kenneth Stampp. The tragedy lay in the spread of racism, not just from the South but to the country as a whole: Foner writes in Reconstruction:

If racism contributed to the undoing of Reconstruction, by the same token Reconstruction’s demise and the emergence of blacks as a disenfranchised class of dependent laborers greatly facilitated racism’s further spread, until by the early twentieth century it had become more deeply embedded in the nation’s culture and politics than at any time since the beginning of the antislavery crusade and perhaps in our entire history.[604]

This acceptance of the idea of a nadir in the history of American race relations, in accord with the Woodward view of the New South and the emergence of segregation, keeps Foner outside the post-revisionist camp (that saw an ever-present racist impulse determining the history of the period), even while acknowledging the importance of racism as an explanatory factor in determining the outcome of Reconstruction. Foner continues:

The removal of a significant portion of the nation’s laboring population from public life shifted the center of gravity of American politics to the right, complicating the tasks of reformers for generations to come. Long into the twentieth century, the South remained a one-party region under the control of a reactionary ruling elite who used the same violence and fraud that had helped defeat Reconstruction to stifle internal dissent. An enduring consequence of Reconstruction’s failure, the Solid South helped define the contours of American politics and weaken the prospects not simply of change in racial matters but of progressive legislation in many other realms.

What had started out for Foner, then, as a comparative exercise, determining Reconstruction’s nature in relation to the emancipation experiences of other societies, has become by the end of Reconstruction a totally American consideration – how the political climate changed for reformers in the United States. The chain is broken – influences can come from outside the United States, but after they have been used here, they don’t move on to other places for further consideration and elaboration, so that they may come back to the United States to stir things up anew.

But in addition to this, the comment is open to a good degree of question. To what degree can people be said to be removed from public life, when they are still laboring, when they are being segregated by law, when they are protesting and being lynched? If Foner is convincing when he explains to his readers that violence was deployed by white Southerners because black freedom meant something real to them, then too this logic may also apply to the phenomenon of lynching, which provided the glue that kept the Jim Crow South intact.

Further, can the failure of Reconstruction be said to have shifted the center of gravity to the right? During Reconstruction itself, Republicans in the North were supporting policies inimical to labor and supportive of the rise of the corporate elite. It was, after all, the glaring contradiction between their support of labor in the South and their opposition to it in the North that helped cause Reconstruction to founder. Moreover, might it not be noted that the end of Reconstruction opened the doors to an “Age of Reform,” spanning Populism, Progressivism, and the New Deal? And, if this is so, might it not be argued then that the attempt to create a nation of white supremacy, fortified by the war in the west with American Indians, and by later imperial expansionism, actually strengthened not weakened the prospects for change within the United States. Might not a new imperial, Progressive consensus be forged, founded on the racism of a Theodore Roosevelt and the Southern sensibilities of a Woodrow Wilson? A league of white nations, anyone?

Of course, this all leads to two books, which will need to be given consideration in later blogs: David Scott’s Refashioning Futures and Madhavi Kale’s Fragments of Empire. It is by considering these two works that we will be able to come up with new more fruitful questions than the fixation with teleological radicalism that clouds historiography. But as a preview of such analysis I will end somewhat cryptically by suggesting that perhaps Eric Williams was correct that particular kinds of reforms were necessary insofar as they were functional to an area on which the economy was seen to depend. Clearly as King Cotton’s influence waned and as consumers looked to other sources for cheap commodities than the South’s cash crops, the logic that kept black labor in its particular position, whatever the actual advance made by the race, became untenable, or at least a distraction from concerns that were emerging elsewhere. It should therefore not be reflexively seen as a saga of freedom (the continuation of Foner’s unfinished revolution), however much the desire for equal treatment and the perquisites of American society motivated those who protested against segregation and other forms of discrimination, and however much they deployed the language of freedom to bring about the changes they sought (of course, the same questions about the radical-ness of the civil rights movement, its success and failure, are also deployed, with the same limitations as in the case of Reconstruction).