Rehearsal for Reconstruction

In March of 1862, a small group of missionaries and evangelical social workers and educators arrived at Beaufort, South Carolina to begin what would amount to an attempt at a social revolution. This effort had been made possible by Union victories in November 1861 on the remote Sea Islands in coastal South Carolina, just outside Charleston Harbor. Under control of the Union Army, these missionaries attempted to help 10,000 black slaves create a new life for themselves, a life of self-reliance and free labor rather than one of dependence and submission. Although the war would progress in close proximity for another three years, the black residents and white missionaries and soldiers of the Sea Islands created a new, reconstructed society that would highlight and predict the adversities the nation would face at the end of the war. In researching and writing Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment, historian Willie Lee Rose has created a focused and thorough investigation into the goals, practices, and dilemmas facing missionaries, soldiers, politicians, and former slaves along the path to creating a post-bellum society. Most importantly, Rose has provided society a chance to review its own performance, and to examine its lingering problems, in the area of equality and civil rights. Overall, Willie Lee Rose?s Rehearsal for Reconstruction provides a crucial, historical, yet contemporary opportunity for America to honestly look at its failures, accomplishments, and challenges in the modern struggle for equality that was shaped in the long nineteenth century.
As both historical monograph and social commentary, Rose?s work bears the characteristics of the revisionist histories taking shape in the 1960s. Feeding off of Kenneth Stampp?s Peculiar Institution, Rose examines the brutality of slavery as causation for the freedmen?s difficulties in adapting to a new place in society. In addition, Rose echoes Stanley Elkin?s arguments portraying psychologically damaged former slaves, individuals handicapped by imposed servitude. The author, however, goes further in creating a social history that focuses on an isolated geographical area as it offers a new view of the Reconstruction era. Far from the Dunning school and its one-dimensional carpetbaggers and inefficient, buffoonish freedmen, Rose?s ?rehearsal? for post-bellum America casts the freedmen as individuals, humans adapting to their new lot in life while dominant whites do their best to both help and hinder black progress. This micro social history places the experiences of the Sea Island blacks in the context of social revolution at the same time America was experiencing new social and racial challenges and disruptions in the 1960s. Rose?s work, then, becomes a work of historical and contemporary importance.
The social experiment at Port Royal was, on the surface, a first effort at merging blacks from the South into free society. In the early stages of the war, with emancipation a secondary goal, Lincoln worried that an experiment in free labor with slaves might muddy the waters and alienate slave states loyal to the Union. Because of this, the missionaries tread lightly in their goals, focusing on education, cleanliness, and assimilation to a white-dominated society. These educators and missionaries functioned on a privately-funded salary, serving to insulate the government from any failures that might arise. Secretly, however, abolitionist-leaning government officials like Salmon Chase were ?hoping that Port Royal would become a proving ground for the reconstruction of the South.?(Rose, p. 155) Indeed, as the war progressed and emancipation became the focus of the war, the major focus of politicians and general citizens became ?What place would the emancipated slave assume in the United States after the war was over??(199) Port Royal and its inhabitants hoped to guide the nation toward the answer to that question.
The experiment in the Sea Islands took on special meaning because of the region?s status as a symbol of the Old Southern Order. Indeed, Beaufort was a town in which ?mansions?attested to the prosperity of a class that had made the great staple crops of South Carolina pay well?over a number of generations.?(7) The planter aristocracy had used the slave system to its full potential, reaping the profits while solidifying the tenets of the slave culture. As a result, slaves of the region embodied ?an exaggerated attitude of dependency; a weak sense of family; an inevitable tendency toward the classic faults of the slave-lying, theft, and irresponsibility.?(140) Upon the missionaries? arrival, slaves who stayed behind after the planters had fled ahead of Union troops exhibited both loyalty and hatred for their masters, as well as a fear of continued status as slaves under new masters. This was the first hurdle that missionaries would have to clear in order to transform slaves into freedmen.
Rooted deep within this mission of transformation was a fundamental difference of opinion as to purpose and method of this great ?experiment?. For the most part, the missionaries, or ?Gideonites? as they were called, hoped to demonstrate that emancipated blacks were not to be feared but rather could be viewed as valued members of white society. However, groups from New York and Boston held different views on how to approach this goal. Those from New York were more evangelical, finding common ground with black religious backgrounds, and emphasizing the concept of revivalism inherent in bringing the blacks forward to salvation. Conversely, the Massachusetts workers focused on ethical and intellectual reasoning in bringing the freedmen forward as functioning members of a northern-valued society, especially as individuals with labor-based value. To Rose, these divisions in purpose were crucial, influencing every action they took with regard to black social and economic advancement. Most importantly this included the value and morality of free labor and the type of education, social or economic, that was to be provided to the former slaves.
Both as historical investigation and social history, Willie Lee Rose has succeeded in making the Port Royal experiment relevant. Perhaps an important criteria for judging an historical monograph is its value to modern historians. Rose?s work provides an extremely readable account of Port Royal?s ?rehearsal? while making its points and lessons important to the present day. Indeed, the author?s questions surrounding black assimilation into white society during the 1860s were relevant for her contemporary audience in the 1960s and are just as crucial today in the beginning of the twenty-first century. Was/is it right to expect an historically and continually oppressed race to assimilate to the dominant race in society? In other words, why do African Americans need to ?become white? to become a valued part of society? The Port Royal experiment demonstrates that even with assimilation, acceptance is long in coming and never guaranteed. Rose has provided a micro history that asks eternally tough questions while reflecting on the nation?s most perplexing struggle-the negotiated battle to define the role of African Americans in a white-dominated society.
Overall, Willie Lee Rose?s Rehearsal for Reconstruction provides a crucial, historical, yet contemporary opportunity for America to honestly look at its failures, accomplishments, and challenges in the modern struggle for equality that was shaped in the long nineteenth century. Rose?s effort speaks neither to definitive successes nor failures of the Port Royal experiment. Neither does it elaborate on the final disposition of Reconstruction itself. The final results, Rose seems to imply, are yet to be seen and evaluated.