Reconstruction describes the years following the Civil War when Americans attempted to reunite the Union and the Confederate states. To many white Southerners, Reconstruction was a vicious and destructive period during which Northerners exacted revenge on a weakened south. To many northerners, Reconstruction policies were the only way to prevent a still-defiant South from continuing on its destructive path. Reconstruction did not provide African Americans with legal protections, material resources, or ensure equality; most blacks had little power to resist continued oppression on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Yet Reconstruction formed the basis for later efforts to win freedom and equality for African Americans under the law. After the Civil War, the South was a desolate place. Towns had been gutted, fields burned, bridges and railroads destroyed. Most whites had little personal property left. 258,000 Confederates had died, and hundreds of thousands more returned home injured, sick, and defeated. 3.5 million black men and women were emerging from bondage; hundreds of thousands immediately left their plantations, with nowhere to go and no possessions or money to their name. Reconstruction become a struggle to define both the meaning of the war and freedom in the new United States. Some blacks believed the only way to secure freedom was to have the government take land from whites, who owned virtually all of it, and give it to former slaves. Others asked only for legal equality. All former slaves, though, made a break from white society, and began to form their own churches, clubs, and even schools. For white Southerners, freedom meant something different - the ability to control their own destinies without interference from Union forces. In practice, former confederates were fighting to preserve local and regional autonomy, as well as white supremacy. Federal troops remained in the South after the war to preserve order and protect newly freed slaves. The Freedmen’s Bureau was an agency of the United States Army that distributed food to millions of former slaves, established schools (staffed by missionaries and church volunteers) and even made a modest effort to settle blacks on lands of their own, though it was only authorized for one year. Larger disagreements among Republicans delayed the implementation of policies designed to solve the serious problems the Union faced after the war. Radical Republicans advocated for disenfranchising large numbers of Southern whites, protecting President Lincoln and other moderates favored a lenient Reconstruction policy, believing that Southern Unionists (mostly former Whigs) could become the nucleus of new, loyal state governments in the South. Lincoln’s plan was unveiled more than a year before the war ended. It offered a general amnesty to white Southerners (excluding high Confederate officials) who would pledge an oath of loyalty to the United States government and accept the abolition of slavery. When 10% of a voting population took the oath, those loyal voters could set up a new state government. Lincoln also proposed extending suffrage to blacks who were educated, owned property, rejected their readmittance. They instead implemented the Wade Davis Bill, which called for the president to appoint a provisional governor for each conquered state. When 50%+ of white men pledged their allegiance, the governor would be authorized to summon a state constitutional convention, whose delegates were to be elected by voters who had never borne arms against the United States. The new Constitutions would be required to abolish slavery and disenfranchise Confederate civil and military leaders; only then would Congress readmit former Confederate states. Lincoln disposed of the bill with a pocket veto that enraged the Radical leaders, and the more pragmatic Lincoln concluded that he would have to accept at least some of the Radical Republican demands. What plan Lincoln may have produced no one can say. In early 1865, John Wilkes Booth, an actor fervently committed to the Southern cause, shot and killed Lincoln while he was attending a play with his wife. The circumstances of Lincoln’s death earned him immediate martyrdom and set off a hysteria in the North - other attempts were made at murdering former Union leaders that night, and Radical Republicans used evidence of the plot to pursue more vigorous punishment of the South. Andrew Johnson, a Democrat until he joined the Union ticket in 1864, assumed the presidency. His plans for Reconstruction, which he preferred to call and under their new governments, they simply re-elected their old Confederate leaders. In addition, many state legislatures were implementing Black Codes, laws which authorized local officials to circumvent slave laws by jailing, fining, and then forcing blacks to work to pay off those fines - some laws also restricted black labor to anything not resembling traditional slave labor. Congress refused to seat the representatives of the “restored” states, and the period of congressional (or “radical”) reconstruction began. Congress passed an act extending the life and powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau, constitutional definition of American citizenship and disallowed even the possibility of slavery. Congress offered automatic re-admittance to any former Confederate state that ratified the Amendment, but only Tennessee did. In the 1866 election, race riots across the South strengthened the Radical Republican’s hand (much to the chagrin of President Johnson, a conservative Republican), and Congressional Republicans began to pursue a plan separate from the president’s. Three bills passed in 1867, vetoed by Johnson and overridden by Congress, firmly establishing, nearly two years after the war, a coherent plan for Reconstruction. Under their plan, Congress rejected the Lincoln-Johnson governments of ten Confederate states, and instead, combined those states into five military districts. A military commander governed each district and had orders to register qualified voters, which included all adult black men and white men who had not participated in the rebellion. Those voters would elect conventions and prepare new constitutions that included black suffrage (a fundamental “question of life or death” for black men after the war); once approved by Congress, the state legislature would have to ratify the 14th Amendment before rejoining the Union. By 1868, seven of the ten states were readmitted. Conservative whites held up the return of Virginia and Texas until 1869 and Mississippi until 1870. By then, Congress had added the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the terms of readmission. (The 15th Amendment forbids the denial of suffrage to any citizen on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude). To stop Johnson from interfering in the plan, Congressional Radicals had passed two laws of dubious constitutionality. One, the Tenure of Office Act, forbade the president from removing civil officials without the consent of the Senate - a law passed to protect Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who was cooperating with the Radicals. The other law, the Command of the Army Act, prohibited the president from issuing military orders except through the commanding general of the Army, Ulysses S. Grant, who could not be relieved or assigned elsewhere without consent of the Senate. Congressional Republicans also took action to stop the Supreme Court from interfering with their plans. They proposed (but did not advance) several bills severely limiting the power of the Court, and the Court protected itself by refusing to accept jurisdiction in cases touching the issue of Reconstruction. Radical Republicans, leery of Johnson’s conservatism and his ability to derail their agenda, actively pursued a case for impeachment through the middle of 1868. In the South, white Republicans were labeled “scalawags” (true pro-Reconstruction Southerners) and carpetbaggers (whites who had moved to the South for economic reasons after the war). Former slaves became Republicans after the war, and played significant roles in the politics of Reconstruction South, including securing election to state and congressional offices. While many Southern whites complained loudly about “Negro rule,” the percentage of elected blacks dwarfed actual demographics. Reconstruction governments were expensive and sometimes corrupt, but largely effective at advancing Radical Republican aims, including the improvement of Southern education. Much of the money and labor for the improvement of Southern education came from outside the South - the Freedmen's Bureau, private philanthropic organizations, The effort to reform land ownership in the South failed, however. The demographics of land ownership did eventually begin to shift, though poor blacks (and whites) often became sharecroppers during reconstruction - tenants of white landowners that worked their own plots of land and paid their landlords either a fixed rent or a share of the crops. It was an improvement from the forced labor of slavery, to be sure, but did little to change the economic system that perpetuated white supremacy in the South. Overall, the per capita income of blacks rose 46% between 1857-1879, remarkable economic progress by any measure. Women and children were less likely to labor in the fields, and adult men tended to work shorter days. Persistent problems faced poor blacks, though. Many blacks and poor whites found themselves held virtually powerless by the new crop-lien system after the war - a high-interest system of credit extended by local stores that took advantage of a lack of competition. Farmers who suffered a few bad years in a row, as many did, could become trapped in a cycle of debt from which they could never escape. Relentless planting of cotton contributed to soil exhaustion, another problem that undermined the Southern agricultural economy over time. As a consequence, Mound Bayou was one of dozens of black towns that sprung by after the war, founded by freedmen, in order to create communities free from the indignities of segregation and the exploitation of sharecropping on white-owned plantations In the 1868 presidential election, American voters selected General Ulysses S. Grant, a strong, stable figure, to guide them through the troubled years of Reconstruction. He had no political experience and suffered from corruption and scandals within his cabinet. Liberal Republicans opposed to the agenda of the Radicals joined the Democrats in 1872, but Grant easily won reelection. Grant struggled to handle the crises of his presidency, including the Panic of 1873, which prompted serious debate over the fate of currency in the United States. Grant excelled at foreign affairs, though, and his officials acquired Alaska for a song and resolved the conflict with Britain over their indirect support of the Confederacy during the war. Reconstruction waned as Grant focused on domestic issues - by the time he left office, Democrats had taken back seven former Confederate governments and most troops left former Confederate states for good in 1877. Where whites were a majority of the population, reassuming control had been relatively easy, but in states where the population was more evenly divided (and in states in which blacks were the majority) whites used intimidation and violence to undermine the progress of Reconstruction. Secret societies, including the Ku Klux Klan, used terrorism to frighten and intimidate blacks from voting. Other paramilitary organizations armed themselves to “police” elections and pressured white males to join the Democratic Party. Economically, white Republicans opposed Reconstruction progress by refusing to do any form of business with Black Republicans. Congress responded by passing the so-called Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1870 and 1871, which prohibited states from discriminating against voters on the basis of race and gave the federal government the authority to protect civil rights. After the adoption of 15th Amendment in 1870, though, some reformers convinced themselves that their long campaign on behalf of black people was now over and that with the vote, blacks were firmly on the path to equality. Former Radical leaders began to call themselves Liberals, cooperating with the Democrats, and many white Republicans moved into the Democratic Party. In 1874, Democrats won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1861. Grant immediately reduced the use of military force in the South, and though he hoped to run for a third presidential term, Republican leaders - shaken by Democratic successes and scandals in Grant’s White House - settled on Rutherford B. Hayes, a champion of civil service reform and a former Ohio governor. The Democrats nominated Samuel Tilden, a reform governor of New York. The 1876 election was close, and the Constitution had established no method to determine the validity of disputed returns; a divided Congress further compounded the issue. Democrats conceded the election of Hayes after gaining secret pledges from Republicans that effectively eased Reconstruction (the so-called Compromise of 1877). In his inaugural address, Hayes announced the South’s most pressing need was the restoration of “wise, honest, and peaceful” self-government and soon let Democrats take over the remaining Southern state governments. The solid Democratic South, which would survive until the mid-20th century, was taking shape. The legacy and impact of Reconstruction is still being disputed. Newly freed, many African Americans gained some measure of means and opportunity, and blacks were, for the first time, able to carve out a society and culture all their own. The movement was not as disastrous for whites as Southerners had feared. Within little more than a decade of the Civil War, the white South had regained control of its own institutions and, to a great extent, restored its ruling class to order. The federal government imposed no drastic economic reforms on the region, and the abolition of slavery is the only lasting political change forced on the South during era. For all its radicalism, Reconstruction remains notable for its limitations. The United States failed in its first serious effort to resolve its oldest and deepest social problem - the problem of race. The experience so disillusioned Americans that one hundred years would pass before white Americans would again fight on behalf of Civil Rights; the 14th and 15th Amendments went largely ignored for a century after Reconstruction. And yet, the successful Civil RIghts movement of the 20th century sometimes called the Second Reconstruction, leaned heavily on the progress made during the first Reconstruction, nearly a century before. In the years following the end of Reconstruction, white southerners rejoiced at the restoration of what they called home rule. In reality, though, most of the South fell under the control of a powerful, conservative oligarchy, whose members were known as “the Redeemers” or “Bourbons.” This post-Reconstruction ruling class resembled the old ruling class but consisted in part of new industrialists, railroad developers, financiers. They banded together in a defense of home rule and social conservatism with a commitment to the economic development of the South. So-called “Bourbon” governments lowered taxes, reduced spending, and diminished state services, including the public school system implemented by the Union after the war. New South advocates adopted some practices of the North, however; they advocated thrift, industry, and progress - qualities that pre-war southerners had often denounced as northern barbarities. With low taxes and abundant cheap labor, including an unprecedented population of single women, southern industry expanded dramatically, especially in the textile, tobacco, and steel industries. The South adopted the northern standard for railroad rail sizing, symbolically linking two economies. Much of the profits of industry flowed upward, however, and Southerners remained markedly poorer than their northern counterparts. Blacks were often shut out of the labor workforce and found themselves prey to the crop-lien system of sharecropping. The New South creed was not the property of whites alone. Blacks invested heavily in education, and many succeeded in elevating themselves into the middle class. The chief spokesman for this movement was Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute. An entirely self-made man, Washington’s message was cautious but hopeful; African Americans should attend school, learn skills, and establish a solid footing in the trades. Industrial education trumped classical education. Blacks should improve their dress, refine their speech, and adopt habits of thrift and personal cleanliness; they should, effectively, adopt the standards of the white middle class. Only then, Washington claimed, could they win the respect of the white population. His philosophy of race relations became known as the Atlanta Compromise - blacks, he said, should forgo agitation for political rights and concentrate on self-improvement and preparation for equality. He challenged whites who wanted to discourage blacks from acquiring an education or securing economic opportunity, but his message was also intended to assure whites that blacks would not challenge the emerging system of segregation. Few white southerners had ever accepted the idea of racial equality at all. “Proponents of the Lost Cause” tried to rewrite the history of the antebellum South to deemphasize the brutality of slavery. They also perpetuated the myth that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights instead of slavery, and continued to celebrate the culture of the Confederacy long after the war had ended. After 1877, federal troops were gone, and by 1883 the Supreme Court ruled that protections against discrimination did not extend to private organizations or individuals. The courts moved soon after to validate state legislation that institutionalized the separation of the races. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court held that separate accommodations did not deprive blacks of equal rights. In Cumming v. County Board of Education a few years later, the Court ruled that communities could establish schools for whites only, even if there were no comparable schools for blacks. Efforts at separating the races had been underway for some time, and in some states, disenfranchisement began almost as soon as Reconstruction had ended. During the 1890s, though, laws restricting the black vote became more rigid. Fearful poor whites would band together with blacks to challenge the “Bourbon” political establishment, the “redeemers” in power understood that a shared commitment to white supremacy could help dilute class animosities between poor and ruling “Bourbon” class whites. Economic issues, then, tended to play a secondary role to race in southern politics, serving as a distraction from the glaring social inequalities that afflicted blacks and whites alike. In devising laws to strip the vote from black males, southern “Bourbon” whites had to find ways to evade the 15th Amendment. Before 1900, two tools emerged - the poll tax/property requirement and the literacy test (sometimes called the “understanding test”). By 1900, black voting decreased by 62% and white voting had fallen off by 26%. Laws restricting the vote were part of a network of state and local statutes - knows as the Jim Crow laws - that by the first years of the 20th century had institutionalized an elaborate system of segregation reaching into almost all areas of southern life. Blacks and whites could not ride together in the same rail cars, sit in the same waiting rooms, use the same restrooms, eat in the same restaurants, or sit in the same theaters. Blacks had no access to many public parks and could not frequent many hospitals. A dramatic increase in white violence against blacks, along with Jim Crow laws, served to inhibit black agitation for equal rights. The worst of the violence - vigilante “lynch mobs” of white men taking the law into their own hands - reached appalling levels in the 1890s. White participants often saw their actions as a legitimate form of law enforcement, and some victims had actually committed crimes. But lynchings were also a means by which whites controlled the black population through terror and intimidation. While an anti-lynching movement, comprised largely of women, sprung up across the nation, it was an exception to the general commitment to segregation and control in the South. Though slavery had been vanquished from the United States, the promise of a great Reconstruction movement remained largely unfulfilled in the South as the 19th century drew to a close. The 20th century now appeared on the American horizon. The great western frontier was now closing, and Americans would soon look abroad to expand their great empire. Monuments to the confederates would be erected across the South, while the children and grandchildren of former slaves were now free, thanks to the sacrifices of countless northern soldiers, to seek opportunity wherever they could find it. America would stitch itself back together, in fits and starts. Debates over the meaning of equality and freedom, born of men like Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin had passed on to Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas and now moved to the likes of Booker T. Washington, Susan B. Anthony, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr, and even Barack Obama. Each American generation confronts an inevitable conclusion: an inspiring commitment to individual liberty gave birth to the United States, but slavery shaped its formative years. Many of our modern divisions are the product of that historical hypocrisy. We inherit this dual legacy today and are defined not only by how we reconcile this past but by the brighter future we seek to build on top of it.