Chapter 15 Reconstruction Reconstruction describes the years following the Civil War, when Americans attempted to reunite the splintered Union and Confederate states. To many white Southerners, Reconstruction was a vicious and destructive period of time during which Northerners exacted a revenge on the weakened South. To many Northerners, though, 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 their equality within the Union. Most blacks had little power to resist continued oppression on both sides of the old Mason-Dixon line.
Yet reconstruction formed the basis for later efforts to win freedom and equality for African Americans under American law. After the Civil War, the South was a desolate place. Towns had been gutted, fields burned, bridges and railroads destroyed for the fighting of the war.
Most whites had little personal property left to their names. Over a quarter million Confederate soldiers had died, and hundreds of thousands more returned home seriously injured, sick, and defeated. 3.5 million black men and women were emerging from bondage.
Hundreds of thousands immediately left their plantations after the end of the war, with nowhere to go and no possessions or money to their name. Reconstruction became a struggle to define both the meaning of the war that had been fought and the meaning of freedom in this 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 the former slaves. Others asked only for legal equality under the law. All former slaves, though, made a break from white society and began to form their own churches, clubs, and even schools across the South.
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 the white support. supremacy they had grown accustomed to.
Federal troops remained in the South after the war to preserve order and to protect these newly freed slaves, or freedmen as they were sometimes called. The Freedmen's Bureau was an agency within the United States Army that distributed food to millions of former slaves, established schools, staffed by missionaries and church volunteers, and even made modest efforts to settle blacks on lands of their own, though that program of the Bureau was only authorized for a year. Larger disagreements among Republicans after the war delayed implementation of policies designed to solve some of the serious problems the Union faced after the war.
Radical Republicans advocated for disenfranchising large numbers of Southern whites, stripping them of the right to vote as a punishment for starting the war. They also advocated for protecting Black civil rights, confiscating the property of wealthy whites who had aided the Confederates, and distributing that land among the freedmen. President Lincoln and other moderates, though, favored a more lenient reconstruction policy approach. believing that Southern Unionists, mostly former Whigs who had never really supported the war in the South, could become the nucleus of new local state governments across the Southern states. Lincoln's plan was unveiled more than a year before the war ended.
It offered general amnesty to white Southerners, including 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 that oath of a state, Those loyal voters could set up a new state government. Lincoln also proposed extending suffrage to blacks who were educated, owned property, or had served in the Union Army.
Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee re-established loyal governments in 1864, but radical Republicans rejected their readmittance. They instead implemented the Wade-Davis Bill. Wade-Davis Bill. We're going to see competing visions for what Reconstruction meant. The Wade Davis bill called for the president to appoint a provisional governor for each conquered state.
When 50 plus percent of white men pledged their allegiance to the United States and to the abolition of slavery, the governor of that territory 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. No one who'd fought in the war could participate. The new constitutions from the states would be required to abolish slavery and disenfranchise Confederate civil and military leaders. Only then could the United States Congress readmit former Confederate states.
See two very different visions between Lincoln and then the radical Republican version of what Reconstruction should be. Lincoln disposed of the Wade Davis bill with a pocket veto. He never took action on it. It enraged radical Republican leaders. And the more pragmatic Lincoln concluded that he would have to accept at least some of the radical Republican demands eventually.
What plan Lincoln may have produced, no one can say. Early 1865, John Wilkes Booth, a southern actor who was 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 hysteria in the North. Other attempts were made at murdering Union leaders that night, and radical Republicans used evidence of the plot to pursue more vigorous punishment for the South.
Andrew Johnson, a Democrat until he had joined Lincoln's ticket in 1864, now assumed the presidency. His plans for Reconstruction, which he preferred to call Restoration, notes a different connotation there, Restoration. looked a lot like the Wade Davis bill of the radical Republicans, but included general amnesty for most white Southerners, as Lincoln's plan had.
By the end of 1865, all Confederate states had formed new governments under either Lincoln's or Johnson's terms, and all waited for readmission into the Union now. Congress balked, and as the South remained defiant in three principal ways. The South, Southern states were reluctant to actually abolish slavery. They largely refused to grant suffrage to Blacks.
and under their new governments they simply re-elect their old confederate leaders. In addition, many state legislatures across the South were implementing black codes, laws which authorized local officials to circumvent slave laws by jailing, fining, and then forcing blacks to pay off those fines. Some laws also restricted black labor to anything not resembling traditional slave labor. Black codes, slavery by another name.
Congress refused to seat the representatives of these restored states, and the period of Congressional or Radical Reconstruction began in earnest. Congress now passed an act extending the life of the powers of the Free Men's Bureau, and then it passed the Civil Rights Act, the first Civil Rights Act, in 1866, declaring blacks to be United States citizens and giving the federal government the power to intervene in state affairs to protect the rights of those citizens. Johnson vetoed both bills, but Congress overrode both vetoes.
Many black families separated by the slave trade had reunited after the war. and many blacks rushed to marry once they were given full citizenship under the law. The same year of the Civil Rights Act, 1866, Congress drew up the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which offered the first constitutional definition of American citizenship and disallowed even the possibility of slavery within the United States any longer.
Congress offered automatic readmittance to any former Confederate state that ratified this amendment, but only Tennessee did so. In the 1866 election, race riots across the South strengthened the radical Republicans'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 but then overridden by Congress, firmly establishing nearly two years after the war a coherent plan for reconstruction now. Under this plan, Congress rejected the Lincoln-Johnson governments of 10 Confederate states. and instead combine those states into five military districts. A military commander now 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 for their states that included black suffrage, a fundamental question of life or death for black men after the war. Once approved by Congress, the state legislatures would have to ratify that 14th Amendment before rejoining the United States. So by 1868, seven of those 10 states were readmitted into the Union, and they were now formally back within the United States.
Conservative whites held up the return of Virginia and Texas until 1869, and then Mississippi until 1870. By then, Congress had added the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the terms of readmission into the United States. The 15th Amendment forbids the denial of suffrage or the right to vote to any citizen on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. To stop Johnson from interfering in this radical Republican plan, congressional radicals had passed two laws of dubious constitutionality.
One is called the Tenure of Office Act, which forbade the president from removing civil officials without the consent of the Senate. It was a law passed specifically to protect the Secretary of War, Edward M. Stanton, who was cooperating with the radicals. The other law, Command of the Army Act, prohibited the American president from issuing military orders except through the commanding general of the army, Ulysses S. Grant, who could not be relieved or signed elsewhere without the consent of the Senate. So Congress, having the ability and the numbers, the sheer numbers, to overturn the president's vetoes, is now trying to neuter the president further. Congressional Republicans also took action to stop the Supreme Court from interfering with their reconstruction plans.
They proposed but did not advance several bills severely limiting the power of the Supreme Court, and the court protected itself by refusing to accept jurisdiction in cases touching the issue of reconstruction. The Supreme Court just did not take these cases up. Radical Republicans, leery of Johnson's conservatism and his ability to derail their agenda, actively pursued a case for impeachment of the man through 1868. Across the South, white Republicans were labeled scalawags, true pro-Reconstruction Southerners, and carpetbaggers.
Carpetbaggers are whites who had moved to the South for economic reasons after the war to try to profit from all the misery. 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 their 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, and Northern white women who traveled to the South after the Civil War to teach in Southern schools. By the 1870s, Reconstruction governments began to build a comprehensive public school system that served Black and white children in a mostly segregated South. 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.
Sharecroppers. Tenants of white, wealthy landowners that generally worked their own plots of land and paid these landlords either fixed rent or a share of the crops they grew. It was an improvement over the forced labor of slavery, to be sure, but it did little to change the economic system that perpetuated the system of white power and supremacy. Overall, the per capita income of blacks rose about 50% between 1857 and 1879, which is remarkable economic progress by any measure.
Women and children were less likely to labor in the fields under the system, and adult men tended to work shorter days than they had under slavery. Persistent problems faced poor blacks, though. Many blacks and poor families and poor whites found themselves held virtually powerless by this new crop-lean system. Crop-lean system.
After the war. There's a high interest system of credit extended by local stores that took advantage of a lack of competition and relative poverty of the people working the fields. Farmers, both black and white, who suffered a few bad years in a row under the crop lien system could become trapped in the cycle of debt from which they could never really escape. Relentless planting of cotton contributed to soil exhaustion across the south, another problem which undermined the southern agricultural economy over time.
As a consequence of this, Mount Bayou was one of dozens of black towns. that sprung up after the war, founded by freed men, free blacks, in order to create communities free of the indignities of segregation and the exploitation of sharecropping on white-owned plantations. In the 1868 presidential election, American voters selected Ulysses S. Grant, the former general U.S. Grant, a strong, stable figure to guide them through the troubled years of Reconstruction.
He had no real political experience and suffered from corruption and scandals within his cabinet. Liberal Republicans opposed the agenda of the Radicals joined the Democrats in 1872, but Grant easily won re-election. Grant struggled to handle the crises of his presidency, including the Panic of 1873, which prompted serious debate over the fate of the currency in the United States. Grant excelled at foreign affairs, though, and his officials acquired Alaska for a song and resolved a conflict with Britain over the 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 population was more evenly divided, and some in states in which blacks were now the majority of citizenry, whites used intimidation and violence to undermine the progress of Reconstruction. Secret societies, including the KKK or the Ku Klux Klan.
used terrorism to frighten and intimidate free 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 the 15th Amendment by all the states in 1870, though, some reformers convinced themselves that their long campaign on behalf of Black Americans was now over, and that with the vote secured, the federal vote secured, Blacks were firmly on the path to equality in the United States.
Former radical Republican leaders began to call themselves liberals now, cooperating more with the Democrats, and many white Republicans had moved into the Democratic Party. In 1874, Democrats won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1861. And of course, in 1861, they never actually took office. Grant immediately reduced the use of military force across the South, and though he hoped to run for a third presidential term, Republican leaders, shaken by Democratic successes and scandals within Grant's White House, settled on a different candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes.
Rutherford B. Hayes, the champion of civil service reform and a former Ohio governor. The Democrats nominated Samuel Tilden, former reform governor of New York. The 1876 election was close. The Constitution has no established method for determining the validity of disputed electoral returns, and a divided Congress at the time further compounded this issue. In this political fray, Democrats conceded the election to Hayes after gaining secret pledges from Republicans that effectively eased Reconstruction.
This is called the Compromise of 1877. In his inaugural address, Hayes announced the South's most pressing need was the restoration. 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 now taking shape. The legacy and the impact of Reconstruction is still being disputed. Newly freed, many African Americans gained some measure of means and opportunity, and all 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 after the Civil War, the white South had regained control over its own institutions and, to a greater 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 this era.
For all of 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 of Reconstruction so disillusioned Americans that 100 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 this first Reconstruction, accomplished 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 Redeemers, or Bourbons, sometimes called. This post-Reconstruction ruling class resembled the old ruling class, but consisted in part of new industrialists, railroad developers, financiers, etc., people with money.
They banded together in defense of home rule and social conservatism with a commitment to the economic development of the South. The 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, as the idea would become known, 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 after the war. especially in the textile, tobacco, and steel industries. The South adopted the Northern Standard for railroad sizing, symbolically linking the two economies now. Much of the profits of industry float upward, however, and Southerners remain markedly poorer than their Northern working counterparts.
Blacks were often shut out of the labor workforce and found themselves prey to the crop-leading system of sharecropping. The New South creed was not the property of whites alone, though. 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. Booker T. Washington and his Tuskegee Institute.
An entirely self-made man, Washington's message was cautious but hopeful. African Americans should attend school, learn skills, 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 and live as equals. His philosophy of race relations became known as the Atlanta Compromise. There it is.
You can actually still hear it. You can hear it. If you go to YouTube, you can hear him talking about this.
Blacks, he said, should forego 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. The proponents of the lost cause now tried to rewrite the history of the antebellum South to de-emphasize the brutality of slavery. They also perpetuated the myth that the Civil War had been fought over states'rights instead of slavery, and continued to celebrate the culture of the Confederacy long after the war 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, Supreme Court ruling, 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. What the United States Supreme Court eventually argued, and would un-argue about 50 to 60 years later, was that separate was not necessarily unequal. Later, they will find that separate is not equal. 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 would become even more rigid. Fearful that 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 these ruling class whites. Economic issues in the South 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 poor whites alike. In devising laws to strip the vote from Black males, Southern Bourbon whites had to find a way to abate the 15th Amendment. Before 1900, two tools emerged.
The poll or property tax requirement and the literacy test, sometimes called the understanding test. Tax and property requirement is one entity, and then the literacy test is another means. By 1900, black voting decreased by 62 percent, and white voting had fallen off by 26 percent as a result of these state laws. Laws restricting the vote were part of a network of state and local statutes known as Jim Crow laws. 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, they could not sit in the same waiting rooms, they could not use the same restrooms, they could not eat in the same restaurants, and they could not 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, 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 could control the black population through terror and intimidation.
While anti-lynching movements comprised largely of women sprung up across the country, 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 Confederate soldiers 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 where 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 George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, had passed to Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
and now move to the likes of Booker T. Washington, Susan B. Anthony, Franklin Delano 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 its foundation.