history assigment

CHAPTER 15: Reconstruction, 1865 – 1877

I felt like a bird out of a cage. Amen. Amen. Amen. I could hardly ask to feel better than I did on that day.

—Houston H. Holloway, a former slave recalling his emancipation in 1865

In 1869, Wyoming Territory did something few Americans could have imagined before the Civil War: It gave women full voting rights. A few local women’s rights advocates supported the measure, but one legislator endorsed it in a spirit of revenge. “Damn it,” he said, “if you are going to let the niggers and pigtails [Chinese] vote, we will ring in the women, too.” A decade later, similar arguments surfaced in California. “We give negroes, and Chinamen, and everything else, a right to vote,” pointed out one delegate to a state constitutional convention. Another challenged him: “Are you going over to that doctrine of the universal brotherhood of man?” He answered, “In regard to women, I am.”

In other spheres, as well, “universal brotherhood” was a subject of intense debate. Congress overhauled the Naturalization Act of 1790, which had limited citizenship to immigrants who were “free white persons.” The most radical congressmen argued that racial barriers to citizenship should be dropped entirely. But their proposal foundered, largely because of opposition to Chinese immigration. One U.S. senator warned that Chinese American citizenship would put “an end to republican government” on the Pacific coast. In the end, Congress offered citizenship rights to people of African descent, but not to those from Asia.

As these debates suggest, the Civil War opened enormous questions about citizenship and nationhood. Americans engaged in intense, often violent struggles over the postwar order. Slavery was finished — that much was certain — and the South had been forcibly reattached to the Union. But how should the United States reincorporate former rebels into the political system? Could it also define a secure place for four million former slaves? What about immigrants from many parts of the world? And if the United States was no longer a “white man’s country,” might citizenship extend to women as well as to black men?

Reconstruction is often thought of as something that happened in the South. But events there were part of a much broader transformation. Far beyond the ex-Confederacy, the United States embarked on an ambitious process of nation building. Chapter 16 will explore events in the West. There, the United States knit together a continental empire; military conflict with Native Americans entered its final phase, and the arrival of Asian immigrants raised new issues of citizenship and trade. In Chapter 15, we will focus on events in Washington, D.C., and in the former Confederacy, where freed slaves, former slave owners, and other southerners found their worlds turned upside down.

The Struggle for National Reconstruction

The U.S. Constitution does not address the question of how to restore rebellious states. After the Civil War, the nation had to determine whether the Confederate states, upon seceding, had legally left the Union. If so, then their reentry required action by Congress. If not — if even during secession they had retained their constitutional status — then restoring these states might be an administrative matter, best left to the president. Lack of clarity on this fundamental question made for explosive politics. In the early years of Reconstruction, the president and Congress struggled over who was in charge. Only by winning this fight did Republicans in Congress open the way for the sweeping achievements of radical Reconstruction.

Presidential Approaches: From Lincoln to Johnson

As wartime president, Lincoln had offered amnesty to all but high-ranking Confederates. When 10 percent of a rebellious states voters had taken an oath of loyalty, he proposed, the state would be restored to the Union, provided that it approved the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery (see Chapter 14). But Confederate states rejected Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan, and Congress proposed a tougher substitute. The Wade-Davis Bill, passed on July 2, 1864, required an oath of allegiance to the Union by a majority of each states adult white men, new governments formed only by those who had never taken up arms against the North, and permanent disenfranchisement of Confederate leaders. Lincoln used a pocket veto to kill the Wade-Davis Bill; that is, he left it unsigned when Congress adjourned, while initiating talks with congressional leaders aimed at a compromise.

We will never know what would have happened had Lincoln lived. His assassination in April 1865 plunged the nation into political uncertainty and fueled Unionist fury against the South. As a special train bore Lincoln’s flag-draped coffin slowly home to Illinois, tens of thousands of Americans lined the railroad tracks to pay respects. Grieving northerners blamed all Confederates for the acts of southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices in the assassination. At the same time, Lincoln’s death left the presidency in the hands of a man utterly lacking in Lincoln’s moral sense and political judgment, Vice President Andrew Johnson.

Johnson was a self-styled “common man” from the hills of eastern Tennessee. Trained as a tailor, he built a career on the support of farmers and laborers. Loyal to the Union, Johnson refused to leave the U.S. Senate when Tennessee seceded. After federal forces captured Nashville in 1862, Lincoln appointed Johnson as Tennessee’s military governor. In the election of 1864, placing this War Democrat on the Republican ticket had seemed a smart move, designed to promote unity and court southern Unionists. But after Lincoln’s death, Johnsons presidency wreaked political havoc. Johnson, who was not even a Republican, often seemed to view ex-Confederates as his friends and abolitionists as his enemies.

In May 1865, with Congress out of session for months to come, Johnson advanced his own version of Reconstruction. He offered amnesty to all southerners who swore allegiance to the United States, except for the highest-ranking Confederates. Johnson appointed provisional governors for the southern states and required only that they revoke secession, repudiate Confederate debts, and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. Within months, all the former Confederate states had met Johnsons terms and created functioning elected governments.

Many northerners were disgusted with Johnson. “The rebels have gotten back all their rights and have all been pardoned,” wrote one angry Union army veteran in Missouri. He called Johnson “a traitor to the loyal people of the Union.” Meanwhile, despite military defeat (see Voices from Abroad, p. 449), southerners’ new legislatures moved to restore slavery in all but name. They enacted laws, known as Black Codes designed to force former slaves back to plantation labor. The codes, for example, imposed severe penalties on blacks who did not hold full-year labor contracts and set up procedures for taking black children away from their parents and apprenticing them to former slave owners. Johnson, moreover, talked tough but then forgave ex-Confederate leaders easily when they appealed for pardons. Emboldened by Johnson’s indulgence, ex-Confederates began to filter back into the halls of power. When Georgians elected Alexander Stephens, former vice president of the Confederacy, to represent them in Congress, many outraged Republicans saw this as the last straw.

Congress versus the President

Under the Constitution, Congress is “the judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members” (Article 1, Section 5). Using this power, Republican majorities in both houses refused to admit southern delegations when Congress convened in December 1865, effectively blocking Johnson’s program. Hoping to mollify Congress, some southern states dropped the most objectionable provisions from the Black Codes. But at the same time, antiblack violence erupted in various parts of the South. A Nashville newspaper reported that white gangs were “riding about whipping, maiming and killing all negroes who do not obey the orders of their former masters.”

Congressional Republicans concluded that the South planned to circumvent the Thirteenth Amendment. The federal government had to intervene. Back in March 1865, Congress had established the Freedmen’s Bureau to aid former slaves. Now, in early 1866, Congress voted to extend the bureau, gave it direct funding for the first time, and authorized its agents to investigate mistreatment of blacks. Even more extraordinary was a civil rights bill that declared formerly enslaved people to be citizens and granted them equal protection and rights of contract, with full access to the courts.

These bills provoked bitter conflict with Johnson, who vetoed them both. Johnson’s racism, hitherto publicly muted, now blazed forth: “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men.” Galvanized, Republicans in Congress gathered two-thirds majorities and overrode both vetoes, passing the Civil Rights Act in April 1866 and the Freedmen’s Bureau law four months later. Their resolve was reinforced by continued violence in the South, which culminated in three days of rioting in Memphis, Tennessee, that left forty-six blacks dead and hundreds of African American homes, churches, and schools burned.

VOICES FROM ABROAD: The Devastated South

david macrae

In this excerpt from The Americans at Home (1870), an account of his tour of the United States, the Scottish clergyman David Macrae describes the war-stricken South as he found it in 1867–1868, at a time when the crisis over Reconstruction was boiling over.

I was struck with a remark made by a Southern gentleman in answer to the assertion that Jefferson Davis [the president of the Confederacy] had culpably continued the war for six months after all hope had been abandoned.

“Sir,” he said, “Mr. Davis knew the temper of the South as well as any man in it. He knew if there was to be anything worth calling peace, the South must win; or, if she couldn’t win, she wanted to be whipped — well whipped — thoroughly whipped.”

The further south I went, the oftener these remarks came back upon me. Evidence was everywhere that the South had maintained the desperate conflict until she was utterly exhausted …. Almost every man I met at the South, especially in North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia, seemed to have been in the army; and it was painful to find many who had returned were mutilated, maimed, or broken in health by exposure. When I remarked this to a young Confederate officer in North Carolina, and said I was glad to see that he had escaped unhurt, he … pulled up one leg of his trousers, and showed me that he had an iron rod there to strengthen his limb, and enable him to walk without limping, half of his foot being off. He showed me on the other leg a deep scar made by a fragment of a shell; and these were two of but seven wounds which had left their marks upon his body. When he heard me speak of relics, he said, “Try to find a North Carolina gentleman without a Yankee mark on him.”

Nearly three years had passed when I traveled through the country, and yet we have seen what traces the war had left in such cities as Richmond, Petersburg, and Columbia. The same spectacle met me at Charleston. Churches and houses had been battered down by heavy shot and shell hurled into the city from Federal batteries at a distance of five miles …. Over the country districts the prostration was equally marked. Along the track of Sherman’s army especially, the devastation was fearful — farms laid waste, fences burned, bridges destroyed, houses left in ruins, plantations in many cases turned into wilderness again.

The people had shared in the general wreck, and looked poverty-stricken, careworn, and dejected. Ladies who before the war had lived in affluence, with black servants round them to attend to their every wish, were … so utterly destitute that they did not know when they finished one meal where they were to find the next …. Men who had held commanding positions … were filling humble situations — struggling, many of them, to earn a bare subsistence …. I remember dining with three cultured Southern gentlemen … all living together in a plain little wooden house, such as they would formerly have provided for their servants. Two of them were engaged in a railway office, the third was seeking a situation, frequently, in his vain search, passing the large blinded house where he had lived in luxurious ease before the war.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins, ed., America through British Eyes (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1968), 345–347.

Memphis Riot, 1866

Whites in postwar Memphis, as in much of the South, bitterly resented the presence in their city of former black soldiers mustered out of service with the U.S. Army. On April 30, 1866, when some black veterans— no longer protected by their uniforms—celebrated the end of their Army service by drinking, violence broke out. For three days, whites burned black neighborhoods, churches, and schools; raped several African American women; and killed dozens of black residents. Two whites also died in the rioting, which hardened Northern public opinion and prompted calls for stronger measures to put down ex-Confederate resistance. This tinted illustration is based on a lithograph that appeared in Harper’s Weekly. Harper’s Weekly/ Picture Research Consultants & Archives.

Radical Republicans and the Fourteenth Amendment

Anxious to protect freedpeople and reassert Republican power in the South, Congress moved to ensure black civil rights. In what became the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, they declared that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” were citizens. No state could abridge “the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States”; deprive “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”; or deny anyone “equal protection of the laws.” Johnson was right on one thing: Republicans were tending toward “centralization.” In a stunning increase in federal power, the Fourteenth Amendment declared that when people’s essential rights were at stake, national citizenship henceforth took precedence over citizenship in a state.

Johnson urged the states not to ratify the amendment, but public opinion had swung against him. In August 1866, Johnson embarked on a disastrous speaking tour, during which he made matters worse by shouting at hecklers and insulting hostile crowds. In the 1866 congressional elections, voters inflicted humiliation on Johnson by giving Republicans a three-to-one majority in Congress.

Power had shifted to the so-called Radical Republicans, who sought sweeping transformations in the defeated South. The Radicals’ leader in the Senate was Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the fiery abolitionist who in 1856 had been nearly beaten to death by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks. Radicals in the House followed Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, a passionate advocate of freedpeople’s political and economic rights. With such men at the fore, and with congressional Republicans now numerous and united enough to override Johnsons vetoes on many questions, Republicans proceeded to remake Reconstruction.

Radical Reconstruction

The Reconstruction Act of 1867, enacted in March, divided the conquered South into five military districts, each under the command of a U.S. general (Map 15.1). To reenter the Union, each former Confederate state had to grant the vote to freedmen and deny it to leading ex-Confederates. Each military commander was required to register all eligible adult males, black as well as white; supervise new state constitutional conventions; and ensure that new constitutions guaranteed black suffrage. Congress would readmit a state to the Union once these conditions were met and the new state legislature ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. Johnson vetoed the Reconstruction Act, but Congress overrode his veto (Table 15.1).

MAP 15.1: Reconstruction

The federal government organized the Confederate states into five military districts during radical Reconstruction. For the states shown in this map, the first date indicates when that state was readmitted to the Union; the second date shows when Radical Republicans lost control of the state government. All the ex-Confederate states rejoined the Union between 1868 and 1870, but the periods of radical rule varied widely. Republicans lasted only a few months in Virginia; they held on until the end of Reconstruction in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina.

TABLE 15.1: Primary Reconstruction Laws and Constitutional Amendments

Law (Date of Congressional Passage)

Key Provisions

Thirteenth Amendment (December 1865*)

Prohibited slavery

Civil Rights Act of 1866 (April 1866)

Defined citizenship rights of freedmen Authorized federal authorities to bring suit against those who violated those rights

Fourteenth Amendment (June 1866†)

Established national citizenship for persons born or naturalized in the United States Prohibited the states from depriving citizens of their civil rights or equal protection under the law Reduced state representation in House of Representatives by the percentage of adult male citizens denied the vote

Reconstruction Act of 1867 (March 1867)

Divided the South into five military districts, each under the command of a Union general Established requirements for readmission of ex-Confederate states to the Union

Tenure of Office Act (March 1867)

Required Senate consent for removal of any federal official whose appointment had required Senate confirmation

Fifteenth Amendment (February 1869‡)

Forbade states to deny citizens the right to vote on the grounds of race, color, or “previous condition of servitude”

Ku Klux Klan Act (April 1871)

Authorized the president to use federal prosecutions and military force to suppress conspiracies to deprive citizens of the right to vote and enjoy the equal protection of the law

* Ratified by three-fourths of all states in December 1865.

† Ratified by three-fourths of all states in July 1868.

‡ Ratified by three-fourths of all states in March 1870.

The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson

Johnson fought back. In August 1867, after Congress adjourned, he “suspended” Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, a Radical, and replaced him with Union general Ulysses S. Grant, believing Grant would be a good soldier and follow orders. Johnson, however, had misjudged Grant, who publicly objected to the presidents machinations. When the Senate reconvened in the fall, it overruled Stanton’s suspension. Grant, now an open enemy of Johnson, resigned so that Stanton could resume his place as secretary of war. On February 21, 1868, Johnson formally dismissed Stanton. The feisty secretary of war responded by barricading himself in his office, precipitating a crisis.

Three days later, for the first time in U.S. history, legislators in the House of Representatives introduced articles of impeachment against the president, employing their constitutional power to charge high federal officials with “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The House serves, in effect, as the prosecutor in such cases, and the Senate serves as the court. The Republican majority brought eleven counts of misconduct against Johnson, most relating to infringement of the powers of Congress. After an eleven-week trial in the Senate, thirty-five senators voted for conviction — one vote short of the two-thirds majority required. Seven Republicans voted for acquittal along with twelve Democrats. The dissenting Republicans felt that removing a president for defying Congress was too damaging to the constitutional system of checks and balances. But despite the president’s acquittal, Congress had shown its power. For the brief months remaining in his term, Johnson was largely irrelevant to Reconstruction policy.

The Election of 1868 and the Fifteenth Amendment

The impeachment controversy made Grant, already the Unions greatest war hero, a Republican idol as well, and he easily won the party’s presidential nomination in 1868. Although he supported radical Reconstruction, Grant also urged reconciliation between the sections. His Democratic opponent, Horatio Seymour, a former governor of New York, almost declined the nomination because he understood that Democrats could not yet overcome the stain of disloyalty. Grant won by an overwhelming margin, receiving 214 out of 294 electoral votes. Republicans retained two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress.

In February 1869, in the wake of this smashing victory, Republicans produced the last Reconstruction amendment, the Fifteenth. It protected male citizens’ right to vote irrespective of race, color, or “previous condition of servitude.” Despite Radical Republicans’ protests, the amendment left room for a poll tax (a tax paid for the privilege of voting) and literacy requirements, both necessary concessions to northern and western states that already relied on such provisions to keep immigrants and the “unworthy” poor from the polls. Congress required the four states remaining under federal control to ratify it as a condition for being readmitted to the Union. A year later, the Fifteenth Amendment became part of the Constitution.

Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, despite its limitations, was an astonishing feat. Elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, lawmakers had left emancipated slaves in a condition of semicitizenship, with no voting rights. But, like almost all Americans, congressional Republicans had extraordinary faith in the power of the ballot. African American leaders agreed. “The colored people of these Southern states have cast their lot with the Government,” declared a delegate to Arkansas’s constitutional convention, “and with the great Republican Party …. The ballot is our only means of protection.” After the amendment was ratified, hundreds of thousands of African Americans flocked to the polls across the South, in an atmosphere of collective pride and celebration.

Woman Suffrage Denied

Northern women had played key roles in the antislavery movement and Union victory. Women’s rights leaders, who had campaigned for women’s voting rights since the Seneca Falls convention of 1848, fervently hoped that Reconstruction would bring votes for women as well as for black men. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton put it, women could “avail ourselves of the strong arm and the blue uniform of the black soldier to walk in by his side.” The addition of a single word in the Fifteenth Amendment would have done it: The protected categories for voting could have read “race, color, sex, or previous condition of servitude.” But that word proved impossible to obtain. For the authors of Reconstruction, enfranchising black men had clear benefits. It punished ex-Confederates and ensured Republican support in the South. But a substantial majority of northern voters — all men, of course — opposed women’s enfranchisement. Even Radicals feared that this “side issue” would defeat the Fourteenth Amendment and overburden the party’s program.

“Out in the Cold”

Though many women, including African American activists in the South, went to the polls in the early 1870s to test whether the new Fourteenth Amendment had given them the vote, federal courts subsequently rejected women’s voting rights. Only the Wyoming and Utah territories fully enfranchised women. At the same time, revised naturalization laws allowed immigrant men of African descent — though not of Asian descent — to become citizens. With its crude Irish, African, and Chinese racial caricatures, this 1884 cartoon from the humor magazine The Judge echoes the arguments of some white suffragists that though men of races stereotyped as inferior had been enfranchised, white women were not. The woman knocking on the door is also a caricature, with her harsh appearance and masculine style of dress. Library of Congress.

At the May 1869 convention of the Equal Rights Association, black abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Frederick Douglass pleaded for white women to understand the plight in which former slaves found themselves, and to allow black male suffrage to take priority. “When women, because they are women, are hunted down, … dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp posts, … then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.” Some women’s rights leaders joined Douglass in backing the Fifteenth Amendment, even without the word sex. But most white women in the audience rebelled. One African American woman remarked that they “all go for sex, letting race occupy a minor position.” In her despair, Elizabeth Cady Stanton lashed out against “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Ung Tung,” maligning uneducated freedmen and immigrants who could vote while educated white women could not. Douglass’s resolution in support of the Fifteenth Amendment failed, and the convention broke up in bitterness.

At this searing moment, a rift opened in the women’s movement. The majority, led by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, reconciled themselves to disappointment. Organized into the American Woman Suffrage Association, they remained loyal to the Republican Party in hopes that once Reconstruction had been settled, it would be women’s turn. A group led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony struck out in a new direction. They saw that the moment of radical innovation had passed and woman suffrage was unlikely in the near future. Stanton declared that woman “must not put her trust in man.” The new organization that she headed, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), focused exclusively on women’s rights and took up the battle for a federal suffrage amendment.

In 1873, NWSA members decided to test the limits of the new constitutional amendments. Suffragists all over the United States, including some African American women in the South, tried to register and vote. Most were turned away. In Rochester, New York, Susan B. Anthony cast a straight Republican ballot and was arrested afterward in her home, by a polite and rather embarrassed U.S. marshal. In one of a series of ensuing lawsuits, suffrage advocate Virginia Minor of Missouri argued that the registrar who rejected her had violated her rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. In Minor v. Happersett (1875), the Supreme Court dashed suffragists’ hopes. It ruled that suffrage rights were not inherent in citizenship; women were citizens, but state legislatures could deny women the ballot if they wished.

Despite these defeats, radical Reconstruction created the conditions for a high-profile, nationwide movement for women’s voting rights. Amid debates over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, some Americans argued for the measure as part of a bold expansion of democracy. Others saw white women’s votes as a possible counterweight to the votes of African American or Chinese men (while opponents pointed out that black and immigrant women would likely be enfranchised, too). When Wyoming Territory gave women the vote in 1869, its governor received telegrams of congratulation from as far away as Europe. Afterward, contrary to antisuffragist warnings, female voters in Wyoming did not appear to neglect their homes, abandon their children, or otherwise “unsex” themselves. In fact, suffragists argued that women’s presence helped make Wyoming politics less corrupt and more respectable. The goal of votes for women could no longer be dismissed as the absurd notion of a tiny minority. It became a serious issue for national debate.

How did Lincoln and Johnson each approach Reconstruction?

What did the supporters of radical Reconstruction do to advance their vision for the postwar South?

The Meaning of Freedom

While political leaders in Washington struggled over Reconstruction, emancipated slaves acted on their own ideas about freedom (see American Voices, p. 456). Freedom meant many things — the end of punishment by the lash; the ability to move around; the reunion of families; and the opportunity to build schools and churches, and publish and read newspapers. Topmost among freedmen’s demands was the right to vote. To achieve a true measure of freedom, former slaves had to overcome both the hostility of former Confederates and the ambivalence of many Unionist allies.

AMERICAN VOICES: Relishing Freedom

jourdon and erson

Folklorists have recorded the sly ways that slaves found, even in bondage, for “puttin’ dowi their masters. But only in freedom — and beyond reach in a northern state at that — could Anderson’s sarcasm be expressed so openly, with the jest that his family might consider returning if they first received the wages due them, calculated to the dollar, for all those years in slavery. Anderson’s letter, although probably written or edited by a white friend in Dayton, surely is faithful to what the ex-slave wanted to say.

Dayton, Ohio

August 7, 1865.

To My Old Master, Colonel P. H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee.

Sir:

I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon …. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s house to kill the union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this ….

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy, — the folks call her Mrs. Anderson, — and the children — Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well …. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master ….

Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you …. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to ….

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls …. I would rather stay here and starve — and die, if it come to that — than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters ….

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant, Jourdon Anderson

SOURCE: Stanley I. Kutler, ed., Looking for America: The Peoples History, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 2: 4–6, 24–27.

The Quest for Land

One of freedmen’s most pressing goals was landownership. In the chaotic final months of war, freedmen had seized control of plantations where they could. In Georgia and South Carolina, General William Tecumseh Sherman had reserved large coastal tracts for liberated slaves and settled them on 40-acre plots. Sherman simply did not want to be bothered with refugees as his army crossed the region, but the freedmen assumed that Shermans order meant that the land was theirs. After the war, resettlement became the responsibility of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Thousands of rural blacks hoped for land distributions. “I have gone through the country,” reported a black spokesman in South Carolina, “and on every side I was besieged with questions: How are we to get homesteads, to get lands?”

Johnson’s amnesty plan, enabling pardoned Confederates to recover property seized during the war, blasted freedmen’s hopes. In October 1865, Johnson ordered General Oliver O. Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, to restore plantations on the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast to their white owners. Dispossessed blacks protested: “Why do you take away our lands? You take them from us who have always been true, always true to the Government! You give them to our all-time enemies! That is not right!” Former slaves resisted efforts to evict them. Led by black Union veterans, they fought pitched battles with plantation owners and bands of ex-Confederate soldiers. But white landowners, sometimes aided by federal troops, generally prevailed.

Freed Slaves and Northerners: Conflicting Goals

The problem of land was broader than Johnsons policies or even ex-Confederate resistance. A profound gap lay between the goals of freed slaves and those of Republicans in Washington. The economic revolution of the antebellum period had transformed New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. Most congressional leaders believed, following in the tradition of antebellum Whigs, that once slavery was dead, the same kind of economic development would revolutionize the South. Republicans sought to restore cotton as the country’s leading export. They envisioned former slaves as wageworkers on cash-crop plantations, not as independent farmers. Only a handful of radicals, like Thaddeus Stevens, argued that freed slaves had already earned a right to the land, through what Lincoln once referred to as “four hundred years of unrequited toil.” Stevens proposed that large southern plantations be treated as “forfeited estates of the enemy” and broken up into small farms for the former slaves.

Today, most historians of Reconstruction agree with Stevens: Policymakers did not go far enough to ensure freedpeople’s economic welfare. Left without land, former slaves were rendered poor and vulnerable. At the time, however, men like Stevens had few allies. Though often accused of harshness toward the defeated Confederacy, most Republicans — even Radicals — recoiled at the idea of confiscating private land. They could not imagine “giving” land to former slaves. The same congressmen, of course, had no difficulty giving homesteaders land on the frontier that had been taken from Indians. But Republicans were deeply reluctant to confiscate white-owned plantations. Some southern Republican state governments did try, without much success, to use tax policy to break up large landholdings and get them into the hands of poorer whites and blacks. In 1869, South Carolina established a land commission to buy property and resell it on easy terms to the landless; about 14,000 black families acquired farms through the program. But such initiatives were the exception, not the rule.

Wage Labor of Former Slaves

This photograph, taken in South Carolina shortly after the Civil War, shows former slaves leaving the cotton fields. Many freed people were organized into work crews probably not that different from earlier slave gangs, although they now labored for wages. Freedmen resisted such working conditions and sought greater freedom from constant threats and oversight, © Collection of the New-York Historical Society.

Wage Labor and Sharecroppping

Freedmen and freedwomen wanted as much independence of work and life as they could achieve. Obtaining no land, however, most began with few options but to work for former slave owners. Serious conflict ensued. Landowners wanted to retain the old gang-labor system, with wages replacing the food, clothing, and shelter that slaves had once received. Southern planters — who had recently scorned the North for the cruelties of the wage-labor system — now embraced waged work with apparent satisfaction. Maliciously comparing freedpeople to free-roaming pigs, landowners told them to “root, hog, or die.” Former slaves found themselves with rock-bottom wages, especially in agriculture; it was a shock to find that Emancipation and a “free labor” system did not prevent a hardworking family from nearly starving. African American workers used a variety of tactics to fight back. Some left the fields and traveled long distances to seek work on the railroads or in turpentine and lumber camps. Others organized to bargain for fairer wages. Not only black farmworkers but also factory workers and laundrywomen went on strike.

At the same time, a major conflict raged between employers and freedpeople over the labor of women. In slavery African American women’s bodies had been the sexual property of white men. Protecting black women from such abuse, as much as possible, was a crucial priority for freedpeople. When planters demanded that black women go back into the fields, African Americans resisted resolutely. “I seen on some plantations,” one freedman recounted, “where the white men would … tell colored men that their wives and children could not live on their places unless they work in the fields. The colored men [answered that] whenever they wanted their wives to work they would tell them themselves.”

There was a profound irony in this man’s definition of freedom: It designated a wife’s labor as her husband’s property. In that, of course, freedpeople were adapting to white norms. Some black women asserted their independence and headed their own households — though in a society utterly disrupted by war, this was often a matter of necessity rather than choice. For many freedwomen and freedmen, the opportunity for a stable family life was one of the greatest achievements of emancipation. Many enthusiastically accepted the northern ideal of domesticity. Missionaries, teachers, and editors of black newspapers urged men to work diligently and support their families, and women (though many worked for wages) to devote themselves to motherhood and the home. Like their northern allies, many southern African Americans believed domesticity was the key to civilization and progress.

Even in rural areas, former slaves refused to work under the conditions of slavery. There would be no gang work, they vowed: no overseers, no whippings, no regulation of their private lives. All across the South, planters who needed labor were forced to yield to what one planter termed “the inveterate prejudices of the freedmen, who desire to be masters of their own time.” In a few areas, waged work became the norm — for example, on the giant sugar plantations of Louisiana financed by northern capital. But cotton planters lacked the money to pay wages, and sometimes, in lieu of a straight wage, they offered a share of the crop. Freedmen, in turn, paid their rent in shares of the harvest.

Thus sprang up the distinctive laboring system of cotton agriculture known as sharecropping, in which freedmen worked as renters, exchanging their labor for the use of land, house, implements, and sometimes seed and fertilizer. Sharecroppers typically turned over half of their crops to the landlord (Map 15.2). In a credit-starved agricultural region that grew crops for a world economy, sharecropping was an effective strategy, through which laborers and landowners shared risks and returns. But it was a very unequal relationship, given sharecroppers’ dire economic circumstances. Starting out penniless, they had no way of making it through the first growing season without borrowing for food and supplies.

MAP 15.2: The Barrow Plantation, 1860 and 1881

This map is a modern redrawing of one that first appeared in the popular magazine Scribner’s Monthly in April 1881, accompanying an article about the Barrow plantation. The boundary line is the same on both maps because the plantation remained in the same family. Comparing the 1860 map of this central Georgia plantation with the 1881 map reveals the impact of sharecropping on patterns of black residence. In 1860, the slave quarters were clustered near the planter’s house. In contrast, by 1881 the sharecroppers were scattered across the plantation’s 2,000 acres, having built cabins on the ridges between the low-lying streams. The surname Barrow was common among the sharecropping families, which means almost certainly that they had been slaves who, years after emancipation, still had not moved on. For sharecroppers, freedom meant not only their individual lots and cabins but also the school and church shown on the map.

Country storekeepers stepped in. Bankrolled by northern suppliers, they furnished the sharecropper with provisions and took as collateral a lien on the crop, effectively assuming ownership of the cropper’s share and leaving him only the proceeds that remained after his debts had been paid. Once indebted at one store, sharecroppers could no longer shop around. They became easy targets for exorbitant prices, unfair interest rates, and crooked bookkeeping. As cotton prices declined during the 1870s, more and more sharecroppers failed to settle accounts and fell into permanent debt. If the merchant was also the landowner or conspired with the landowner, the debt became a pretext for forced labor, or peonage, though when things became hopeless, sharecroppers sometimes managed to pull up stakes and move on.

Sharecropping— a product of the struggles of Reconstruction — endured in part because it was a good fit for cotton agriculture. Cotton, unlike sugarcane, could be raised efficiently by small farmers (provided they had the lash of indebtedness always on their backs). We can see this in the experience of other countries that became major producers in response to the global cotton famine set off by the Civil War. In India, Egypt, Brazil, and West Africa, variants of the sharecropping system emerged. Most striking was the adoption everywhere of crop-lien laws, at the behest of international merchants and bankers who put up the capital. Indian and Egyptian villagers got the advances they needed to shift from subsistence agriculture to cotton but at the price of being placed, as in America, permanently under the thumb of furnishing merchants. American planters resisted sharecropping at first because they started at a different place: not traditional, subsistence economies that had to be converted to cotton but a proven plantation system over which they had been absolute masters.

For freedmen, sharecropping was not the worst choice, in a world where former masters threatened to impose labor conditions that were close to slavery. But for southern agriculture, the costs were devastating. With farms leased on a year-to-year basis, neither tenant nor owner had much incentive to improve the property. The crop-lien system rested on expensive interest payments — money that might otherwise have gone into agricultural improvements. And sharecropping committed the South inflexibly to cotton, which as a market crop generated the cash required by landlords and furnishing merchants. The result was a stagnant farm economy that blighted the Souths future. As Republican governments tried to remake the South, they faced not only the challenges of wartime destruction and widespread poverty but also the failure of their hopes that free labor would create a modern, prosperous South, built in the image of the industrializing North. Instead, a rural economy emerged that remained mired in widespread poverty and based on an uneasy compromise between landowners and laborers.

Republican Governments in the South

Between 1868 and 1871, all the former Confederate states met congressional stipulations and rejoined the Union. Protected by federal troops, Republican administrations in these states retained power for periods ranging from a few months in Virginia to nine years in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. These governments remain some of the most misunderstood institutions in all U.S. history. Ex-Confederates never accepted their legitimacy. Many contemporaries agreed, focusing particularly on the role of African American Republicans who began to serve in public office. “It is strange, abnormal, and unfit,” declared one British visitor to Louisiana, “that a negro Legislature should deal … with the gravest commercial and financial interests.”

During much of the twentieth century, historians echoed such critics, condemning Reconstruction leaders as ignorant and corrupt. These historians shared, at root, the racist assumptions of the British observer: Blacks were simply unfit to legislate. (In the early twentieth century, U.S. historians lived in a country that once again elected, year after year, an all-white Congress; the prospect of a nonwhite president was completely unthinkable.) In fact, Reconstruction governments were ambitious. They were hated, in part, because they undertook impressive reforms in public education, family law, social services, commerce, and transportation. Like their northern allies, southern Republicans admired the economic and social transformations that had occurred in the North before the Civil War, and during Reconstruction they worked energetically to import them.

The southern Republican Party included former Whigs, a few former Democrats, black and white newcomers from the North, and southern African Americans. From the start its leaders faced the dilemma of racial prejudice. In the upcountry, white Unionists were eager to join the party. But in most areas the Republicans also needed African American voters, who constituted a majority of registered voters in Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, and Mississippi.

Outside the Freedmen’s Bureau Office, Beaufort, South Carolina

This photograph, taken in the 1870s, shows how offices of the Freedmen’s Bureau became hubs of activity in southern cities and towns. Southerners, both black and white, gathered at the offices to sign contracts, resolve labor disputes, obtain official advice — even get married and mediate family conflicts. Bureau officials, whose numbers were pitifully small in comparison with the scope and number of their duties, had limited resources to address postwar devastation and the arrival of “free labor.” Nonetheless, in the power vacuum of the ex-Confederacy, many bureau officials played a central role in restoring order and upholding justice. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

For a brief moment in the late 1860s, black and white Republicans joined forces through the Union League, a secret fraternal order. Formed in border states and northern cities during the Civil War, the Union League became a powerful political club that spread through the former Confederacy. Functioning as a grassroots wing of Radical Republicanism, league members pressured Congress to uphold justice to freedmen. After blacks won voting rights, the Union League organized meetings at churches and schoolhouses to instruct freedmen on political issues and voting procedures. League clubs also held parades and military drills, giving a public face to the new political order.

The Freedmen’s Bureau also supported grassroots Reconstruction efforts. Though some bureau officials were hostile to freedmen and sympathized with planters’ interests, most were dedicated, often idealistic men who tried valiantly to reconcile opposing interests. Bureau men kept a sharp eye out for unfair labor contracts and often forced landowners to bargain with workers and tenants. Bureau leaders advised freedmen on economic matters; provided direct payments to desperate families, especially women and children; and helped establish freedpeople’s schools. In cooperation with northern aid societies, the bureau played a key role in founding African American colleges and universities such as Fisk, Tougaloo, and the Hampton Institute. These institutions, in turn, focused first on training teachers. By 1869, there were more than three thousand teachers instructing freedpeople in the South. More than half were themselves black.

Freedmen’s School, Petersburg, Virginia, 1870s

A Union veteran, returning to Virginia in the 1870s to photograph battlefields, captured this image of an African American teacher and her students at a freedmen’s school. Note the difficult conditions in which they study: Many are barefoot, and there are gaps in the walls and floor of the school building. Nonetheless, the students have a few books. Despite poverty and relentless hostility from many whites, freedpeople across the South were determined to get a basic education for themselves and their children. William L Clements Library, University of Michigan.

Ex-Confederates viewed the Union League, Freedmen’s Bureau, and Republican Party as illegitimate forces in southern affairs, and they bitterly resented the political education of freedpeople. They referred to southern whites who supported Reconstruction as scalawags — an ancient Scots-Irish term for worthless animals — and they denounced northern whites as carpetbaggers, self-seeking interlopers who carried all their property in cheap suitcases called carpetbags. Such labels glossed over the actual diversity of white Republicans. Many new arrivals from the North, while motivated by personal profit, also brought capital and skills. Interspersed with ambitious schemers were idealists hoping to advance the cause of freedmen’s rights. The so-called scalawags were even more varied. Some were former slave owners; others were ex-Whigs or even ex-Democrats drawn to Republicanism as the best way to attract northern capital. But most hailed from the backcountry and wanted to rid the South of its slaveholding aristocracy. They had generally fought against, or at least refused to support, the Confederacy, believing that slavery had victimized whites as well as blacks.

Southern Democrats’ contempt for black leaders, whom they regarded as ignorant field hands, was just as misguided as their stereotypes about white Republicans. The first African American leaders in the South came from the ranks of antebellum free blacks. They were joined by northern blacks who moved south to support Reconstruction. Many were Union veterans; some were employees of the Freedmen’s Bureau and northern missionary societies. Others had escaped from slavery and were returning home. One of these ex-slaves was Blanche K. Bruce, who had been tutored on a Virginia plantation by his white father. During the war, Bruce escaped and established a school for freedmen in Missouri. In 1869, he moved to Mississippi and became active in politics; in 1874, he became Mississippi’s second black U.S. senator.

During radical Reconstruction, African American speakers, some financed by the Republican Party, fanned out into the old plantation districts and recruited former slaves to participate in politics. Still, few of the new leaders were field hands; most had been preachers or artisans. Literacy helped freedman Thomas Allen, a Baptist minister and shoemaker, win election to the Georgia legislature. “In my county,” Allen recalled, “the colored people came to me for instructions, and I gave them the best instructions I could. I took the New York Tribune and other papers, and in that way I found out a great deal, and I told them whatever I thought was right.” Though never proportionate to their numbers in the population, blacks became officeholders across the South. In South Carolina, African Americans constituted a majority in the lower house of the legislature in 1868. Over the course of Reconstruction, twenty African Americans served in state administrations as governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, or lesser offices. More than six hundred served as state legislators and sixteen as congressmen.

Southern Republicans had big plans. Their Reconstruction governments eliminated property qualifications for the vote and abolished the Black Codes that hemmed in freedpeople. Their new state constitutions expanded the rights of married women, enabling them to hold property and wages independent of their husbands’ — “a wonderful reform,” one white woman in Georgia wrote, for “the cause of Women’s Rights.” Like their counterparts in the North, southern Republicans also believed in using government to foster economic growth. They sought to diversify the economy beyond cotton agriculture, and they poured money into railroads and other building projects to expand the region’s shattered economy.

In myriad ways, Republicans brought southern state and city governments up to date. They outlawed corporal punishments such as whipping and branding. They established more humane penitentiaries as well as hospitals and asylums for orphans and the disabled. South Carolina offered free public health services, while Alabama provided free legal representation for defendants who could not pay. Some municipal governments paved the streets and installed streetlights. Petersburg, Virginia, established a board of health that offered free medical care during the smallpox epidemic of 1873. Nashville, Tennessee, created soup kitchens for the poor.

Most impressive of all were achievements in public education, where the South had lagged woefully. Republicans viewed education as the foundation of a true democratic order. By 1875, over half of black children were attending school in Mississippi, Florida, and South Carolina. African Americans of all ages rushed to the newly established schools, even when they had to pay tuition. They understood why slaveholders had criminalized slave literacy: The practice of freedom rested on the ability to read newspapers, labor contracts, history books, and the Bible. A school official in Virginia reported that freedpeople were “crazy to learn.” One Louisiana man explained why he was sending his children to school, even though he needed their help in the field. It was “better than leaving them a fortune; because if you left them even five hundred dollars, some man having more education than they had would come along and cheat them out of it all.” Meanwhile, thousands of white children, particularly girls and the sons of poor farmers and laborers, also benefited from the new public education system. Young white women’s graduation from high school, an unheard of occurrence before the Civil War, became accepted and even celebrated in southern cities and towns.

Building Black Communities

In slavery days, African Americans had built networks of religious worship and mutual aid to sustain one another, but these operated largely underground. After emancipation, southern blacks could engage in open community building. In doing so, they cooperated with northern missionaries and teachers who came to help in the great work of freedom. “Ignorant though they may be, on account of long years of oppression, they exhibit a desire to hear and to learn, that I never imagined,” reported African American minister Reverend James Lynch, who had traveled from Maryland to the Deep South. “Every word you say while preaching, they drink down and respond to, with an earnestness that sets your heart all on fire.”

Independent churches quickly became central institutions of black life, as blacks across the South left white-dominated congregations, where they had sat in segregated balconies, and built churches of their own. These churches joined their counterparts in the North to become national denominations, including, most prominently, the National Baptist Convention and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Everywhere, black churches served not only as sites of worship but also as schools, social centers, and meeting halls. Black ministers were community leaders and often political spokesmen as well. As Charles H. Pearce, a Methodist minister in Florida, declared, “A man in this State cannot do his whole duty as a minister except he looks out for the political interests of his people.” Calling forth the special destiny of formerly enslaved southerners as the new “Children of Israel,” black ministers provided a powerful religious underpinning for the politics of their congregations.

The flowering of southern black churches, schools, newspapers, and civic groups was one of the most enduring initiatives of the Reconstruction era. Dedicated teachers and charity leaders embarked on a project of “race uplift” that never ceased thereafter, while black entrepreneurs were proud to build businesses that served their own communities. The issue of desegregation — sharing public facilities with whites — was a trickier one. Some black leaders pressed for desegregated public facilities, but they were keenly aware of the backlash this was likely to provoke. Many freedpeople made it clear that they preferred their children to attend all-black schools, especially if they had encountered hostile or condescending white teachers. Others had pragmatic concerns. Asked whether she wanted her boys to attend an integrated school, one woman in New Orleans said no: “I don’t want my children to be pounded by dem white boys. I don’t send them to school to fight, I send them to learn.”

At the national level, congressmen wrestled with similar issues as they debated an ambitious civil rights bill championed by Radical Republican senator Charles Sumner. Sumner first introduced his bill in 1870, seeking to enforce, among other things, equal access to schools, public transportation, hotels, and churches. Through a series of defeats and delays, the bill remained on Capitol Hill for five years. Opponents charged that shared use of public spaces would lead to race mixing and intermarriage. Some sympathetic Republicans feared a backlash, while others questioned whether, because of the First Amendment, the federal government had the right to regulate churches. On his deathbed in 1874, Sumner exhorted a visitor to remember the civil rights bill: “Don’t let it fail.” In the end, the Senate removed Sumner’s provision for integrated churches, and the House removed the clause requiring integrated schools. But to honor the great Massachusetts abolitionist, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The law required “full and equal” access to jury service and to transportation and public accommodations, irrespective of race. It was the last such act for almost a hundred years — until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In what ways did the freedmen’s goal of landownership clash with the goals of northern Republicans and of southerners? What were the results of that clash?

How did black communities develop during Reconstruction? Based on their collective activities, what priorities did they appear to have had in the wake of emancipation?

The Undoing of Reconstruction

Sumner’s death marked the waning of radical Reconstruction. Leaders of that movement had accomplished more than anyone dreamed a few years earlier. But a chasm had opened between the goals of freedmen, who wanted autonomy, and policymakers, whose first priorities were to reincorporate ex-Confederates into the nation and build a powerful national economy. Meanwhile, the North was flooded with one-sided, often racist reports such as James M. Pike’s The Prostrate State (1873), which described South Carolina in the grip of “black barbarism.” Events of the 1870s deepened the northern public’s disillusionment. Scandals rocked the Grant administration, and a sudden economic depression placed severe restraints on both private investment and public spending. At the same time, northern resolve was worn down by ex-Confederates’ continued refusal to accept Reconstruction. Only full-scale military intervention could reverse the situation in the South, and by the mid-1870s the North had no political willpower to renew the occupation. Besieged by economic hardship and ex-Confederate resistance, Reconstruction faltered.

The Republican Unraveling

Republicans who banked on economic growth to underpin their ambitious programs found their hopes dashed by a severe depression that began in 1873. This global downturn affected much of Europe and even touched other parts of the world. In the United States, the initial panic was triggered by the bankruptcy of the Northern Pacific Railroad, backed by leading financier Jay Cooke. Cooke’s supervision of Union finances during the Civil War had made him a national hero; his downfall was a shock, and since Cooke was so well connected in Washington, it raised suspicions that Republican financial manipulation had caused the depression. Grant’s officials deepened public resentment toward their party when they rejected pleas to increase the money supply and provide relief from debt and unemployment.

The impact of the depression varied in different parts of the United States. But many farmers found themselves in a terrible plight as crop prices plunged, while industrial workers faced layoffs and sharp reductions in pay. Within a year, 50 percent of American iron manufacturing had stopped. By 1877, half the nations railroad companies had filed for bankruptcy. Rail construction halted. With hundreds of thousands thrown out of work, people took to the road. Wandering “tramps,” who camped beside railroad tracks and knocked on doors to beg for work and food, became a source of fear and anxiety for prosperous Americans.

In addition to discrediting Republicans, the depression directly undercut their policies, most dramatically in the South. The ex-Confederacy was still recovering from the ravages of war, and the regions new economic and social order, negotiated in the wake of emancipation, remained fragile. The ambitious policies of southern Republicans — for education, public health, and grants to railroad builders — cost a great deal of money. Federal support, offered through programs like the Freedmen’s Bureau, had begun to fade even before 1873. Republicans had banked on major infusions of northern and foreign investment capital into the South; for the most part, these failed to materialize. Investors who had sunk money into Confederate bonds, only to have those repudiated, were especially wary. The Souths economy grew more slowly than Republicans had hoped, and when the depression hit, growth screeched to a halt. State debts mounted rapidly, and as crushing interest on bonds fell due, public credit collapsed.

Not only had Republican officials failed to anticipate a severe depression; during the era of generous spending, considerable funds had been wasted or ended up in the pockets of public officials. Corruption was common in an era of railroad building and ambitious public contracts, and some notorious cases in the South rivaled the scandals that would soon be uncovered in Washington, D.C. Two swindlers in North Carolina, one of them a former Union general, were found to have distributed more than $200,000 in bribes and loans to legislators to gain millions in state funds for rail construction. Instead of building railroads, they used the money to travel to Europe and speculate in stocks and bonds. Not only Republicans were on the take. “You are mistaken,” wrote one Democrat to a northern friend, “if you suppose that all the evils … result from the carpetbaggers and negroes. The Democrats are leagued with them when anything is proposed that promises to pay.” Bipartisan or not, such corruption severely damaged the cause of Reconstruction.

One of the depressions most tragic results was the failure of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company. This private bank, founded in 1865, had worked closely with the Freedmen’s Bureau and Union army across the South. Former slaves associated it with the party of Lincoln, and thousands responded to northerners’ call for thrift and savings by bringing their small deposits to the nearest branch. Not only African American farmers and entrepreneurs but also churches and charitable groups opened accounts at the bank. But in the early 1870s, the bank’s directors sank their money into risky loans and speculative investments. In June 1874, the bank failed.

Some Republicans believed that, because the bank had been so closely associated with the U.S. Army and other federal agencies, Congress had a duty to step in. Even a southern Democratic representative argued that the government was “morally bound to see to it that not a dollar is lost.” But in the end, Congress refused to compensate the sixty-one thousand depositors; about half recovered small amounts — averaging $18.51 — but the other half received nothing. Abandonment of the bank signaled that the party of Reconstruction was losing its moral leadership.

The Disillusioned Liberals

As a result of both the depression and a backlash against the activist government of the postwar years, a revolt took shape inside the Republican Party. It was led by influential intellectuals, journalists, and businessmen who were classical liberals — believers in free trade, smaller government, and limited voting rights. Unable to block Grants renomination in 1872, these dissidents broke away and formed a new party under the name Liberal Republican. Their candidate was Horace Greeley, longtime publisher of the New York Tribune and veteran reformer and abolitionist. The Democrats, still in disarray, also nominated Greeley, notwithstanding his editorial diatribes against them. A poor campaigner, Greeley was assailed so bitterly that, as he said, “I hardly knew whether I was running for the Presidency or the penitentiary.”

Grant won reelection overwhelmingly, capturing 56 percent of the popular vote and every electoral vote. Yet the Liberal Republicans had managed to shift the terms of political debate. The agenda they had advanced — civil service reform, smaller government, restricted voting rights, and reconciliation with the South — resonated with Democrats, who were working to reclaim their status as a legitimate national party. Democrats had long been the party of limited government, and the rise of Liberal Republicanism provided an opportunity to revive that message. Liberalism thus crossed party lines, uniting disillusioned Republicans with Democrats who denounced government activism, especially social welfare programs. E. L. Godkin of The Nation and other classical liberal editors played key roles in turning northern public opinion against Reconstruction. With unabashed elitism, liberals claimed freedmen were unfit to vote. They denounced universal suffrage, which “can only mean in plain English the government of ignorance and vice.”

The second Grant administration gave the liberals plenty of ammunition for their anticorruption guns. The most notorious scandal involved Crédit Mobilier, a sham corporation set up by shareholders in the Union Pacific Railroad to secure government grants at an enormous profit. Organizers of the scheme protected it from federal investigation by providing gifts of Credit Mobilier stock to powerful members of Congress. Another major scandal involved the Whiskey Ring, a network of liquor distillers and treasury agents who defrauded the government of millions of dollars of excise taxes on whiskey. The ringleader was a Grant appointee, and Grants private secretary, Orville Babcock, had a hand in the thievery. The others went to prison, but Grant stood by Babcock, possibly perjuring himself to save his secretary from jail. The stench of scandal permeated the White House.

Counterrevolution in the South

While northerners became preoccupied with scandals and the shock of economic depression, ex-Confederates seized the initiative in the South. Most believed (as northern liberals had also begun to argue) that southern Reconstruction governments were illegitimate “regimes.” Led by the planters, ex-Confederates staged a massive counterrevolution designed to take back the South.

Insofar as they could win at the ballot box, southern Democrats took that route. They got ex-Confederate voting rights restored and campaigned against “negro rule.” But when violence was necessary, southern Democrats used it. Present-day Americans, witnessing violence and political instability in other countries, seldom remember that our own history includes the overthrow of elected governments by paramilitary groups. But this is exactly how Reconstruction ended in many parts of the South. Ex-Confederates organized to terrorize Republicans, especially in districts with large proportions of black voters. Black political leaders were shot, hanged, beaten to death, and in one case even beheaded. Many Republicans, both black and white, went into hiding or fled for their lives. Southern Democrats called this violent process “Redemption.”

No one looms larger in this bloody story than Nathan Bedford Forrest, a decorated Confederate general. Born in poverty in 1821, Forrest had scrambled in the booming cotton economy to become a big-time slave trader and Mississippi plantation owner. A fiery champion of secession, Forrest had formed a Tennessee Confederate cavalry regiment, fought bravely at the battle of Shiloh, and won fame as a daring raider. On April 12, 1864, his troopers perpetrated one of the war’s worst atrocities, the slaughter of black Union troops at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. Forrest’s troops refused to take prisoners, instead shooting down black soldiers as they tried to surrender.

Forrest’s determination to uphold white supremacy emerged again after the war’s end, altering the course of Reconstruction. William G. Brownlow, elected as Tennessee’s Republican governor in 1865, was a tough man, a former prisoner of the Confederates who was not shy about calling his enemies to account. Ex-Confederates struck back with a campaign of terror, targeting especially Brownlow’s black supporters. Amid the mayhem, some ex-Confederates formed the first Ku Klux Klan group in late 1865 or early 1866. As it proliferated across the state, the Klan turned to Forrest, who had been trying, unsuccessfully, to rebuild his prewar fortunes. Late in 1866, at a secret meeting in Nashville, Forrest donned the robes of Grand Wizard. His activities are mostly cloaked in mystery, but there is no mistake about his goals: The Klan would strike blows against the despised Republican government of Tennessee.

Nathan Bedford Forrest in Uniform, c. 1865

Before he became Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Forrest had been a celebrated cavalry general in the Confederate army. This photograph shows him in uniform before he was mustered out. Library of Congress.

In many towns, the Klan became virtually identical to the Democratic Party. In fact, Klan members — including Forrest — dominated Tennessee’s delegation to the Democratic national convention of 1868. At home, the Klan unleashed a murderous campaign of terror, and though Governor Brownlow responded resolutely, in the end the Republicans cracked. By March 1869, Brownlow retreated to the U.S. Senate. The Klan spread in the meantime to other states, where its members burned freedmen’s schools, beat teachers, murdered and threatened Republican politicians, and attacked Republican gatherings. By 1870, Democrats had seized power in Georgia and North Carolina and were making headway across the South.

In responding to the Klan between 1869 and 1871, the federal government showed it could still exert power effectively in the South. Determined to end Klan violence, Congress held extensive hearings and passed laws designed to put down the Klan and enforce freedmen’s rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. These so-called Enforcement Laws authorized federal prosecutions, military intervention, and martial law to suppress terrorist activities. The Grant administration made full use of these new powers. In South Carolina, where the Klan became deeply entrenched, U.S. troops occupied nine counties, made hundreds of arrests, and drove as many as 2,000 Klansmen from the state.

This assault on the Klan, while raising the spirits of southern Republicans, also revealed how dependent they were on Washington. The potency of the anti-Klan legislation, a Mississippi Republican wrote, “derived alone from its source” in the federal government. “No such law could be enforced by state authority, the local power being too weak.” But northern Republicans were growing disillusioned with Reconstruction, and in the South, prosecuting Klansmen was an uphill battle against all-white juries and unsympathetic federal judges. After 1872, prosecutions began to drop off. In the meantime, Texas fell to the Democrats in 1873 and Alabama and Arkansas in 1874.

As the increasingly divided Republicans debated how to respond, voters in the congressional election of 1874 handed the ruling party one of the most stunning defeats of the entire nineteenth century. Responding particularly to the severe depression that gripped the nation, they defeated almost half of the party’s 199 representatives in the House. Democrats, who had held 88 seats, now commanded an overwhelming majority of 182. “The election is not merely a victory but a revolution,” exulted one Democratic newspaper in New York.

After 1874, with Democrats in firm control of the House, Republicans who tried to shore up their southern wing had limited options. Bowing to election results, the Grant administration began to reject southern Republicans’ appeals for aid. Events in Mississippi showed the results. As state elections neared in 1875, paramilitary groups such as the Red Shirts operated openly. Mississippi’s Republican governor, Adelbert Ames, a Union veteran from Maine, appealed to the president for federal troops, but Grant refused. “The whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South,” complained one Grant official, who went on to tell southern Republicans that they were responsible for their own fate. As Mississippi Republicans faced a rising tide of brutal murders, Governor Ames — realizing that nothing could result but further bloodshed — urged his allies to give up the fight. Brandishing guns and stuffing ballot boxes, Democratic “Redeemers” swept the 1875 elections and took control of Mississippi. Thus, by 1876, Reconstruction was largely over. Republican governments, backed by token U.S. military units, remained in only three southern states: Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida. Elsewhere, former Confederates and their allies were back in power.

The Supreme Court Rejection of Equal Rights

Northern Democrats and so-called Redeemers in the South played decisive roles in ending Reconstruction. But even though, for the moment, Democrats had won control of the House and ex-Confederates had seized power in southern states, new landmark constitutional amendments and federal laws remained in force. If the Supreme Court had left these intact, subsequent generations of civil rights advocates could have used the federal courts to combat discrimination and violence. Instead, the court closed off this avenue for the pursuit of justice and equal rights, just as it had dashed the hopes of women’s rights advocates.

As early as 1873, in a group of decisions known collectively as the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Court began to undercut the power of the Fourteenth Amendment. In these cases and a related ruling, U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), the justices argued that the Fourteenth Amendment offered only a few, rather trivial federal protections to citizens (such as access to navigable waterways). In Cruikshank — a case that emerged from the massacre of African American farmers by ex-Confederates in Colfax, Louisiana, which was followed by a Democratic political coup — the Court ruled that voting rights remained a state prerogative unless the state itself violated those rights. So long as the civil rights of former slaves were being violated by individuals or private groups (including the Klan), that was a state responsibility and beyond federal jurisdiction. Therefore, the Fourteenth Amendment did not protect citizens from armed vigilantes, even if those vigilantes seized political power. The Court thus gutted the Fourteenth Amendment. In the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the justices also struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The impact of these decisions endured for decades.

The Political Crisis of 1877

After the grim election results of 1874, Republicans faced an uphill battle in the presidential election of 1876. Abandoning Grant, they nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, a former Union general who was untainted by corruption and — even more important — was governor of the key swing state of Ohio. Hayes’s Democratic opponent was New York governor Samuel J. Tilden, a Wall Street lawyer with a reform reputation. Tilden favored home rule for the South, but so, more discreetly, did Hayes. With enforcement on the wane, Reconstruction did not figure prominently in the campaign, and little was said about the states still ruled by Reconstruction governments: Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana.

Once returns started coming in on election night, however, those three states began to loom very large. Tilden led in the popular vote and seemed headed for victory until sleepless politicians at Republican headquarters realized that the electoral vote stood at 184 to 165, with the 20 votes from Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana still uncertain. If Hayes took those votes, he would win by a margin of 1. Republicans still controlled the election process in the three states; citing Democratic fraud and intimidation, they certified Republican victories. The “Redeemer” Democrats who had seized the states sent in their own electoral votes, for Tilden. When Congress met in early 1877, it confronted two sets of electoral votes from those states.

The Constitution does not provide for such a contingency. All it says is that the president of the Senate (in 1877, a Republican) opens the electoral certificates before the House (Democratic) and the Senate (Republican) and that “the Votes shall then be counted” (Article 2, Section 1). Suspense gripped the country. There was talk of inside deals, of a new election, even of a violent coup. Finally, Congress appointed an electoral commission to settle the question. The commission included seven Republicans, seven Democrats, and, as the deciding member, David Davis, a Supreme Court justice not known to have fixed party loyalties. Davis, however, disqualified himself by accepting an Illinois seat in the Senate. He was replaced by Republican justice Joseph P. Bradley, and by a vote of 8 to 7, on party lines, the commission awarded the disputed votes to Hayes.

In the House of Representatives, outraged Democrats vowed to stall the final count of electoral votes so as to prevent Hayes’s inauguration on March 4. But in the end, they went along—partly because Tilden himself urged that they do so. Hayes had publicly indicated his desire to offer substantial patronage to the South, including federal funds for education, internal improvements, and economic growth. He promised “a complete change of men and policy” — naively hoping, at the same time, that he could count on support from old-line southern Whigs and protect black voting rights. Hayes was inaugurated on schedule. He expressed hope in his inaugural address that the federal government could protect “the interests of both races carefully and equally.” But, setting aside the U.S. troops who were serving on border duty in Texas, only 3,000 Union soldiers remained in the South. As soon as the new president ordered them back to their barracks, the last Republican administrations in the South fell. Reconstruction had ended.

Lasting Legacies

In the short run, the fall of the last state Republican governments had little impact on the lives of most southerners. Much of the violent work of “Redemption” had already been done. What mattered was the broad political trend: the long, slow decline of Radical Republican power from the early 1870s through the mid-1880s, and the corresponding rise of ex-Confederate power in the South and Democrats on the national stage. It was obvious to most Americans that so-called Redeemers in the South had assumed power through violence. But many — including prominent classical liberals who shaped public opinion — believed that ex-Confederates had overthrown corrupt, illegitimate governments and that the end justified the means. Those who deplored the results had little political traction. The only remaining question was how far the revolution would be rolled back. In 1884, when Democrats elected their first post-Civil War president, Grover Cleveland, many freedpeople feared that he would seek to repeal the Thirteenth Amendment and reinstate slavery.

But the South never went back to the antebellum status quo. Sharecropping, for all its flaws and injustices, was not slavery. Freedmen and freedwomen managed to resist gang labor and work on their own terms. They had established their right to marry, read and write, worship as they pleased, and travel in search of a better life — rights that were not easily revoked. Across the South, black farmers overcame great odds to buy and work their own land. African American businessmen built thriving enterprises. Parents sacrificed to send their children to school, and a few proudly watched their sons and daughters graduate from college. Black religious and charitable leaders sustained networks of mutual aid. At the grassroots level, Reconstruction never entirely ended.

Reconstruction had also shaken, if not entirely overturned, the legal and political framework that had, since the founding of the United States, made it a white man’s country. This was a stunning achievement, and though hostile courts and violent resistance undercut it, no one ever repealed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. They remained in the Constitution, an enduring statement of belief in equality, even if equality in practice was as yet unfulfilled. It was on this constitutional framework that the civil rights movement of the twentieth century would be built (Chapter 26). Meanwhile, legal cases brought by Asian immigrants, Mexicans in the Southwest, and American-born women would show that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had transformed the nature of American citizenship.

In fact, the new federal powers asserted in Reconstruction — what Andrew Johnson disparaged as “centralization” — were in some ways more potent in the West than in the South. Republicans boldly carried their nation-building project into the West, to consolidate a continental empire. U.S. policymakers and businessmen also developed networks of trade and finance that stretched overseas. Before 1865, Americans had often worried about European interference in their domestic affairs. After the Civil War, Americans seldom brooded over such matters. Instead, the United States proudly began to describe itself as Britain’s leading rival, not only in championing Emancipation and other marks of “advancing civilization” but also as a naval and commercial power around the world. Though the cause of freedom did not always advance, the federal powers that had secured emancipation would find new outlets in the postwar era.

What factors undermined Republican control of the federal government during the 1870s?

What economic, social, and political legacies persisted after the end of Reconstruction?

SUMMARY

Postwar Republicans confronted two great tasks: restoring the rebellious states to the Union and defining the role of emancipated slaves. After Lincoln’s assassination, his successor, Andrew Johnson, hostile to Congress, unilaterally offered the South easy terms for reentering the Union. Exploiting this opportunity, southerners adopted oppressive Black Codes and welcomed ex-Confederates back into power. Congress impeached Johnson, and though failing to convict him, seized the initiative. They placed the South under military rule. In this second, or radical, phase of Reconstruction, Republican state governments tried to transform the Souths economic and social institutions. Congress passed innovative civil rights acts and funded new agencies like the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Fourteenth Amendment defined U.S. citizenship and asserted that states could no longer limit or supersede it. The Fifteenth Amendment gave full voting rights to formerly enslaved men. Debate over this amendment precipitated a split among women’s rights advocates, since women did not win inclusion.

Freedmen found that their goals conflicted with those of Republican leaders, who counted on cotton to fuel economic growth. Like Southern landowners, they envisioned former slaves as wageworkers, while freedmen wanted their own land. Sharecropping, which satisfied no one completely, emerged as a compromise suited to the needs of the cotton market and an impoverished, credit-starved region.

Nothing could reconcile ex-Confederates to Republican government, and they staged a violent counterrevolution in the name of white supremacy and “Redemption.” Meanwhile, struck by a massive economic depression, Northern voters handed Republicans a crushing defeat in the election of 1874. By 1876, Reconstruction was dead. Rutherford B. Hayes’s extremely narrow victory in the presidential election of that year, decided by a federal commission, resulted in the withdrawal of the last Union troops from the South. A series of Supreme Court decisions also undermined the Fourteenth Amendment and civil rights laws, setting up legal parameters through which, over the long term, disenfranchisement and segregation would flourish. Nonetheless, grassroots community-building among African Americans continued in the South, even after national Reconstruction faded.

For additional primary sources from this period, see Documents for America’s History, Seventh Edition.

For Web sites, images, and documents related to topics and places in this chapter, visit Make History at bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.

For Further Exploration

The best modern book on Reconstruction is Eric Foner’s major synthesis, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877(1988). Foner’s Nothing But Freedom (1983) helpfully places Reconstruction in a comparative context. See also Michael Perman, Emancipation and Reconstruction, 2nd ed. (2003). Black Reconstruction in America (1935), by African American activist and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, deserves attention as the first book on Reconstruction that stressed the role of blacks in their own emancipation. On freedmen’s experiences, see Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979). More recent studies include Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860–1870 (1994). In Gendered Strife and Confusion (1997), Laura F. Edwards explores the impact of ordinary women and men on Reconstruction. For recent views of the Freedmen’s Bureau, see Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., The Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction (1999). For national politics, see (in addition to Foner) The Reconstruction Presidents (1998), by Brooks D. Simpson. On Americans’ fading support for Reconstruction at the national level, see Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction (1991), and David W. Blight’s sweeping Race and Reunion (1991). The site for the PBS documentary Reconstruction: The Second Civil War (www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reconstruction/index.html) features many helpful primary documents and images.

Test Your Knowledge

For practice quizzes, activities, and other study tools, visit the Online Study Guide at bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.

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TIMELINE

1864

Wade-Davis Bill passed by Congress but killed by Lincoln’s pocket veto

1865

Freedmen’s Bureau established

Lincoln assassinated; Andrew Johnson succeeds him as president

Johnson implements Lincoln’s restoration plan

1866

Civil Rights Act passes over Johnson’s veto

Republican gains in congressional elections

1867

Reconstruction Act

1868

Impeachment crisis

Fourteenth Amendment ratified

Ulysses S. Grant elected president

1870

Ku Klux Klan at peak of power Fifteenth Amendment ratified

1872

Grant reelected

1873

Panic of 1873 ushers in severe economic depression of 1873–1877

1874

Sweeping Democratic gains in congressional election

1875

Whiskey Ring scandal undermines Grant administration

Minor v. Happersett Supreme Court rules that Fourteenth Amendment does not extend voting rights to women

1877

Rutherford B. Hayes becomes president

Reconstruction ends

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A., Henretta, J., Edwards, Rebecca, Self, O.. America: A Concise History, Volume One: To 1877, 5th Edition. Bedford/St. Martin's, 01/2012. VitalBook file.