Discuss the transformation of the southern economy after Reconstruction

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The lower half of the city of Charleston, South Carolina, the seedbed of secession, lay in

ruin when most of the white population evacuated on February 18, 1865. A bombardment

by Union batteries and gunboats around Charleston harbor had already destroyed many of

the lovely, neoclassical townhomes of the low-country planters. Then, as the city was

abandoned, fires broke out everywhere, ignited in bales of cotton left in huge stockpiles in

public squares. To many observers, the flames were the funeral pyres of a dying civilization.

Among the first Union troops to enter Charleston was the Twenty-first U.S. Colored

Regiment, which received the surrender of the city from its mayor. For black Charlestonians,

most of whom were former slaves, this was a time of celebration. In symbolic ceremonies,

they proclaimed their freedom and announced their rebirth. Whatever the postwar order

would bring, the freedpeople of Charleston converted Confederate ruin into a vision of

Reconstruction based on Union victory and black liberation.

Still, in Charleston as elsewhere, death demanded attention. During the final year of the

war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ Race Course, a horse-racing track, and

its famed Washington Jockey Club, into a prison. Union soldiers were kept in terrible

conditions in the interior of the track, without shelter. The who died there of exposure

and disease were buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. After the fall of the city,

Charleston’s blacks organized to create a proper burial ground for the Union dead. During

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877 Chapter Introduction

Book Title: A People & A Nation

Chapter Introduction

Photograph of the grandstand and clubhouse of the Washington Jockey Club and Race Course, Charleston, SC, site of Confederate prison and burial ground of more than 260 Union soldiers, as well as the first commemoration of Decoration Day, May 1, 1865.

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April, more than twenty black workmen reinterred the dead in marked graves and built a

high fence around the cemetery. On the archway over the cemetery’s entrance they painted

the inscription “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

And then they planned an extraordinary ceremony. On the morning of May 1, 1865, a

procession of ten thousand people marched around the planters’ Race Course, led by three

thousand children carrying armloads of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” The

children were followed by black women with baskets of flowers and wreaths, and then by

black men. The parade concluded with members of black and white Union regiments, along

with white missionaries and teachers led by James Redpath, the supervisor of freedmen’s

schools in the region. All who could fit assembled at the gravesite; five black ministers read

from scripture, and a black children’s choir sang “America,” “We’ll Rally ’Round the Flag,”

“The Star-Spangled Banner,” and Negro spirituals. When the ceremony ended, the huge

crowd retired to the Race Course for speeches, picnics, and military festivities.

Chronology

• Johnson begins rapid and lenient Reconstruction

• White southern governments pass restrictive black codes

• Congress refuses to seat southern representatives

• Thirteenth Amendment (The constitutional amendment that

abolished slavery; passed by Congress in 1865.) ratified,

abolishing slavery

• Congress passes Civil Rights Act (An act designed to

desegregate public places that lacked enforcement provisions.)

and renewal of Freedmen’s Bureau over Johnson’s veto

• Congress approves Fourteenth Amendment (Defined U.S.

citizens as anyone born or naturalized in the United States, barred

states from interfering with citizens’ constitutional rights, and

stated for the first time that voters must be male.)

• In Ex parte Milligan, the Supreme Court reasserts its influence

• Congress passes First Reconstruction Act and Tenure of Office

Act

• Constitutional conventions called in southern states

• House impeaches and Senate acquits Johnson

• Most southern states readmitted to Union under Radical plan

• Fourteenth Amendment ratified

• Grant elected president

• Congress approves Fifteenth Amendment (Prohibited states

from denying the vote to any citizen on account of “race, color, or

previous condition of servitude.”) (ratified in 1870)

• sharecropping (A system where landowners and former slaves

managed a new arrangement, with tenants paying landowners a

portion of their crops for the use of the land on which they farmed,

thereby usually ending up in permanent debt.) takes hold across a

cash-poor southern economy

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1871

1872

1873

1874

1875

1876

1877

• Congress passes second Enforcement Act and Ku Klux Klan

(A terrorist organization established by six Confederate war

veterans that sought to reestablish white supremacy in the South,

suppress black voting, and topple Reconstruction governments.)

Act

• Treaty with England settles Alabama claims

• Amnesty Act frees almost all remaining Confederates from

restrictions on holding office

• Grant reelected

• Slaughter-House cases limit power of Fourteenth Amendment

• Panic of 1873 leads to widespread unemployment and labor

strife

• Democrats win majority in House of Representatives

• Several Grant appointees indicted for corruption

• Congress passes weak Civil Rights Act

• Democratic Party increases control of southern states with white

supremacy campaigns

• U.S. v. Cruikshank further weakens Fourteenth Amendment

• Presidential election disputed

• Congress elects Hayes president

The war was over in Charleston, and “Decoration Day”—now Memorial Day, the day to

remember the war dead and decorate their graves with flowers—had been founded by

African Americans and their allies. Black people—by their labor, their words, their songs,

and their marching feet on the old planters’ Race Course—had created an American

tradition. In their vision, they were creating the Independence Day of a Second American

Revolution.

Reconstruction would bring revolutionary circumstances, but revolutions can also go

backward. The Civil War and its aftermath wrought unprecedented changes in American

society, law, and politics, but the underlying realities of economic power, racism, and judicial

conservatism limited Reconstruction’s revolutionary potential. As never before, the nation

had to determine the nature of federal-state relations, whether confiscated land could be

redistributed, and how to bring justice to both freedpeople and aggrieved white southerners

whose property and lives had been devastated. Americans faced the harrowing challenge of

psychological healing from a bloody and fratricidal war. How they would negotiate the

tangled relationship between healing and justice would determine the fate of

Reconstruction.

Nowhere was the turmoil of Reconstruction more evident than in national politics. Lincoln’s

successor, Andrew Johnson, fought bitterly with Congress over the shaping of

Reconstruction policies. Although a southerner, Johnson had always been a foe of the

South’s wealthy planters, and his first acts as president suggested that he would be tough

on “traitors.” Before the end of 1865, however, Johnson’s policies changed direction, and he

became the protector of white southern interests.

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Johnson imagined a lenient and rapid “restoration” of the South to the Union rather than the fundamental “reconstruction” that Republican congressmen favored. Between 1866 and

1868, the president and the Republican leadership in Congress engaged in a bitter power

struggle over how to put the United States back together again. Before the struggle ceased, Congress had impeached the president, enfranchised freedmen, and given them a role in reconstructing the South. The nation also adopted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth

Amendments, ushering equal protection of the law, a definition of birthright citizenship, and

universal manhood suffrage into the Constitution. But little was done to open the doors of

economic opportunity to black southerners, and the cause of equal rights for African

Americans fell almost as fast as it had risen.

By 1869, the Ku Klux Klan employed extensive violence and terror to thwart Reconstruction

and undermine black freedom. As white Democrats in the South took control of state

governments, they encountered little opposition from the North. Moreover, the wartime

industrial boom had created new opportunities and priorities. The West, with its seemingly

limitless potential and its wars against Indians, drew American resources and

consciousness like never before. Political corruption became a nationwide scandal, and

bribery a way of doing business.

Thus, Reconstruction became a revolution eclipsed. The white South’s desire to reclaim

control of its states and of race relations overwhelmed the national interest in stopping it.

But Reconstruction left enduring legacies from which the nation has benefited and with

which it has struggled ever since.

• Should the Reconstruction era be considered the Second American Revolution? By what criteria should we make such a judgment?

• What were the origins and meanings of the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1860s? What is its significance today?

• Reconstruction is judged to have “ended” in 1877. Over the course of the 1870s, what caused its end?

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877 Chapter Introduction

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877 Chapter Contents

Book Title: A People & A Nation

Chapter 14 Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877

• 14-3 Johnson’s Reconstruction Plan • 14-3a Andrew Johnson of Tennessee

• 14-3b Johnson’s Racial Views

• 14-3c Johnson’s Pardon Policy

• 14-3d Presidential Reconstruction

• 14-3e Black Codes

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877 Chapter Contents

Book Title: A People & A Nation

© 2017 Cengage Learning Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this work may by reproduced or used in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic, or mechanical, or in any other manner - without the written permission of the copyright holder.

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-3 Johnson’s Reconstruction Plan

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-3 Johnson’s Reconstruction Plan

When Reconstruction began under President Andrew Johnson, many expected his policies

to be harsh. Throughout his career in Tennessee, he had criticized the wealthy planters and championed the small farmers. When an assassin’s bullet thrust Johnson into the

presidency, many former slave owners shared the dismay of a North Carolina woman who

wrote, “Think of Andy Johnson [as] the president! What will become of us—‘the aristocrats

of the South’ as we are termed?” Northern Radicals also had reason to believe that Johnson

would deal sternly with the South. When one of them suggested the exile or execution of ten

or twelve leading rebels to set an example, Johnson replied, “How are you going to pick out

so small a number? … Treason is a crime; and crime must be punished.”

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-3 Johnson’s Reconstruction Plan

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-3a Andrew Johnson of Tennessee

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-3a Andrew Johnson of Tennessee

Like his martyred predecessor, Johnson followed a path in antebellum politics from

obscurity to power. With no formal education, he became a tailor’s apprentice. But from

1829, while in his early twenties, he held nearly every office in Tennessee politics:

alderman, state representative, congressman, two terms as governor, and U.S. senator by

1857. Although elected as a southern Democrat, Johnson was the only senator from a

seceded state who refused to follow his state out of the Union. Lincoln appointed him war

governor of Tennessee in 1862; hence his symbolic place on the ticket in the president’s bid

for reelection in 1864.

Although a Unionist, Johnson’s political beliefs made him an old Jacksonian Democrat. And

as they said in the mountainous region of east Tennessee, where Johnson established a

reputation as a stump speaker, “Old Andy never went back on his raisin.’” Johnson was also

an ardent states’ rightist. Before the war, he had supported tax-funded public schools and

homestead legislation, fashioning himself as a champion of the common man. Although he vehemently opposed secession, Johnson advocated limited government. He shared none of

the Radicals’ expansive conception of federal power. His philosophy toward Reconstruction

may be summed up in the slogan he adopted: “The Constitution as it is, and the Union as it

was.”

Through 1865, Johnson alone controlled Reconstruction policy, for Congress recessed

shortly before he became president and did not reconvene until December. In the following

eight months, Johnson formed new state governments in the South by using his power to

grant pardons. He advanced Lincoln’s leniency by extending even easier terms to former Confederates.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-3a Andrew Johnson of Tennessee

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-3b Johnson’s Racial Views

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-3b Johnson’s Racial Views

Johnson had owned house slaves, although he had never been a planter. He accepted emancipation as a result of the war, but he did not favor black civil and political rights. Johnson believed that black suffrage could never be imposed on a southern state by the federal government, and that set him on a collision course with the Radicals. When it came to race, Johnson was a thoroughgoing white supremacist. He held what one politician called

“unconquerable prejudices against the African race.” In perhaps the most blatantly racist official statement ever delivered by an American president, Johnson declared in his annual message of 1867 that blacks possessed less “capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands;

… wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.”

Combative and inflexible, President Andrew Johnson contributed greatly to the failure of his own Reconstruction program.

[LC-B8184-10690]/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Such racial views had an enduring effect on Johnson’s policies. Where whites were

concerned, however, Johnson seemed to be pursuing changes in class relations. He

proposed rules that would keep the wealthy planter class at least temporarily out of power.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-3b Johnson’s Racial Views

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-3c Johnson’s Pardon Policy

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-3c Johnson’s Pardon Policy

White southerners were required to swear an oath of loyalty as a condition of gaining

amnesty or pardon, but Johnson barred several categories of people from taking the oath:

former federal officials, high-ranking Confederate officers, and political leaders or graduates

of West Point or Annapolis who joined the Confederacy. To this list, Johnson added another

important group: all ex-Confederates whose taxable property was worth more than $20,000 . These individuals had to apply personally to the president for pardon and restoration of their

political rights. The president, it seemed, meant to take revenge on the old planter elite and

thereby promote a new leadership of deserving yeomen.

Johnson appointed provisional governors, who began the Reconstruction process by calling

state constitutional conventions. The delegates chosen for these conventions had to draft

new constitutions that eliminated slavery and invalidated secession. After ratification of

these constitutions, new governments could be elected, and the states would be restored to

the Union with full congressional representation. But only those southerners who had taken

the oath of amnesty and had been eligible to vote on the day the state seceded could

participate in this process. Thus unpardoned whites and former slaves were not eligible.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-3c Johnson’s Pardon Policy

Book Title: A People & A Nation

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-3d Presidential Reconstruction

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-3d Presidential Reconstruction

If Johnson intended to strip former aristocrats of their power, he did not hold to his plan. The

old white leadership proved resilient and influential; prominent Confederates won elections

and turned up in various appointive offices. Then Johnson started pardoning planters and

leading rebels. He hired additional clerks to prepare the necessary documents and then

began to issue pardons to large categories of people. By September 1865, hundreds were

issued in a single day. These pardons, plus the rapid return of planters’ abandoned lands,

restored the old elite to power and quickly gave Johnson an image as the South’s

champion.

Why did Johnson allow the planters to regain power? He was determined to achieve a rapid Reconstruction in order to deny the Radicals any opportunity for the more thorough racial

and political changes they desired in the South. And Johnson needed southern support in

the 1866 elections; hence, he declared Reconstruction complete only eight months after

Appomattox. Thus, in December 1865, many Confederate congressmen traveled to

Washington to claim seats in the U.S. Congress. Even Alexander Stephens, vice president

of the Confederacy, returned to Capitol Hill as a senator-elect from Georgia.

The election of such prominent rebels troubled many northerners. Some of the state

conventions were slow to repudiate secession; others admitted only grudgingly that slavery

was dead and wrote new laws to show it.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-3d Presidential Reconstruction

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-3e Black Codes

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-3e Black Codes

To define the status of freed men and women and control their labor, some legislatures merely revised large sections of the slave codes by substituting the word freedmen for slaves. The new black codes compelled former slaves to carry passes, observe a curfew, live in housing provided by a landowner, and give up hope of entering many desirable occupations. Stiff vagrancy laws and restrictive labor contracts bound freedpeople to plantations, and “anti-enticement” laws punished anyone who tried to lure these workers to other employment. State-supported schools and orphanages excluded blacks entirely.

Link to Louisiana Black Code.

It seemed to northerners that the South was intent on returning African Americans to

servility and that Johnson’s Reconstruction policy held no one responsible for the terrible

war. But memories of the war—not yet even a year over—were still raw and would dominate

political behavior for several elections to come. Thus, the Republican majority in Congress

decided to call a halt to the results of Johnson’s plan. On reconvening, the House and

Senate considered the credentials of the newly elected southern representatives and

decided not to admit them. Instead, they bluntly challenged the president’s authority and

established a joint committee to study and investigate a new direction for Reconstruction.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-3e Black Codes

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877 Chapter Contents

Book Title: A People & A Nation

Chapter 14 Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877

• 14-5 Politics and Reconstruction in the South • 14-5a White Resistance

• 14-5b Black Voters and the Southern Republican Party

• 14-5c Triumph of Republican Governments

• 14-5d Industrialization and Mill Towns

• 14-5e Republicans and Racial Equality

• 14-5f Myth of “Negro Rule”

• 14-5g Carpetbaggers and Scalawags

• 14-5h Tax Policy and Corruption as Political Wedges

• 14-5i Ku Klux Klan

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877 Chapter Contents

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-5 Politics and Reconstruction in the South

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-5 Politics and Reconstruction in the South

From the start, Reconstruction encountered the resistance of white southerners. In the black

codes and in private attitudes, many whites stubbornly opposed emancipation, and the

former planter class proved especially unbending because of its tremendous financial loss

in slaves. In 1866, a Georgia newspaper frankly observed that “most of the white citizens

believe that the institution of slavery was right, and … they will believe that the condition,

which comes nearest to slavery, that can now be established will be the best.” And for many

poor whites who had never owned slaves and yet had sacrificed enormously in the war,

destitution, plummeting agricultural prices, disease, and the uncertainties of a growing

urban industrialization drove them off land, toward cities, and into hatred of the very idea of

black equality.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-5 Politics and Reconstruction in the South

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-5a White Resistance

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-5b Black Voters and the Southern Republican Party

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-5b Black Voters and the Southern Republican Party

Enthusiastically and hopefully, black men voted Republican. Most agreed with one man who

felt he should “stick to the end with the party that freed me.” Illiteracy did not prohibit blacks

(or uneducated whites) from making intelligent choices. Although Mississippi’s William

Henry could read only “a little,” he testified that he and his friends had no difficulty selecting

the Republican ballot. “We stood around and watched,” he explained. “We saw D. Sledge

vote; he owned half the county. We knowed he voted Democratic so we voted the other

ticket so it would be Republican.” Women, who could not vote, encouraged their husbands

and sons, and preachers exhorted their congregations to use the franchise. Zeal for voting

spread through entire black communities.

Thanks to a large black turnout and the restrictions on prominent Confederates, a new

southern Republican Party came to power in the constitutional conventions of 1868–1870.

Republican delegates consisted of a sizable contingent of blacks ( out of the total of just

over delegates throughout the South), some northerners who had moved to the

South, and native southern whites who favored change. The new constitutions drafted by

this Republican coalition were more democratic than anything previously adopted in the

history of the South. They eliminated property qualifications for voting and holding office,

and they turned many appointed offices into elective posts. They provided for public schools

and institutions to care for the mentally ill, the blind, the deaf, the destitute, and the

orphaned.

The conventions broadened women’s rights in property holding and divorce. Usually, the

goal was not to make women equal with men but to provide relief to thousands of suffering

debtors. In white families left poverty-stricken by the war and weighed down by debt, it was

usually the husband who had contracted the debts. Thus, giving women legal control over

their own property provided some protection to their families.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-5b Black Voters and the Southern Republican Party

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1,000 265

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-5c Triumph of Republican Governments

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-5c Triumph of Republican Governments

Under these new constitutions, the southern states elected Republican-controlled

governments. For the first time, the ranks of state legislators in 1868 included black

southerners. Contrary to what white southerners would later claim, the Republican state

governments did not disfranchise ex-Confederates as a group. James Lynch, a leading

black politician from Mississippi, explained why African Americans shunned the “folly” of

disfranchising whites. Unlike northerners who “can leave when it becomes too

uncomfortable,” landless former slaves “must be in friendly relations with the great body of

the whites in the state. Otherwise … peace can be maintained only by a standing army.”

Despised and lacking material or social power, southern Republicans strove for acceptance,

legitimacy, and safe ways to gain a foothold in a depressed economy.

Far from being vindictive toward the race that had enslaved them, most southern blacks

treated leading rebels with generosity and appealed to white southerners to adopt a spirit of

fairness. In this way, the South’s Republican Party condemned itself to defeat if white voters

would not cooperate. Within a few years, most of the fledgling Republican parties in the

southern states would be struggling for survival against violent white hostility. But for a time,

some propertied whites accepted congressional Reconstruction as a reality.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-5c Triumph of Republican Governments

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-5d Industrialization and Mill Towns

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-5d Industrialization and Mill Towns

Reflecting northern ideals and southern necessity, the Reconstruction governments

enthusiastically promoted industry. Accordingly, Reconstruction legislatures encouraged

investment with loans, subsidies, and short-term exemptions from taxation. The southern

railroad system was rebuilt and expanded, and coal and iron mining made possible

Birmingham’s steel plants. Between 1860 and 1880, the number of manufacturing

establishments in the South nearly doubled.

This emphasis on big business, however, produced higher state debts and taxes, drew

money away from schools and other programs, and multiplied possibilities for corruption in

state legislatures. The alliance between business and government took firm hold, often at

the expense of the needs of common farmers and laborers. It also locked Republicans into

a conservative strategy and doomed their chances with poorer whites.

Poverty remained the lot of vast numbers of southern whites. On a daily basis during the

Reconstruction years, they had to subordinate politics to the struggle for livelihood. The war

had caused a massive onetime loss of income-producing wealth, such as livestock, and a

steep decline in land values. In many regions, the old planter class still ruled the best land

and access to credit or markets.

As many poor whites and blacks found farming less tenable, they moved to cities and new

mill towns. Industrialization did not sweep the South as it did the North, but it certainly laid

deep roots. Attracting textile mills to southern towns became a competitive crusade. “Next to

God,” shouted a North Carolina evangelist, “what this town needs is a cotton mill!” In 1860,

the South counted some mill workers; by 1880, the number grew to and, by

the end of the century, to . Thus, poor southerners began the multigenerational

journey from farmer to mill worker and other forms of low-income urban wage earner.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-5d Industrialization and Mill Towns

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The Queen of

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states whites were in the majority, and former slave owners controlled the best land and

other sources of economic power. Economic progress was uppermost in the minds of most

freedpeople. Black southerners needed land, and much land did fall into state hands for

nonpayment of taxes. Such land was offered for sale in small lots. But most freedmen had

too little cash to bid against investors or speculators. South Carolina established a land

commission, but it could help only those with money to buy. Any widespread redistribution

of land had to arise from Congress, which never supported such action.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-5e Republicans and Racial Equality

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-5f Myth of “Negro Rule”

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-5f Myth of “Negro Rule”

Within a few years, white hostility to congressional Reconstruction began to dominate.

Some conservatives had always wanted to fight Reconstruction through pressure and racist

propaganda. They put economic and social pressure on blacks: one black Republican

reported that “my neighbors will not employ me, nor sell me a farthing’s worth of anything.”

Charging that the South had been turned over to ignorant blacks, conservatives deplored

“black domination,” which became a rallying cry for a return to white supremacy.

Such attacks were inflammatory propaganda and part of the growing myth of “Negro rule,”

which would serve as a central theme in battles over the memory of Reconstruction. African

Americans participated in politics but hardly dominated or controlled events. They were a

majority in only two out of ten state constitutional writing conventions (transplanted

northerners were a majority in one). In the state legislatures, only in the lower house in

South Carolina did blacks ever constitute a majority. Sixteen blacks won seats in Congress

before Reconstruction was over, but none was ever elected governor. Only eighteen served

in a high state office, such as lieutenant governor, treasurer, superintendent of education, or

secretary of state.

In all, some four hundred blacks served in political office during the Reconstruction era, a

signal achievement by any standard. Although they never dominated the process, they

established a rich tradition of government service and civic activism. Elected officials, such

as Robert Smalls in South Carolina, labored tirelessly for cheaper land prices, better health

care, access to schools, and the enforcement of civil rights for black people. For too long,

the black politicians of Reconstruction were the forgotten heroes of this seedtime of

America’s long civil rights movement.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-5f Myth of “Negro Rule”

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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“corrupt political vampires who rob and cheat and prey upon the prejudices of our people”

and “feed upon the political carcass of a prostrate state,” the paper insisted, were not black

folks’ allies. The white southern counterrevolutionaries seemed to be winning the

propaganda war.

Conservatives also invented the term scalawag (Term used by conservative southerners to

describe other white southerners who were perceived as aiding or benefiting from

Reconstruction.) to discredit any native white southerner who cooperated with the

Republicans. A substantial number of southerners did so, including some wealthy and

prominent men. Most scalawags, however, were yeoman farmers, men from mountain

areas and nonslaveholding districts who had been Unionists under the Confederacy. They

saw that they could benefit from the education and opportunities promoted by Republicans.

Sometimes banding together with freedmen, they pursued common class interests and

hoped to make headway against the power of long-dominant planters. In the long run,

however, the hope of such black-white coalitions floundered in the quicksand of racism.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-5g Carpetbaggers and Scalawags

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-5h Tax Policy and Corruption as Political Wedges

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-5h Tax Policy and Corruption as Political Wedges

Taxation was a major problem for the Reconstruction governments. Republicans wanted to

repair the war’s destruction, stimulate industry, and support such new ventures as public

schools. But the Civil War had destroyed much of the South’s tax base. One category of

valuable property—slaves—had disappeared entirely. And hundreds of thousands of

citizens had lost much of the rest of their property—money, livestock, fences, and

buildings—to the war. Thus, an increase in taxes (sales, excise, and property) was

necessary even to maintain traditional services. Inevitably, Republican tax policies aroused

strong opposition, especially among the yeomen.

Corruption was another serious charge leveled against the Republicans. Unfortunately, it

was often true. Many carpetbaggers and black politicians engaged in fraudulent schemes,

sold their votes, or padded expenses, taking part in what scholars recognize was a

nationwide surge of corruption in an age ruled by “spoilsmen” (see). Corruption carried no

party label, but the Democrats successfully pinned the blame on unqualified blacks and

greedy carpetbaggers among southern Republicans.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-5h Tax Policy and Corruption as Political Wedges

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-5i Ku Klux Klan

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-5i Ku Klux Klan

All these problems hurt the Republicans, whose leaders also allowed factionalism along

racial and class lines to undermine party unity. But in many southern states, the deathblow

came through violence. The Ku Klux Klan (its members altered the Greek word for “circle,”

kuklos), a secret veterans’ club that began in Tennessee in 1866, spread through the South,

and rapidly evolved into a terrorist organization. Violence against African Americans

occurred from the first days of Reconstruction but became far more organized and

purposeful after 1867. Klansmen sought to frustrate Reconstruction and keep the freedmen

in subjection. Nighttime harassment, whippings, beatings, rapes, and murders became

common, as terrorism dominated some counties and regions.

Although the Klan tormented blacks who stood up for their rights as laborers or individuals,

its main purpose was political. Lawless night riders made active Republicans the target of

their attacks. Leading white and black Republicans were killed in several states. After

freedmen who worked for a South Carolina scalawag started voting, terrorists visited the

plantation and, in the words of one victim, “whipped every … [black] man they could lay their

hands on.” Klansmen also attacked Union League clubs—Republican organizations that

mobilized the black vote—and schoolteachers who were aiding the freedmen.

Klan violence was not a spontaneous outburst of racism; very specific social forces shaped

and directed it. In North Carolina, for example, Alamance and Caswell counties were the

sites of the worst Klan violence. Slim Republican majorities there rested on cooperation

between black voters and white yeomen, particularly those whose Unionism or discontent

with the Confederacy had turned them against local Democratic officials. Together, these

black and white Republicans had ousted officials long entrenched in power. The wealthy

and powerful men in Alamance and Caswell who had lost their accustomed political control

were the Klan’s county officers and local chieftains. They organized a deliberate campaign

of terror, recruiting members and planning atrocities. By intimidation and murder, the Klan

weakened the Republican coalition and restored a Democratic majority.

Two members of the Ku Klux Klan, photographed in regalia, circa. 1870.

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Klan violence injured and ultimately destroyed Republicans across the South. One of every

ten black leaders who had been delegates to the 1867–1868 state constitutional

conventions was attacked, seven fatally. In one judicial district of North Carolina, the Ku

Klux Klan was responsible for twelve murders, over seven hundred beatings, and other acts

of violence, including rape and arson. A single attack on Alabama Republicans in the town

of Eutaw left four blacks dead and fifty-four wounded. In South Carolina, five hundred

masked Klansmen lynched eight black prisoners at the Union County jail, and in nearby

York County, the Klan committed at least eleven murders and hundreds of whippings.

According to historian Eric Foner, the Klan “made it virtually impossible for Republicans to

campaign or vote in large parts of Georgia.”

Thus, a combination of difficult fiscal problems, Republican mistakes, racial hostility, and

terror brought down the Republican regimes. In most southern states, Radical

Reconstruction lasted only a few years (see Map 14.1). The most enduring failure of

Reconstruction, however, was not political; it was social and economic. Reconstruction

failed to alter the South’s social structure or its distribution of wealth and power.

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I * - , ' t

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877 Chapter Contents

Book Title: A People & A Nation

Chapter 14

Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877

• 14-7 Chapter Review

• 14-7a Summary

• 14-7b Suggestions for Further Reading

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877 Chapter Contents

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-7 Chapter Review

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-7 Chapter Review

14-7a Summary

Reconstruction left a contradictory record. It was an era of tragic aspirations and failures but

also of unprecedented legal, political, and social change. The Union victory brought about

an increase in federal power, stronger nationalism, sweeping federal intervention in the

southern states, and landmark amendments to the Constitution. It also sparked a revolution

in how people would see the role of the state in their lives, often resulting in positive modes

of dependence on government heretofore unimagined. But northern commitment to make

these changes endure eroded, and the revolution remained unfinished. The mystic sense of

promise for new lives and liberties among the freedpeople, demonstrated in that first

Decoration Day in Charleston, was tarnished although not dead by 1877.

The North embraced emancipation, black suffrage, and constitutional alterations

strengthening the central government. But it did so to defeat the rebellion and secure the

peace. As the pressure of these crises declined, Americans, especially in the North,

retreated from Reconstruction. The American people and the courts maintained a

preference for state authority and a distrust of federal power. The ideology of free labor

dictated that property should be respected and that individuals should be self-reliant.

Racism endured and transformed into the even more virulent forms of Klan terror and

theories of black degeneration. Concern for the human rights of African Americans and

other reforms frequently had less appeal than moneymaking in an individualistic,

industrializing society.

New challenges began to overwhelm the aims of Reconstruction. How would the country

develop its immense resources in an increasingly interconnected national economy? Could

farmers, industrial workers, immigrants, and capitalists coexist? Industrialization not only

promised prosperity but also wrought increased exploitation of labor. Moreover, industry

increased the nation’s power and laid the foundation for an enlarged American role in

international affairs. The American imagination again turned to the conquest of new

frontiers.

In the wake of the Civil War, Americans faced two profound tasks—the achievement of

healing and the dispensing of justice. Both had to occur, but they never developed in

historical balance. Making sectional reunion compatible with black freedom and equality

overwhelmed the imagination in American political culture, and the nation still faced much of

this dilemma more than a century later.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-7 Chapter Review

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-7b Suggestions for Further Reading

Book Title: A People & A Nation

Chapter Review

14-7b Suggestions for Further Reading

David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001)

Gregory P. Downs, Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular

Politics in the South, 1861–1908 (2011)

W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988)

William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (1980)

Gerald Jaynes, Branches Without Roots: The Genesis of the Black Working Class in the

American South, 1862–1882 (1986)

George Rable, But There Was No Peace (1984)

Heather Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil

War (2007)

Elliot West, “Reconstructing Race,” Western Historical Quarterly (Spring 2003)

Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America

(2011)

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-7b Suggestions for Further Reading

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877 Chapter Contents

Book Title: A People & A Nation

Chapter 14

Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877

• 14-4 The Congressional Reconstruction Plan

• 14-4a The Radicals

• 14-4b Congress Versus Johnson

• 14-4c Fourteenth Amendment

• 14-4d The South’s and Johnson’s Defiance

• 14-4e Reconstruction Acts of 1867–1868

• 14-4f Failure of Land Redistribution

• 14-4g Constitutional Crisis

• 14-4h Impeachment of President Johnson

• 14-4i Election of 1868

• 14-4j Fifteenth Amendment

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877 Chapter Contents

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-4 The Congressional Reconstruction Plan

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-4 The Congressional Reconstruction Plan

Northern congressmen were hardly unified, but they did not doubt their right to shape

Reconstruction policy. The Constitution mentioned neither secession nor reunion, but it

gave Congress the primary role in the admission of states. Moreover, the Constitution

declared that the United States shall guarantee to each state a “republican form of

government.” This provision, legislators believed, gave them the authority to devise policies

for Reconstruction.

They soon faced other grave constitutional questions. What, for example, had rebellion

done to the relationship between southern states and the Union? Lincoln had always

believed secession impossible—the Confederate states had engaged in an “insurrection”

within the Union in his view. Congressmen who favored vigorous Reconstruction measures

argued that the war had broken the Union and that the South was subject to the victor’s will.

Moderate congressmen held that the states had forfeited their rights through rebellion and

thus had come under congressional supervision.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-4 The Congressional Reconstruction Plan

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Litratyaf Confess

southern representatives should be admitted to Congress. Among the Republicans, the

Radicals’ influence grew in proportion to Johnson’s intransigence and outright provocation.

It is an old story in American politics: when compromise fails, more radical visions will fill the

void.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-4a The Radicals

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-4b Congress Versus Johnson

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-4b Congress Versus Johnson

Trying to work with Johnson, Republicans believed a compromise had been reached in the

spring of 1866. Under its terms, Johnson would agree to two modifications of his program:

extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau for another year and passage of a civil rights bill to

counteract the black codes. This bill would force southern courts to practice equality under

the ultimate scrutiny of the federal judiciary. Its provisions applied to public, not private, acts

of discrimination. The Civil Rights Bill of 1866 was the first statutory definition of the rights of

American citizens and is still on the books today.

Johnson destroyed the compromise, however, by vetoing both bills (they later became law

when Congress overrode the president’s veto). Denouncing any change in his program, the

president condemned Congress’s action and revealed his own racism. Because the civil

rights bill defined U.S. citizens as native-born persons who were taxed, Johnson claimed it

discriminated against “large numbers of intelligent, worthy, and patriotic foreigners … in

favor of the negro.” Anticipating arguments used by modern conservatives, the bill, he said,

operated “in favor of the colored and against the white race.”

All hope of presidential-congressional cooperation was now dead. In 1866, newspapers

reported daily violations of blacks’ rights in the South and carried alarming accounts of

antiblack violence—notably in Memphis and New Orleans, where police aided brutal mobs

in their attacks. In Memphis, forty blacks were killed and twelve schools burned by white

mobs, and in New Orleans, the toll was thirty-four African Americans dead and two hundred

wounded. Such violence convinced Republicans, and the northern public, that more needed

to be done. A new Republican plan took the form of the Fourteenth Amendment to the

Constitution.

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-4c Fourteenth Amendment

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-4c Fourteenth Amendment

Of the five sections of the Fourteenth Amendment, the first would have the greatest legal

significance in later years. It conferred citizenship on “all persons born or naturalized in the

United States” and prohibited states from abridging their constitutional “privileges and

immunities” (see the Appendix for the Constitution and all amendments). It also barred any

state from taking a person’s life, liberty, or property “without due process of law” and from

denying “equal protection of the laws.” These resounding phrases have become powerful

guarantees of African Americans’ civil rights—indeed, of the rights of all citizens, except for

Indians, who were not granted citizenship rights until 1924.

Nearly universal agreement emerged among Republicans on the amendment’s second and

third sections. The fourth declared the Confederate debt null and void, and guaranteed the

war debt of the United States. Northerners rejected the notion of paying taxes to reimburse

those who had financed a rebellion, and business groups agreed on the necessity of

upholding the credit of the U.S. government, an element of the Fourteenth Amendment that

has been invoked in bitter debates between congressional Republicans and the Obama

administration over raising the federal “debt ceiling” in 2011 and again in 2013. The second

and third sections barred Confederate leaders from holding state and federal office. Only

Congress, by a two-thirds vote of each house, could remove the penalty. The amendment

thus guaranteed a degree of punishment for the leaders of the Confederacy.

The second section of the amendment also dealt with representation and embodied the

compromises that produced the document. Northerners disagreed about whether blacks

should have the right to vote. As a citizen of Indiana wrote to a southern relative, “[a]lthough

there is a great deal [of] profession among us for the relief of the darkey yet I think much of

it is far from being cincere. I guess we want to compell you to do right by them while we are

not willing ourselves to do so.” Those arched words are indicative not only of how

revolutionary Reconstruction had become, but also of how far the public will, North and

South, lagged behind the enactments that became new constitutional cornerstones. Many

northern states still maintained black disfranchisement laws during Reconstruction.

Emancipation finally ended the three-fifths clause for the purpose of counting blacks, which

would increase southern representation. Thus, the postwar South stood to gain power in

Congress, and if white southerners did not allow blacks to vote, former secessionists would

derive the political benefit from emancipation. That was more irony than most northerners

could bear. So Republicans determined that, if a southern state did not grant black men the

vote, their representation would be reduced proportionally. If they did enfranchise black

men, their representation would be increased proportionally. This compromise avoided a

direct enactment of black suffrage but would deliver future black southern voters to the

Republican Party.

The Fourteenth Amendment specified for the first time that voters were “male” and ignored

female citizens, black and white. For this reason, it provoked a strong reaction from the

women’s rights movement. Advocates of women’s equality had worked with abolitionists for

decades, often subordinating their cause to that of the slaves. During the drafting of the

Fourteenth Amendment, however, female activists demanded to be heard. Prominent

leaders, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, ended their alliance with

abolitionists and fought for women, while others remained committed to the idea that it was

“the Negro’s hour.” Thus, the amendment infused new life into the women’s rights

movement and caused considerable strife among old allies. Many male former abolitionists,

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white and black, were willing to delay the day of woman suffrage in favor of securing

freedmen the right to vote in the South.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-4c Fourteenth Amendment

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-4d The South’s and Johnson’s Defiance

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-4d The South’s and Johnson’s Defiance

In 1866, however, the major question in Reconstruction politics was how the public would

respond to the congressional initiative. Johnson did his best to block the Fourteenth

Amendment in both North and South. Condemning Congress for its refusal to seat southern

representatives, the president urged state legislatures in the South to vote against

ratification. Every southern legislature, except Tennessee’s, rejected the amendment by a

wide margin.

To present his case to northerners, Johnson organized a National Union Convention and

took to the stump himself. In an age when active personal campaigning was rare for a

president, Johnson boarded a special train for a “swing around the circle” that carried his

message into the Northeast, the Midwest, and then back to Washington. In city after city, he

criticized the Republicans in a ranting, undignified style. Increasingly, audiences rejected his

views, hooting and jeering at him. In this whistle-stop tour, Johnson began to hand out

American flags with thirty-six rather than twenty-five stars, declaring the Union already

restored. At many towns, he likened himself to a “persecuted” Jesus who might now be

martyred “upon the cross” for his magnanimity toward the South. And, repeatedly, he

labeled the Radicals “traitors” for their efforts to take over Reconstruction.

The elections of 1866 were a resounding victory, though, for Republicans in Congress.

Radicals and moderates whom Johnson had denounced won reelection by large margins,

and the Republican majority grew to two-thirds of both houses of Congress. The North had

spoken clearly: Johnson’s official policies of states’ rights and white supremacy were

prematurely giving the advantage to rebels and traitors. Thus, Republican congressional

leaders won a mandate to pursue their Reconstruction plan.

But Johnson and southern intransigence had brought the plan to an impasse. Nothing could

be accomplished as long as the “Johnson governments” existed and the southern electorate

remained exclusively white. Republicans resolved to form new state governments in the

South and enfranchise the freedmen.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-4d The South’s and Johnson’s Defiance

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-4e Reconstruction Acts of 1867–1868

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-4e Reconstruction Acts of 1867–1868

After some embittered debate in which Republicans and the remaining Democrats in

Congress argued over the meaning and memory of the Civil War itself, the First

Reconstruction Act passed in March 1867. This plan, under which the southern states were

actually readmitted to the Union, incorporated only a part of the Radical program. Union

generals, commanding small garrisons of troops and charged with supervising elections,

assumed control in five military districts in the South (see Map 14.1). Confederate leaders

designated in the Fourteenth Amendment were barred from voting until new state

constitutions were ratified. The act guaranteed freedmen the right to vote in elections as

well as serve in state constitutional conventions and in subsequent elections. In addition,

each southern state was required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, to ratify its new

constitution by majority vote, and to submit it to Congress for approval (see Table 14.1).

Map 14.1

The Reconstruction Act of 1867

This map shows the five military districts established when Congress passed the

Reconstruction Act of 1867. As the dates within each state indicate, conservative

Democratic forces quickly regained control of government in four southern states.

So-called Radical Reconstruction was curtailed in most of the others as factions

within the weakened Republican Party began to cooperate with conservative

Democrats.

©Cengage Learning 2015

Table 14.1

Plans for Reconstruction Compared

Johnson’s

Plan

Radicals’

Plan

Fourteenth

Amendment

Reconstruction

Act of 1867

Voting Whites only;

high-ranking

Give vote to

black males

Southern whites

may decide but

Black men gain

vote; whites

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Johnson’s

Plan

Radicals’

Plan

Fourteenth

Amendment

Reconstruction

Act of 1867

Confederate

leaders must

seek pardons

can lose

representation if

they deny black

suffrage

barred from office

by Fourteenth

Amendment

cannot vote while

new state

governments are

being formed

Office

holding

Many

prominent

Confederates

regain power

Only loyal

white and

black males

eligible

Confederate

leaders barred

until Congress

votes amnesty

Fourteenth

Amendment in

effect

Time out

of Union

Brief Several years;

until South is

thoroughly

democratized

Brief – years after

war

Other

change

southern

society

Little; gain of

power by

yeomen not

realized;

emancipation

grudgingly

accepted, but

no black civil

or political

rights

Expand

education;

confiscate

land and

provide farms

for freedmen;

expansion of

activist federal

government

Probably slight,

depending on

enforcement

Considerable,

depending on

action of new

state

governments

Thus, African Americans gained an opportunity to fight for a better life through the political

process, and ex-Confederates were given what they interpreted as a bitter pill to swallow in

order to return to the Union. The Second, Third, and Fourth Reconstruction Acts, passed

between March 1867 and March 1868, provided the details of operation for voter

registration boards, the adoption of constitutions, and the administration of “good faith”

oaths on the part of white southerners.

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3 5

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-4f Failure of Land Redistribution

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-4f Failure of Land Redistribution

In the words of one historian, the Radicals succeeded in “clipping Johnson’s wings.” But

they had hoped Congress could do much more. Thaddeus Stevens, for example, argued

that economic opportunity was essential to the freedmen. “If we do not furnish them with

homesteads from forfeited and rebel property,” Stevens declared, “and hedge them around

with protective laws … we had better left them in bondage.” Stevens therefore drew up a

plan for extensive confiscation and redistribution of land, but it was never realized.

Racial fears among whites and an American obsession with the sanctity of private property

made land redistribution unpopular. Northerners were accustomed to a limited role for

government, and the business community staunchly opposed any interference with private-

property rights, even for former Confederates. Thus, black farmers were forced to seek work

in a hostile environment in which landowners opposed their acquisition of land.

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-4g Constitutional Crisis

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-4g Constitutional Crisis

Congress’s quarrels with Andrew Johnson grew still worse. To restrict Johnson’s influence

and safeguard its plan, Congress passed a number of controversial laws. First, it limited

Johnson’s power over the army by requiring the president to issue military orders through

the General of the Army, Ulysses S. Grant, who could not be dismissed without the

Senate’s consent. Then Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, which gave the Senate

power to approve changes in the president’s cabinet. Designed to protect Secretary of War

Stanton, who sympathized with the Radicals, this law violated the tradition that a president

controlled appointments to his own cabinet.

All of these measures, as well as each of the Reconstruction Acts, were passed by a two-

thirds override of presidential vetoes. The situation led some to believe that the federal

government had reached a stage of “congressional tyranny” and others to conclude that

Johnson had become an obstacle to the legitimate will of the people in reconstructing the

nation on a just and permanent basis.

Johnson took several belligerent steps of his own. He issued orders to military commanders

in the South, limiting their powers and increasing the powers of the civil governments he

had created in 1865. Then he removed military officers who were conscientiously enforcing

Congress’s new law, preferring commanders who allowed disqualified Confederates to vote.

Finally, he tried to remove Secretary of War Stanton. With that attempt, the confrontation

reached its climax.

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-4h Impeachment of President Johnson

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-4h Impeachment of President Johnson

Impeachment (Process to remove a president from office; attempted but failed in case of

Andrew Johnson.) is a political procedure provided for in the Constitution as a remedy for

crimes or serious abuses of power by presidents, federal judges, and other high

government officials. Those impeached (politically indicted) in the House are then tried in

the Senate. Historically, this power has generally not been used as a means to investigate

and judge the private lives of presidents, although in recent times it was used in this manner

in the case of President Bill Clinton.

Twice in 1867, the House Judiciary Committee had considered impeachment of Johnson,

rejecting the idea once and then recommending it by only a -to- vote. That

recommendation was decisively defeated by the House. After Johnson tried to remove

Stanton, however, a third attempt to impeach the president carried easily in early 1868. The

indictment concentrated on his violation of the Tenure of Office Act, though many modern

scholars regard his efforts to obstruct enforcement of the Reconstruction Act of 1867 as a

far more serious offense.

Johnson’s trial in the Senate lasted more than three months. The prosecution, led by

Radicals, attempted to prove that Johnson was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

But they also argued that the trial was a means to judge Johnson’s performance, not a

judicial determination of guilt or innocence. The Senate ultimately rejected such reasoning,

which could have made removal from office a political weapon against any chief executive

who disagreed with Congress. Although a majority of senators voted to convict Johnson, the

prosecution fell one vote short of the necessary two-thirds majority. Johnson remained in

office, politically weakened and with less than a year left in his term. Some Republicans

backed away from impeachment because they had their eyes on the 1868 election and did

not want to hurt their prospects of regaining the White House.

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Republican regimes and sometimes currying favor with Democrats. On occasion, Grant

called out federal troops to stop violence or enforce acts of Congress. But he never imposed

a true military occupation on the South. Rapid demobilization had reduced a federal army of

more than million to within a year of the surrender at Appomattox. Thereafter, the

number of troops in the South continued to fall, until in 1874 there were only in the

southern states outside Texas. The later legend of “military rule,” so important to southern

claims of victimization during Reconstruction, was steeped in myth.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-4i Election of 1868

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1 57,000 4,000

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-4j Fifteenth Amendment

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-4j Fifteenth Amendment

In 1869, the Radicals pushed through the Fifteenth Amendment, the final major measure in

the constitutional revolution of Reconstruction. This measure forbade states to deny the

right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Such wording did

not guarantee the right to vote. It deliberately left states free to restrict suffrage on other

grounds so that northern states could continue to deny suffrage to women and certain

groups of men—Chinese immigrants, illiterates, and those too poor to pay poll taxes.

Although several states outside the South refused to ratify, three-fourths of the states

approved the measure, and the Fifteenth Amendment became law in 1870. It, too, had been

a political compromise, and though African Americans rejoiced all across the land at its

enactment, it left open the possibility for states to create countless qualification tests to

obstruct voting in the future.

With passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, many Americans, especially supportive

northerners, considered Reconstruction essentially completed. “Let us have done with

Reconstruction,” pleaded the New York Tribune in April 1870. “The country is tired and sick

of it …. Let us have Peace!” But some northerners, like abolitionist Wendell Phillips, worried.

“Our day,” he warned, “is fast slipping away. Once let public thought float off from the great

issue of the war, and it will take … more than a generation to bring it back again.”

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-2 The Meanings of Freedom

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-2 The Meanings of Freedom

Black southerners entered into life after slavery with hope and circumspection. A Texas man

recalled his father telling him, even before the war was over, “Our forever was going to be

spent living among the Southerners, after they got licked.” Freed men and women tried to

gain as much as they could from their new circumstances. Often the changes they valued

the most were personal—alterations in location, employer, or living arrangements.

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-2a The Feel of Freedom

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-2a The Feel of Freedom

For America’s former slaves, Reconstruction had one paramount meaning: a chance to

explore freedom. A southern white woman admitted in her diary that the black people

“showed a natural and exultant joy at being free.” Former slaves remembered singing far

into the night after federal troops, who confirmed rumors of their emancipation, reached

their plantations. The slaves on a Texas plantation shouted for joy, their leader proclaiming,

“We is free—no more whippings and beatings.” A few people gave in to the natural desire to

do what had been impossible before. One angry grandmother dropped her hoe and ran to

confront her mistress. “I’m free!” she yelled. “Yes, I’m free! Ain’t got to work for you no more!

You can’t put me in your pocket now!” Another man recalled that he and others “started on

the move,” either to search for family members or just to exercise the human right of

mobility.

Many freed men and women reacted more cautiously and shrewdly, taking care to test the

boundaries of their new condition. “After the war was over,” explained one man, “we was

afraid to move. Just like terrapins or turtles after emancipation. Just stick our heads out to

see how the land lay.” As slaves, they had learned to expect hostility from white people, and

they did not presume it would instantly disappear. Life in freedom might still be a matter of

what was possible, not what was right. Many freedpeople evaluated potential employers

with shrewd caution. “Most all the Negroes that had good owners stayed with ’em, but the

others left. Some of ’em come back and some didn’t,” explained one man. After

considerable wandering in search of better circumstances, a majority of blacks eventually

settled as agricultural workers back on their former farms or plantations. But they relocated

their houses and did their utmost to control the conditions of their labor.

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-2b Reunion of African American Families

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-2b Reunion of African American Families

Throughout the South, former slaves devoted themselves to reuniting their families,

separated during slavery by sale or hardship, and during the war by dislocation and the

emancipation process. With only shreds of information to guide them, thousands of

freedpeople embarked on odysseys in search of a husband, wife, child, or parent. By relying

on the black community for help and information, and by placing ads that continued to

appear in black newspapers well into the 1880s, some succeeded in their quest, while

others searched in vain.

Husbands and wives who had belonged to different masters established homes together for

the first time, and, as they had tried under slavery, parents asserted the right to raise their

own children. A mother bristled when her old master claimed a right to whip her children.

She informed him that “he warn’t goin’ to brush none of her chilluns no more.” The freed

men and women were too much at risk to act recklessly, but, as one man put it, they were

tired of punishment and “sure didn’t take no more foolishment off of white folks.”

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-2c Blacks’ Search for Independence

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-2c Blacks’ Search for Independence

Many black people wanted to minimize contact with whites because, as Reverend Garrison

Frazier told General Sherman in January 1865, “There is a prejudice against us … that will

take years to get over.” To avoid contact with overbearing whites who were used to

supervising them, blacks abandoned the slave quarters and fanned out to distant corners of

the land they worked. “After the war my stepfather come,” recalled Annie Young, “and got

my mother and we moved out in the piney woods.” Others described moving “across the

creek” or building a “saplin house … back in the woods.” Some rural dwellers established

small, all-black settlements that still exist along the back roads of the South.

Even once-privileged slaves desired such independence and social separation. One man

turned down his master’s offer of the overseer’s house and moved instead to a shack in

“Freetown.” He also declined to let the former owner grind his grain for free because it

“make him feel like a free man to pay for things just like anyone else.”

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-2d Freedpeople’s Desire for Land

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-2d Freedpeople’s Desire for Land

In addition to a fair employer, what freed men and women most wanted was the ownership

of land. Land represented self-sufficiency and a chance to gain compensation for

generations of bondage. General Sherman’s special Field Order Number , issued in

February 1865, set aside acres of land in the Sea Islands region for the exclusive

settlement of freedpeople. Hope swelled among ex-slaves as forty-acre plots, mules, and

“possessary titles” were promised to them. But President Johnson ordered them removed in

October and the land returned to its original owners under army enforcement. A northern

observer noted that slaves freed in the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia made

“plain, straight-forward” inquiries as they settled on new land. They wanted to be sure the

land “would be theirs after they had improved it.” Everywhere, blacks young and old thirsted

for homes of their own.

But most members of both political parties opposed genuine land redistribution to the

freedmen. Even northern reformers who had administered the Sea Islands during the war

showed little sympathy for black aspirations. The former Sea Island slaves wanted to

establish small, self-sufficient farms. Northern soldiers, officials, and missionaries of both

races brought education and aid to the freedmen but also insisted that they grow cotton for

the competitive market.

“The Yankees preach nothing but cotton, cotton!” complained one Sea Island black. “We

wants land,” wrote another, but tax officials “make the lots too big, and cut we out.” Indeed,

the U.S. government eventually sold thousands of acres in the Sea Islands, percent of

which went to wealthy investors from the North. At a protest against evictions from a

contraband camp in Virginia in 1866, freedman Bayley Wyatt made black desires and

claims clear: “We has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our

wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands

we now locates upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land.”

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400,000 15

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-2e Black Embrace of Education

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-2e Black Embrace of Education

Ex-slaves everywhere reached out for education. Blacks of all ages hungered for the

knowledge in books that had been permitted only to whites. With freedom, they started

schools and filled classrooms both day and night. On log seats and dirt floors, freed men

and women studied their letters in old almanacs and in discarded dictionaries. Young

children brought infants to school with them, and adults attended at night or after “the crops

were laid by.” Many a teacher had “to make herself heard over three other classes reciting

in concert” in a small room. The desire to escape slavery’s ignorance was so great that,

despite their poverty, many blacks paid tuition, typically $ or $ a month. These small

amounts constituted major portions of a person’s agricultural wages and added up to more

than $ million by 1870.

The federal government and northern reformers of both races assisted this pursuit of

education. In its brief life, the Freedmen’s Bureau founded over four thousand schools, and

idealistic men and women from the North established others funded by private philanthropy.

The Yankee schoolmarm—dedicated, selfless, and religious—became an agent of progress

in many southern communities. Thus did African Americans seek a break from their past

through learning. More than were enrolled in elementary school by 1877.

Blacks and their white allies also saw the need for colleges and universities. The American

Missionary Association founded seven colleges, including Fisk University and Atlanta

University, between 1866 and 1869. The Freedmen’s Bureau helped to establish Howard

University in Washington, D.C., and northern religious groups, such as the Methodists,

Baptists, and Congregationalists, supported dozens of seminaries and teachers’ colleges.

During Reconstruction, African American leaders often were highly educated individuals;

many were from the prewar elite of free people of color. Francis Cardozo, who held various

offices in South Carolina, had attended universities in Scotland and England. P. B. S.

Pinchback, who became lieutenant governor of Louisiana, was the son of a planter who had

sent him to school in Cincinnati. Both of the two black senators from Mississippi, Blanche K.

Bruce and Hiram Revels, possessed privileged educations. Bruce was the son of a planter

who had provided tutoring at home; Revels was the son of free North Carolina blacks who

had sent him to Knox College in Illinois.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-2e Black Embrace of Education

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1 1.50

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-2f Growth of Black Churches

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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C h

a p

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4 : R

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, 1 8

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la c k sh

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ro w

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p re

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r S o

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rk in

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m e

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la n

ta tio

n sto

re s like

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ra p

h e

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in 1

8 6

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h a

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le d

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, like th

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e d

e b

ts th a

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s h

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p p

e rs

w e

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p a

y. W h

y d id

b o

th fo

rm e

r sla ve

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d fo

rm e

r sla v e

o w

n e

rs in

itia lly

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o rt- a

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p in

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th e

fre e

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a n

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e co

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is M ississ

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n in

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its p o

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s tsla

v e

a g

ricu ltu

re in

th e

S o

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877 Chapter Contents

Book Title: A People & A Nation

Chapter 14

Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877

• 14-1 Wartime Reconstruction

• 14-1a Lincoln’s Percent Plan

• 14-1b Congress and the Wade-Davis Bill

• 14-1c Thirteenth Amendment

• 14-1d Freedmen’s Bureau

• 14-1e Ruins and Enmity

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-1 Wartime Reconstruction

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-1 Wartime Reconstruction

Civil wars leave immense challenges of healing, justice, and physical rebuilding.

Anticipating that process, reconstruction of the Union was an issue as early as 1863, well

before the war ended. Many key questions loomed on the horizon when and if the North

succeeded on the battlefield: How would the nation be restored? How would southern states

and leaders be treated—as errant brothers or as traitors? How would a devastated southern

economy be revived? What was the constitutional basis for readmission of states to the

Union, and where, if anywhere, could American statesmen look for precedence or

guidance? More specifically, four vexing problems compelled early thinking and would haunt

the Reconstruction era throughout. One, who would rule in the South once it was defeated?

Two, who would rule in the federal government—Congress or the president? Three, what

were the dimensions of black freedom, and what rights under law would the freedmen

enjoy? And four, would Reconstruction be a preservation of the old republic or a second

Revolution, a reinvention of a new republic?

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-1a Lincoln’s Percent Plan

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-1a Lincoln’s Percent Plan

Abraham Lincoln had never been antisouthern, though he had become the leader of an

antislavery war. He lost three brothers-in-law, killed in the war on the Confederate side. His

worst fear was that the war would collapse at the end into guerrilla warfare across the

South, with surviving bands of Confederates carrying on resistance. Lincoln insisted that his

generals give lenient terms to southern soldiers once they surrendered. In his Second

Inaugural Address, delivered only a month before his assassination, Lincoln promised

“malice toward none; with charity for all,” as Americans strove to “bind up the nation’s

wounds.”

Lincoln planned early for a swift and moderate Reconstruction process. In his “Proclamation

of Amnesty and Reconstruction,” issued in December 1863, he proposed to replace majority

rule with “loyal rule” as a means of reconstructing southern state governments. He proposed

pardons to all ex-Confederates except the highest-ranking military and civilian officers.

Then, as soon as percent of the voting population in the 1860 general election in a given

state had taken an oath to the United States and established a government, the new state

would be recognized. Lincoln did not consult Congress in these plans, and “loyal”

assemblies (known as “Lincoln governments”) were created in Louisiana, Tennessee, and

Arkansas in 1864, states largely occupied by Union troops. These governments were weak

and dependent on northern armies for survival.

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-1b Congress and the Wade-Davis Bill

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-1b Congress and the Wade-Davis Bill

Congress responded with great hostility to Lincoln’s moves to readmit southern states in

what seemed such a premature manner. Many Radical Republicans, strong proponents of

emancipation and of aggressive prosecution of the war against the South, considered the

percent plan a “mere mockery” of democracy. Led by Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania in

the House and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in the Senate, congressional Republicans

locked horns with Lincoln and proposed a longer and harsher approach to Reconstruction.

Stevens advocated a “conquered provinces” theory, arguing that southerners had organized

as a foreign nation to make war on the United States and, by secession, had destroyed their

status as states. They therefore must be treated as “conquered foreign lands” and returned

to the status of “unorganized territories” before any process of readmission could be

entertained by Congress.

In July 1864, the Wade-Davis bill, named for its sponsors, Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio

and Congressman Henry W. Davis of Maryland, emerged from Congress with three specific

conditions for southern readmission.

1. It demanded a “majority” of white male citizens participate in the creation of a new

government.

2. To vote or be a delegate to constitutional conventions, men had to take an “iron-clad”

oath (declaring that they had never aided the Confederate war effort).

3. All officers above the rank of lieutenant and all civil officials in the Confederacy would

be disfranchised and deemed “not a citizen of the United States.”

The Confederate states were to be defined as “conquered enemies,” said Davis, and the

process of readmission was to be harsh and slow. Lincoln, ever the adroit politician, pocket-

vetoed the bill and issued a conciliatory proclamation of his own, announcing that he would

not be inflexibly committed to any “one plan” of Reconstruction.

This exchange came during Grant’s bloody campaign against Lee in Virginia, when the

outcome of the war and Lincoln’s reelection were still in doubt. On August 5, Radical

Republicans issued the “Wade-Davis Manifesto” to newspapers. An unprecedented attack

on a sitting president by members of his own party, it accused Lincoln of usurpation of

presidential powers and disgraceful leniency toward an eventually conquered South. What

emerged in 1864–1865 was a clear debate and a potential constitutional crisis. Lincoln saw

Reconstruction as a means of weakening the Confederacy and winning the war; the

Radicals saw it as a longer-term transformation of the political and racial order of the

country.

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-1c Thirteenth Amendment

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-1c Thirteenth Amendment

In early 1865, Congress and Lincoln joined in two important measures that recognized

slavery’s centrality to the war. On January 31, with strong administration backing, Congress

passed the Thirteenth Amendment, which had two provisions: first, it abolished involuntary

servitude everywhere in the United States; second, it declared that Congress shall have the

power to enforce this outcome by “appropriate legislation.” When the measure passed by

to , a mere votes more than the necessary two-thirds, rejoicing broke out in

Congress. A Republican recorded in his diary, “Members joined in the shouting and kept it

up for some minutes. Some embraced one another, others wept like children. I have felt

ever since the vote, as if I were in a new country.”

But the Thirteenth Amendment had emerged from a long congressional debate and

considerable petitioning and public advocacy. One of the first and most remarkable petitions

for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery was submitted early in 1864 by Elizabeth

Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the Women’s Loyal National League. Women

throughout the Union accumulated thousands of signatures, even venturing into staunchly

pro-Confederate regions of Kentucky and Missouri to secure supporters. It was a long road

from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Thirteenth Amendment—through treacherous

constitutional theory about individual “property rights,” a bedrock of belief that the sacred

document ought never to be altered, and partisan politics. But the logic of winning the war

by crushing slavery, and of securing a new beginning under law for the nation that so many

had died to save, won the day. This story gained wide attention from the 2012 movie,

Lincoln, directed by Steven Spielberg.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-1c Thirteenth Amendment

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119 56 2

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-1d Freedmen’s Bureau

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-1d Freedmen’s Bureau

Potentially as significant, on March 3, 1865, Congress created the Bureau of Refugees,

Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—the Freedmen’s Bureau (Created by Congress in

March 1865, this agency had responsibility for the relief, education, and employment of

former slaves as well as white refugees) , an unprecedented agency of social uplift

necessitated by the ravages of the war. Americans had never engaged in federal aid to

citizens on such a scale. With thousands of refugees, white and black, displaced in the

South, the government continued what private freedmen’s aid societies had started as early

as 1862. In the mere four years of its existence, the Freedmen’s Bureau supplied food and

medical services, built several thousand schools and some colleges, negotiated several

hundred thousand employment contracts between freedmen and their former masters, and

tried to manage confiscated land.

Link to the congressional act establishing the Freedmen’s Bureau

The Bureau would be a controversial aspect of Reconstruction—within the South, where

whites generally hated it, and within the federal government, where politicians divided over

its constitutionality. Some bureau agents were devoted to freedmen’s rights, whereas others

were opportunists who exploited the chaos of the postwar South. The war had forced into

the open an eternal question of republics: what are the social welfare obligations of the state

toward its people, and what do people owe their governments in return? Apart from their

conquest and displacement of the eastern Indians, Americans were relatively inexperienced

at the Freedmen’s Bureau’s task—social reform through military occupation. They were also

unaccustomed to the sheer reality that government possessed the only resources and

institutions capable of confronting the social and economic chaos wrought by the war.

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-1e Ruins and Enmity

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-1e Ruins and Enmity

In 1865, due to the devastation of the war, America was now a land with ruins. Like the

countries of Europe, it now seemed an older, more historic landscape. It had torn itself

asunder—physically, politically, spiritually. Some of its cities lay in rubble, large stretches of

the southern countryside were depopulated and defoliated, and thousands of people, white

and black, were refugees. Some of this would in time seem romantic to northern travelers in

the postwar South.

Thousands of yeoman farmer-soldiers, some paroled by surrenders, walked home too late

in the season to plant a crop in a collapsed economy. Many white refugees faced genuine

starvation. Of the approximately rations distributed across the South in the first

three years of the Freedmen’s Bureau, went to whites. In early 1866, in a proud

agricultural society, the legislature of South Carolina issued $ in state bonds to

purchase corn for the destitute.

In October 1865, just after a five-month imprisonment in Boston, former Confederate vice

president Alexander H. Stephens rode a slow train southward. In Virginia he found “the

desolation of the country … was horrible to behold.” When Stephens reached northern

Georgia, his native state, his shock ran over: “War has left a terrible impression…. Fences

gone, fields all a-waste, houses burnt.” A northern journalist visiting Richmond that same fall

observed a city “mourning for her sins … in dust and ashes.” The “burnt district” was a “bed

of cinders … broken and blackened walls, impassable streets deluged with debris.” Above

all, every northern traveler encountered a wall of hatred among white southerners for their

conquerors. An innkeeper in North Carolina told a journalist that Yankees had killed his

sons in the war, burned his house, and stolen his slaves. “They left me one inestimable

privilege,” he said, “to hate ’em. I git up at half-past four in the morning, and sit up ’til twelve

at night, to hate ’em.”

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877 Chapter Contents

Book Title: A People & A Nation

Chapter 14

Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877

• 14-6 Retreat from Reconstruction

• 14-6a Political Implications of Klan Terrorism

• 14-6b Industrial Expansion and Reconstruction in the North

• 14-6c Liberal Republican Revolt

• 14-6d General Amnesty

• 14-6e The West, Race, and Reconstruction

• 14-6f Foreign Expansion

• 14-6g Judicial Retreat from Reconstruction

• 14-6h Disputed Election of 1876 and Compromise of 1877

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877 Chapter Contents

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-6 Retreat from Reconstruction

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-6 Retreat from Reconstruction

During the 1870s, northerners increasingly lost the political will to sustain Reconstruction in

the South as a vast economic and social transformation occurred in their own region as well

as in the West. Radical Republicans like Albion Tourgée, a former Union soldier who moved

to North Carolina and was elected a judge, condemned Congress’s timidity. Turning the

freedman out on his own without protection, said Tourgée, constituted “cheap philanthropy.”

Indeed, many African Americans believed that, during Reconstruction, the North “threw all

the Negroes on the world without any way of getting along.” As the North underwent its own

transformations and lost interest in the South’s dilemmas, Reconstruction collapsed.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-6 Retreat from Reconstruction

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-6a Political Implications of Klan Terrorism

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-6a Political Implications of Klan Terrorism

In one southern state after another, Democrats regained control, and they threatened to

defeat Republicans in the North as well. Whites in the old Confederacy referred to this

decline of Reconstruction as “southern redemption,” and during the 1870s, “redeemer”

Democrats claimed to be the saviors of the South from alleged “black domination” and

“carpetbag rule.” And for one of only a few times in American history, violence and terror

emerged as tactics in normal politics.

In 1870 and 1871, the violent campaigns of the Ku Klux Klan forced Congress to pass two

Enforcement Acts (Laws that sought to protect black voters, made violations of civil and

political rights a federal offense, and sought to end Ku Klux Klan violence.) and an anti-Klan

law. These laws made actions by individuals against the civil and political rights of others a

federal criminal offense for the first time. They also provided for election supervisors and

permitted martial law and suspension of the writ of habeas corpus to combat murders,

beatings, and threats by the Klan. Federal prosecutors used the laws rather selectively. In

1872 and 1873, Mississippi and the Carolinas saw many prosecutions; but in other states

where violence flourished, the laws were virtually ignored. Southern juries sometimes

refused to convict Klansmen; out of a total of cases, only ended in convictions.

Although many Klansmen (roughly in South Carolina alone) fled their state to avoid

prosecution, and the Klan officially disbanded, the threat of violence did not end.

Paramilitary organizations known as Rifle Clubs and Red Shirts often took the Klan’s place.

Klan terrorism openly defied Congress, yet even on this issue there were ominous signs

that the North’s commitment to racial justice was fading. Some conservative but influential

Republicans opposed the anti-Klan laws. Rejecting other Republicans’ arguments that the

Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments had made the federal government the

protector of the rights of citizens, these dissenters echoed an old Democratic charge that

Congress was infringing on states’ rights. Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who had been

a key author of the Thirteenth Amendment, declared that the states remained “the

depositories of the rights of the individual.” If Congress could punish crimes like assault or

murder, he asked, “what is the need of the State governments?” For years, Democrats had

complained of “centralization and consolidation”; now some Republicans seemed to agree

with them. This opposition foreshadowed a more general revolt within Republican ranks in

1872.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-6a Political Implications of Klan Terrorism

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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3,310 1,143 2,000

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-6b Industrial Expansion and Reconstruction in the North

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-6b Industrial Expansion and Reconstruction in the North

Both immigration and industrialization surged in the North. Between 1865 and 1873,

million immigrants entered the country, most settling in the industrial cities of the North and

West. Within only eight years, postwar industrial production increased by percent. For the

first time, nonagricultural workers outnumbered farmers, and wage earners outnumbered

independent craftsmen. And by 1873, only Britain’s industrial output was greater than that of

the United States. Government financial policies did much to bring about this rapid growth.

Low taxes on investment and high tariffs on manufactured goods aided the growth of a new

class of powerful industrialists, especially railroad entrepreneurs.

Railroads became the symbol of and the stimulus for the American age of capital. From

1865 to 1873, thirty-five thousand miles of new track were laid, a total exceeding the entire

national rail network of 1860. Railroad building fueled the banking industry and made Wall

Street the center of American capitalism. Eastern railroad magnates, such as Thomas Scott

of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the largest corporation of its time, created economic empires

with the assistance of huge government subsidies of cash and land. Railroad corporations

also bought up mining operations, granaries, and lumber companies. In Congress and in

every state legislature, big business now employed lobbyists to curry favor with government.

Corruption ran rampant; some congressmen and legislators were paid annual retainers by

major companies. Indeed, the transcontinental railroads helped Americans imagine how to

conquer vast spaces, as well as conceive of time in new ways. The railroads brought

modernity to the United States like almost nothing else; but they also taught the nation

sordid lessons about the perils of monopoly and corruption, and by the late nineteenth

century railroad entrepreneurs were the most hated men in the West.

This soaring capitalist–politician alliance led as well to an intensified struggle between labor

and capital. As captains of industry amassed unprecedented fortunes in an age with no

income tax, gross economic inequality polarized American society. The workforce, worried a

prominent Massachusetts business leader, was in a “transition state … living in boarding

houses” and becoming a “permanent factory population.” In Cincinnati, three large factories

employed as many workers as the city’s thousands of small shops. In New York or

Philadelphia, workers increasingly lived in dark, unhealthy tenement housing. Thousands

would list themselves on the census as “common laborer” or “general jobber.” Many of the

free-labor maxims of the Republican Party were now under great duress. Did the individual

work ethic guarantee social mobility in America or erode, under the pressure of profit

making, into a world of unsafe factories, child labor, and declining wages? In 1868, the

Republicans managed to pass an eight-hour workday bill in Congress that applied to federal

workers. The “labor question” (see Chapter 16) now preoccupied northerners far more than

the “southern” or the “freedmen” question.

Then, the Panic of 1873 ushered in more than five years of economic contraction. Three

million people lost their jobs as class attitudes diverged, especially in large cities. Debtors

and the unemployed sought easy-money policies to spur economic expansion (workers and

farmers desperately needed cash). Businessmen, disturbed by the widespread strikes and

industrial violence that accompanied the panic, fiercely defended property rights and

demanded “sound money” policies as they sought to crush labor unions. The chasm

between farmers and workers on the one hand, and wealthy industrialists on the other, grew

ever wider.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-6b Industrial Expansion and Reconstruction in the North

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-6c Liberal Republican Revolt

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-6c Liberal Republican Revolt

Disenchanted with Reconstruction, a largely northern group calling itself the Liberal

Republicans bolted the party in 1872 and nominated Horace Greeley, the famous editor of

the New York Tribune, for president. The Liberal Republicans were a varied group, including

foes of corruption and advocates of a lower tariff. Normally such disparate elements would

not cooperate with one another, but two popular and widespread attitudes united them:

distaste for federal intervention in the South and an elitist desire to let market forces and the

“best men” determine policy and events.

The Democrats also gave their nomination to Greeley in 1872. The combination was not

enough to defeat Grant, who won reelection, but it reinforced Grant’s desire to avoid

confrontation with white southerners. Greeley’s campaign for North-South reunion, for

“clasping hands across the bloody chasm,” was a bit premature to win at the polls but was a

harbinger of the future in American politics. Organized Blue-Gray fraternalism (gatherings of

Union and Confederate veterans) began as early as 1874. Grant continued to use military

force sparingly and in 1875 refused a desperate request from the governor of Mississippi for

troops to quell racial and political terrorism in that state.

Dissatisfaction with Grant’s administration grew during his second term. Strong willed but

politically naive, Grant made a series of poor appointments. His secretary of war, his private

secretary, and officials in the treasury department and navy were involved in bribery or tax-

cheating scandals. Instead of exposing the corruption, Grant defended the culprits. In 1874,

as Grant’s popularity and his party’s prestige declined, the Democrats recaptured the House

of Representatives, signaling the end of the Radical Republican vision of Reconstruction.

“Republican Party Struck by Lightning,” read a Buffalo newspaper headline. And “Busted!

The Republican Machine Gone to Smash!” said the Louisville Courier-Journal gleefully. Of

thirty-five states holding legislative elections, twenty-three were won by Democrats.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-6c Liberal Republican Revolt

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-6d General Amnesty

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-6d General Amnesty

The effect this political turnaround in Congress was to weaken legislative resolve on

southern issues. Congress had already lifted the political disabilities of the Fourteenth

Amendment from many former Confederates. In 1872, it had adopted a sweeping Amnesty

Act, which pardoned most of the remaining rebels and left only five hundred barred from

political office holding. In 1875, Congress passed a Civil Rights Act, partly as a tribute to the

recently deceased Charles Sumner, purporting to guarantee black people equal

accommodations in public places, such as inns and theaters, but the bill was watered down

and contained no effective provisions for enforcement. (The Supreme Court later struck

down this law;.)

Democrats regained control of four state governments before 1872 and a total of eight by

the end of January 1876 (see Map 14.1). In the North, Democrats successfully stressed the

failure and scandals of Reconstruction governments. As opinion shifted, many Republicans

sensed that their constituents were tiring of southern issues and the racial legacies of the

war. Sectional reconciliation now seemed crucial for commerce. The nation was expanding

westward rapidly, and the South was a new frontier for investment.

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Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-6e The West, Race, and Reconstruction

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-6e The West, Race, and Reconstruction

Nowhere did the new complexity and violence of American race relations play out so vividly

as in the West. As the Fourteenth Amendment and other enactments granted to blacks the

beginnings of citizenship, other nonwhite peoples faced continued persecution. Across the

West, the federal government pursued a policy of containment against Native Americans. In

California, where white farmers and ranchers often forced Indians into captive labor, some

civilians practiced a more violent form of “Indian hunting.” By 1880, thirty years of such

violence left an estimated forty-five hundred California Indians dead at the hands of white

settlers.

In Texas and the Southwest, the rhetoric of national expansion still deemed Mexicans and

other mixed-race Hispanics to be debased, “lazy,” and incapable of self-government. And in

California and other states of the Far West, thousands of Chinese immigrants became the

victims of brutal violence. Few whites had objected to the Chinese who did the dangerous

work of building railroads through the Rocky Mountains. But when the Chinese began to

compete for urban, industrial jobs, great conflict emerged. Anti-coolie clubs appeared in

California in the 1870s, seeking laws against Chinese labor, fanning the flames of racism,

and organizing vigilante attacks on Chinese workers and the factories that employed them.

Western politicians sought white votes by pandering to prejudice, and in 1879 the new

California constitution denied the vote to Chinese.

If we view America from coast to coast, and not merely on the North–South axis, the Civil

War and Reconstruction years both dismantled racial slavery and fostered a volatile new

racial complexity, especially in the West. During the same age when early anthropologists

employed elaborate theories of “scientific” racism to determine a hierarchy of racial types,

the West was a vast region of racial mixing and conflict. Some African Americans, despite

generations of mixture with Native Americans, asserted that they were more like whites than

the nomadic, “uncivilized” Indians, while others, like the Creek freedmen of Indian Territory,

sought an Indian identity. In Texas, whites, Indians, blacks, and Hispanics had mixed for

decades, and by the 1870s forced reconsideration in law and custom of who was white and

who was not.

Anti-Chinese cartoon, “Every Dog (No Distinction of Color) Has His Day.” The

imagery here links Native Americans, African Americans, and Chinese immigrants

in the same racist and xenophobic fear.

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During Reconstruction, America was undergoing what one historian has called a

reconstruction of the very idea of race itself. As it did so, tumbling into some of the darkest

years of American race relations, the turbulence of the expanding West reinforced the new

nationalism and the reconciliation of North and South based on a resurgent white

supremacy.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-6e The West, Race, and Reconstruction

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-6f Foreign Expansion

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-6f Foreign Expansion

Following the Civil War, pressure for expansion reemerged (see Chapter 19), and in 1867

Secretary of State William H. Seward arranged a vast addition of territory to the national

domain through the purchase of Alaska from Russia. Opponents ridiculed Seward’s $

million venture, calling Alaska “Frigidia,” “the Polar Bear Garden,” and “Walrussia.” But

Seward convinced important congressmen of Alaska’s economic potential, and other

lawmakers favored the dawning of friendship with Russia.

Also in 1867, the United States took control of the Midway Islands, a thousand miles

northwest of Hawai’i. And in 1870, President Grant tried unsuccessfully to annex the

Dominican Republic. Seward and his successor, Hamilton Fish, also resolved troubling Civil

War grievances against Great Britain. Through diplomacy they arranged a financial

settlement of claims on Britain for damage done by the Alabama and other cruisers built in

England and sold to the Confederacy. They recognized that sectional reconciliation in

Reconstruction America would serve new ambitions for world commerce and expansion.

Links to the World

The “Back to Africa” Movement

In the wake of the Civil War, and especially after the despairing end of

Reconstruction, some African Americans sought to leave the South for the American

West or North, but also to relocate to Africa. Liberia had been founded in the 1820s

by the white-led American Colonization Society (ACS), an organization dedicated to

relocating blacks “back” in Africa. Some eleven thousand African Americans had

emigrated voluntarily to Liberia by 1860, with largely disastrous results. Many died

of disease, and others felt disoriented in the strange new land and ultimately

returned to the United States.

Reconstruction reinvigorated the emigration impulse, especially in cotton-growing

districts where blacks had achieved political power before 1870 but were crushed by

violence and intimidation in the following decade. When blacks felt confident in their

future, the idea of leaving America fell quiet; but when threatened or under assault,

whole black communities dreamed of a place where they could become an

independent “race,” a “people,” or a “nation” as their appeals often announced.

Often that dream, more imagined than realized, lay in West Africa. Before the Civil

War, most blacks had denounced the ACS for its racism and its hostility to their

sense of American birthright. But letters of inquiry flooded into the organization’s

headquarters after 1875. Wherever blacks felt the reversal of the promise of

emancipation the keenest, they formed local groups such as the Liberia Exodus

Association of Pinesville, Florida; or the Liberian Exodus Arkansas Colony; and

many others.

At emigration conventions, and especially in churches, blacks penned letters to the

ACS asking for maps or any information about a new African homeland. Some local

organizers would announce eighty or a hundred recruits “widawake for Liberia,”

although such enthusiasm rarely converted into an Atlantic voyage. The impulse

was genuine, however. “We wants to be a People,” wrote the leader of a Mississippi

emigration committee; “we can’t be it heare and find that we ar compel to leve this

Cuntry.” Henry Adams, a former Louisiana slave, Union soldier, and itinerant

emigration organizer, advocated Liberia, but also supported “Kansas fever” with

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-6g Judicial Retreat from Reconstruction

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-6g Judicial Retreat from Reconstruction

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court played a major part in the northern retreat from

Reconstruction. During the Civil War, the Court had been cautious and inactive. Reaction to

the Dred Scott decision (1857) had been so vehement, and the Union’s wartime emergency

so great, that the Court had avoided interference with government actions. The justices

breathed a collective sigh of relief, for example, when legal technicalities prevented them

from reviewing the case of Clement Vallandigham, a Democratic opponent of Lincoln’s war

effort who had been convicted by a military tribunal of aiding the enemy. But in 1866, a

similar case, Ex parte Milligan, reached the Court.

Lambdin P. Milligan of Indiana had plotted to free Confederate prisoners of war and

overthrow state governments. For these acts, a military court sentenced Milligan, a civilian,

to death. Milligan challenged the authority of the military tribunal, claiming he had a right to

a civil trial. Reasserting its authority, the Supreme Court declared that military trials were

illegal when civil courts were open and functioning.

In the 1870s, the Court successfully renewed its challenge to Congress’s actions when it

narrowed the meaning and effectiveness of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Slaughter-

House cases (1873) began in 1869, when the Louisiana legislature granted one company a

monopoly on the slaughtering of livestock in New Orleans. Rival butchers in the city

promptly sued. Their attorney, former Supreme Court justice John A. Campbell, argued that

Louisiana had violated the rights of some of its citizens in favor of others. The Fourteenth

Amendment, Campbell contended, had revolutionized the constitutional system by bringing

individual rights under federal protection, safeguarding them from state interference.

But in the Slaughter-House decision, the Supreme Court dealt a stunning blow to the scope

of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court declared state citizenship and national citizenship

separate. National citizenship involved only matters such as the right to travel freely from

state to state, and only such narrow rights, held the Court, were protected by the Fourteenth

Amendment.

The Supreme Court also concluded that the butchers who sued had not been deprived of

their rights or property in violation of the due-process clause of the amendment. Shrinking

from a role as “perpetual censor” for civil rights, the Court’s majority declared that the

framers of the recent amendments had not intended to “destroy” the federal system, in

which the states exercised “powers for domestic and local government, including the

regulation of civil rights.” Thus, the justices severely limited the amendment’s potential for

securing and protecting the rights of black citizens—its original intent.

The next day, the Court decided Bradwell v. Illinois, a case in which Myra Bradwell, a

female attorney, had been denied the right to practice law in Illinois because she was a

married woman, and hence not considered a free agent. Pointing to the Fourteenth

Amendment, Bradwell’s attorneys contended the state had unconstitutionally abridged her

“privileges and immunities” as a citizen. The Supreme Court rejected her claim, declaring a

woman’s “paramount destiny … to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.”

In 1876, the Court weakened the Reconstruction era amendments even further by

emasculating the enforcement clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and revealing

deficiencies inherent in the Fifteenth Amendment. In U.S. v. Cruikshank, the Court overruled

the conviction under the 1870 Enforcement Act of Louisiana whites who had attacked a

meeting of blacks and conspired to deprive them of their rights. The justices ruled that the

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Fourteenth Amendment did not give the federal government power to act against these

whites, who had murdered possibly as many as one hundred blacks. The duty of protecting

citizens’ equal rights, the Court said, “rests alone with the States.” Such judicial

conservatism as well as states’ rights doctrine, practiced by justices who had all been

appointed by Republican presidents Lincoln and Grant, left a profound imprint down through

the next century, blunting the revolutionary potential in the Civil War amendments.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-6g Judicial Retreat from Reconstruction

Book Title: A People & A Nation

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Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-6h Disputed Election of 1876 and Compromise of 1877

Book Title: A People & A Nation

14-6h Disputed Election of 1876 and Compromise of 1877

As the 1876 elections approached, Americans increasingly focused on economic issues.

The North was no longer willing to pursue the goals of Reconstruction. The results of a

disputed presidential election confirmed this fact. Samuel J. Tilden, the Democratic

governor of New York, ran strongly in the South and needed only one more electoral vote to

triumph over Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican nominee. Nineteen electoral votes from

Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida (the only southern states not yet under Democratic

rule) were disputed; both Democrats and Republicans claimed to have won in those states

despite fraud committed by their opponents (see Map 14.2).

Map 14.2

Presidential Election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877

In 1876, a combination of solid southern support and Democratic gains in the North

gave Samuel Tilden the majority of popular votes, but Rutherford B. Hayes won the

disputed election in the electoral college, after a deal satisfied Democratic wishes

for an end to Reconstruction.

To resolve this unprecedented situation, Congress established a fifteen-member electoral

commission. Membership on the commission was to be balanced between Democrats and

Republicans. Because the Republicans held the majority in Congress, they prevailed, to

, on every attempt to count the returns, with commission members voting along strict party

lines. Hayes would become president if Congress accepted the commission’s findings.

Congressional acceptance was not certain. Democrats controlled the House and could

filibuster to block action on the vote. Many citizens worried that the nation would slip once

again into civil war, as some southerners vowed, “Tilden or Fight!” The crisis was resolved

when Democrats acquiesced in the election of Hayes based on a “deal” cut in a Washington

hotel between Hayes’s supporters and southerners who wanted federal aid to railroads,

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1876

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Popular Vote 4,036,572 48,0% 4,284.020 51.0%

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internal improvements, federal patronage, and removal of troops from southern states.

Northern and southern Democrats simply decided not to contest the election of a

Republican who was not going to continue Reconstruction policies in the South. Thus,

Hayes became president, inaugurated privately inside the White House to avoid any threat

of violence. Southerners relished their promises of economic aid, and Reconstruction was

unmistakably over.

Southern Democrats rejoiced, but African Americans grieved over the betrayal of their

hopes for equality. The Civil War had brought emancipation, and Reconstruction had

guaranteed their rights under law. But events and attitudes in larger white America were

foreboding. In a Fourth of July speech in Washington, D.C., in 1875, Frederick Douglass

anticipated this predicament. He reflected anxiously on the American centennial to be

celebrated the following year. The nation, Douglass feared, would “lift to the sky its million

voices in one grand Centennial hosanna of peace and good will to all the white race … from

gulf to lakes and from sea to sea.” Douglass looked back on fifteen years of unparalleled

change for his people and worried about the hold of white supremacy on America’s

historical memory: “If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what

will peace among the whites bring?” Douglass’s question would echo down through

American political culture for decades.

Legacy for a People and a Nation

The Lost Cause

All major wars and their aftermath compel a struggle over their memory. Sometimes

losers prevail over winners in contests to shape historical memory. After the Civil

War, white southerners and their northern allies constructed a “Lost Cause”

tradition, a potent and racially exclusive version of the war and Reconstruction that

persists in American culture today.

The Lost Cause emerged among ex-Confederates as a mourning ritual and a

psychological response to the trauma of defeat. But with time it also took root in

selective reinterpretations of the war’s causes; in southern resistance to

Reconstruction; in doctrines of white supremacy; and in a mythic, nostalgic popular

culture enjoyed and promoted by northerners and southerners alike. Lost Cause

advocates—from high-ranking officers to common soldiers writing reminiscences to

women leading memorial associations—argued that the war had never been about

slavery, that the Confederates had only lost to Yankee numbers and resources, and

that the nation should reconcile by equally honoring both southern and northern

sacrifice. In the industrial, urban, multiethnic America of the emerging twentieth

century, an Old South of benevolent masters and faithful slaves, of Robert E. Lee

portrayed as America’s truest Christian soldier, provided a romantic, sentimentalized

road to reunion.

From 1865 to the 1880s, this Confederate legend had been forged by wartime

participants determined to vindicate the Confederacy. By the 1890s, however, Lost

Cause culture emerged especially with the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Elite southern white women built monuments, lobbied congressmen, delivered

lectures, ran essay contests for schoolchildren, and strove to control the content of

history textbooks, all in the service of an exalted South. Above all, Lost Causers

advocated a story not at all about loss, but about what one historian has called a

“victory narrative.” This new victory was the nation’s triumph over the racial

revolution and constitutional transformations of Reconstruction. In his 1881 memoir,

Jefferson Davis argued that slavery “was in no wise the cause of the conflict” and

that slaves had been “contented with their lot.” He also declared the Lost Cause not

lost: “Well may we rejoice in the regained possession of self-government…. This is

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the great victory … a total noninterference by the Federal government in the

domestic affairs of the States.” These stories and images reverberated in the very

heartbeat of Jim Crow America, and they endure in modern tastes for Civil War

memorabilia, such as the epic Gone with the Wind, the 2003 film Gods and

Generals, and uses of the Confederate flag to oppose civil rights and represent

southern identity. And the Confederate state rights tradition is employed today by

some states and advocacy groups to resist federal stimulus money, national health

care reform, and the presidency of Barack Obama.

Chapter 14: Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877: 14-6h Disputed Election of 1876 and Compromise of 1877

Book Title: A People & A Nation

mechanical, or in any other manner - without the written permission of the copyright holder.

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Chapter 14 Introduction
Chapter 14 Johnsons Reconstruction Plan

Chapter 14 Politics and Reconstruction in the South

Chapter 14 Reading Summary

Chapter 14 The Congressional Reconstruction Plan

Chapter 14 The Meaning of Freedom

Chapter 14 Wartime Reconstruction

flashcard Wartime Reconstruction
Retreat from Reconstruction