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The American Yawp, Volume 1, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the original free This shelf’s study material is shared under the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Chapter 15 · pp. 489–527
Reconstruction was the effort, from 1863 to 1877, to bring the Southern states back into the Union and to decide what place African Americans would hold in the nation. This chapter follows the political fights over how to rebuild, the new rights and offices won by Black Southerners, and the daily struggles of freedpeople over land, work, family, education and faith. It also covers women's rights debates, white terrorism, economic change, the effects on Native peoples, and the political deals that ended the era in 1877.
Reconstruction began before the Civil War ended and ran until 1877. White Americans gave formerly enslaved people legal freedom, but most were not committed to enforcing further rights. Later, terrorism and election fraud helped bring the era's reforms to an end. Many limits on Black freedom lasted for almost another century. (p. 489)
Lincoln's 1863 plan. Lincoln expected the Union to win and hoped to weaken the Confederacy by encouraging Southerners who were loyal to the Union. He let Southerners swear an oath of allegiance. Once just 10 percent of a state's voters had sworn it, loyal citizens could set up a new state government. The plan asked for very little loyalty, so it was lenient. The resulting "Lincoln governments" appeared in Union-held pockets of Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansas. These were the same areas the Emancipation Proclamation did not cover. (p. 489)
The limits of emancipation. The Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved people only in areas that were in rebellion. More than 700,000 people stayed enslaved in the border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri, and in Union-occupied parts of Louisiana, Tennessee and Virginia. Ending slavery everywhere needed a constitutional amendment. (p. 489)
The Thirteenth Amendment. Congress passed it on January 31, 1865. It abolished slavery "except as a punishment for crime," a loophole that later allowed convict leasing and other forced labor. Section Two gave Congress the power to pass laws to enforce the ban. By the end of 1865, three-fourths of the states had ratified it, and about four million people were free of a slavery that had lasted 250 years in North America. (p. 489)
John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln on April 14, 1865, and Lincoln died the next morning. Vice President Andrew Johnson became president. Johnson was a Tennessean who favored states' rights and held openly racist views. He offered the South a fast and lenient return. (pp. 490–491)
Johnson's plan had only three main demands. Provisional Southern governments had to:
On everything else, the state conventions could act without federal interference. (pp. 490–491)
Johnson pardoned nearly all ex-Confederates. The exception was wealthy planters with more than $20,000 in property, who had to ask him for individual pardons. He hoped to weaken the old planter elite and see a new class of Southerners take the lead. In practice, the old elite often regained power anyway. (p. 491)
Southern governments quickly passed laws to rebuild the old order. The Black Codes began in South Carolina and Mississippi, and other states followed. They gave Black people some rights, such as owning property, marrying and making contracts. But they also took away basic rights. Black men could not serve on juries or in state militias. Courts would not accept Black testimony against white people. Orphaned Black children could be apprenticed to their former enslavers. Vagrancy rules were harsh. (p. 491)
Mississippi's law shows how the system worked. Freedpeople had to carry papers proving they had a job. Without proof, they could be arrested and fined. If they could not pay, the sheriff could hire them out to anyone who paid the fine. This let white employers regain control over Black labor, which one scholar called "slavery by another name." (p. 491)
The Black Codes and violent mobs against Black Southerners convinced Republicans that a stronger Reconstruction was needed. Johnson declared the Southern states restored, but Republicans in Congress refused to seat the delegates they sent. Their motives were mixed. A few, like Thaddeus Stevens, truly believed in racial equality. Most were mainly protecting their party, since the only way to keep Republicans strong in the South was to give the vote to hundreds of thousands of Black men. (p. 491)
The Civil Rights Act of 1866. This law answered the Black Codes directly. It was the first federal effort to define nearly all American-born residents, except Native peoples, as citizens. It also banned restrictions on their "fundamental rights." (p. 491)
The Fourteenth Amendment. It was drafted at the same time to make sure the Civil Rights Act was constitutional. Section One granted birthright citizenship and overturned the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision (1857). It also barred states from denying due process or equal protection of the laws. This showed that the federal government would enforce the Bill of Rights against state authority. The House approved it on June 13, 1866. (p. 492)
Johnson opposed the amendment and vetoed the Civil Rights Act, because he did not think Black Americans deserved equal rights. But Republicans won a two-thirds majority in the 1866 midterm elections and overrode his veto. (p. 492)
In 1867 Congress passed the first Reconstruction Act. It dissolved the Southern governments and divided the South into five military districts. To rejoin the Union, a state had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, write a new constitution that gave Black men the vote, and end the Black Codes. Johnson kept obstructing Congress, so the House impeached him. He escaped removal in the Senate by a narrow margin, and Congress took charge of the next phase. The states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment on July 9, 1868. (p. 493)
In the 1868 presidential election, Union general Ulysses S. Grant ran under the slogan "Let Us Have Peace." He promised to protect the new arrangement. His Democratic opponent, Horatio Seymour, promised to repeal Reconstruction. Black Southern voters helped Grant carry most of the former Confederacy. They were the backbone of the Republican coalition in the South. (pp. 493–494)
Opponents gave nicknames to the white people who backed the Republican Party in the South. A "scalawag" was a white Southerner who was a Republican. A "carpetbagger" was a Northerner who moved to the South during Reconstruction. Both words were meant as insults. Even so, neither group was the party's main base. Black voters were the backbone of the Southern Republican coalition (pp. 493–494).
Reconstruction was the first time African Americans took part in democracy on a mass scale. In 1860, only five Northern states let Black men vote on equal terms with white men. After 1867, Congress ordered the Southern states to end racial discrimination in voting. Black candidates then won elections across the region. The South changed from an all-white, proslavery Democratic stronghold into a group of Republican-led states (p. 494).
Black men also served as delegates at the state constitutional conventions of 1868. They drew on the earlier Colored Conventions tradition to prepare. One major result was public education. Public schools were almost unknown in the South before the war, but by the end of Reconstruction every Southern state had a school system. Republican governments also opened state institutions, such as asylums, hospitals, orphanages, and prisons, to both races, though usually in segregated form. They also worked to promote industry and Northern investment (p. 494).
Black men held office at every level:
The officeholders had varied backgrounds. Some were free and wealthy before the war. Antoine Dubuclet and William Breedlove were examples, and both had owned enslaved people. Most officeholders, however, had been enslaved until the war. Among them were Emanuel Fortune, a shoemaker, James D. Lynch, a minister, and William V. Turner, a teacher. Running for office continued the leadership they already gave their communities (pp. 494–495).
This progress did not last. By 1877, more than two thousand Black men had held offices, from levee commissioner to senator. When white Democrats regained power that year, nearly all lost their posts. A few local offices lasted several more years in places such as South Carolina. But the federal protection that had made Black officeholding possible was gone. Large-scale Black political participation did not return until well into the twentieth century (pp. 495–496, 520).
Freedpeople wanted land above all. In January 1865, General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, which set aside land in Georgia and South Carolina for them. But he did not have the authority to take and hand out land, so the plan never fully took effect (p. 496).
The Freedmen's Bureau was expected to give freedpeople abandoned and confiscated land. Those grants were short-lived. In 1866, land was returned to ex-Confederates. Bureau agents, including General O. O. Howard on Edisto Island, had to tell freedpeople to work as wage laborers for their former enslavers. Freedpeople protested, since they had been promised homesteads. Bills by Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner to redistribute land were tabled in Congress. Republicans cared more about economic stability than racial justice (p. 496).
The bureau's record was mixed. Agents wanted crops harvested, so they sometimes pressured freedpeople into contracts with former enslavers. Yet the bureau also ran courts where Black workers could complain about employers who abused them or did not pay them. It also helped build schools across the South (pp. 496, 499).
The Freedman's Bank shows the same weakening of Republican commitment. It was founded in 1865 as a savings bank for formerly enslaved people and their descendants. At its peak it had over 70,000 depositors, 37 branches, and about 3.5 million was out in loans, mostly to white borrowers near Washington, DC. Frederick Douglass became president in March 1874, just months before Congress ordered the bank closed. When it shut in July, 61,144 depositors still had $2.9 million in their accounts. No one was held responsible (p. 497).
Family was another central goal. Many freedpeople left plantations to look for relatives who had been sold away. They ran newspaper ads for lost family members, and such ads appeared until about 1900. They also tried to regain children who had been apprenticed to white employers. Many couples held formal weddings. The government supported this because it wanted Black men to head their own households so that women and children would not rely on the state (pp. 497, 499).
Freedpeople were eager to learn. Many wanted to read the Bible themselves, so tired workers filled night schools and Sunday schools. One room might hold fifty or more students aged three to eighty. Booker T. Washington described it as a whole race trying to go to school (p. 499).
Churches often served as schoolhouses. After emancipation, independent Black churches and church associations multiplied. Many rural congregations had never belonged to white churches. Associations such as the Virginia Baptist State Convention built on earlier antislavery organizing and backed Black political participation. Baptists became the fastest-growing denomination. Tensions arose between Northern and Southern Black churches. Rural Southern congregations preferred inspired preaching, while urban Northerners wanted more orderly worship and an educated ministry (p. 499).
Churches were also centers of leadership. They were often the largest buildings in town, and many officeholders were ministers. Groups like the Union League borrowed church rituals and hymns. Women pushed for a larger role. Nannie Helen Burroughs and Virginia Broughton helped lead women's conventions and worked to protect Black women from sexual violence by white men (pp. 499–500).
Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed the Women's Loyal National League in 1863 to petition Congress to abolish slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment's passage showed that women could be politically effective. Stanton saw Reconstruction as a chance to win equal rights for all. In 1866, the Women's Rights Convention merged with the American Anti-Slavery Society to form the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) (pp. 500, 502).
The AERA soon split over whether Black male suffrage should come first. Frederick Douglass argued that the vote was a matter of life and death for Black men in the South, but not for women. Frances Harper urged white women to recognize their privilege as white and middle-class. In Kansas in 1867, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony saw their allies pull away from women's suffrage. They then turned to white supremacists who supported it (p. 502).
The Fourteenth Amendment, for the first time, put the word "male" into the Constitution. The Fifteenth Amendment banned voting discrimination based on race, color, or previous servitude, but said nothing about sex. After this, the AERA dissolved. Stanton and Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Suffragists who supported the Fifteenth Amendment despite its limits formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) (pp. 502, 504–505).
The NWSA's "New Departure" argued that the two amendments already guaranteed women the vote, because they protected the rights of all citizens. About seven hundred women registered to vote between 1868 and 1872. Anthony was one of them. She was arrested and tried. In 1875, the Supreme Court ruled that women were citizens but that citizenship did not guarantee the right to vote. After this loss, Stanton and others often dropped universal suffrage. They argued instead that white women's virtue at the polls was needed, and these arguments were often racist (p. 504).
The war changed life for Southern women, and white and Black women reacted in different ways. During the war, many white women ran farms and businesses while the men were away. Upper-class women saw what life was like without a husband's protection, and many disliked it. Some feared that racial equality would follow. Formerly wealthy women hoped to rebuild the old social ranking and keep their status (p. 504).
Ladies' Memorial Associations (LMAs) were Southern white women's groups. They grew out of wartime Soldiers' Aid Societies. Their main work was burying and honoring the Confederate dead. Their speeches and memorials also praised the manhood of Confederate soldiers. The LMAs became the early keepers of the Lost Cause story. They also created new holidays, such as some groups marking the death of Stonewall Jackson on May 10. On these days white Southerners could renew loyalty to the Confederacy and show opposition to Black rights. In this way the women took on real political roles (pp. 504–505).
Misconception: the war was about states' rights. Supporters of the Lost Cause tried to make slavery look less brutal. They also spread the myth that the war was fought over states' rights. This is false. Slavery was the actual cause of the war. The myth mattered because it let white Southerners defend the prewar order and remember the Confederacy as noble (p. 504).
Black women in the South used freedom to take charge of their own labor and households. This put them in direct conflict with white women and men who wanted to keep control over them (pp. 505–506).
A good example is washing. Gertrude Clanton, a former plantation mistress, hired a Black laundress. She believed her money had bought a full day of work. The laundress thought she was paid only to finish the washing, so she did it and went home. Gertrude was frustrated by this misunderstanding. Washerwomen like her set their own wages and hours. Many began taking in laundry at their own homes. This kept them away from the close watch of white women and from the sexual threat posed by white men (pp. 505–506).
The same fights happened across the South. White Southerners demanded that Black women work in plantation homes. They also used apprenticeship systems to put Black children into unpaid labor. Black women pushed back by refusing jobs with unfair pay or conditions. They also held tightly to their children (p. 506).
Black women also formed clubs, much as white LMA members did. The clubs buried the dead, honored Black men, and helped their communities. On May 1, 1865, Black residents of Charleston honored Union soldiers who had been buried hastily at a racetrack that had been turned into a prison. This event foreshadowed Memorial Day. About three hundred Black women took part, and they had belonged to the local Patriotic Association, which had aided freedpeople during the war. Black women kept joining Decoration Day ceremonies and later founded their own clubs (p. 506).
White Southerners had lived in a society built on slavery, so many could not picture free Black labor. In 1865, the investigator Carl Schurz found that they almost all believed Black people would not work without physical force. Violence had enforced slavery before the war. After emancipation, it was used to block Black progress and bring back the old order. Slavery had required a society resting on white supremacy and unfree workers. When slavery ended, whites used Black Codes and terror to regain control (pp. 506–507).
Three forms of violence. Violence in this era took three main forms (p. 508):
The Ku Klux Klan was organized in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866. By 1868 it had spread to nearly every former Confederate state. Many members came from the old Southern elite, and some Klan groups overlapped with criminal gangs or former Confederate guerrillas. Other groups, such as the Knights of the White Camellia, acted in similar ways. Together they formed a web of terror (pp. 508–509).
The numbers show how bad it was. In Panola County, Mississippi, there were twenty-four Klan-style murders between August 1870 and December 1872. In Lafayette County, Klansmen drowned thirty Black people in one massacre. Targets included Black people who bought land and white Republicans such as the sheriff Allen Huggins, who was beaten. Thousands of men and women, white and Black, were whipped, raped, or murdered (p. 509).
The Enforcement Acts (1870–1871). Congress made it a crime to deprive people of their civil rights. The acts treated Klan violence as rebellion against the United States. They also allowed troops to protect freedpeople. For a time, courts and soldiers worked to break the Klan, but the violence did not stop. By 1876, Democrats had "redeemed" the South and restored "home rule." Federal opposition weakened and the nation's attention moved elsewhere (p. 509).
Misconception: "waving the bloody shirt." White conservatives said Republicans exaggerated the violence for political gain. Some claimed it was made up, or that it was the natural result of Black voting. One South Carolina writer compared the Klan to the Boston Tea Party. The victims told a different story. Sallie Adkins wrote to President Grant after Klansmen murdered her husband Joseph, a Georgia state senator, in 1869. She said that "pardoned rebels" killed him and asked for justice. Her letter shows that the violence was real. It was meant to end Reconstruction, and it helped bring in a new era of racial repression (pp. 509–511).
African Americans tried to leave slavery's legacy behind. Many dropped the names their enslavers had given them and chose names like "Freeman" or "Lincoln." Others moved far from old plantations, hoping to farm their own land or run businesses (p. 511).
By the end of Reconstruction, this desire for independence led to dozens of Black towns. The best known was Mound Bayou, Mississippi, founded in 1887 by Isaiah Montgomery and Ben Green. Both had been enslaved by the family of Jefferson Davis. Black residents owned all the property, including banks, insurance companies, shops, and farms. Such towns let people live free from segregation and from sharecropping on white-owned land (p. 511).
Before the war, the South's wealth rested on enslaved labor. Over four million enslaved people grew cotton and other crops. The South had more wealth per person than any other slave economy in the New World. Enslavers counted the people they held as their most valuable property, worth about $3 billion. The North, by contrast, was a free-labor region. It had New England clothing factories, Pennsylvania kerosene, and Midwestern grain for export. Northern firms such as McCormick (harvesters) and Colt (firearms) made advanced goods that moved by railroad. Banks and financial markets gathered money to invest. The war revealed this stronger Northern base (pp. 511–512).
The Confederacy's money problems. The Union blockade kept the Confederacy from selling cotton to Europe to pay for the war. Its Congress printed paper money, which lost value fast and caused inflation. Officials often skipped cash taxes and took food and supplies from citizens. Even in a farming region, many Southerners went hungry. The North also had inflation, but it never seized supplies. Its farms and factories supplied the army (pp. 512–513).
Growth of federal economic power. The Union government took bold steps (pp. 513–514):
The Civil War left the South economically broken. State governments were deeply in debt. White planters had kept most of their capital in the form of enslaved people, so emancipation wiped out much of their wealth. Cotton stayed the main crop, but after the war it faced competition from new cotton plantations in other parts of the world. Because of these pressures, the South entered a long stretch of deep poverty that lasted until at least the New Deal of the 1930s (p. 513).
Sharecropping was a system in which a family farmed a small plot of land and paid for the use of it with a share of the crop. Planters created it by breaking their large farms into small family-sized plots. Black farmers who had no money to buy land often had to accept it. Because families usually owed money for supplies, sharecropping often created cycles of debt that kept them tied to the land (pp. 513–514).
Emancipation let African Americans rebuild families, sign contracts, own property, and move freely. Even so, white Southerners used laws and violence to keep labor bound. Vagrancy laws gave police an excuse to arrest innocent Black men and women. Under the convict-lease system, an arbitrary arrest could lead to years of forced labor without pay. The crime exception in the Thirteenth Amendment made this possible. This new form of servitude lasted until World War II (pp. 513–514).
The North did not boom right away after the war. The wartime government had also changed its role in the economy, with greenbacks, higher tariffs, and a national banking system. These changes did not help everyone. The Homestead Act was meant to help small farmers settle the West, but railroad corporations and speculators often blocked that goal (p. 515).
The war years also tied government closely to business leaders. Sometimes the result was corruption and disaster, as in the market crash of Black Friday, September 24, 1869. People in the West and South resented what they saw as Washington's Eastern, industrial bias. Arguments over the direction of the economy soon replaced arguments over emancipation and civil rights (p. 515).
After the war, the United States put more resources into taking Native lands. The Navajo Long Walk was a series of forced marches between 1863 and 1866. General James Carleton chose a dry, nearly treeless site at Bosque Redondo, 300 miles from Navajo land. He ordered Kit Carson to round up the Navajo, and those who resisted were to be shot. Spoiled food and disease killed thousands. General Sherman saw the harsh conditions, but he urged the Navajo's return mainly because the reservation cost too much. The Treaty of Bosque Redondo, signed June 1, 1868, let the Navajo go home, which was unusual for US–Native treaties (p. 516).
In California, the Senate never ratified the 1850s treaties with Native nations. The Native population fell from about 150,000 to under 20,000 by 1880. State laws helped cause this. A white person could bring a Native adult or child before a judge, promise food and clothing, and gain an "apprentice" laborer for ten to twenty years. Thousands were forced into slave-like work in mining, farming, railroads, and cattle (pp. 516–517).
Grant's "peace policy" began with the 1868 Indian Peace Commission. Under Grant, Congress created the Board of Indian Commissioners, and much of the reservation system went to Protestant churches, which picked agents and missionaries. Historian Francis Paul Prucha thought "religious policy" was a better name. Congress hoped religious men would carry out assimilation more justly (p. 517).
Missionaries also tried to remake Native family life. They wanted small patriarchal households in place of tribal social units. In many Native societies women did the farming and controlled its products, which gave them status. Missionaries wanted women to do housework instead. Most officials thought Native cultures were inferior. A report from J. L. Broaddus in 1875, calling Native people idle, shows this bias (pp. 517–518).
Between 1868 and 1877, economic issues pushed Reconstruction off the national agenda. Federal troops in key Southern cities were all that kept white Democratic violence from overthrowing Republican governments, and the government never sent enough personnel to protect Black rights fully (p. 518).
Two groups led the retreat. Stalwart Republicans put party politics and economics ahead of civil rights and controlled the party by the early 1870s. New Departure Democrats, called Redeemers in the South, stressed business and promised local rule by white Democrats. By 1871 they had overthrown Reconstruction in Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia (p. 518).
The Panic of 1873 began when Jay Cooke and Company went bankrupt in September, starting a six-year depression. Northerners lost interest in Reconstruction. In the South credit vanished, wages fell, and debt peonage trapped workers. Democrats won the House in 1874, which weakened Congress's power to direct Reconstruction (pp. 518–519).
In 1875 Democrats carried out the Mississippi Plan, a wave of violence to scare Black activists and keep Black people from voting. Mississippi's Republican governor begged for federal help, and national Republicans ignored him. Meanwhile Rutherford B. Hayes won Ohio's governorship by stressing corruption and economic recovery, not Reconstruction. This made him a presidential candidate (p. 519).
In 1876 Hayes ran against Democrat Samuel Tilden. Results in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina were disputed. A special commission voted 8 to 7 along party lines for Hayes. In the Compromise of 1877, Democrats accepted Hayes as president in return for removing the remaining troops. Troops left in April 1877, and Southern Democrats returned to power without fearing federal reprisal (p. 520).
Reconstruction restored the Union and ended legal slavery, but it left most promises unmet. African Americans and women were still denied full citizenship. The nation turned to economic growth and expansion (p. 520).
