The period after the American Civil War when the South was occupied by Northern troops, while major changes went forward in its way of life. These included the destruction of slavery and the attempted integration of the freed black people. Reconstruction brought three amendments to the US Constitution, as well as bitter dispute over the extent of the needed changes. Resistance to it among white Southerners resulted in the founding of the Ku Klux Klan in 1866. Once scorned by historians as a tragic era of corruption, Reconstruction is now seen as a period of necessary but incomplete social change. The era ended in 1877, when a bargain among politicians gave a disputed presidential election to the Republicans in return for home (ie white) rule in the South. Once white rule was fully restored, a policy of racial segregation was imposed to keep black people firmly subordinate.
Reconstruction was a period in United States history, 1862–1877, that resolved the issues of the American Civil War when both the Confederacy and its system of slavery were destroyed. The period of Reconstruction addressed the return of the southern states that had seceded, the status of ex-Confederate leaders, and the integration of the African-American Freedmen into the legal, political, economic and social system. Moderates said this could be easily accomplished as soon as Confederate armies surrendered and the southern states repealed secession and ratified the 13th Amendment — all of which happened by September 1865.
President Abraham Lincoln was the leader of the moderate Republicans and wanted to speed up Reconstruction and reunite the nation as soon as possible. Lincoln formally began Reconstruction in late 1863 with his Ten percent plan, which went into operation in several states but which Radicals opposed. He too favored voting rights for veterans of the United States Colored Troops.
The election of 1866 decisively changed the balance of power, giving the Radicals control of Congress and enough votes to overcome Johnson's vetoes and even to try to impeach him. Johnson was acquitted by one vote, but remained almost powerless regarding Reconstruction policy. Radicals used the Army to take over the South and give the vote to black men, and took the vote away from an estimated 10,000 or 15,000 white men who had been Confederate officials or senior officers. The Radical stage lasted for varying lengths in the different states, where a Republican coalition of Freedmen, Scalawags and Carpetbaggers took control and promoted modernization through railroads and public schools.
By 1877, however, Redeemers regained control of every state, and President Rutherford Hayes withdrew federal troops, causing the collapse of the remaining three Republican state governments.
Loyalty Issue
The loyalty issue emerged in the debates over the Wade-Davis Act of 1864, which Lincoln vetoed. Northern states that had referenda on the subject rejected allowing their own small number of blacks to vote, but that was not the issue. Conservatives (including most white Southerners, Northern Democrats, and some Northern Republicans) opposed black voting. As President in 1865, Johnson wrote to the man he appointed as governor of Mississippi, recommending, "If you could extend the elective franchise to all persons of color who can read the Constitution in English and write their names, and to all persons of color who own real estate valued at not less than two hundred and fifty dollars, and pay taxes thereon, you would completely disarm the adversary [Radicals in Congress], and set an example the other states will follow." In 1867, black men voted for the first time and, over the course of Reconstruction, more than 1,500 African Americans held public office in the South. (The question of women's suffrage was also debated, but was rejected.)
The South's postwar white leaders renounced secession and slavery, but they were angered in 1867 when their state governments were ousted by federal military forces, and replaced by Republican lawmakers elected by blacks, Scalawags and Carpetbaggers.
Wartime proposals and legislation
Lincoln's Plan of Reconstruction
Planning for Reconstruction began in 1861, at the onset of the war. The Radical Republicans, seeking strict policies, used as their base the Congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction. Motivated by a desire to build a strong Republican party in the South and to end the bitterness engendered by war, he issued on December 8, 1863, a proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction for those areas of the Confederacy occupied by Union armies. Once a group in any conquered state equal in number to one tenth of that state's total vote in the presidential election of 1860 took the prescribed oath and organized a government that abolished slavery, he would grant that government executive recognition.
Thus, Lincoln pursued a lenient plan for reconstruction, especially in Virginia, West Virginia, Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansas. They passed (July, 1864) the Wade-Davis Bill, which required 50% of a state's male voters to take an “ironclad” oath that they had never voluntarily supported the Confederacy. Congress, however, refused to seat the Senators and Representatives elected from those states, and by the time of Lincoln's assassination the President and Congress were at a stalemate.
Observers at the time of the Wade-Davis bill--and historians since--agree that probably no state would have qualified, leaving them under military control indefinitely. Moreover, Lincoln believed that the best strategy was to introduce black suffrage in the South by degrees in order to accustom southern whites to blacks voting. How far he was willing to go in extending rights to former slaves remained unclear, but his gradualist approach to social change remained intact, just as when he had tried to get the border states in 1862 to adopt gradual emancipation. Finally, the radicals and Lincoln held quite different views of the relationship of Reconstruction to the war effort. By erecting impossibly high standards that no southern state could meet, the Wade–Davis bill sought to postpone Reconstruction until the war was over. For Lincoln, in contrast, a lenient program of Reconstruction would encourage southern whites to abandon the Confederacy and thus was integral to his strategy for winning the war.
On April 11, 1865, Lincoln delivered his last public address, in which he continued to uphold a generous and lenient reconstruction policy.
Lincoln thus wanted to bring the Southern states back into good standing as soon as possible and with a minimum of vengeance.
Johnson's presidential reconstruction: 1865–66
Northern anger over the Confederate John Wilkes Booth's assassination of Lincoln and the immense human cost of the war led to demands for harsh policies. but when he succeeded Lincoln as President, Johnson took a much softer line, pardoning many Confederate leaders and allowing ex-Confederates to maintain their control of Southern state governments, Southern lands, and black people.
Black Codes
see main article: Black codes
The Johnson governments quickly enacted "black codes". They gave freedmen more rights than free blacks had before the war, but still only a limited set of second-class civil rights, and no voting rights. Two states had full fledged black codes, Mississippi and South Carolina.
The Black codes outraged northern opinion and apparently were rarely put into effect because of the protection afforded by the Freedman's Bureau, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
Moderate responses
In response to the Black codes and worrisome signs of Southern recalcitrance, the Radical Republicans blocked the readmission of the ex-rebellious states to the Congress in fall 1865. He proposed the first Civil Rights Law because, he explained:
Of what avail, he asked, is the Thirteenth Amendment "if in the late slaveholding States laws are to be enacted and enforced depriving persons of African descent of privileges which are essential to freemen?" The legislatures of the Southern States have by law discriminated against the negroes. and it is perhaps difficult to draw the precise line to say where freedom ceases and slavery begins but a law that does not allow a colored person to go from one county to another, and one that does not allow him to hold property, to teach, to preach, are certainly laws in violation of the rights of a freeman.… The purpose of this bill is to destroy all these discriminations and to carry into effect the constitutional amendment;" it is to give the negro "the right to acquire property, to go and come at pleasure, to enforce rights in the courts, to make contracts, and to inherit and dispose of property."The key to the bill was the opening section:
"All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign Power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall have the same right in every State and Territory in the United States, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, and penalties and to none other, any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom to the Contrary notwithstanding." Democrats regroupAlthough strongly urged by moderates in Congress to sign the Civil Rights bill, Johnson broke decisively with them by vetoing it on March 27. His veto message objected to the measure because it conferred citizenship on the Freedmen at a time when eleven out of thirty-six States were unrepresented and attempted to fix by Federal law "a perfect equality of the white and black races in every State of the Union." Johnson said it was an invasion by Federal authority of the rights of the States;
The Democratic party, proclaiming itself the party of white men, north and south, supported Johnson. It extended citizenship to everyone born in the United States (except visitors and Indians on reservations), penalized states that did not give the vote to Freedmen, and most importantly, created new federal civil rights that could be protected by federal courts. Johnson used his influence to block the amendment in the states, as three-fourths of the states were required for ratification. (The Amendment was later ratified.) The moderate effort to compromise with Johnson had failed and an all-out political war broke out between the Republicans (both Radical and moderate) on one side, and, on the other, Johnson and his allies in the Democratic party in the North, and the conservative groupings (which used different names) in each southern state.
Radical Reconstruction: 1866–77
Radicals win 1866 election
The Congressional elections of 1866 were fought over the issue of Reconstruction. The Southern states were not allowed to vote, having not yet been re-admitted to the Union; The Radicals under Stevens and Sumner, for the first time, now took full control of Congress and passed the first Reconstruction Act in March 1867. The 14th Amendment was rejected in 1866 but ratified in 1868, guaranteeing citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and granting them federal civil rights. The 15th Amendment passed in 1870, decreeing that the right to vote could not be denied because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude (it did not grant the right to vote, as electoral policies are defined by the states).
Re-admission to the union
Tennessee - July 24, 1866 Arkansas - June 22, 1868 Florida - June 25, 1868 North Carolina - July 4, 1868 South Carolina - July 9, 1868 Louisiana - July 9, 1868 Alabama - July 13, 1868 Virginia - January 26, 1870 Mississippi - February 23, 1870 Texas - March 30, 1870 Georgia - July 15, 1870Military reconstruction
The first Reconstruction Act placed ten Confederate states under military control, grouping them into five military districts:
First Military District: Virginia, under General John Schofield Second Military District: The Carolinas, under General Daniel Sickles Third Military District: Georgia, Alabama and Florida, under General John Pope Fourth Military District: Arkansas and Mississippi, under General Edward Ord Fifth Military District: Texas and Louisiana, under Generals Philip Sheridan and Winfield Scott HancockTennessee, which had been readmitted to full status on July 24, 1866, was not made part of a military district, and federal controls did not apply.
The ten Southern state governments were re-constituted under the direct control of the US Army. There was little or no fighting, but rather a state of martial law in which the military closely supervised local government, supervised elections, and protected office holders from violence. former Confederate leaders were excluded.[Foner 1988 p 274–5] No one state was representative. The Reconstruction Acts called for registering all adult males, white and black, except those who had ever sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and then engaged in rebellion.… Sheridan interpreted these restrictions stringently, barring from registration not only all pre-1861 officials of state and local governments who had supported the Confederacy but also all city officeholders and even minor functionaries such as sextons of cemeteries. It is impossible to say how many whites were rejected or refused to register (estimates vary from 7,500 to 12,000), but blacks, who constituted only about 30 percent of the state's population, were significantly overrepresented at 45 percent of all voters.
Elections, in 1867, returned a Republican victory in every state (except Virginia, where Conservative Democrats won). With most ex-Confederates ineligible because they could not take the Ironclad oath, the majority of delegates in every state but South Carolina were African Americans.
| Race of delegates to 1867 state conventions | ||||
| Black | White | % Black | ||
| Virginia | 80 | 25 | 76% | |
| North Carolina | 107 | 13 | 89% | |
| South Carolina | 48 | 76 | 39% | |
| Georgia | 133 | 33 | 80% | |
| Florida | 28 | 18 | 61% | |
| Alabama | 92 | 16 | 85% | |
| Mississippi | 68 | 17 | 80% | |
| Texas | 81 | 9 | 90% | |
| Louisiana | "great majority" |
Source: Rhodes (1920) v 6 p. 199
All Southern states were readmitted to the Union by the end of 1870, the last being Georgia, gaining re-admission on July 15, 1870.
Black Reconstruction
One by one, the Southern states held new elections in which Freedmen voted. In most cases, the result was a Republican state government; the state was readmitted, the Congressional delegation was seated, and most soldiers were removed. The Republican coalition in each state comprised Freedmen (the largest group) and local white Republicans (called "scalawags"), the second largest group.
The old political élite of the Democratic Party, mostly former Confederates, were (temporarily) frozen out of power (although some, like General James Longstreet, joined the Republicans).
Black Officeholders
Republicans took control of all Southern state governorships and state legislatures, leading to the election of numerous African-Americans to state and national office, as well as to the installation of African-Americans into other positions of power.
Public schools and Railroads During Reconstruction
As modernizers the Republicans believed that education was a long-term solution to the economic poverty and ignorance of the South. One historian found that the schools were not very effective, because of "poverty, the inability of the states to collect taxes, and inefficiency and corruption in many places prevented successful operation of the schools." Every state created state colleges for Freedmen, such as Alcorn State University in Mississippi; in 1890 the black state colleges started receiving federal funds as land grant schools. They received state funds after Reconstruction ended because, as Lynch explains, "there are very many liberal, fair-minded and influential Democrats in the State who are strongly in favor of having the State provide for the liberal education of both races."
Every state (and many localities) subsidized railroads, which modernizers felt could haul the South out of isolation and poverty. One ring in North Carolina spent $200,000 in bribing the legislature and obtained millions in state money for its railroads. As Franklin explains, "numerous railroads fed at the public trough by bribing legislators...and through the use and misuse of state funds." The effect, according to one businessman, "was to drive capital from the State, paralyze industry, and demoralize labor."
The new spending on schools and especially on railroad subsidies, combined with fraudulent spending and a collapse in state credit because of huge deficits, forced the states to dramatically increase tax rates — up to ten times higher — despite the poverty of the region. for no doubt it would have been much easier upon the taxpayers to have increased at that time the interest-bearing debt of the State than to have increased the tax rate.
Views of the Conservatives in the South
The white Southerners who lost power reformed themselves into "Conservative" parties that battled the Republicans throughout the South.
Historian Walter Lynwood Fleming was representative of the Dunning School in that he was sympathetic to southern conservatives and contemptuous of Radical corruption, and paternalistic toward the African Americans: he wrote:
The Negro troops, even at their best, were everywhere considered offensive by the native whites. A New Orleans newspaper thus states the Southern point of view: "Our citizens who had been accustomed to meet and treat the Negroes only as respectful servants, were mortified, pained, and shocked to encounter them … wearing Federal uniforms and bearing bright muskets and gleaming bayonets.… They are jostled from the sidewalks by dusky guards, marching four abreast. But white men, too, were victims of lawless violence, and in all portions of the North as well as in the late "rebel" states. The project to make voters out of black men was not so much for their social elevation as for the further punishment of the Southern white people —for the capture of offices for Radical scamps and the entrenchment of the Radical party in power for a long time to come in the South and in the country at large. One Northern state had followed another in refusing to give the ballot to its own negroes.Redemption and the end of Reconstruction in 1870s
Republicans split: election of 1872
As early as 1868 Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, a leading Radical during the war, concluded that:
"Congress was right in not limiting, by its reconstruction acts, the right of suffrage to whites; but wrong in the exclusion from suffrage of certain classes of citizens and all unable to take its prescribed retrospective oath, and wrong also in the establishment of despotic military governments for the States and in authorizing military commissions for the trial of civilians in time of peace. and no oath except one of faithful obedience and support to the Constitution and laws, and of sincere attachment to the constitutional Government of the United States."By 1872, President Grant had alienated large numbers of leading Republicans, including many Radicals by the wanton corruption of his administration and his use of federal soldiers to prop up Radical state regimes in the South.
Grant made up for the defections by new gains among Union veterans, as well as strong support from the "Stalwart" faction of his party (which depended on his patronage), and the Southern Republican parties. Grant won a smashing landslide, as the Liberal Republican party vanished and many former supporters — even ex-abolitionists — abandoned the cause of Reconstruction. In 1868, Georgia Democrats, with support from some Republicans, expelled all 28 black Republican members (arguing blacks were eligible to vote, but not to hold office.) In state after state the more conservative scalawags fought for control with the more radical carpetbaggers, and usually lost. Furthermore, the poor whites "with a few exceptions, were less efficient, less capable, and knew less about matters of state and governmental administration than many of the ex-slaves.… As a rule, therefore, the whites that came into the leadership of the Republican party between 1872 and 1875 were representatives of the most substantial families of the land."
Democrats try a "New Departure"
By 1870, the Democratic–Conservative leadership across the South decided it had to end its opposition to Reconstruction as well as to black suffrage in order to survive and move on to new issues. Eventually, a group called Redeemers took control of the party in state after state.
In North Carolina, Republican governor William Woods Holden used state troops against the Klan, but the prisoners were released by federal judges, Holden became the first governor in American history to be impeached and removed from office.
Panic of 1873 weakens GOP
The Panic of 1873 hit the Southern economy hard, and disillusioned many Republicans who had gambled that railroads would pull the South out of its poverty.
Nationally, President Grant took the blame for the depression, as his Republican party lost 96 seats in all parts of the country in the 1874 elections. State after state fell to the Redeemers, with only four in Republican hands in 1873, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina; Political violence was endemic in Louisiana, but efforts to seize the state government were repulsed by federal troops who entered the state legislature and hauled away several Democratic legislators. By now, all Democrats and most northern Republicans agreed that Confederate nationalism and slavery were dead — the war goals were achieved — and further federal military interference was an undemocratic violation of historic Republican values. Ames fled the state as the Democrats took over Mississippi.
1876 Election
Reconstruction continued in South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida until 1877. By this point, everyone had agreed that Reconstruction was finished However, the African-Americans who wanted their legal rights guaranteed by the Federal government were repeatedly frustrated for another 75 years; they considered Reconstruction a failure
The end of Reconstruction marked the beginning of a period, 1877–1900, that saw the steady reduction of many civil and political rights for African-Americans, and ushered in the nadir of American race relations. The exact process varied state by state and town by town. made local officials appointees of the state legislature; Blacks would legally and socially remain second-class citizens until Jim Crow was abolished by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
South under Redeemers
The initial flurry of Reconstruction civil rights measures was eroded and converted into laws that expanded racial segregation and discrimination throughout Southern institutions and everyday life. With the backing of President Lyndon Johnson, it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in "public accommodations" (i.e., restaurants, hotels and businesses open to the public)), terminology which originated in the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
Legacy and Historiography
Reconstruction was initially viewed as a failure by most observers North and South because of its corruption. Washington, who grew up in West Virginia during Reconstruction, concluded that, "the Reconstruction experiment in racial democracy failed because it began at the wrong end, emphasizing political means and civil rights acts rather than economic means and self-determination."
Two novels by Thomas Dixon — The Clansman and The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden — 1865–1900 — romanticized white resistance to Northern/black coercion, hailing vigilante action by the Ku Klux Klan.
The Dunning School of scholars based at the history department of Columbia University analyzed Reconstruction as a failure, at least after 1866, for quite different reasons. As one scholar notes, for the Dunning School, "Reconstruction was a battle between two extremes: the Democrats, as the group which included the vast majority of the whites, standing for decent government and racial supremacy, versus the Republicans, the Negroes, alien carpetbaggers, and renegade scalawags, standing for dishonest government and alien ideals. They argued that the Radical rhetoric of equal rights was mostly a smokescreen hiding the true motivation of Reconstruction's real backers. While conceding that a few men like Stevens and Sumner were thoroughly idealistic, Howard Beale argued Reconstruction was primarily a successful attempt by financiers, railroad builders and industrialists in the Northeast, using the Republican party, to control the national government for its own selfish economic ends. This it did by inaugurating Reconstruction, which made the South Republican, and by selling its policies to the voters wrapped up in such attractive vote-getting packages as northern patriotism or the bloody shirt. However, historians in the 1950s and 1960s refuted Beale's economic causation by demonstrating that Northern businessmen were widely divergent on monetary or tariff policy, and seldom paid attention to Reconstruction issues. Strongly aligned with the Civil Rights Movement, they rejected the Dunning school and found a great deal to praise in Radical Reconstruction. The neo-abolitionists followed the revisionists in minimizing or the corruption and waste created by Republican state governments, saying it was no worse than Tweed's Ring in New York City. They argued that the real tragedy of Reconstruction was not that it failed because blacks were incapable of governing, but that it failed because the civil rights and equalities granted during this period were but a passing, temporary development. These rights were suspended in the South from the 1880s through 1964, but were restored by the Civil Rights Movement that is sometimes referred to as the "Second Reconstruction." Blum - have encouraged greater attention to race, religion, and issues of gender while at the same time pushing the "end" of Reconstruction to the end of the nineteenth century, while monographs by Charles Reagan Wilson, Gaines Foster, W. Scott Poole have offered new views of the southern "Lost Cause"
Significant dates
| State | Seceded from Union | Joined Confederacy | Readmitted into Union | Democratic Party Establishes Control |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| South Carolina | December 20, 1860 | February 4, 1861 | July 9, 1868 | November 28, 1876 |
| Mississippi | January 9, 1861 | February 4, 1861 | February 23, 1870 | January 4, 1876 |
| Florida | January 10, 1861 | February 4, 1861 | June 25, 1868 | January 2, 1877 |
| Alabama | January 11, 1861 | February 4, 1861 | July 14, 1868 | November 16, 1874 |
| Georgia | January 19, 1861 | February 4, 1861 | July 15, 1870 | November 1, 1871 |
| Louisiana | January 26, 1861 | February 4, 1861 | June 25 or July 9, 1868 | January 2, 1877 |
| Texas | February 1, 1861 | March 2, 1861 | March 30, 1870 | January 14, 1873 |
| Virginia | April 17, 1861 | May 7, 1861 | January 26, 1870 | October 5, 1869 |
| Arkansas | May 6, 1861 | May 18, 1861 | June 22, 1868 | November 10, 1874 |
| North Carolina | May 21, 1861 | May 16, 1861 | July 4, 1868 | November 28, 1876 |
| Tennessee | June 8, 1861 | May 16, 1861 | July 24, 1866 | October 4, 1869 |
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