Reconstruction

A political cartoon of Andrew Johnson and Abraham Lincoln, 1865, entitled "The Rail Splitter At Work Repairing the Union."

Reconstruction is the name of the historical period following the American Civil War during which the U.S. government attempted to resolve the divisions of the war and integrate former slaves into the political and social life of the country. From 1865, with the war's end, the Confederacy was demolished and the Southern states which had borne the brunt of the war were in ruins. Slavery was abolished first in states of the Confederacy by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and later by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865. Reconstruction addressed the return of the Southern states that had seceded, the status of ex-Confederate leaders, and the Constitutional and legal status of the African-American Freedmen.

Reconstruction is generally dated from 1865 to 1877, but some historians include a phase of Presidential Reconstruction from 1863 to 1866 during which Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson advanced policies designed to restore U.S. sovereignty over rebellious states even during wartime. Their moderate programs were opposed by the Radical Republicans, a political faction that gained power after the 1866 elections and began Radical Reconstruction, from 1866-1873, emphasizing civil rights and voting rights for the Freedmen. Violent controversy arose when a Republican coalition of freedmen, carpetbaggers and scalawags assumed control of most of the southern states. In the so-called Redemption, 1873-1877, white supremacist Southerners defeated the Republicans and took control of each southern state, marking the end of Reconstruction and the federal attempt to integrate freedmen into the legal, political, economic, and social system of the American South.

Policy issues

Following the surrender of Confederate forces at Appomattox, Virginia, in April 1865, Republican leaders agreed that slavery and the slave power had to be permanently destroyed, and that all forms of Confederate nationalism had to be suppressed. Moderates said this could be easily accomplished as soon as Confederate armies surrendered and the Southern states repealed secession and ratified the 13th Amendment—all of which happened by September 1865.

Map of the states and territories of the United States as it was from October 1864 to 1865.

President Abraham Lincoln was the leader of the moderate Republicans and wanted to speed up Reconstruction and reunite the nation as painlessly and as quickly 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. Lincoln vetoed the Radical plan, the Wade-Davis Bill of 1864, which was much more strict than the Ten-Percent Plan. The opposing faction of Radical Republicans were skeptical of Southern intentions and demanded more stringent federal action. Congressman Thaddeus Stevens and Senator Charles Sumner led the Radical Republicans. After Lincoln's assassination, President Andrew Johnson switched from the Radical to the moderate camp. He favored voting rights for veterans of the United States Colored Troops. By 1866, however, Johnson, with no party affiliation, broke with the moderate Republicans and aligned himself more with the Democrats who opposed equality and the Fourteenth Amendment. Radicals attacked the policies of Johnson, especially his veto of the Civil Rights Bill for the Freedmen.

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 impeach him. Johnson was acquitted by one vote, but he remained almost powerless regarding Reconstruction policy. Radicals used the Army to take over the South and give the vote to black men, and they 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. They were charged with corruption by their opponents, the conservative–Democratic coalition, calling themselves "Redeemers" after 1870. Violence sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan was overcome by federal intervention.

By 1877, however, Redeemers regained control of every state, and President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew federal troops, causing the collapse of the remaining three Republican state governments. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were permanent legacies. Bitterness from the heated partisanship of the era lasted well into the twentieth century.

Loyalty issue

A loyalty issue emerged in the debates over the Wade-Davis Bill of 1864. Wade-Davis required voters to take the "Ironclad Oath," swearing that in the past they never had supported the Confederacy or been one of its soldiers. Lincoln ignored the past and asked voters to swear that in the future they would support the Union. The Radicals lost support following Lincoln's pocket veto, but they regained strength in the mood of vengeance that followed Lincoln's assassination in April 1865.

Suffrage issue

Suffrage for ex-Confederates was one of two main concerns. Moderates wanted to restore voting rights to virtually all former Confederates, but Radicals repeatedly tried to impose the Ironclad oath, which would allow none to vote. Thaddeus Stevens proposed, unsuccessfully, that all ex-Confederates lose the vote for five years. The compromise that was reached disenfranchised many ex-Confederate civil and military leaders; no one knew how many temporarily lost the vote, but one estimate was 10,000 to 15,000.

Second was the issue of whether freed blacks should vote. Northern states that had referenda on the subject rejected allowing their own small number of blacks to vote, but that was not the issue. More germane was the issue of creating a loyally pro-American electorate in the South. Radicals said that the ex-Confederates could not be trusted. Conservatives (including most white Southerners, Northern Democrats, and some Northern Republicans) opposed black voting. Lincoln and Johnson took a middle position that would allow some black men to vote, especially army veterans. Lincoln proposed giving the vote to "the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks", while, in 1864, Governor Johnson said, "The better class of them will go to work and sustain themselves, and that class ought to be allowed to vote, on the ground that a loyal negro is more worthy than a disloyal white man." 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."

Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, leaders of the Radical Republicans, were initially hesitant to enfranchise the largely illiterate ex-slave population. However, Sumner and Stevens finally decided it was necessary for blacks to vote for their own protection; for the protection of white Unionists (scalawags); and for the peace of the country.

The Radicals passed laws allowing all male freedmen to vote, and in 1867, black men voted for the first time. 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.

Presidential Reconstruction, 1863-66

Lincoln's plan

Planning for Reconstruction began as early as 1861, at the onset of secession, with little premonition of what would prove to be the extent or duration of the Civil War. By 1863, although the war was far from over, the Union had won some strategic victories, notably dividing the confederacy by retaking the Mississippi, and Lincoln proposed certain tactical steps of restoration. Motivated by a desire to build a strong Republican Party in the South and to end the bitterness engendered by war, on December 8, 1863, he issued a proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction for those areas of the Confederacy occupied by Union armies. It offered pardon, with certain exceptions, to any Confederate who would swear to support the Constitution and the Union. 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. This was the ten percent plan.

Thus, Lincoln pursued a lenient plan for reconstruction, especially in Virginia, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Lincoln's 1863 plan aroused the sharp opposition of the radicals in Congress, who believed it would simply restore to power the old planter aristocracy. In July 1864, they passed the Wade-Davis Bill, which required 50 percent of a state's male voters to take an "Ironclad Oath" that they had never voluntarily supported the Confederacy. Lincoln's veto kept the Wade-Davis Bill from becoming law, the Radicals lost momentum, and he implemented his own plan. By the end of the war it had been tried, not too successfully, in Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia. 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. By vetoing the bill, Lincoln blocked the Radicals from a dominant role in government, though they rose to power again in 1866. Historian William Gienapp explains Lincoln's veto:

Lincoln, in contrast, shrank from inaugurating a fundamental upheaval in southern society and mores, and by stressing future over past loyalty, he was willing to allow recanting Rebels to dominate the new southern governments. 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 March 4, 1865, Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address, what the London Spectator called "the noblest political document known to history," reaffirming his generous stance toward the reunification of Confederate states: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."

On April 11, 1865, Lincoln delivered his last public address, in which he continued to uphold a lenient reconstruction policy. Insisting as well that there be new rights for the Freedmen, he created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in January 1865, known as the Freedmen's Bureau. In one experiment in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Freedmen were allowed to farm plantations seized by the Army, although they never received ownership.

Johnson's presidential reconstruction: 1865–66

Northern anger over the assassination of Lincoln and the immense human cost of the war led to demands for harsh, punitive policies toward the defeated South. Vice President Andrew Johnson had taken a hard line and spoke of hanging rebel Confederates, but when he succeeded Lincoln as President, Johnson took a much softer approach, pardoning many Confederate leaders and allowing ex-Confederates to maintain their control of Southern state governments, Southern lands, and, informally, even many former slaves. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was held in prison for two years, but not the other Confederate leaders were imprisoned and there were no treason trials. Only one person—Captain Henry Wirz, the commandant of the infamous prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia—was executed for war crimes.

Black codes

a Harper's Magazine political cartoon alleging Klan and White League opposition to Reconstruction

The Johnson government quickly enacted the restrictive "black codes," giving freedmen more rights than free blacks had before the war, but still limited, second-class civil rights, and no voting rights. Southern plantation owners feared extensive black vagrancy would mean loss of the essential labor force, and many Southern whites rejected the notion of equality with Southern blacks. Two states had full fledged Black Codes—Mississippi and South Carolina. Among other provisions, they stringently limited blacks' ability to control their own employment.

The Black codes and had limited effect because the Freedman's Bureau They codes were nullified by the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

In response to the Black codes, which outraged northern opinion, and worrisome signs of Southern recalcitrance, the Radical Republicans blocked the readmission of former Confederate states to the Congress in fall 1865. Congress also renewed the Freedman's Bureau, providing legal protection of freedman, but Johnson vetoed the Freedmen's Bureau Bill in February 1866. Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, leader of the moderate Republicans, then proposed the first Civil Rights Law. The abolition of slavery was empty, he said, if "laws are to be enacted and enforced depriving persons of African descent of privileges which are essential to freemen…. 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."

According to the bill:

All persons born in the United States … 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 … shall have the same right in every State … 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.

Congress quickly passed the Civil Rights bill; the Senate on February 2 voted 33–12; the House on March 13 voted 111–38.

Johnson vetoes; Republicans rally against him

Although 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 establish 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, had no warrant in the Constitution, was contrary to all precedents, and was a "stride toward centralization and the concentration of all legislative power in the national government."

File:Free-bur.jpg

The debate over reconstruction and the Freedman's Bureau was nationwide, as seen in this 1866 Pennsylvania election poster. The racist imagery shows Bureau money lavished on lazy freedmen at the expense of white workers.

The Democratic Party, proclaiming itself the party of white men, north and south, supported Johnson. However the Republicans in Congress overrode his veto (the Senate by the close vote of 33:15, the House by 122:41) and the Civil Rights bill became law. Congress also passed the Freedmen's Bureau Bill over Johnson's veto.

The last moderate proposal was the Fourteenth Amendment, also authored by Trumbull. It was designed to put the key provisions of the Civil Rights Act into the Constitution, but it went much further. It extended citizenship to everyone born in the United States (except visitors and Native Americans 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. It also guaranteed the Federal war debt (and promised the Confederate debt would never be paid by the federal treasury). Johnson used his influence to block the amendment in the states, since three-fourths of the states were required for ratification, although the amendment was soon ratified. The moderate effort to compromise with Johnson had failed, and a political fight broke out between the Republicans (both Radical and moderate) on one side, and on the other side, 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: 1866–73

Constitutional amendments and black officeholders

Three new Constitutional amendments were adopted in succession following the conclusion of the Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and was ratified in 1865. The Fourteenth Amendment was rejected in 1866 but ratified in 1868, guaranteeing citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, except Native Americans, and granting them federal civil rights. The Fifteenth Amendment passed in 1870, decreeing that the right to vote could not be denied because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The amendment did not declare suffrage an unconditional right and only prohibited these specific types of discrimination, while specific electoral policies were determined within each state. Notably, the Fifteenth Amendment did not enfranchise women.

Republicans also took control of all Southern state governorships and state legislatures, leading to the election of numerous African-Americans to state and national offices, as well as to the installation of African-Americans into other positions of power.

Military reconstruction

Because the South remained defiant, a pervasive insurgency emerged in many regions against free blacks and Union supporters (and in a few cases, Union veterans). As retribution against the violence, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act.

The first Reconstruction Act placed ten former 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 Hancock

Tennessee was not made part of a military district, and therefore federal controls did not apply.

The ten Southern state governments were re-constituted under the direct control of the United States Army. There was little or no fighting, but rather a state of martial law in which the military closely supervised local government and elections, and protected office holders from violence. Blacks were enrolled as voters, while former Confederate leaders were excluded. In some cases whites were rejected or refused to register while blacks were significantly overrepresented as a percent of all voters.

All Southern states were readmitted to the Union by the end of 1870, the last being Georgia. All but 500 top Confederate leaders were pardoned when President Grant signed the Amnesty Act of 1872.

Public schools

As modernizers, the Republicans believed that education was a long-term solution to the poverty and social dislocation of the South. They accordingly created a system of public schools, which were segregated by race everywhere except New Orleans. Most blacks approved the segregated schools because they provided jobs for black teachers and kept their children in a safer learning environment. Teachers were poorly paid, and their pay was often in arrears. Conservatives contended the rural schools were too expensive and unnecessary for a region where the vast majority of people were cotton or tobacco farmers. 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."

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1868 Republican cartoon identifies Democratic candidate Horatio Seymour (right panel) with KKK violence and with Confederate soldiers (left panel)

Numerous private academies and colleges for Freedmen were also established by northern missionaries. Every state created state colleges for Freedmen, and in 1890, after Reconstruction ended, black state colleges started receiving federal funds as land grant schools because many fair-minded Democrats supported the liberal education of both races.

Railroad subsidies and payoffs

Every Southern state subsidized railroads, which modernizers felt could haul the South out of isolation and poverty. Millions of dollars in bonds and subsidies were fraudulently pocketed. One ring in North Carolina spent $200,000 in bribing the legislature and obtained millions in state money for its railroads. Instead of building new track, however, it used the funds to speculate in bonds, reward friends with extravagant fees, and enjoy lavish trips to Europe. Taxes were quadrupled across the South to pay off the railroad bonds and the school costs, leading to intense complaints among taxpayers. Nevertheless thousands of miles of lines were built as the Southern system expanded from 11,000 miles (17,700 km) in 1870 to 29,000 miles (46,700 km) in 1890. The lines were owned and directed overwhelmingly by Northerners. Railroads helped create a mechanically skilled group of craftsmen and indeed broke the isolation of much of the region. Passengers were few, however, and apart from hauling the cotton crop when it was harvested, there was little freight traffic. 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."

Taxpayer revolt

The new spending on schools and especially on railroad subsidies, combined with fraudulent spending and collapsing state credit caused by huge deficits, forced the states to dramatically increase tax rates—up to ten times higher—despite the poverty of the region. Angry taxpayers revolted, and the conservatives shifted their focus away from race to taxes. Former Congressman John Lynch, a black Republican leader from Mississippi, concluded, "The argument made by the taxpayers, however, was plausible and it may be conceded that, upon the whole, they were about right; 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. The latter course, however, had been adopted and could not then be changed."

Views of conservatives in the South

The white Southerners who lost power reformed themselves into "Conservative" parties that battled the Republicans. The party names varied, but by the late 1870s, they simply called themselves "Democrats." Historian Walter Lynwood Fleming describes mounting anger and point of view of Southern whites, racist as it may be: "The Negro troops, even at their best, were everywhere considered offensive by the native whites…. The Negro soldier, impudent by reason of his new freedom, his new uniform, and his new gun, was more than Southern temper could tranquilly bear, and race conflicts were frequent."

Fleming described the first results of the Ku Klux Klan movement as "good" and the later ones as "both good and bad," further reflecting the viewpoints of Southern whites. According to Fleming (1907), the KKK "quieted the Negroes, made life and property safer, gave protection to women, stopped burnings, forced the Radical leaders to be more moderate, made the Negroes work better, drove the worst of the Radical leaders from the country and started the whites on the way to gain political supremacy." The evil results, Fleming said, was that lawless elements "made use of the organization as a cloak to cover their misdeeds … the lynching habits of today [1907] are due largely to conditions, social and legal, growing out of Reconstruction."

Ellis Oberholtzer (a northern scholar) in 1917 explained:

Outrages upon the ex-slaves in the South there were in plenty. Their sufferings were many. But white men, too, were victims of lawless violence, and in all portions of the North as well as in the late "rebel" states. Not a political campaign passed without the exchange of bullets, the breaking of skulls with sticks and stones, the firing of rival club-houses. Republican clubs marched the streets of Philadelphia, amid revolver shots and brickbats, to save the negroes from the "rebel" savages in Alabama…. 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.

Reaction by conservatives included the formation of violent secret societies, especially the Ku Klux Klan. Violence occurred in cities and in the countryside between white former Confederates, Republicans, African-Americans, representatives of the federal government, and Republican-organized armed Loyal Leagues.

Redemption 1873-77

Republicans split nationally: 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. There should have been as little military government as possible; no military commissions; no classes excluded from suffrage; 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. The opponents, called "Liberal Republicans," included founders of the party who expressed dismay that the party had succumbed to corruption. Leaders included editors of some of the nation's most powerful newspapers. Charles Sumner, embittered by the corruption of the Grant administration, joined the new party, which nominated editor Horace Greeley. The badly disorganized Democratic party also supported Greeley.

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.

Republican coalition splinters in South

In the South, political–racial tensions built up inside the Republican party. 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 several states the more conservative scalawags fought for control with the more radical carpetbaggers and usually lost. Thus, in Mississippi, the conservative faction led by scalawag James Lusk Alcorn was decisively defeated by the radical faction led by carpetbagger Adelbert Ames. The party lost support steadily as many scalawags left it; few new recruits were acquired. Meanwhile, the Freedmen were demanding a much bigger share of the offices and patronage, thus squeezing out their carpetbagger allies. Finally some of the more prosperous Freedmen were joining the Democrats, angered at the failure of the Republicans to help them acquire land. Although some Marxist historians, especially W.E.B. Du Bois, looked for and celebrated a cross-racial coalition of poor whites and poor blacks, such coalition rarely formed. Congressman Lynch explains that,

While the colored men did not look with favor upon a political alliance with the poor whites, it must be admitted that, with very few exceptions, that class of whites did not seek, and did not seem to desire such an alliance.

Lynch explains that poor whites resented the job competition from Freedmen. 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.

Thus, the poor whites became Democrats and bitterly opposed the black Republicans.

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. The Grant administration had proven by its crackdown on the Ku Klux Klan that it would use as much federal power as necessary to suppress open anti-black violence. The Democrats in the North concurred. They wanted to fight the GOP on economic grounds rather than race. The New Departure offered the chance for a clean slate without having to refight the Civil War every election. Furthermore, many wealthy landowners thought they could control part of the newly enfranchised black electorate to their own advantage.

Not all Democrats agreed; a hard core element wanted to resist Reconstruction at all costs. Eventually, a group called "Redeemers" took control of the party in the states. They formed coalitions with conservative Republicans, including scalawags and carpetbaggers, emphasizing the need for economic modernization. Railroad building was seen as a panacea since northern capital was needed. The new tactics were a success in Virginia, where William Mahone built a winning coalition. In Tennessee, the Redeemers formed a coalition with Republican governor DeWitt Senter. Across the South, Democrats switched from the race issue to taxes and corruption, charging that Republican governments were corrupt and inefficient, as taxes began squeezing cash-poor farmers who rarely saw $20 in currency a year but had to pay taxes in currency or lose their farm.

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. Republican political disputes in Georgia split the party and enabled the Redeemers to take over. Violence was a factor in neutralizing Republican leaders in the Deep South, with its larger black Republican population. In the North, a live-and-let-live attitude made elections more like a sporting contest. But in the Deep South, it affected the lives of the citizens. As an Alabama scalawag explained, "Our contest here is for life, for the right to earn our bread … for a decent and respectful consideration as human beings and members of society."

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. The price of cotton fell by half; many small landowners, local merchants and cotton factors (wholesalers) went bankrupt. Sharecropping, for both black and white farmers, became more common as a way to spread the risk of owning land. The old abolitionist element in the North was aging away, or had lost interest, and was not replenished. Many carpetbaggers returned to the North or joined the Redeemers. Blacks had an increased voice in the Republican Party, but across the South it was divided by internal bickering and was rapidly losing its cohesion. Many local black leaders started emphasizing individual economic progress in cooperation with white elites, rather than racial political progress in opposition to them, a conservative attitude that foreshadowed Booker T. Washington.

Nationally, President Grant took the blame for the depression; the Republican Party lost 96 seats in all parts of the country in the 1874 elections. The Bourbon Democrats took control of the House and were confident of electing Samuel J. Tilden president in 1876. President Grant was not running for re-election and seemed to be losing interest in the South. States fell to the Redeemers, with only four in Republican hands in 1873, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina; Arkansas then fell after the Brooks-Baxter War in 1874. 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. The violation of tradition embarrassed Grant, and some of his cabinet recommended against further intervention. 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. The victory of Rutherford Hayes in the hotly contested Ohio gubernatorial election of 1875 indicated his "let alone" policy toward the South would become Republican policy, as indeed happened when he won the 1876 GOP nomination for president. The last explosion of violence came in Mississippi's 1875 election, in which Democratic rifle clubs, operating in the open and without disguise, threatened or shot enough Republicans to decide the election for the Redeemers. Republican Governor Adelbert Ames asked Grant for federal troops to fight back; Grant refused, saying public opinion was "tired out" of the perpetual troubles in the South. Ames fled the state as the Democrats took over Mississippi.

1876 election

Reconstruction continued in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida until 1877. After Republican Rutherford Hayes won the disputed U.S. Presidential election of 1876, the Compromise of 1877 was reached whereby the white South agreed to accept Hayes's victory if he withdrew the last Federal troops. 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.

Redeemers in the South

Further information: Jim Crow laws

Further information: Disfranchisement after the Civil War

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 process varied by states and towns. In Virginia, the Redeemers gerrymandered cities to minimize Republican seats; reduced the number of polling places in black precincts; made local officials appointees of the state legislature; and did not allow the vote to felons or to people who failed to pay their annual poll tax.

Much of the Reconstruction civil rights legislation was overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Most notably, the court held in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), that the 14th amendment only gave Congress the power to outlaw public, rather than private, discrimination. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the court went even further, announcing that state-mandated segregation was legal as long as the law provided for "separate but equal" facilities.

Legacy and historiography

The interpretation of Reconstruction has swung back and forth several times. Nearly all historians, however, have concluded that it was a failure. In the 1865-75 period, most writers took the view that the ex-Confederates were traitors and Johnson was their ally who threatened to undo the Union's Constitutional achievements. In the 1870s and 1880s many writers argued that Johnson and his allies were not traitors but blundered badly in rejecting the 14th Amendment and setting the stage for Radical Reconstruction.

The Civil War amendments gave significant power to the Federal Government over the states, and were a significant departure from the original Constitution. Prior to the Civil War, the United States Supreme Court could only rule on disagreements between states. These amendments allowed individuals and corporations to take grievances against their states to the Federal Government. They gave the Supreme Court the power to regulate morality. For example, the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion was based on the 14th amendment. However, such controversial decisions have often divided the nation and undermined the legitimacy of the Court in the minds of those who believe they have a right to make personal moral decisions.

Among black scholars, Booker T. 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." His solution was to concentrate on building the economic infrastructure of the black community.

In popular literature, 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. Other authors romanticized the benevolence of slavery and the happy world of the antebellum plantation. These sentiments were expressed on the screen in D.W. Griffith's anti-Republican 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation.

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. They claimed that it took freedoms and rights from qualified whites and gave them to unqualified blacks who were being duped by corrupt carpetbaggers and scalawags. As one scholar notes, "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. These historians wrote literally in terms of white and black."

In the 1930s, "revisionism" became popular among scholars. As disciples of Charles A. Beard, revisionists focused on economics, downplaying politics and constitutional issues. 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. Those ends were to continue the wartime high protective tariff, the new network of national banks, and to guarantee a "sound" currency. To succeed, the business class had to remove the old ruling agrarian class of Southern planters and Midwestern farmers. 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. Historian William Hesseltine added the point that the Northeastern businessmen wanted to control the South economically, which they did through ownership of the railroads. 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.

In the 1960s, neoabolitionist historians emerged, led by John Hope Franklin, Kenneth Stampp, and Eric Foner. Strongly aligned with the Civil Rights Movement, they rejected the Dunning school and found a great deal to praise in Radical Reconstruction. Foner, the primary advocate of this view, argued that it was never truly completed, and that a Second Reconstruction was needed in the late twentieth century to complete the goal of full equality for African-Americans. The neoabolitionists followed the revisionists in minimizing the corruption and waste created by Republican state governments, saying it was no worse than Boss Tweed's ring in New York City. Instead they emphasized that poor treatment of Freedmen was a worse scandal and a grave corruption of America's republican ideals. 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."

More recent work by Nina Silber, David Blight, Cecelia O'Leary, Laura Edwards, LeeAnn Whites, and Edward J. Blum has 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, and W. Scott Poole have offered new views of the southern "Lost Cause."

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Berlin, Ira. Free at last: a documentary history of slavery, freedom, and the Civil War. New York: The New Press, 1992. ISBN 9781565840157
• Blaine, James Gillespie. Twenty years of Congress, from Lincoln to Garfield with a review of the events which led to the political revolution of 1860. Norwich, Conn: Henry Bill, 1884.
• Fleming, Walter L. Documentary history of reconstruction, political, military, social, religious, educational & industrial, 1865 to the present time. Cleveland, O.: The A.H. Clark Company, 1906.
• Hyman, Harold Melvin. The radical Republicans and Reconstruction, 1861-1870. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1967.
• Palmer, Ochoa, and Harold M Hyman. Book Reviews—The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens. Vol 1: January 1814-March 1865. Vol 2: April 1865-August 1868. The Journal of Southern History. 65 (1):162 1999.
• Sumner, Charles, and Beverly Wilson Palmer.The selected letters of Charles Sumner. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990. ISBN 9781555530785

External links

• Reconstruction: The Second Civil War Retrieved June 20, 2007.
• Guide to Reconstruction HistoryRetrieved June 20, 2007.
• PBS' American Experience: Reconstruction Retrieved June 20, 2007.
• Lincoln and Freedom: Reconstruction Retrieved June 20, 2007.
• Reconstruction in Mississippi Retrieved June 20, 2007.
• "Reconstruction Historiography: A Source of Teaching Ideas" by Robert P. Green, Jr. (1991) Retrieved June 20, 2007.
• Charles Sumner, "Our Domestic Relations: or, How to Treat the Rebel States" Atlantic Monthly September 1863 Retrieved June 20, 2007.
• Reid, Whitelaw. After the war: a southern tour, May 1, 1865 to May 1, 1866. (1866) Retrieved June 20, 2007.
• Barnes, William H., ed. History of the Thirty-ninth Congress of the United States. (1868) Retrieved June 20, 2007.
• Memoirs of W. W. Holden (1911) Retrieved June 20, 2007.
• Full text online The Facts of Reconstruction Retrieved June 20, 2007.

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