Chapter 17 - Review

US:  A Narrative History Volume 1 – Chapter 17 Review

Reconstructing the Union [1865-1877]

The Secret Sale at Davis Bend

Joseph Davis had had enough. Well on in years and financially ruined by the war, he decided to quit farming. In November 1866 he sold his Mississippi plantations Hurricane and Brierfield to Benjamin Montgomery and his sons. The sale of southern plantations was common enough after the war, but this transaction was bound to attract attention, since Joseph Davis was the elder brother of Jefferson Davis. Indeed, before the war the Confederate president had operated Brierfield as his own plantation, although his brother retained legal title to it. In truth, the sale was so unusual that the parties involved agreed to keep it secret, since the Montgomerys were black, and Mississippi law prohibited African Americans from owning land. Though a slave, Montgomery had been the business manager of the two Davis plantations before the war. He had also operated a store on Hurricane Plantation for white as well as black customers with his own line of credit in New Orleans. In 1863 Montgomery fled to the North, but when the war was over, he returned to Davis Bend, where the federal government was leasing plots of the land on confiscated plantations, including Hurricane and Brierfield, to black farmers. Montgomery quickly emerged as the leader of the African American community at the Bend. Then, in 1866, President Andrew Johnson pardoned Joseph Davis and restored his lands. By then Davis was over 80 years old and lacked the will and stamina to rebuild. Yet unlike many ex-slaveholders, he still felt bound by obligations to his former slaves. He was convinced that with proper encouragement African Americans could succeed economically in freedom. Only when the law prohibiting African Americans from owning land was overturned in 1867 did Davis publicly confirm the sale to his former slave. For his part, Montgomery undertook to create a model society at Davis Bend based on mutual cooperation. He rented land to black farmers, hired others to work his own fields, sold supplies on credit, and ginned and marketed the crops. To the growing African American community, he preached the gospel of hard work, self-reliance, and education. Various difficulties dogged these black farmers, including the destruction caused by the war, several disastrous floods, insects, droughts, and declining cotton prices. Yet before long, cotton production exceeded that of the prewar years, and in 1870 the black families at Davis Bend produced 2,500 bales. The Montgomerys eventually acquired another plantation and owned 5,500 acres, which made them reputedly the third largest planters in the state. They won national and international awards for the quality of their cotton. Their success demonstrated what African Americans, given a fair chance, might accomplish. The experiences of Benjamin Montgomery during the years after 1865 were not those of most black southerners, who did not own land or have a powerful white benefactor. Yet Montgomery's dream of economic independence was shared by all African Americans. As one black veteran noted, “Every colored man will be a slave, and feel himself a slave until he can raise him own bale of cotton and put him own mark upon it and say dis is mine!” Blacks could not gain effective freedom simply through a proclamation of emancipation. They needed economic power, including their own land that no one could unfairly take away. For nearly two centuries the laws had prevented slaves from possessing such economic power. If those conditions were to be overturned, black Americans needed political power too. Thus the Republic would have to be reconstructed to give African Americans political power that they had been previously denied. War, in its blunt way, had roughed out the contours of a solution, but only in broad terms. Clearly, African Americans would no longer be enslaved. The North, with its industrial might, would be the driving force in the nation's economy and retain the dominant political voice. But, beyond that, the outlines of a reconstructed Republic remained vague. Would African Americans receive effective power? How would the North and the South readjust their economic and political relations? These s lay at the heart of the problem of Reconstruction.

Presidential Reconstruction

Throughout the war Abraham Lincoln had considered Reconstruction his responsibility. Elected with less than 40 percent of the popular vote in 1860, he was acutely aware that once the states of the Confederacy were restored to the Union, the Republicans would be weakened unless they ceased to be a sectional party. By a generous peace, Lincoln hoped to attract former Whigs in the South, who supported many of the Republicans' economic policies, and build up a southern wing of the party. Lincoln outlined his program in a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction issued in December 1863. When a minimum of 10 percent of the qualified voters from 1860 took a loyalty oath to the Union, they could organize a state government. The new state constitution had to be republican in form, abolish slavery, and provide for black education, but Lincoln did not insist that high-ranking Confederate leaders be barred from public life.

Lincoln indicated that he would be generous in granting pardons and did not rule out compensation for slave property. Moreover, while he privately suggested permitting some black men to vote in the disloyal states, “as for instance, the very intelligent and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks,” he did not demand social or political equality for black Americans, and he recognized pro-Union governments in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee that allowed only white men to vote. The Radical Republicans found Lincoln's approach much too lenient. Strongly antislavery, Radical members of Congress had led the struggle to make emancipation a war aim. Now they were in the forefront in advocating rights for the freed people. Lincoln argued that the executive branch should bear the responsibility for restoring proper relations with the former Confederate states. The Radicals, on the other hand, believed that it was the duty of Congress to set the terms under which states would regain their rights in the Union. Though the Radicals often disagreed on other matters, they were united in a determination to readmit southern states only after slavery had been ended, black rights protected, and the power of the planter class destroyed. Under the direction of Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, Congress formulated a much stricter plan of Reconstruction. It proposed that Confederate states be ruled temporarily by a military governor, required half the white adult males to take an oath of allegiance before drafting a new state constitution, and restricted political power to the hard-core Unionists in each state. When the Wade-Davis bill passed on the final day of the 1864 congressional session, Lincoln exercised his right of a pocket veto. Still, his own program could not succeed without the assistance of Congress, which refused to seat Unionist representatives who had been elected from Louisiana or Arkansas. As the war drew to a close, Lincoln appeared ready to make concessions to the Radicals. At his final cabinet meeting, he approved placing the defeated South temporarily under military rule. But only a few days later Booth's bullet found its mark, and Lincoln's final approach to Reconstruction would never be known.

Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson

In the wake of defeat, the immediate reaction among white southerners was one of shock, despair, and hopelessness. Some former Confederates, of course, were openly antagonistic. A North Carolina innkeeper remarked bitterly that Yankees had stolen his slaves, burned his house, and killed all his sons, leaving him only one privilege: “To hate 'em. I git up at half-past four in the morning, and sit up till twelve at night, to hate 'em.” Most Confederate soldiers were less defiant, having had their fill of war. Even among hostile civilians the feeling was widespread that the South must accept northern terms. A South Carolina paper admitted that “the conquere has the right to make the terms, and we must submit.” This psychological moment was critical. To prevent a resurgence of resistance, the president needed to lay out clearly what white southerners had to do to regain their old status in the Union. Any wavering on the peace terms could only increase the likelihood of resistance. Perhaps even a clear and firm policy would not have been enough. But with Lincoln's death, the executive power came to rest in far less capable hands. Andrew Johnson, the new president, had been born in North Carolina and eventually moved to Tennessee, where he worked as a tailor. Barely able to read and write when he married, he rose to political power by portraying himself as the champion of the people against the wealthy planter class. “Someday I will show the stuck-up aristocrats who is running the country,” he vowed as he began his political career. He had not opposed slavery before the war—in fact; he hoped to disperse slave ownership more widely in southern society. Although he accepted emancipation as one consequence of the war, Johnson remained a confirmed racist. “Damn the negroes,” he said during the war, “I am fighting these traitorous aristocrats, their masters.” Because Johnson disliked the planter class, Republican Radicals in Congress expected him to uphold their views on Reconstruction. In fact, the new president did speak of trying Confederate leaders and breaking up planters' estates. Unlike most Republicans, however, Johnson strongly supported states' rights. Furthermore, his prickly personality made conflict between the president and Congress inevitable. Scarred by his humble origins, Johnson remained an outsider throughout his life. When challenged or criticized he became tactless and inflexible, alienating even those who sought to work with him. Johnson moved quickly to return the southern states to their place in the Union. He prescribed a loyalty oath that white southerners would have to take to regain their civil and political rights and to have their property, except for slaves, restored. Excluded were high Confederate officials and those with property worth over $20,000, who had to apply for individual pardons. Johnson announced that once a state had drafted a new constitution and elected state officers and members of Congress, he would revoke martial law and recognize the new state government. Suffrage was limited to white citizens who had taken the loyalty oath. This plan was similar to Lincoln's, though more lenient. Only informally did Johnson ask that the southern states renounce their ordinances of secession, repudiate the Confederate debt, and ratify the proposed Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery.

The Failure of Johnson's Program

The southern delegates who met to construct new governments were in no frame of mind to follow Johnson's recommendations. Several states merely repealed instead of repudiating their ordinances of secession, rejected the Thirteenth Amendment, or refused to repudiate the Confederate debt. Nor did the new governments allow African Americans any political rights or make any effective provisions for black education. In addition, each state passed a series of laws, often modeled on its old slave code, that applied only to African Americans. These black codes did grant African Americans some rights that had not been enjoyed by slaves. They legalized marriages performed under slavery and allowed black southerners to hold and sell property and to sue and be sued in state courts. Yet their primary purpose was to keep African Americans as propertyless agricultural laborers with inferior legal rights. The new freedmen, or freedpeople, could not serve on juries, testify against whites, or work as they pleased. South Carolina forbade blacks to engage in anything other than agricultural labor without a special license; Mississippi prohibited them from buying or renting farmland. Most states ominously provided that black people who were vagrants could be arrested and hired out to landowners. Many northerners were incensed by the restrictive black codes. Southern voters under Johnson's plan also defiantly elected prominent Confederate military and political leaders to office, headed by Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, who was elected senator from Georgia. At this point, Johnson could have called for new elections or admitted that a different program of Reconstruction was needed. Instead he caved in.For all his harsh rhetoric, he shrank from the prospect of social upheaval, and he found it enormously gratifying when upper-class planters praised his conduct and requested pardons. As the lines of ex-Confederates waiting to see him lengthened, he began issuing special pardons almost as fast as they could be printed. In the next two years he pardoned some 13,500 former rebels. In private, Johnson warned southerners against a reckless course. Publicly he put on a bold face, announcing that Reconstruction had been successfully completed. But many members of Congress were deeply alarmed.

Johnson's Break with Congress

The new Congress was by no means of one mind. A small number of Democrats and a few conservative Republicans backed the president's program. At the other end of the spectrum, a larger group of Radical Republicans, led by Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, Benjamin Wade, and others, was bent on remaking southern society in the image of the North. Reconstruction must “revolutionize Southern institutions, habits, and manners,” insisted Representative Stevens, “… or all our blood and treasure have been spent in vain.” Unlike Johnson, Radicals championed civil and political rights for African Americans and believed that the only way to maintain loyal governments and develop a Republican party in the South was to give black men the ballot. As a minority, the Radicals could accomplish nothing without the aid of the moderate Republicans, the largest bloc in Congress. Led by William Pitt Fessenden and Lyman Trumbull, the moderates hoped to avoid a clash with the president, and they had no desire to foster social revolution or promote racial equality in the South. But they wanted to keep Confederate leaders from reassuming power, and they were convinced that the former slaves needed federal protection. Otherwise, Trumbull declared, the freedpeople would “be tyrannized over, abused, and virtually reenslaved.” Moderates agreed that the new southern governments were too harsh toward African Americans, but they feared that too great an emphasis on black civil rights would alienate northern voters. In December 1865, when southern representatives to Congress appeared in Washington, a majority in Congress voted to exclude them. Congress also appointed a joint committee, chaired by Senator Fessenden, to look into how to implement Reconstruction. The split with the president became clearer when Congress passed a bill extending the life of the Freedmen's Bureau. Created in March 1865, the bureau provided emergency food, clothing, and medical care to war refugees (including white southerners) and took charge of settling freedpeople on abandoned lands. The new bill gave the bureau the added responsibilities of supervising special courts to resolve disputes involving freedpeople and establishing schools for black southerners. Although this bill passed with near unanimous Republican support, Johnson vetoed it. Congress failed to override his veto.Johnson also vetoed a civil rights bill designed to overturn the most severe provisions of the black codes. The law made African Americans citizens of the United States and granted them the right to own property, make contracts, and have access to courts as parties and witnesses. For most Republicans Johnson's action was the last straw, and in April 1866 Congress overrode his veto, the first major legislation in American history to be enacted over a presidential veto. Congress then approved a slightly revised Freedmen's Bureau bill in July and promptly overrode the president's veto. Johnson's refusal to compromise drove the moderates into the arms of the Radicals.

The Fourteenth Amendment

To prevent unrepentant Confederates from taking over the reconstructed state governments and denying African Americans basic freedoms, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction proposed an amendment to the Constitution, which passed both houses of Congress with the necessary two-thirds vote in June 1866. The amendment, coupled with the Freedmen's Bureau and civil rights bills, represented the moderates' terms for Reconstruction. The Fourteenth Amendment put a number of matters beyond the control of the president.The amendment guaranteed repayment of the national war debt and prohibited repayment of the Confederate debt. To counteract the president's wholesale pardons, it disqualified prominent Confederates from holding office and provided that only Congress by a two-thirds vote could remove this penalty. Because moderates, fearful of the reaction of white northerners, balked at giving the vote to African Americans, the amendment merely gave Congress the right to reduce the representation of any state that did not have impartial male suffrage. The practical effect of this provision, which Radicals labeled a “swindle,” was to allow northern states to restrict suffrage to whites if they wished, since unlike southern states they had few African Americans and thus would not be penalized. The amendment's most important provision, Section 1, defined an American citizen as anyone born in the United States or naturalized, thereby automatically making African Americans citizens. Section 1 also prohibited states from abridging “the privileges or immunities” of citizens, depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” or denying “any person … equal protection of the laws.” The framers of the amendment probably intended to prohibit laws that applied to one race only, such as the black codes, or that made certain acts felonies when committed by black but not white people, or that decreed different penalties for the same crime when committed by white and black lawbreakers. The framers probably did not intend to prevent African Americans from being excluded from juries or to forbid segregation (the legal separation of the races) in schools and public places. Nevertheless, Johnson denounced the proposed amendment and urged southern states not to ratify it. Ironically, of the seceded states only the president's own state ratified the amendment, and Congress readmitted Tennessee with no further restrictions. The telegram sent to Congress by a longtime foe of Johnson announcing Tennessee's approval ended, “Give my respects to the dead dog in the White House.” The amendment was ratified in 1868.

The Elections of 1866

When Congress blocked his policies, Johnson undertook a speaking tour of the East and Midwest in the fall of 1866 to drum up popular support. But the president found it difficult to convince northern audiences that white southerners were fully repentant. News that summer of major race riots in Memphis and New Orleans heightened northern concern. Forty-six African Americans died when white mobs invaded the black section of Memphis, burning homes, churches, and schoolhouses. About the same number were killed in New Orleans when whites attacked both black and white delegates to a convention supporting black suffrage. “The negroes now know, to their sorrow, that it is best not to arouse the fury of the white man,” boasted one Memphis newspaper. When the president encountered hostile audiences during his northern campaign, he made matters only worse by trading insults and ranting that the Radicals were traitors. Even supporters found his performance humiliating. Not to be outdone, the Radicals vilified Johnson as a traitor aiming to turn the country over to rebels and Copperheads. Resorting to the tactic of “waving the bloody shirt,” they appealed to voters by reviving bitter memories of the war. In a classic example of such rhetoric, Governor Oliver Morton of Indiana proclaimed that “every bounty jumper, every deserter, every sneak who ran away from the draft” was a Democrat; everyone “who murdered Union prisoners…. In short, the Democratic party may be described as a common sewer.” Voters soundly repudiated Johnson, as the Republicans won more than a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, every northern gubernatorial contest, and control of every northern legislature.

Congressional Reconstruction

With a clear mandate in hand, congressional Republicans passed their own program of Reconstruction, beginning with the first Reconstruction Act in March 1867. Like all later pieces of Reconstruction legislation, it was repassed over Johnson's veto. Placing the 10 unreconstructed states under military commanders, the act directed officials to include black adult males as voters but not former Confederates barred from holding office under the Fourteenth Amendment. State conventions would frame constitutions that provided for black suffrage and that disqualified prominent ex-Confederates from office. The first state legislatures to meet under the new constitution were required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Once these steps were completed and Congress approved the new state constitution, a state could send representatives to Congress. White southerners found these requirements so obnoxious that officials took no steps to register voters. Congress then enacted a second Reconstruction Act, also in March, ordering the local military commanders to put the machinery of Reconstruction into motion. Johnson's efforts to limit the power of military commanders produced a third act, passed in July that upheld their superiority in all matters. When elections were held to ratify the new state constitutions, white southerners boycotted them in large numbers. Undaunted, Congress passed the fourth Reconstruction Act (March 1868), which required ratification of the constitution by only a majority of those voting rather than those who were registered. By June 1868 Congress had readmitted the representatives of seven states. Georgia's state legislature expelled its black members once it had been readmitted, granting seats to those barred by Congress from holding office. Congress ordered the military commander to reverse these actions, and Georgia was then admitted a second time in July 1870. Texas, Virginia, and Mississippi did not complete the process until 1869.

Post-Emancipation Societies in the Americas

With the exception of Haiti's revolution (1791–1804), the United States was the only society in the Americas in which the destruction of slavery was accomplished by violence. But the United States, uniquely among these societies, enfranchised former slaves almost immediately after the emancipation. Thus in the United States former masters and slaves battled for control of the state in ways that did not occur in other post-emancipation societies. In most of the Caribbean, property requirements for voting left the planters in political control. Jamaica, for example, with a population of 500,000 in the 1860s, had only 3,000 voters. Moreover, in reaction to political efforts to mobilize disfranchised black peasants, Jamaican planters dissolved the assembly and reverted to being a Crown colony governed from London. Of the sugar islands, all but Barbados adopted the same policy, thereby blocking the potential for any future black peasant democracy. Nor did any of these societies have the counterparts of the Radical Republicans, a group of outsiders with political power that promoted the fundamental transformation of the post-emancipation South. These comparisons highlight the radicalism of Reconstruction in the United States, which alone saw an effort to forge an interracial democracy.

The Land Issue

While the political process of Reconstruction proceeded, Congress confronted the  of whether land should be given to former slaves to foster economic independence. At a meeting with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton near the end of the war, African American leaders declared, “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and till it by our own labor.” During the war, the Second Confiscation Act of 1862 had authorized the government to seize and sell the property, including land, of supporters of the rebellion. In June 1866, however, President Johnson ruled that confiscation laws applied only to wartime. Congress debated land confiscation off and on from December 1865 until early 1867. Thaddeus Stevens, a leading Radical in the House, advocated confiscating 394 million acres of land from about 70,000 of what he termed the “chief rebels” in the South, who made up less than 5 percent of the South's white families. He proposed to give 40 acres to every adult male freedperson and then sell the remaining land, which would amount to nine-tenths of the total, to pay off the public debt, compensate loyal southerners for losses they suffered during the war, and fund Union veterans' pensions. Land, he insisted, would be far more valuable to African Americans than the right to vote. But in the end Congress rejected all proposals. Given Americans' strong belief in self-reliance, little sympathy existed for the idea that government should support any group. In addition, land redistribution represented an attack on property rights, another cherished American value. By 1867 land reform was dead.

Impeachment

Throughout 1867 Congress routinely overrode Johnson's vetoes. Still, the president had other ways of undercutting congressional Reconstruction. He interpreted the new laws as narrowly as possible and removed military commanders who vigorously enforced them. Congress responded by restricting Johnson's power to issue orders to military commanders in the South. It also passed the Tenure of Office Act, which forbade Johnson to remove any member of the cabinet without the Senate's consent. The intention of this law was to prevent him from firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the only radical in the cabinet. When Johnson tried to dismiss Stanton in February 1868, the determined secretary of war barricaded himself in his office (where he remained night and day for about two months). Angrily, the House of Representatives approved articles of impeachment. The articles focused on the violation of the Tenure of Office Act, but the charge with the most substance was that Johnson had conspired to systematically obstruct Reconstruction legislation. In the trial before the Senate, his lawyers argued that a president could be impeached only for an indictable crime, which Johnson clearly had not committed. The Radicals countered that impeachment applied to political offenses and not merely criminal acts. In May 1868 the Senate voted 36 to 19 to convict, one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed. The seven Republicans who joined the Democrats in voting for acquittal were uneasy about using impeachment as a political weapon. The Radicals had reached the height of their power.

Reconstruction in the South

The refusal of Congress to convict Johnson sent a clear signal: the power of the Radicals in Congress was waning. Increasingly the success or failure of Reconstruction hinged on developments not in Congress but in the southern states themselves. Power there rested with the new Republican parties, representing a coalition of black and white southerners and transplanted northerners.

Black and White Republicans

Almost from the beginning of Reconstruction, African Americans had lobbied for the right to vote. After they received the franchise, black men constituted as much as 80 percent of the Republican voters in the South. They steadfastly opposed the Democratic Party with its appeal to white supremacy. Throughout Reconstruction, African Americans never held office in proportion to their voting strength. No African American was ever elected governor, and only in South Carolina, where more than 60 percent of the population was black, did they control even one house of the legislature. During Reconstruction between 15 and 20 percent of the state officers and 6 percent of members of Congress (2 senators and 15 representatives) were black. Only in South Carolina did black officeholders approach their proportion of the population. Blacks who held office generally came from the top levels of African-American society. Among state and federal officeholders, perhaps four-fifths were literate, and more than a quarter had been free before the war, both marks of distinction in the black community. Their occupations also set them apart: two-fifths were professionals (mostly clergy), and of the third who were farmers, nearly all owned land. Among black members of Congress, all but three had a secondary school education, and four had gone to college. In their political and social values, African-American leaders were more conservative than the rural black population was, and they showed little interest in land reform. Black citizens were a majority of the voters only in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Thus in most of the South the Republican Party had to secure white votes to stay in power. Opponents scornfully labeled white southerners who allied with the Republican Party scalawags, yet an estimated quarter of white southerners at one time voted Republican. Although the party appealed to some wealthy planters, they were outnumbered by Unionists from the upland counties and hill areas who were largely yeoman farmers. Such voters were attracted by Republican promises to rebuild the South, restore prosperity, create public schools, and open isolated areas to the market with railroads.

The other group of white Republicans in the South was known as carpetbaggers. Originally from the North, they allegedly had arrived with all their worldly possessions stuffed in a carpetbag, ready to plunder the defeated South. Some did, but northerners moved south for a variety of reasons. Those in political office were especially well educated. Though carpetbaggers made up only a small percentage of Republican voters, they controlled almost a third of the offices. More than half of all southern Republican governors and nearly half of Republican members of Congress were originally northerners. The Republican Party in the South had difficulty maintaining unity. Scalawags were especially susceptible to the race issue and social pressure. “Even my own kinspeople have turned the cold shoulder to me because I hold office under a Republican administration,” testified a Mississippi white Republican. As black southerners pressed for greater recognition and a greater share of the offices, white southerners increasingly defected to the Democrats. Carpetbaggers were less sensitive to race, although most felt that their black allies should be content with minor offices. The friction between scalawags and carpetbaggers, which grew out of their rivalry for party honors, was particularly intense.

Reforms under the New State Governments

The new southern state constitutions enacted several reforms. They put in place fairer systems of legislative representation, allowed voters to elect many officials who before had been appointed, and abolished property requirements for officeholding. In South Carolina, for the first time, voters were allowed to vote for the president, governor, and other state officers. (Previously, presidential electors as well as the governor had been chosen by the South Carolina legislature.) The Radical state governments also assumed some responsibility for social welfare and established the first statewide systems of public schools in the South. All the new constitutions proclaimed the principle of equality and granted black adult males the right to vote. On social relations they were much more cautious. No state outlawed segregation, and South Carolina and Louisiana were the only states that required integration in public schools (a mandate that was almost universally ignored).

Economic Issues and Corruption

The war left the southern economy in ruins, and problems of economic reconstruction were as difficult as those of politics. The new Republican governments encouraged industrial development by providing subsidies, loans, and even temporary exemptions from taxes. These governments also largely rebuilt the southern railroad system, often offering lavish aid to railroad corporations. The investments in the South helped double its manufacturing establishments in the two decades after 1860. Yet the harsh reality was that the South steadily slipped further behind the booming industrial economy of the North. The expansion of government services offered temptations for corruption. In many southern states, officials regularly received bribes and kickbacks for their award of railroad charters, franchises, and other contracts. By 1872 the debts of the 11 states of the Confederacy had increased by $132 million, largely because of railroad grants and new social services such as schools. The tax rate grew as expenditures went up, so that by the 1870s it was four times the rate of 1860. Corruption, however, was not only a southern problem: the decline in morality affected the entire nation. During these years in New York City alone, the Democratic Tweed Ring stole more money than all the Radical Republican governments in the South combined. Moreover, corruption in the South was hardly limited to Republicans. Many Democrats and white business leaders participated in the looting. “Everybody is demoralizing down here. Corruption is the fashion,” reported Louisiana governor Henry Warmoth. Corruption in Radical governments existed, but southern whites exaggerated its extent for partisan purposes. Conservatives just as bitterly opposed honest Radical regimes as they did corrupt ones. In the eyes of most white southerners the real crime of the Radical governments was that they allowed black citizens to hold some offices and tried to protect the civil rights of African Americans. Race was the conservatives' greatest weapon. And it would prove the most effective means to undermine Republican power in the South.

Black Aspirations

Emancipation came to slaves in different ways and at different times. For some it arrived during the war when Union soldiers entered an area; for others it came some time after the Confederacy's collapse, when Union troops or officials announced that they were free. Whatever the timing, freedom meant a host of precious blessings to people who had been in bondage all their lives.

Experiencing Freedom

The first impulse was to think of freedom as a contrast to slavery. Emancipation immediately released slaves from the most oppressive aspects of bondage—the whippings, the breakup of families, the sexual exploitation. Freedom also meant movement, the right to travel without a pass or white permission. Above all, freedom meant that African-Americans' labor would be for their own benefit. One Arkansas freedman, who earned his first dollar working on a railroad, recalled that when he was paid, “I felt like the richest man in the world.” Freedom included finding a new place to work. Changing jobs was one concrete way to break the psychological ties of slavery. Even planters with reputations for kindness sometimes saw their former hands depart. The cook who left a South Carolina family even though they offered her higher wages than her new job explained, “I must go. If I stays here I'll never know I'm free.” Symbolically, freedom meant having a full name, and African Americans now adopted last names. More than a few took the last name of some prominent individual; more common was to take the name of the first master in the family's oral history as far back as it could be recalled. Most, however, retained their first name, especially if the name had been given to them by their parents (as most often had been the case among slaves). It had been their form of identity in bondage, and for those separated from their family it was the only link with their parents. Whatever name they took, it was important to black Americans that they make the decision themselves without white interference.

  

The Black Family

African Americans also sought to strengthen the family in freedom. Because slave marriages had not been recognized as legal, thousands of former slaves insisted on being married again by proper authorities, even though a ceremony was not required by law. Blacks who had been forcibly separated in slavery and later remarried confronted the dilemma of which spouse to take. Laura Spicer, whose husband had been sold away in slavery, received a series of wrenching letters from him after the war. He had thought her dead, had remarried, and had a new family. “You know it never was our wishes to be separated from each other, and it never was our fault. I had rather anything to had happened to me most than ever have been parted from you and the children,” he wrote. “As I am, I do not know which I love best, you or Anna.” Declining to return, he closed, “Laura, truly, I have got another wife, and I am very sorry….” Like white husbands, black husbands deemed themselves the head of the family and acted legally for their wives. They often insisted that their wives would not work in the fields as they had in slavery, a decision that had major economic repercussions for agricultural labor. In negotiating contracts, a father also demanded the right to control his children and their labor. All these changes were designed to insulate the black family from white control.

The Schoolhouse and the Church

In freedom, the schoolhouse and the black church became essential institutions in the black community. Next to ownership of land, African Americans saw education as the best hope for advancement. At first, northern churches and missionaries, working with the Freedmen's Bureau, set up black schools in the South. Tuition represented 10 percent or more of a laborer's monthly wages. Yet these schools were full. Many parents sent their children by day and attended classes themselves at night. Eventually, the Bureau schools were replaced by the new public school systems, which by 1876 enrolled 40 percent of African American children. Black adults had good reasons for seeking literacy. They wanted to be able to read the Bible, to defend their newly gained civil and political rights, and to protect themselves from being cheated. One elderly Louisiana freedman explained that giving children an education was better than giving them a fortune, “because if you left them even $500, some man having more education than they had would come along and cheat them out of it all.” After living for years in a society where teaching slaves to read and write was usually illegal, freedpeople viewed literacy as a key to securing their newfound freedom. Blacks were not merely “ anxious to learn,” a school official in Virginia reported, they were “crazy to learn.” Teachers in the Freedmen's Bureau schools were primarily northern middle-class white women sent south by northern missionary societies. “I feel that it is a precious privilege,” Esther Douglass wrote, “to be allowed to do something for these poor people.” Many saw themselves as peacetime soldiers, struggling to make emancipation a reality. Indeed, on more than one occasion, hostile white southerners destroyed black schools and threatened and even murdered white teachers. Then there were the everyday challenges: low pay, dilapidated buildings, lack of sufficient books, classes of 100 or more children, and irregular attendance. Meanwhile, the Freedmen's Bureau undertook to train black teachers, and by 1869 most of the 3,000 teachers in freedmen's schools were black. Before the war, most slaves had attended white churches or services supervised by whites. Once free, African Americans quickly established their own congregations led by black preachers. In the first year of freedom, the Methodist Church South lost fully half of its black members. By 1870 the Negro Baptist Church had increased its membership threefold when compared to the membership in 1850, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church expanded at an even greater rate. Black churches were so important because they were the only major organizations in the African American community controlled by blacks. Black ministers were respected leaders, and many of the black men elected to office during Reconstruction were preachers. As it had in slavery, religion offered African Americans a place of refuge in a hostile white world and provided them with hope, comfort, and a means of self-identification.

New Working Conditions

As a largely propertyless class, blacks in the postwar South had no choice but to work for white landowners. Except for paying wages, whites wanted to retain the old system of labor, including close supervision, gang labor, and physical punishment. Determined to remove all emblems of servitude, African Americans refused to work under these conditions, and they demanded time off to devote to their own interests. Convinced that working at one's own pace was part of freedom, they simply would not work as long or as hard as they had in slavery. Because of shorter hours and the withdrawal of children and women from the fields, work output declined by an estimated 35 percent in freedom. Blacks also refused to live in the old slave quarters located near the master's house. Instead, they erected cabins on distant parts of the plantation. Wages at first were $5 or $6 a month plus provisions and a cabin; by 1867, they had risen to an average of $10 a month. These changes eventually led to the rise of sharecropping. Under this arrangement African-American families farmed separate plots of land and then at the end of the year split the crop with the white landowner. Sharecropping had higher status and offered greater personal freedom than being a wage laborer. “I am not working for wages,” one black farmer declared in defending his right to leave the plantation at will, “but am part owner of the crop and as [such,] I have all the rights that you or any other man has.” Although black per capita agricultural income increased 40 percent in freedom, sharecropping was a harshly exploitative system in which black families often sank into perpetual debt.The task of supervising the transition from slavery to freedom on southern plantations fell to the Freedmen's Bureau, a unique experiment in social policy supported by the federal government. Assigned the task of protecting freedpeople's economic rights, approximately 550 local agents supervised and regulated working conditions in southern agriculture after the war. The racial attitudes of Bureau agents varied widely, as did their commitment and competence. Then, too, they had to depend on the army to enforce their decisions. Most agents encouraged or required written contracts between white planters and black laborers, specifying not only wages but also the conditions of employment. Although agents sometimes intervened to protect freedpeople from unfair treatment, they also provided important help to planters. They insisted that black laborers not desert at harvest time; they arrested those who violated their contracts or refused to sign new ones at the beginning of the year; and they preached the gospel of work and the need to be orderly and respectful. Given such attitudes, freedpeople increasingly complained that Bureau agents were mere tools of the planter class. “They are, in fact, the planters' guards, and nothing else,” claimed the New Orleans Tribune, a black newspaper. The primary means of enforcing working conditions were the Freedmen's Courts, which Congress created in 1866 to avoid the discrimination African Americans received in state courts. These new courts functioned as military tribunals, and often the agent was the entire court. The sympathy black laborers received varied from state to state. But in 1869, with the Bureau's work scarcely under way, Congress decided to shut it down, and by 1872 it had gone out of business. Despite its mixed record, it was the most effective agency in protecting blacks' civil and political rights. Its disbanding signaled the beginning of the northern retreat from Reconstruction.

Planters and a New Way of Life

Planters and other white southerners faced emancipation with dread. “All the traditions and habits of both races had been suddenly overthrown,” a Tennessee planter recalled, “and neither knew just what to do, or how to accommodate themselves to the new situation.” Slavery had been a complex institution that welded black and white southerners together in intimate relationships. After the war, however, planters increasingly embraced the ideology of segregation. Because emancipation significantly reduced the social distance between the races, white southerners sought psychological separation and kept dealings with African Americans to a minimum.

By the time Reconstruction ended, white planters had developed a new way of life based on the institutions of sharecropping and segregation and undergirded by a militant white supremacy.

Although most planters kept their land, they did not regain the economic prosperity of the prewar years. Rice plantations, unsuitable to tenant farming, largely disappeared after the war. In addition, southern cotton growers faced increased competition from new areas such as India, Egypt, and Brazil. Cotton prices began a long decline, and by 1880 the value of southern farms had slid 33 percent below the level of 1860.

The Abandonment of Reconstruction

On Christmas Day 1875, A white acquaintance approached Charles Caldwell on the streets of Clinton, Mississippi, and invited him into Chilton's store to have a drink to celebrate the holiday. A former slave, Caldwell was a state senator and the leader of the Republican party in Hinds County, Mississippi. But the black leader's fearlessness made him a marked man. Only two months earlier, he had been forced to flee the county to escape a white mob angry about a Republican barbecue he and his fellow Republicans had organized. For four days the mob hunted down and killed nearly 40 Republican leaders for presuming to hold a political meeting. Despite that hostility, Caldwell had returned to vote in the November state election. Even more boldly, he had led a black militia company through the streets to help quell the disturbances. Now, as Caldwell and his “friend” raised their glasses in a holiday toast, a gunshot exploded through the window. Caldwell collapsed, mortally wounded from a bullet to the back of his head. He was taken outside, where his assassins riddled his body with bullets. Charles Caldwell shared the fate of more than a few southern black Republicans. Southern whites used violence, terror, and political assassination to challenge the federal government's commitment to Reconstruction. If northerners had boldly countered such terrorism, Reconstruction might have ended differently. But in the years following President Johnson's impeachment trial in 1868, the influence of Radical Republicans steadily waned. The Republican party was being drained of the crusading idealism that had stamped its early years.

The Grant Administration

Immensely popular after the war, Ulysses S. Grant was the natural choice of Republicans to run for president in 1868. Although Grant was elected, Republicans were shocked that despite his great military stature, his popular margin was only 300,000 votes. An estimated 450,000 black Republican votes had been cast in the South, which meant that a majority of whites casting ballots had voted Democratic. The 1868 election helped convince Republican leaders that an amendment securing black suffrage throughout the nation was necessary. In February 1869 Congress sent the Fifteenth Amendment to the states for ratification. It forbade any state to deny the right to vote on grounds of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Some Radicals had hoped to forbid literacy or property requirements to protect blacks further. Others wanted a simple declaration that all adult male citizens had the right to vote. But the moderates in the party were aware that many northerners were increasingly worried about the number of immigrants who were again entering the country and wanted to be able to restrict their voting. As a result, the final amendment left loopholes that eventually allowed southern states to disfranchise African Americans. The amendment was ratified in March 1870, aided by the votes of the four southern states that had not completed the process of Reconstruction and thus were also required to endorse this amendment before being readmitted to Congress. Proponents of women's suffrage were gravely disappointed when Congress refused to prohibit voting discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race. The Women's Loyal League, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, had pressed for first the Fourteenth and then the Fifteenth Amendment to recognize women's public role. But even most Radicals, contending that black rights had to be ensured first, were unwilling to back women's suffrage.The Fifteenth Amendment ruptured the feminist movement. Although disappointed that women were not included in its provisions, Lucy Stone and the American Woman Suffrage Association urged ratification. Stanton and Anthony, however, broke with their former allies among the Radicals, denounced the amendment, and organized the National Woman Suffrage Association to work for passage of a new amendment giving women the ballot. The division hampered the women's rights movement for decades to come. Ulysses Grant was ill at ease with the political process. His simple, quiet manner, while superb for commanding armies, did not serve him as well in public life, and his well-known resolution withered when he was uncertain of his goal. Also, he lacked the moral commitment to make Reconstruction succeed. A series of scandals wracked Grant's presidency. Although Grant did not profit personally, he remained loyal to his friends and displayed little zeal to root out wrongdoing. His relatives were implicated in a scheme to corner the gold market, and his private secretary escaped conviction for stealing federal whiskey revenues only because Grant interceded on his behalf. His secretary of war resigned to avoid impeachment. Nor was Congress immune from the lowered tone of public life. In such a climate ruthless state machines, led by men who favored the status quo, came to dominate the party. Office and power became ends in themselves, and party leaders worked in close cooperation with northern industrial interests. The few Radicals still active in public life increasingly repudiated Grant and the Republican governments in the South. Congress in 1872 passed an amnesty act, removing the restrictions of the Fourteenth Amendment on officeholding except for about 200 to 300 ex-Confederate leaders. As corruption in both the North and the South worsened, reformers became more interested in cleaning up government than in protecting blacks' rights. These liberal Republicans opposed the continued presence of the army in the South, denounced the corruption of southern governments as well as the national government, and advocated free trade and civil service reform. In 1872 they broke with the Republican party and nominated for president Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune. A onetime Radical, Greeley had become disillusioned with Reconstruction and urged a restoration of home rule in the South as well as adoption of civil service reform. Democrats decided to back the Liberal Republican ticket. The Republicans renominated Grant, who, despite the defection of a number of prominent Radicals, won an easy victory with 56 percent of the popular vote.

Growing Northern Disillusionment

During Grant's second term, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the last major piece of Reconstruction legislation. This law prohibited racial discrimination in all public accommodations, transportation, places of amusement, and juries. At the same time, Congress rejected a ban on segregation in public schools, which was almost universally practiced in the North as well as the South. Although some railroads, streetcars, and public accommodations in both sections were desegregated after the bill passed, the federal government made little attempt to enforce the law, and it was ignored throughout most of the South. In 1883 the Supreme Court struck down its provisions except the one relating to juries. Grant swings from a trapeze while supporting a number of associates accused of corruption. Among those holding on are Secretary of the Navy George M. Robeson (top center), who was accused of accepting bribes for awarding navy contracts; Secretary of War William W. Belknap (top right), who was forced to resign for selling Indian post traderships; and the president's private secretary, Orville Babcock (bottom right), who was implicated in the Whiskey Ring scandal. Although not personally involved in the scandals during his administration, Grant was reluctant to dismiss supporters accused of wrongdoing from office. Despite passage of the Civil Rights Act, many northerners were growing disillusioned with Reconstruction. They were repelled by the corruption of the southern governments, they were tired of the violence and disorder in the South, and they had little faith in black Americans. “We have tried this long enough,” remarked one influential northern Republican of Reconstruction. “Now let the South alone.” As the agony of the war became more distant, the Panic of 1873 diverted public attention from Reconstruction to economic issues. In the severe depression that followed over the next four years, some 3 million people found themselves out of work. Congress became caught up in the  of whether printing greenbacks would help the economy prosper. Battered by the panic and the corruption issue, the Republicans lost a shocking 77 seats in Congress in the 1874 elections, and along with them control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1861. “The truth is our people are tired out with the worn out cry of ‘Southern outrages’!!” one Republican concluded. “Hard times and heavy taxes make them wish the ‘everlasting nigger’ were in hell or Africa.” Republicans spoke more and more about cutting loose the unpopular southern governments.

The Triumph of White Supremacy

As northern commitment to Reconstruction waned, southern Democrats set out to overthrow the remaining Radical governments. White Republicans already in the South felt heavy pressure to desert their party. In Mississippi one party member justified his decision to leave on the grounds that otherwise he would have “to live a life of social oblivion” and his children would have no future. To poor white southerners who lacked social standing, the Democratic appeal to racial solidarity offered great comfort. As one explained, “I may be poor and my manners may be crude, but … because I am a white man, I have a right to be treated with respect by Negroes…. That I am poor is not as important as that I am a white man; and no Negro is ever going to forget that he is not a white man.” The large landowners and other wealthy groups that led southern Democrats objected less to black southerners voting. These well-to-do leaders did not face social and economic competition from African Americans, and in any case, they were confident that if outside influences were removed, they could control the black vote. Democrats also resorted to economic pressure to undermine Republican power. In heavily black counties, white observers at the polls took down the names of black residents who cast Republican ballots and published them in local newspapers. Planters were urged to discharge black tenants who persisted in voting Republican. But terror and violence provided the most effective means to overthrow the Radical regimes. A number of paramilitary organizations broke up Republican meetings, terrorized white and black Republicans, assassinated Republican leaders, and prevented black citizens from voting. The most famous was the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1866 in Tennessee. It and similar groups functioned as unofficial arms of the Democratic Party. In the war for supremacy, contesting control of the night was of paramount concern to both southern whites and blacks. Before emancipation, masters attempted to control the nighttime hours, with a system of passes and patrols that chased slaves who went hunting or tried to sneak a visit to a family member at a neighboring plantation. For slaves the night provided precious hours not devoted to work: time to read, to meet for worship, school, or dancing. During Reconstruction, African Americans actively took back the night for a host of activities, including a custom that white Americans had enjoyed since the beginning of the republic: torchlight political parades. Part of the Klan's mission was to recoup this contested ground and to limit the ability of African Americans to use the night as they pleased. Sometimes the Klan's threat of violence was indirect: one or two riders galloping through black neighborhoods rattling fences with lances. Other times several “dens” of the KKK might gather to ride from plantation to plantation over the course of a night, stopping in every black home they could reach and demanding all firearms. Other times the violence was direct: beatings and executions—again, heightened by the dark of night. Then in 1875 Democrats inaugurated what became known as the Mississippi Plan, the decision to use as much violence as necessary to carry the state election. Several local papers trumpeted, “Carry the election peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must.” When Republican governor Adelbert Ames requested federal troops to stop the violence, Grant's advisers warned that sending troops to Mississippi would cost the party the Ohio election. In the end the administration told Ames to depend on his own forces. Bolstered by terrorism, the Democrats swept the election in Mississippi.Violence and intimidation prevented as many as 60,000 black and white Republicans from voting, converting the normal Republican majority into a Democratic majority of 30,000. Mississippi had been “redeemed.”

The Disputed Election of 1876

With Republicans on the defensive across the nation, the 1876 presidential election was crucial to the final overthrow of Reconstruction. The Republicans nominated Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes to oppose Samuel Tilden of New York. Once again, violence prevented many Republican votes, this time an estimated quarter of a million, from being cast in the South. Tilden had a clear majority of 250,000 in the popular vote, but the outcome in the Electoral College was in doubt because both parties claimed South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, the only reconstructed states still in Republican hands. Hayes needed all three states to be elected, for even without them, Tilden had amassed 184 electoral votes, one short of a majority. Republican canvassing boards in power disqualified enough Democratic votes to give each state to Hayes. To arbitrate the disputed returns, Congress established a 15-member electoral commission: 5 members each from the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court. By a straight party vote of 8–7, the commission awarded the disputed electoral votes—and the presidency—to Hayes. When angry Democrats threatened a filibuster to prevent the electoral votes from being counted, key Republicans met with southern Democrats on February 26 at the Wormley Hotel in Washington. There they reached an informal understanding, later known as the Compromise of 1877. Hayes's supporters agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South and not oppose the new Democratic state governments. For their part, southern Democrats dropped their opposition to Hayes's election and pledged to respect the rights of African Americans. Without federal support, the Republican governments in South Carolina and Louisiana promptly collapsed, and Democrats took control of the remaining states of the Confederacy. By 1877, the entire South was in the hands of the Redeemers, as they called themselves. Reconstruction and Republican rule had come to an end.

Racism and the Failure of Reconstruction

Reconstruction failed for a multitude of reasons. The reforming impulse that had created the Republican Party in the 1850s had been battered and worn down by the war. The new materialism of industrial America inspired in many Americans a jaded cynicism about the corruption of the age and a desire to forget uncomfortable issues. In the South, African-American voters and leaders inevitably lacked a certain amount of education and experience; elsewhere, Republicans were divided over policies and options. Yet beyond these obstacles, the sad fact remains that the ideals of Reconstruction were most clearly defeated by the deep-seated racism that permeated American life. Racism was why the white South so unrelentingly resisted Reconstruction. Racism was why most white northerners had little interest in black rights except as a means to preserve the Union or to safeguard the Republic.  Racism was why northerners were willing to write off Reconstruction and with it the welfare of African Americans. While Congress might pass a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, it could not overturn at a stroke the social habits of two centuries. Certainly the political equations of power, in the long term, had been changed. The North had fought fiercely during the war to preserve the Union. In doing so, it had secured the power to dominate the economic and political destiny of the nation. With the overthrow of Reconstruction, the white South had won back some of the power it had lost in 1865. But even with white supremacy triumphant, African Americans did not return to the social position they had occupied before the war. They were no longer slaves, and black southerners who walked dusty roads in search of family members, sent their children to school, or worshiped in churches they controlled knew what momentous change emancipation was. Even under the exploitative sharecropping system, black income rose significantly in freedom. Then, too, the Fourteenth Amendment principles of “equal protection” and “due process of law” had been written into the Constitution. These guarantees would be available for later generations to use in championing once again the Radicals' goal of racial equality. But this was a struggle left to future reformers. For the time being, the clear trend was away from change or hope—especially for former slaves like Benjamin Montgomery and his sons, the owners of the old Davis plantations in Mississippi. In the 1870s bad crops, lower cotton prices, and falling land values undermined the Montgomerys' financial position, and in 1875 Jefferson Davis sued to have the sale of Brierfield invalidated. A lower court ruled against him, since he had never received legal title to the plantation. Davis appealed to the state supreme court, which, following the overthrow of Mississippi's Radical government, had a white conservative majority. In a politically motivated decision, the court awarded Brierfield to Davis in 1878, and the Montgomerys lost Hurricane as well. Reconstruction was over and done, along with the hopes that came with it. The waning days of Reconstruction were filled with such ironies: of governments “redeemed” by violence and Supreme Court decisions using Fourteenth Amendment rights to protect giant corporations rather than individual African Americans. Increasingly, the industrial North focused on the economic task of integrating the South and West into the Union. Northern factories sought southern and western raw materials (cotton, timber, cattle, and minerals) to produce goods to sell in national and international markets. This trend was global in scope. During the coming decades European nations also scrambled to acquire natural resources and markets. In the onrushing age of imperialism, Western nations would seek to dominate newly acquired colonies in Africa and Asia. There would be gold rushes in South Africa as well as in the United States, vast cattle ranches in Argentina and Canada as well as across the American Great Plains. Farmers would open up lands in New Zealand and Australia as well as in Oklahoma and Wyoming. And just as racism replaced slavery as the central justification for white supremacy in the South, it promoted the campaigns against Indians and Hispanics in the West and in a belief in “inferior races” to be swept aside by imperialists all across the world. The ideal of a truly diverse and democratic society remained largely unsought and unfulfilled.

Chapter Overview

The chapter begins by examining the saga of Benjamin Montgomery, an extraordinary ex-slave who purchased the plantation of Confederate president Jefferson Davis after the war. Through energy and hard work, Montgomery became a leading planter in the postwar South during the period of Reconstruction, when the South began the process of resuming its place in the Union. Montgomery's hopes and aspirations, as well as his ultimate failure, symbolized both the possibilities for radical change in the South and the ultimate tragedy of Reconstruction for black Americans.

Presidential Reconstruction
The magnitude of potential problems facing Reconstruction forced Lincoln to consider the issue even during the war. He favored a less stringent plan than Congress did, since he wanted to bring states back into the Union quickly and simultaneously build up a Republican Party in the South. Radical Republicans in Congress, on the other hand, doubted southern whites' loyalty, wanted to punish the South, and saw blacks as the only sizable loyal group in the region. Lincoln vetoed the Radicals' plan in 1864, but by war's end he seemed to move in the direction of the Radicals. Lincoln's assassination elevated Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat from Tennessee, to the presidency. In this critical moment, with southerners bewildered and looking for guidance, it became crucial that the president make clear what the federal government required of them. Johnson moved in the summer of 1865 to enact Lincoln's program, but in so doing he changed its terms and lessened its requirements.

Under Johnson's guidelines, all the former states of the Confederacy established new state governments in 1865. Yet southern whites refused to give blacks many civil rights enjoyed by whites, instead passing a series of black codes. These laws applied only to blacks, and attempted to keep them an uneducated and an agricultural laboring class without property. White southerners defiant election of prominent former Confederates to office proved equally disturbing to northerners. Congress repudiated Johnson's program in December 1865, and refused to seat the senators and members of Congress from the former Confederate states. Instead, it extended the life of the Freedmen's Bureau over Johnson's veto in order to provide assistance to freed people (former slaves) and passed the Fourteenth Amendment, sending it to the states for ratification. This amendment made blacks citizens, extended basic civil rights to all citizens, required prominent Confederates to receive a pardoned from Congress, and indirectly provided for black male suffrage in the South. Of the Confederate states, only Tennessee ratified the amendment and thus received prompt readmission to the Union. The remaining 10 states still lacked congressional representation and remained under military rule. Breaking with Congress, Johnson took his case to the northern people in the fall elections of 1866. To his dismay, Republicans won a sweeping victory, including more than a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress (thus allowing them to override any presidential veto).

Congressional Reconstruction
Given a popular mandate, Republicans in Congress proceeded to enact their own program of Reconstruction, requiring the unreconstructed states to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and adopt black suffrage. States that delayed the process also had to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment, which forbid racial tests for voting. Congress refused, however, to redistribute land to the freedmen, believing that giving blacks the ballot and civil rights was sufficient.

Johnson remained at odds with Congress and tried to obstruct the will of the legislative branch by interpreting laws as narrowly as possible and removing army generals in the South who sympathized with Congress on Reconstruction.

When the president attempted to remove Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Radical, in violation of the new Tenure of Office Act, the House finally impeached Johnson. Despite his obstructionism, the Senate acquitted him by one vote. Those Republican Senators who voted for acquittal believed that Johnson had not committed any crime, only political errors, and they were uneasy about using the impeachment process to resolve a political dispute between the two branches of government. Johnson served out the remainder of his term, but the power of the Radicals had peaked. The Supreme Court refused to intervene in the dispute between Johnson and Congress, and it declined to rule on the constitutionality of Reconstruction. It adopted the position that Reconstruction was an extraordinary situation and thus essentially a political matter.

Reconstruction in the South
Under Congress' program, radical governments assumed power in the South. Despite the complaints and allegations of unreconstructed southerners, black southerners controlled none of these governments. Only in South Carolina, where a majority of the voters were African Americans, did black officeholders approximate their proportion of the population. Black officeholders, who ranged widely in ability, generally came from the top rungs of African-American society. In most southern states, black voters proved insufficient to form a majority; the Republican Party needed white support as well. Native white southerners called their counterparts who joined the Republicans scalawags; these men were often Unionists from the hill counties, or former Whigs attracted by the party's economic nationalism. Northerners who came to the South after the war and held public office were derisively referred to as carpetbaggers. Contrary to their image, they were not all poor and self-interested, but they proved much more sympathetic to black rights than did southern-born white Republicans and disproportionately held office--especially the highest offices--in the Republican regimes. The new southern state constitutions adopted some important reforms, most notably the establishment of public schools. But they remained cautious on the issue of racial equality and did not forbid segregation. The southern Republican governments confronted the problem of rebuilding the war-ravaged South. They sought to encourage industrialization and expand the railroad network. Taxes went up with expenditures, and these governments came under heavy attack for corruption. Corruption certainly existed--indeed, it was a nationwide problem--but opponents exaggerated its extent for partisan purposes. In truth, the major objection of opponents to these governments was that they shared power with blacks.

Black Aspirations
Initially, black southerners thought of freedom largely as a contrast to slavery: it meant the right to move about, to choose their employer, and to prevent physical punishment and the breakup of families. In freedom, blacks moved to protect the black family and gain educational rights. The Freedmen's Bureau initially established black schools in the South, and thousands of adults as well as children enrolled, even though the schools charged a fee. Blacks also left the white-controlled churches and established their own churches with black ministers. They negotiated new working conditions with white landlords, refusing to live in the old slave quarters or work in gangs under the supervision of an overseer. Eventually the system of sharecropping evolved as the way to organize black agricultural labor. The Freedmen's Bureau supervised the contracts between white landlords and black workers, and special Freedmen's Courts adjudicated disputes. The Bureau's record in protecting blacks varied considerably, but in general it had only limited success in getting them fair compensation for their labor. Planters responded to emancipation by seeking physical and psychological separation from former slaves. They discarded the old paternalist ideal in favor of segregation. Less prosperous than before the war, planters developed a new way of life based on segregation and sharecropping.

The Abandonment of Reconstruction
In 1868 the Republicans rejected all their experienced leaders; they instead nominated and elected Ulysses S. Grant for president. The enforcement and maintenance of Reconstruction thus rested in Grant's hands. Republicans tried to make Reconstruction more secure by passing the Fifteenth Amendment, which forbade a state from denying the right to vote on grounds of race. Efforts to include women's suffrage by forbidding discrimination based on gender failed. Grant lacked the skill or commitment to make Reconstruction succeed. A series of scandals rocked his administration, creating widespread popular disenchantment and fostering the Liberal Republican revolt in 1872. As charges of corruption swelled and public disorder continued unabated in the South, northern public opinion, which never had much faith in the abilities of former slaves, became increasingly disillusioned with Reconstruction. Many decided that erecting the program on black suffrage had proven a mistake. In addition, the beginning of a severe depression in 1874 directed public attention closer to home and gave Democrats control of the House for the first time since 1861. With the northern commitment weakening, white southerners stepped up their assault on the radical governments in the South. They used social ostracism, economic pressure, and racist appeals to undermine Republican support. Their most effective weapon, however, was terror and violence directed against Republican leaders and black voters. The constant violence in the South during elections further weakened the northern commitment to Reconstruction. Grant acted decisively to suppress the Ku Klux Klan, a leading terrorist organization, but no one seemed capable of stemming the tide of violence.  In the end, a combination of southern white terror and northern white indifference combined to end Reconstruction. The 1876 election failed to produce a clear winner, as both parties claimed to have carried South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, the three southern states still under Republican control. In the end, a special electoral commission by a straight party vote declared Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the winner. In private negotiations, Republicans had already agreed to restore home rule in the South in exchange for Hayes' election. This deal became known as the Compromise of 1877. Once in office, Hayes withdrew support for the remaining radical governments in the South, and they collapsed. By 1877, Southerners had "redeemed" all of the states of the former Confederacy and Reconstruction had ended. along with the dreams of so many African Americans for equal rights. The courts soon overturned the racial legacy of Reconstruction. By both weakening northern resolve and stimulating southern white resistance, racism played a major role in failure of Reconstruction.

Review Questions

1. The chapter introduction tells the story of Benjamin Montgomery to make the point that:

A.    former slaves who really tried could achieve a measure of prosperity in the postwar South.

B.     Reconstruction clearly hinged on northern rather than southern actions after the war.

C.     Reconstruction was an impossible task, for neither northerners or southerners wanted African Americans to gain political and economic opportunity.

D.    for former slaves to attain meaningful lives as free citizens, they would need economic power, which in turn required political power.

2. According to your text, what two issues lay at the heart of Reconstruction?

A.    Whether the federal or state government was ultimately sovereign, and whether African Americans or Native Americans were the most oppressed minority group.

B.     Which party would gain the ascendancy, and how the government could regulate the economy.

C.     The future of political and economic power for freed slaves, and the future of North-South economic and political relations.

D.    Rebuilding the North's shattered economy, and restoring the South's shattered society.

3. Under new President Andrew Johnson, presidential reconstruction:

A.    would force a harsher program on the South than Lincoln's 10 Percent Plan.

B.     adhered substantially to the views of Congressional leaders.

C.     made it possible for former high-ranking Confederates to assume positions of power in the reconstructed southern governments.

D.    was never implemented because Congress passed its own program before Johnson's could go into effect.

4. Most northerners interpreted the Black Codes as:

A.    evidence that southerners sought to keep freedmen in an economically dependent and legally inferior status.

B.     evidence that southerners, by granting limited rights such as jury duty, were slowly accepting Reconstruction.

C.     a realistic solution by southerners to the problems created by sudden emancipation.

D.    a dangerous experiment by southerners that could lead to social equality for blacks in the North.

 

5. The Fourteenth Amendment:

A.    was part of Johnson's Reconstruction program.

B.     was rejected twice by the Senate before it finally passed in June 1866.

C.     automatically made African Americans citizens of the United States.

D.    gave the vote to African Americans.

6. The last state permanently readmitted to the union was:

A.    Tennessee.

B.     Georgia.

C.     South Carolina.

D.    Texas.

7. Andrew Johnson narrowly avoided conviction on impeachment charges because:

A.    of his earlier cooperative attitude toward Congress.

B.     Radical Republicans were beginning to support his policies.

C.     some Republicans feared that removal would set a bad precedent for using impeachment as a political weapon against the Presidency.

D.    only a minority of the Senate voted to convict.

8. Corruption during Reconstruction:

A.    was limited primarily to the South.

B.     also occurred in the North, where In New York City the Tweed Ring stole more money than all the Reconstruction governments in the South combined.

C.     was primarily a Republican phenomenon.

D.    was exaggerated for the purposes of radical reform.

9. One measure of black efforts to strengthen the family unit was:

A.    that males would rather work for wages than live the rough life of a sharecropper.

B.     the small homes built by hand in villages separate from the land they farmed.

C.     the insistence that black women not work in the fields.

D.    adoption of a last name.

10. Sharecropping was NOT:

A.    a sign of higher status than being a wage laborer.

B.     a harshly exploitative system in which families often sank into perpetual debt.

C.     a means for black farmers to work on land they leased from whites in return for an equal share of the crop at the end of the year.

D.    the reason why black per capita income dropped 40 percent in freedom.

11. The Freedmen's Bureau:

A.    had as its main purpose to prevent armed clashes between former masters and former slaves.

B.     relied upon Freedmen's Courts to enforce contracts between white planters and black laborers.

C.     was criticized bitterly by southerners, but consistently praised by the former slaves.

D.    was canceled by Congress over the opposition of Radicals who saw the need for a permanent welfare agency for African Americans.

 

12. Causes of the success of "redemption" in the mid-1870s include all of the following EXCEPT:

A.    Northern weariness and disillusion with Reconstruction.

B.     the distraction of economic boom times.

C.     Southern Democratic efforts to win back white votes.

D.    terror and violence to prevent blacks from voting.

13. The Mississippi Plan:

A.    was designed to break the power of the Ku Klux Klan.

B.     was a Democratic plan to use as much violence as necessary to carry the 1875 state elections.

C.     was opposed by troops President Grant sent to the state.

D.    prevented few Republicans from voting.

14. Disputes over the Election of 1876 were resolved by the Compromise of 1877, in which:

A.    Rutherford B. Hayes became president because Republicans agreed to withdraw troops from southern states.

B.     Samuel Tilden, the Democrat, became president because he received a majority of the popular vote.

C.     the election results were sent to the Supreme Court for adjudication.

D.    Democrats gained the presidency in exchange for granting Republicans control of most state governments in the South.

15. Reconstruction should be understood in all of the following ways EXCEPT:

A.    as a radical, vengeful program, imposing northern values on southerners.

B.     as a program of political and economic adjustment that failed because of racism.

C.     as a time of failure to bring blacks into the American mainstream.

D.    as a time of Congressional dominance that ended in corruption and disillusionment.

Practice Test

1. The Tenure of Office Act:

A.    gave the Senate the power to appoint members of the president's cabinet.

B.     was designed to limit President Andrew Johnson's authority.

C.     was roundly condemned by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.

D.    was both designed to limit President Andrew Johnson's authority and roundly condemned by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.

2. The Fifteenth Amendment dealt with the issue of:

A.    slavery.

B.     citizenship.

C.     cruel and unusual punishment.

D.    income tax.

E.     suffrage.

 

3. Which faction of the Republican Party wanted Reconstruction to punish the former Confederacy, disenfranchise large numbers of southern whites, and confiscate the property of leading Confederates?

A.    moderates

B.     conservatives

C.     Redeemers

D.    Scalybaggers

E.     Radicals

 

 4. In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached because he:

A.    violated the Tenure of Office Act.

B.     offered political opposition to Radical Republicans.

C.     dismissed Edwin Stanton from office.

D.    All of the above

5. Which of the following Reconstruction Acts is not properly matched with its conditions?

A.    1st Act-placed 10 unreconstructed states under military commanders, and could register black voters but not former Confederates

B.     2nd Act-ordered military commanders to put the machinery of Reconstruction into motion

C.     3rd Act-delegates to the state conventions were to frame constitutions that disqualified prominent ex-Confederates from office

D.    4th Act- required ratification of the Constitution by only a majority of those voting, rather than those who were registered

6. During Reconstruction, most "carpetbaggers" were:

A.    white southerners who moved to the North.

B.     freedmen who moved out of the South.

C.     former confederates who moved to the West.

D.    northern white veterans who moved to the South.

E.     northern politicians who took offices in southern states.

 7. The Wade-Davis Bill:

A.    essentially followed President Lincoln's Reconstruction plans.

B.     was criticized by Conservative Republicans for being too mild.

C.     called for the disenfranchisement of leading Confederates.

D.    denied reentry into the Union by former Confederate states for ten years.

E.     quickly became the law of the land.

8. Which best describes the extent of "Negro rule" in the southern states during Reconstruction?

A.    African Americans played a significant political role in several states but never elected a governor or controlled a state legislature.

B.     Some African Americans held local elective offices and a very few were elected to state legislatures but the numbers were politically inconsequential in every state.

C.     In the Deep South states where African Americans constituted a majority of the voters due to white disenfranchisement, blacks dominated both houses of the state legislatures and controlled state politics as long as federal troops remained in the South.

D.    African Americans did not actually hold many offices in any state, but they effectively dominated local offices in all but Tennessee and Arkansas through alliances with white Republicans.

E.     It was significant only in Georgia and Mississippi.

9. The "redeemed" governments of the South:

A.    saw an end to occupation by federal troops.

B.     suppressed the activities of white supremacists.

C.     saw the Republican Party win control of southern state governments.

D.    saw the Democratic Party win control of the Congress

10. The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

A.    declared that the right to vote could not be denied on account of race.

B.     officially ended slavery.

C.     granted "citizenship" to the freedmen.

D.    provided that states could only count three-fifths (60%) of their black population when determining how many members they would be given in the U.S. House of Representatives.

E.     opened up the West to homesteading by African Americans.

11. Republicans were afraid that the quick return of the southern states to Congress would lead to more Democratic votes, thereby increasing the likelihood that Congress would establish protective tariffs and subsidize railroads.

A.    True

B.     False

 12. President Johnson vetoed both the Freedmen's Bureau and the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

A.    True

B.     False

13. Radical Republicans favored a reconstruction process that would readmit the former Confederate states to the Union quickly.

A.    True

B.     False

14. Without the support of black voters in 1868, Ulysses S. Grant would have had only a minority of the popular vote.

A.    True

B.     False

15. "Scalawags" were southerners who moved north after the Civil War.

A.    True

B.     False

16. The most numerous Republicans in the South were ________.

black freedmen

 

17. After the Civil War, most black agricultural workers toiled as ________.

sharecroppers

 

18. A number of paramilitary organizations broke up Republican meetings, terrorized white and black Republicans, assassinated Republican leaders, and prevented black citizens from voting. The most notorious of these organizations was the ________.

Ku Klux Klan

 

19. President Johnson's home state of ________, in which he had served as senator and then ruled as military governor, ratified the Fourteenth Amendment against his wishes, and was thus readmitted in 1866, before the Reconstruction Acts were passed.

Tennessee

 

20. State laws designed to restore slavery in all but name in the post-Civil War South were called ________.

Black Codes

 

21. The Fourteenth Amendment offered the first national definition of ________.

citizenship

22. Sensitive to status, ________ pushed for prohibition of social discrimination, but white Republicans refused to adopt such a radical policy.

mulattoes

 

23. An end to Reconstruction was achieved by the ________ of 1877.

Compromise

 

24. The last federal troops were withdrawn from the South by President ________.

Hayes

 

25.  ________ finally won the 1876 election after an electoral commission awarded him all of the disputed electoral votes from three southern states.

Rutherford B. Hayes

 

26. The agency established by the federal government to protect freed people's economic rights was commonly known as the ________.

Freedmen's Bureau

 

27. Ultimately, according to the authors of your text, wartime ideals and the goals of a real Reconstruction were scuttled by a deep-seated ________ in America.

racism

28. The economic system whereby a farmer rents the land by paying not with cash but with a fraction (often half) of the harvest is known as ________.

sharecropping

 

29. The Tenure of Office Act was designed to protect the job of Secretary of War ________.

Edwin Stanton

 

30. During Grant's second term, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the last major piece of ________ legislation.

Reconstruction

 

31. Lincoln wanted ex-Confederate states admitted to the Union when ________ percent of a state's white voters took a loyalty oath.

Ten

Chapter Test

1. The Tenure of Office Act and the Command of the Army Act were passed by Congress to prevent southern states from sending former Confederates to Congress or from having them control the state militia companies.

A.    True

B.     False

2. The "Black Codes" were a set of regulations established by:

A.    the Congress to protect the rights of the former slaves to own property and to find employment.

B.     the U.S. Supreme Court to enforce the provisions of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

C.     the northern states to prevent a massive influx of former slaves from entering their states and seeking homes and jobs.

D.    the southern states to promote white supremacy and to control the economic and social activities of the freed men.

E.     the southern states to ameliorate radical Reconstruction Acts.

3. In the period from the end of Reconstruction into the twentieth century, the Democratic Party was the political party of the vast majority of southern whites.

A.    True

B.     False

4. The Wade-Davis Bill sought to make it more difficult than Lincoln desired for those states which had left the Union to return.

A.    True

B.     False

5. Northern white Republicans who relocated to the south during reconstruction were called:

A.    Scalawags

B.     Redeemers

C.     Black Republicans

D.    Carpetbaggers

6. In 1865, southern blacks defined "freedom" as:

A.    independence from white control.

B.     acquiring the legal rights to live as did whites.

C.     land reform.

D.    All of the above

7. Ulysses S. Grant's election as president was largely a result of his being

A.    governor of New York during the postwar economic boom.

B.     a triumphant commanding general of the Union army.

C.     the popular administrator of the Freedmen's Bureau.

D.    a flamboyant cavalry officer in the western Indian wars.

E.     incorruptible.

8. The growing conflict between President Johnson and the Radical Republicans was manifested in all of the following actions EXCEPT:

A.    he vetoed the bill extending the life of the Freedman's Bureau

B.     he vetoed a civil rights bill designed to overturn the more flagrant provisions of the black codes

C.     in 1865 when southern representatives to Congress appeared in Washington, a majority in Congress voted to exclude them

D.    he convinced his home state Tennessee to refuse to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment

9. Black sharecropping:

A.    represented a continuation of the pre-Civil War gang-labor system.

B.     differed sharply from the tenant system.

C.     usually led to economic independence.

D.    was a very common occupation of former slaves.

E.     involved close white supervision which recalled the days of slavery.

10. Which of the following became essential institutions in the black community in the south during Reconstruction?

A.    black church and Freedman's Bureau offices

B.     Freedman's Bureau and Freedman's Courthouse

C.     the schoolhouse and the black church

D.    Republican Party offices and Freedman's Courthouse

11. Even though the House's impeachment charges were nominally based on specific "high crimes and misdemeanors," Andrew Johnson was actually convicted by the Senate and removed from the presidency for petty political reasons.

A.    True

B.     False

12. President Abraham Lincoln's "ten percent" plan for the South referred to:

A.    the area of land in each state that should be reserved for former slaves.

B.     the ratio of federal to state money to be spent in rebuilding the southern economy.

C.     the ratio of federal troops to freed slaves in each Southern state.

D.    the percentage of freed slaves who must be given the vote before setting up a state government.

E.     the number of white voters required to take loyalty oaths before setting up a state government.

13. The first Reconstruction Act contained all of the following provisions EXCEPT:

A.    barred former Confederates from registering to vote and holding office

B.     required the first state legislatures to meet under the new constitution drafted by their state conventions to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment

C.     required military officials to register black adult males to vote

D.    required ratification of the new state constitutions by only a majority of those voting rather than those who were registered

14. The elections of 1876 saw:

A.    the Supreme Court decide the presidential election.

B.     a Democrat become president for the first time since the Civil War.

C.     the candidate with the most popular votes fail to get elected.

D.    Ulysses Grant make an unsuccessful bid for an unprecedented third term.

E.     the governor of New York become president.

15. By the late 1890s, a significantly smaller portion of southern blacks was allowed to vote than in the late 1860s.

A.    True

B.     False