17 - Higher Education | Pearson · 460 CHAPTER 17 Reconstruction 1863–1877 in the wake of the Civil War. Communities throughout the South struggled over the meaning of freedom in

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C H A P T E R O U T L I N E

Reconstruction 1863–1877

American Communities 459Hale County, Alabama: From Slavery toFreedom in a Black Belt Community

The Politics of Reconstruction 461The Defeated SouthAbraham Lincoln’s PlanAndrew Johnson and Presidential

ReconstructionFree Labor and the Radical

RepublicanVisionCongressional Reconstruction and the

Impeachment Crisis

The Election of 1868Woman Suffrage and Reconstruction

The Meaning of Freedom 469Moving AboutAfrican American Families, Churches,

and SchoolsLand and Labor After SlaveryThe Origins of African American Politics

Southern Politics and Society 476Southern RepublicansReconstructing the States:A

Mixed Record

White Resistance and “Redemption”King Cotton: Sharecroppers,Tenants, and

the Southern Environment

Reconstructing the North 482The Age of CapitalLiberal Republicans and the Election

of 1872The Depression of 1873The Electoral Crisis of 1876

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459

had recently beenappointed a voterregistrar for the dis-trict. Orrick sworehe would never be registered by a black man and shotWebb dead. Hundreds of armed and angry freedmenformed a posse to search for Orrick but failed to findhim. Galvanized by Webb’s murder, 500 local freedmenformed a chapter of the Union League, the RepublicanParty’s organizational arm in the South. The chapterfunctioned as both a militia company and a forum to agi-tate for political rights.

Violent political encounters between black peopleand white people were common in southern communities

Hale County, Alabama: From Slavery to Freedomin a Black Belt Community

Theodor Kaufmann (1814–1896), On to Liberty, 1867. Oil on canvas, 36 � 56 in (91.4 � 142.2 cm). Runaway slaves escaping through the woods. Art Resource/Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On a bright Saturday morning in May 1867,4,000 former slaves streamed into the town of

Greensboro, bustling seat of Hale County in west-central Alabama.They came to hear speeches from twodelegates to a recent freedmen’s convention in Mobileand to find out about the political status of black peo-ple under the Reconstruction Act just passed byCongress.Tensions mounted in the days following thisunprecedented gathering, as military authorities begansupervising voter registration for elections to theupcoming constitutional convention that wouldrewrite the laws of Alabama. On June 13, John Orrick,a local white, confronted Alex Webb, a politicallyactive freedman, on the streets of Greensboro. Webb

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460 CHAPTER 17 Reconstruction 1863–1877

in the wake of the Civil War. Communities throughoutthe South struggled over the meaning of freedom in waysthat reflected their particular circumstances.The 4 millionfreed people constituted roughly one-third of the totalsouthern population,but the black–white ratio in individ-ual communities varied enormously. In some places, theUnion army had been a strong presence during the war,hastening the collapse of the slave system and encouragingexperiments in free labor. Other areas had remained rela-tively untouched by the fighting. In some areas, smallfarms prevailed; in others, including Hale County, largeplantations dominated economic and political life.

West-central Alabama had emerged as a fertile cen-ter of cotton production just two decades before theCivil War.There, African Americans, as throughout theSouth’s black belt, constituted more than three-quartersof the population.With the arrival of federal troops inthe spring of 1865,African Americans in Hale County,like their counterparts elsewhere, began to challengethe traditional organization of plantation labor.

One owner, Henry Watson, found that his entireworkforce had deserted him at the end of 1865. “I amin the midst of a large and fertile cotton growing coun-try,” Watson wrote to a partner. “Many plantations areentirely without labor, many plantations have insuffi-cient labor, and upon none are the laborers doing theirformer accustomed work.” Black women refused towork in the fields, preferring to stay home with theirchildren and tend garden plots. Nor would male fieldhands do any work, such as caring for hogs, that did notdirectly increase their share of the cotton crop.

Above all, freed people wanted more autonomy.Overseers and owners grudgingly allowed them towork the land “in families,” letting them choose theirown supervisors and find their own provisions. Theresult was a shift from the gang labor characteristic ofthe antebellum period, in which large groups of slavesworked under the harsh and constant supervision ofwhite overseers, to the sharecropping system, in whichAfrican American families worked small plots of land inexchange for a small share of the crop.This shift repre-sented less of a victory for newly freed AfricanAmericans than a defeat for plantation owners, whoresented even the limited economic independence itforced them to concede to their black workforce.

Only a small fraction—perhaps 15 percent—ofAfrican American families were fortunate enough to

be able to buy land.The majority settled for some ver-sion of sharecropping, while others managed to rentland from owners, becoming tenant farmers. Still,planters throughout Hale County had to change theold routines of plantation labor. Local AfricanAmericans also organized politically. In 1866, Congresshad passed the Civil Rights Act and sent theFourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to thestates for ratification; both promised full citizenshiprights to former slaves. Hale County freedmen joinedthe Republican Party and local Union League chap-ters. They used their new political power to press forbetter labor contracts, demand greater autonomy forthe black workforce, and agitate for the more radicalgoal of land confiscation and redistribution. “The col-ored people are very anxious to get land of their ownto live upon independently; and they want money tobuy stock to make crops,” reported one black UnionLeague organizer. “The only way to get these neces-saries is to give our votes to the [Republican] party.”Two Hale County former slaves, Brister Reese andJames K. Green, won election to the Alabama state leg-islature in 1869.

It was not long before these economic and politi-cal gains prompted a white counterattack. In thespring of 1868, the Ku Klux Klan—a secret organiza-tion devoted to terrorizing and intimidating AfricanAmericans and their white Republican allies—cameto Hale County. Disguised in white sheets, armed withguns and whips, and making nighttime raids on horse-back, Klansmen flogged, beat, and murdered freedpeople.They intimidated voters and silenced politicalactivists. Planters used Klan terror to dissuade formerslaves from leaving plantations or organizing forhigher wages. With the passage of the Ku Klux KlanAct in 1871, the federal government cracked down onthe Klan, breaking its power temporarily in parts ofthe former Confederacy. But no serious effort wasmade to stop Klan terror in the west Alabama blackbelt, and planters there succeeded in reestablishingmuch of their social and political control.

The events in Hale County illustrate the strugglesthat beset communities throughout the South during theReconstruction era after the Civil War.The destructionof slavery and the Confederacy forced African Americansand white people to renegotiate their old roles. Thesecommunity battles both shaped and were shaped by the

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461

3. What were the most important politicaland social legacies of Reconstruction inthe southern states?

4. How did economic and politicaltransformations in the North reflectanother side of Reconstruction?

1863–1877

1. What were the competing politicalplans for reconstructing the defeatedConfederacy?

2. How did African Americans negotiatethe difficult transition from slaveryto freedom?

victorious and newly expansive federalgovernment in Washington. But thenew arrangements of both politicalpower sharing and the organiza-tion of labor had to be workedout within local communities. Inthe end, Reconstruction was only

partially successful. Not until the “SecondReconstruction” of the twentieth-century civil rights movement wouldthe descendants of Hale County’sAfrican Americans begin to enjoythe full fruits of freedom—and eventhen not without challenge.

Greensboro

The Politics of ReconstructionWhen General Robert E. Lee’s men stacked their guns atAppomattox, the bloodiest war in American history ended.More than 600,000 soldiers had died during the four yearsof fighting, 360,000 Union and 260,000 Confederate.Another 275,000 Union and 190,000 Confederate troopshad been wounded. Although President AbrahamLincoln insisted early on that the purpose of the war wasto preserve the Union, by 1863 it had evolved as wellinto a struggle for African American liberation. Indeed,the political, economic, and moral issues posed by slav-ery were the root cause of the Civil War, and the warultimately destroyed slavery, although not racism, onceand for all.

The Civil War also settled the constitutional crisisprovoked by the secession of the Confederacy and itsjustification in appeals to states’ rights.The name “UnitedStates” would from then on be understood as a singularrather than a plural noun, signaling an important changein the meaning of American nationality.The old notionof the United States as a voluntary union of sovereignstates gave way to the new reality of a single nation, in

which the federal government took precedence overthe individual states.The key historical developments ofthe Reconstruction era revolved around precisely how thenewly strengthened national government would define itsrelationship with the defeated Confederate states and the4 million newly freed slaves.

The Defeated SouthThe white South paid an extremely high price for seces-sion, war, and defeat. In addition to the battlefield casual-ties, the Confederate states sustained deep material andpsychological wounds. Much of the best agricultural landwas laid waste, including the rich fields of northernVirginia, the Shenandoah Valley, and large sections ofTennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina.Many towns and cities—including Richmond, Atlanta,and Columbia, South Carolina—were in ruins. By 1865,the South’s most precious commodities, cotton andAfrican American slaves, no longer were measures ofwealth and prestige. Retreating Confederates destroyedmost of the South’s cotton to prevent its capture by fed-eral troops. What remained was confiscated by Union

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agents as contraband of war. The former slaves, many ofwhom had fled to Union lines during the latter stages ofthe war, were determined to chart their own course inthe reconstructed South as free men and women.

Emancipation proved the bitterest pill for whiteSoutherners to swallow, especially the planter elite.Conquered and degraded, and in their view robbed oftheir slave property, white people responded by regard-ing African Americans, more than ever, as inferior to

themselves. In the antebellumSouth, white skin had defined asocial bond that transcended eco-nomic class. It gave even the

poorest white a badge of superiority over even the mostskilled slave or prosperous free African American.Emancipation, however, forced white people to redefinetheir world. The specter of political power and socialequality for African Americans made racial order theconsuming passion of most white Southerners duringthe Reconstruction years. In fact, racism can be seen as

one of the major forces driving Reconstruction and,ultimately, undermining it.

Abraham Lincoln’s PlanBy late 1863, Union military victories had convincedPresident Lincoln of the need to fashion a plan for thereconstruction of the South (see Chapter 16). Lincolnbased his reconstruction program on bringing the secededstates back into the Union as quickly as possible. HisProclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction ofDecember 1863 offered “full pardon” and the restorationof property, not including slaves, to white Southernerswilling to swear an oath of allegiance to the United Statesand its laws, including the Emancipation Proclamation.Prominent Confederate military and civil leaders wereexcluded from Lincoln’s offer, though he indicated that hewould freely pardon them.

The president also proposed that when the number ofany Confederate state’s voters who took the oath of alle-giance reached 10 percent of the number who had voted

Confederate Song, “I’m aGood Old Rebel” (1866)at www.myhistorylab.com

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“Decorating the Graves of Rebel Soldiers,” Harper’s Weekly, August 17, 1867. After the Civil War, bothSoutherners and Northerners created public mourning ceremonies honoring fallen soldiers. Women ledthe memorial movement in the South that, by establishing cemeteries and erecting monuments, offeredthe first cultural expression of the Confederate tradition. This engraving depicts citizens of Richmond,Virginia, decorating thousands of Confederate graves with flowers at the Hollywood Memorial Cemeteryon the James River. A local women’s group raised enough funds to transfer over 16,000 Confederate deadfrom northern cemeteries for reburial in Richmond.

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The Politics of Reconstruction 463

in the election of 1860, this group could establish a stategovernment that Lincoln would recognize as legitimate.Fundamental to this Ten Percent Plan was that the recon-structed governments accept the abolition of slavery.Lincoln’s plan was designed less as a blueprint for recon-struction than as a way to shorten the war and gain whitepeople’s support for emancipation.

Lincoln’s amnesty proclamation angered thoseRepublicans—known as Radical Republicans—whoadvocated not only equal rights for the freedmen but alsoa tougher stance toward the white South. In July 1864,Senator Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio and CongressmanHenry W. Davis of Maryland, both Radicals, proposed aharsher alternative to the Ten Percent Plan.The Wade–Davisbill required 50 percent of a seceding state’s white male cit-izens to take a loyalty oath before elections could be heldfor a convention to rewrite the state’s constitution. TheRadical Republicans saw reconstruction as a chance toeffect a fundamental transformation of southern society.They thus wanted to delay the process until war’s end andto limit participation to a small number of southernUnionists. Lincoln viewed Reconstruction as part of thelarger effort to win the war and abolish slavery. Hewanted to weaken the Confederacy by creating new stategovernments that could win broad support from southernwhite people.The Wade–Davis bill threatened his effortsto build political consensus within the southern states.Lincoln, therefore, pocket-vetoed the bill by refusing to signit within ten days of the adjournment of Congress.

As Union armies occupied parts of the South, com-manders improvised a variety of arrangements involvingconfiscated plantations and the African American laborforce. For example, in 1862 General Benjamin F. Butlerbegan a policy of transforming slaves on Louisiana sugarplantations into wage laborers under the close supervisionof occupying federal troops. Butler’s policy required slavesto remain on the estates of loyal planters, where theywould receive wages according to a fixed schedule, as wellas food and medical care for the aged and sick.Abandonedplantations would be leased to northern investors.

In January 1865, General William T. Sherman issuedSpecial Field Order 15, setting aside the Sea Islands off theGeorgia coast and a portion of the South CarolinaLowcountry rice fields for the exclusive settlement offreed people. Each family would receive forty acres of landand the loan of mules from the army—the origin, perhaps,of the famous call for “forty acres and a mule” that wouldsoon capture the imagination of African Americansthroughout the South. Sherman’s intent was not to revolu-tionize southern society but to relieve the demands placedon his army by the thousands of impoverished AfricanAmericans who followed his march to the sea. By thesummer of 1865 some 40,000 freed people, eager to takeadvantage of the general’s order, had been settled on400,000 acres of “Sherman land.”

Conflicts within the Republican Party prevented thedevelopment of a systematic land distribution program.Still, Lincoln and the Republican Congress supportedother measures to aid the emancipated slaves. In March1865 Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau. Alongwith providing food, clothing, and fuel to destitute formerslaves, the bureau was charged with supervising and man-aging “all the abandoned lands in the South and the con-trol of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen.”Theact that established the bureau also stated that forty acres ofabandoned or confiscated land could be leased to freedslaves or white Unionists, who would have an option topurchase after three years and “such title thereto as theUnited States can convey.”

On the evening of April 14, 1865, while attending thetheater in Washington, President Lincoln was shot by JohnWilkes Booth and died of his wounds several hours later.At the time of his assassination, Lincoln’s reconstructionpolicy remained unsettled and incomplete. In its broadoutlines, the president’s plans hadseemed to favor a speedy restorationof the southern states to the Unionand a minimum of federal interven-tion in their affairs. But with hisdeath the specifics of postwar Reconstruction had to behammered out by a new president, Andrew Johnson ofTennessee, a man whose personality, political background,

Photography pioneer Timothy O’Sullivan took this portrait of amultigenerational African American family on the J. J. Smith plantationin Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1862. Many white plantation owners inthe area had fled, allowing slaves like these to begin an early transitionto freedom before the end of the Civil War.

Carl Schurz, Report onthe Condition of theSouth (1865) atwww.myhistorylab.com

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and racist leanings put him at odds with the Republican-controlled Congress.

Andrew Johnson and PresidentialReconstructionAndrew Johnson, a Democrat and former slaveholder, wasa most unlikely successor to the martyred Lincoln.Throughout his career, Johnson had championed yeomanfarmers and viewed the South’s plantation aristocrats withcontempt. He was the only southern member of the U.S.Senate to remain loyal to the Union, and he held theplanter elite responsible for secession and defeat. In 1862,Lincoln appointed Johnson to the difficult post of militarygovernor of Tennessee. There he successfully beganwartime Reconstruction and cultivated Unionist supportin the mountainous eastern districts of that state.

In 1864, the Republicans, in an appeal to northernand border state “War Democrats,” nominated Johnson forvice president. But despite Johnson’s success in Tennesseeand in the 1864 campaign, many Radical Republicans dis-trusted him, and the hardscrabble Tennessean remained apolitical outsider in Republican circles. In the immediateaftermath of Lincoln’s murder, however, Johnson appearedto side with those Radical Republicans who sought totreat the South as a conquered territory. Any support forJohnson quickly faded as the new president’s policiesunfolded. Johnson defined Reconstruction as the provinceof the executive, not the legislative branch, and he plannedto restore the Union as quickly as possible. He blamedindividual Southerners—the planter elite—rather thanentire states for leading the South down the disastrousroad to secession. In line with this philosophy, Johnsonoutlined mild terms for reentry to the Union.

In the spring of 1865, Johnson granted amnesty andpardon, including restoration of property rights exceptslaves, to all Confederates who pledged loyalty to theUnion and support for emancipation. Fourteen classes ofSoutherners, mostly major Confederate officials andwealthy landowners, were excluded. But these men couldapply individually for presidential pardons. (During histenure Johnson pardoned roughly 90 percent of thosewho applied.) Significantly, Johnson instituted this planwhile Congress was not in session.

By the autumn of 1865, ten of the elevenConfederate states claimed to have met Johnson’srequirements to reenter the Union. On December 6,1865, in his first annual message to Congress, the presi-dent declared the “restoration” of the Union virtuallycomplete. But a serious division within the federal gov-ernment was taking shape, for the Congress was notabout to allow the president free rein in determining theconditions of southern readmission.

Andrew Johnson used the term “restoration” ratherthan “reconstruction.” A lifelong Democrat with ambi-tions to be elected president on his own in 1868,

Johnson hoped to build a new political coalition com-posed of northern Democrats, conservative Republicans,and southern Unionists. Firmly committed to whitesupremacy, he opposed political rights for the freedmen.Johnson’s open sympathy for his fellow whiteSoutherners, his antiblack bias, and his determination tocontrol the course of Reconstruction placed him on a col-lision course with the powerful Radical wing of theRepublican Party.

Free Labor and the RadicalRepublican VisionMost Radicals were men whose careers had been shapedby the slavery controversy. One of the most effectiverhetorical weapons used against slavery and its spread hadbeen the ideal of a society based upon free labor. Themodel of free individuals, competing equally in the labormarket and enjoying equal political rights, formed thecore of this worldview. Equality of opportunity created amore fluid social structure where, as Abraham Lincoln hadnoted, “There is not of necessity any such thing as a freehired laborer being fixed in that condition.”

Radicals now looked to reconstruct southern societyalong these same lines, backed by the power of thenational government. They argued that once free labor,universal education, and equal rights were implanted inthe South, that region would be able to share in theNorth’s material wealth, progress, and social mobility.Representative George W. Julian of Indiana typified theRadical vision for the South. He called for elimination ofthe region’s large plantations, arguing that the Southneeded to develop “small farms, thrifty tillage, freeschools, social independence, flourishing manufacturesand the arts, respect for honest labor, and equality ofpolitical rights.” In the most far-reaching proposal,Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania calledfor the confiscation of 400 million acres belonging to thewealthiest 10 percent of Southerners to be redistributedto black and white yeomen and northern land buyers.“The whole fabric of Southern society must bechanged,” Stevens told Pennsylvania Republicans inSeptember 1865,“and never can it be done if this oppor-tunity is lost. How can republican institutions, freeschools, free churches, free social intercourse exist in amingled community of nabobs and serfs?”

Northern Republicans were especially outraged by thestringent “black codes” passed by South Carolina,Mississippi, Louisiana, and otherstates. These were designed torestrict the freedom of the blacklabor force and keep freed peo-ple as close to slave status as possible. Laborers who left theirjobs before contracts expired would forfeit wages alreadyearned and be subject to arrest by any white citizen.Vagrancy, very broadly defined, was punishable by fines and

Mississippi Black Code (1865)at www.myhistorylab.com

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involuntary plantation labor.Apprenticeship clauses obligedblack children to work without pay for employers. Somestates attempted to bar African Americans from land owner-ship. Other laws specifically denied African Americansequality with white people in civil rights, excluding themfrom juries and prohibiting interracial marriages.The blackcodes underscored the unwillingness of white Southernersto accept freedom for African Americans

The Radicals, although not a majority of their party,were joined by moderate Republicans as growing num-bers of Northerners grew suspicious of white southernintransigence and the denial of political rights to freed-men. When the Thirty-ninth Congress convened inDecember 1865, the large Republican majority preventedthe seating of the white Southerners elected to Congressunder President Johnson’s provisional state governments.Republicans also established the Joint Committee onReconstruction.After hearing extensive testimony from abroad range of witnesses, it concluded that not only wereold Confederates back in power in the South but also thatblack codes and racial violence required increased protec-tion for African Americans.

In the spring of 1866, Congress passed two importantbills designed to aid African Americans. The landmarkCivil Rights bill, which bestowed full citizenship onAfrican Americans, overturned the 1857 Dred Scott deci-sion and the black codes. It defined all persons born in theUnited States (except Indian peoples) as national citizens,and it enumerated various rights, including the rights tomake and enforce contracts, to sue, to give evidence, and

to buy and sell property. Under this bill,African Americansacquired “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedingsfor the security of person and property as is enjoyed bywhite citizens.”

Congress also voted to enlarge the scope of theFreedmen’s Bureau, empowering it to build schools andpay teachers, and also to establish courts to prosecute thosecharged with depriving African Americans of their civilrights. The bureau achieved important, if limited, successin aiding African Americans. Bureau-run schools helpedlay the foundation for southern public education. Thebureau’s network of courts allowed freed people to bringsuits against white people in disputes involving violence,nonpayment of wages, or unfair division of crops.The veryexistence of courts hearing public testimony by AfricanAmericans provided an important psychological challengeto traditional notions of white racial domination.

But an angry President Johnson vetoed both of thesebills. In opposing the Civil Rights bill, Johnson denouncedthe assertion of national power to protect AfricanAmerican civil rights, claiming it was a “stride toward cen-tralization, and the concentration of all legislative powersin the national Government.” But Johnson’s intemperateattacks on the Radicals—he damned them as traitorsunwilling to restore the Union—united moderate andRadical Republicans and they succeeded in overriding thevetoes. Congressional Republicans, led by the Radical fac-tion, were now unified in challenging the president’spower to direct Reconstruction and in using nationalauthority to define and protect the rights of citizens.

“Office of the Freedmen’s Bureau,Memphis, Tennessee,” Harper’sWeekly, June 2, 1866. Establishedby Congress in 1865, theFreedmen’s Bureau providedeconomic, educational, and legalassistance to former slaves in thepost–Civil War years. Bureauagents were often called on tosettle disputes between black andwhite Southerners over wages,labor contracts, political rights,and violence. Although mostsouthern whites only grudginglyacknowledged the bureau’slegitimacy, freed people gainedimportant legal and psychologicalsupport through testimony atpublic hearings like this one.

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In June 1866, fearful that the Civil Rights Act mightbe declared unconstitutional, and eager to settle the basisfor the seating of southern representatives, Congresspassed the Fourteenth Amendment. The amendmentdefined national citizenship to include former slaves (“allpersons born or naturalized in the United States”) andprohibited the states from violating the privileges of citi-zens without due process of law. It also empoweredCongress to reduce the representation of any state thatdenied suffrage to males over twenty-one. Republicansadopted the Fourteenth Amendment as their platform forthe 1866 congressional elections and suggested thatsouthern states would have to ratify it as a condition ofreadmission. President Johnson, meanwhile, took to thestump in August to support conservative Democratic andRepublican candidates. His unrestrained speeches oftendegenerated into harangues, alienating many voters andaiding the Republican cause.

For their part, the Republicans skillfully portrayedJohnson and northern Democrats as disloyal and whiteSoutherners as unregenerate. Republicans began an effec-tive campaign tradition known as “waving the bloodyshirt”—reminding northern voters of the hundreds ofthousands of Yankee soldiers left dead or maimed by thewar. In the November 1866 elections, the Republicansincreased their majority in both the House and the Senateand gained control of all the northern states.The stage wasnow set for a battle between the president and Congress.Was it to be Johnson’s “restoration” or CongressionalReconstruction?

Congressional Reconstruction and theImpeachment CrisisUnited against Johnson, moderate and RadicalRepublicans took control of Reconstruction early in 1867.In March, Congress passed the First Reconstruction Actover Johnson’s veto. This act divided the South into fivemilitary districts subject to martial law.To achieve restora-tion, southern states were first required to call new consti-

tutional conventions, elected byuniversal manhood suffrage. Oncethese states had drafted new con-

stitutions, guaranteed African American voting rights,and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, they were eli-gible for readmission to the Union. Supplementary leg-islation, also passed over the president’s veto, invalidatedthe provisional governments established by Johnson,empowered the military to administer voter registra-tion, and required an oath of loyalty to the UnitedStates (see Map 17.1).

Congress also passed several laws aimed at limitingJohnson’s power. One of these, the Tenure of Office Act,stipulated that any officeholder appointed by the presi-dent with the Senate’s advice and consent could not beremoved until the Senate had approved a successor. In

this way, congressional leaders could protect Republicans,such as Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, entrustedwith implementing Congressional Reconstruction. InAugust 1867, with Congress adjourned, Johnson sus-pended Stanton and appointed General Ulysses S. Grantinterim secretary of war. This move enabled the presi-dent to remove generals in the field that he judged to betoo radical and replace them with men who were sym-pathetic to his own views. It also served as a challenge tothe Tenure of Office Act. In January 1868, when theSenate overruled Stanton’s suspension, Grant brokeopenly with Johnson and vacated the office. Stantonresumed his position and barricaded himself in his officewhen Johnson attempted to remove him once again.

Outraged by Johnson’s relentless obstructionism,and seizing upon his violation of the Tenure of OfficeAct as a pretext, moderate and Radical Republicans inthe House of Representatives again joined forces andvoted to impeach the president by a vote of 126 to 47on February 24, 1868, charging him with eleven countsof high crimes and misdemeanors.To ensure the supportof moderate Republicans, the articles of impeachmentfocused on violations of the Tenure of Office Act. Thecase against Johnson would have to be made on the basisof willful violation of the law. Left unstated were theRepublicans’ real reasons for wanting the presidentremoved: Johnson’s political views and his opposition tothe Reconstruction Acts.

Reconstruction atwww.myhistorylab.com

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TEXAS

NORTHCAROLINA

GEORGIA

ARKANSAS

LOUISIANA

TENNESSEE

SOUTHCAROLINA

VIRGINIA

ALABAMAMISSISSIPPI

FLORIDA

MARYLAND

DELAWARE

KENTUCKY

OHIOINDIANA

ILLINOIS

IOWA

MISSOURI

NEWJERSEY

PENNSYLVANIA

WESTVIRGINIA

KANSAS

NEBRASKA

INDIANTERRITORY

ATLANTICOCEAN

Gulf of Mexico

Gulf of Mexico

1

234

5

1870(1873)

1868(1877)

1868(1877)

1868(1876)

1868(1874)

1870(1876)

1870(1871)

1870(1869)

1868(1870)

1868(1874)

1866 (1869)

Five military districts est.1867

Border states

Date of readmission to Union

Date of reestablishment ofDemocratic Party control

(1874)

1868

MAP 17.1 Reconstruction of the South,1866–77 Dates for the readmission of former Confederate states

to the Union and the return of Democrats to power varied according

to the specific political situations in those states.

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An influential group of moderate Senate Republicansfeared the damage a conviction might do to the constitu-tional separation of powers. They also worried about thepolitical and economic policies that might be pursued byBenjamin Wade, the president pro tem of the Senate and aleader of the Radical Republicans,who,because there was novice president, would succeed to the presidency if Johnsonwere removed from office. Behind the scenes during hisSenate trial, Johnson agreed to abide by the ReconstructionActs. In May, the Senate voted 35 for conviction, 19 foracquittal—one vote shy of the two-thirds necessary forremoval from office. Johnson’s narrow acquittal establishedthe precedent that only criminal actions by a president—notpolitical disagreements—warranted removal from office.

The Election of 1868By the summer of 1868, seven former Confederate states(Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina,South Carolina, and Tennessee) had ratified the revisedconstitutions, elected Republican governments, and ratified

the Fourteenth Amendment. They had thereby earnedreadmission to the Union. In 1868 Republicans nominatedUlysses S. Grant, the North’sforemost military hero, as theirnominee for President. Grantenjoyed tremendous popularityafter the war, especially when he broke with Johnson.Totally lacking in political experience, Grant admitted,after receiving the nomination, that he had been forcedinto it in spite of himself.

Significantly, at the very moment that the South wasbeing forced to enfranchise former slaves as a prerequisitefor readmission to the Union, the Republicans rejected acampaign plank endorsing black suffrage in the North.State referendums calling for black suffrage failed in eightnorthern states between 1865 and 1868, succeeding only inIowa and Minnesota. The Democrats, determined toreverse Congressional Reconstruction, nominated HoratioSeymour, former governor of New York and a longtimefoe of emancipation and supporter of states’ rights.

History Bookshelf: Ulysses S.Grant, Memoirs (1886) atwww.myhistorylab.com

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The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, stipulated that the right to vote could not be denied “onaccount of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” This illustration expressed the optimism andhopes of African Americans generated by this consitutional landmark aimed at protecting black politicalrights. Note the various political figures (Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, Frederick Douglass) andmovements (abolitionism, black education) invoked here, providing a sense of how the amendment endeda long historical struggle.

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The Ku Klux Klan emerged as a potent instrumentof terror (see the opening of this chapter). In Louisiana,Arkansas, Georgia, and South Carolina, the Klanthreatened, whipped, and murdered black and whiteRepublicans to prevent them from voting.This terrorismenabled the Democrats to carry Georgia and Louisiana,but it ultimately cost the Democrats votes in the North. Inthe final tally, Grant carried twenty-six of the thirty-fourstates for an Electoral College victory of 214 to 80.Significantly, more than 500,000 African American voterscast their ballots for Grant, demonstrating their over-whelming support for the Republican Party. TheRepublicans also retained large majorities in both housesof Congress.

In February 1869, Congress passed the FifteenthAmendment, providing that “the right of citizens of theUnited States to vote shall not be denied or abridged onaccount of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”To enhance the chances of ratification, Congress requiredthe four remaining unreconstructed states—Mississippi,Georgia,Texas, and Virginia—to ratify both the Fourteenthand Fifteenth Amendments before readmission.They did so

and rejoined the Union in early 1870. The FifteenthAmendment was ratified in February 1870. In the narrowsense of simply readmitting the former Confederate statesto the Union, Reconstruction was complete.

Woman Suffrage and ReconstructionMany women’s rights advocates had long been active inthe abolitionist movement.The Fourteenth and FifteenthAmendments, which granted citizenship and the vote tofreedmen, both inspired and frustrated these activists.Insisting that the causes of the African American voteand the women’s vote were linked, Elizabeth CadyStanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone founded theAmerican Equal Rights Association in 1866. The grouplaunched a series of lobbying and petition campaigns toremove racial and sexual restrictions on voting from stateconstitutions.Throughout the nation, the old abolitionistorganizations and the Republican Party emphasized pas-sage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments andwithdrew funds and support from the cause of womansuffrage. Disagreements over these amendments dividedsuffragists for decades.

This contemporary colored engraving depicts a meeting of the National Woman Suffrage Association inChicago, c.1870. The suffrage campaign attracted many middle class women into political activism for thefirst time.

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Amendment and Date Passed by Congress Main Provisions

Ratification Process (3/4 of all StatesIncluding Ex-Confederate States Required)

13 (January 1865) • Prohibited slavery in theUnited States

December 1865 (27 states, including8 southern states)

14 (June 1866) • Conferred national citizenship onall persons born or naturalized inthe United States

July 1868 (after Congress made ratification aprerequisite for readmission of ex-Confederatestates to the Union)

• Reduced state representation inCongress proportionally for anystate disfranchising male citizens

• Denied former Confederates theright to hold state or national office

• Repudiated Confederate debt

15 (February 1869) • Prohibited denial of suffragebecause of race, color, or previouscondition of servitude

March 1870 (ratification required forreadmission of Virginia, Texas, Mississippi,and Georgia)

The Meaning of Freedom 469

The radical wing, led by Stanton and Anthony,opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, arguing that ratifica-tion would establish an “aristocracy of sex,” enfranchisingall men while leaving women without political privileges.They argued for a Sixteenth Amendment that wouldsecure the vote for women.Other women’s rights activists,including Lucy Stone and Frederick Douglass, assertedthat “this hour belongs to the Negro.” They feared adebate over woman suffrage at the national level wouldjeopardize passage of the two amendments.

By 1869 woman suffragists had split into two com-peting organizations: the moderate American WomanSuffrage Association (AWSA), which sought the supportof men, and the more radical all-female NationalWoman Suffrage Association (NWSA). For the NWSA,the vote represented only one part of a broad spectrumof goals inherited from the Declaration of Sentimentsmanifesto adopted at the first women’s rights conven-tion held in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York (seeChapter 13).

Although women did not win the vote in thisperiod, they did establish an independent suffragemovement that eventually drew millions of women intopolitical life. The NWSA in particular demonstratedthat self-government and democratic participation inthe public sphere were crucial for women’s emancipa-tion. The failure of woman suffrage after the Civil Warwas less a result of factional fighting than of the larger

defeat of Radical Reconstruction and the ideal ofexpanded citizenship.

The Meaning of FreedomFor nearly 4 million slaves, freedom arrived in variousways in different parts of the South. In many areas, slaveryhad collapsed long before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.In regions far removed from the presence of federaltroops, African Americans did not learn of slavery’s enduntil the spring of 1865.There were thousands of sharplycontrasting stories, many of which revealed the need forfreed slaves to confront their owners. One Virginia slave,hired out to another family during the war, had beenworking in the fields when a friend told her she was nowfree.“Is dat so?” she exclaimed. Dropping her hoe, she ranthe seven miles to her old place, confronted her formermistress, and shouted, “I’se free! Yes, I’se free! Ain’t got towork fo’ you no mo’.” But regardless of specific regionalcircumstances, the meaning of “freedom” would be con-tested for years to come.The deep desire for independencefrom white control formed the underlying aspiration ofnewly freed slaves. For their part, most southern whitepeople sought to restrict the boundaries of that indepen-dence. As individuals and as members of communitiestransformed by emancipation, former slaves struggled toestablish economic, political, and cultural autonomy.Theybuilt on the twin pillars of slave culture—the family and

OVERVIEW Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution,1865–1870

OVERVIEW Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution,1865–1870

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the church—to consolidate and expand African Americaninstitutions and thereby laid the foundation for the mod-ern African American community.

Moving AboutThe first impulse of many emancipated slaves was to testtheir freedom.The simplest, most obvious way to do this

involved leaving home.Throughoutthe summer and fall of 1865,observers in the South noted enor-mous numbers of freed people on

the move. One former slave squatting in an abandonedtent outside Selma, Alabama, explained his feeling to anorthern journalist:“I’s want to be free man, cum when Iplease, and nobody say nuffin to me, nor order me roun’.”When urged to stay on with the South Carolina familyshe had served for years as a cook, a slave woman repliedfirmly:“No, Miss, I must go. If I stay here I’ll never knowI am free.”

Yet many who left their old neighborhoods returnedsoon afterward to seek work in the general vicinity oreven on the plantation they had left. Many wanted toseparate themselves from former owners, but not fromfamilial ties and friendships. Others moved away alto-gether, seeking jobs in nearby towns and cities. Manyformer slaves left predominantly white counties, wherethey felt more vulnerable and isolated, for new lives inthe relative comfort of predominantly black communi-ties. In most southern states, there was a significant pop-ulation shift toward black belt plantation counties andtowns after the war. Many African Americans, attractedby schools, churches, and fraternal societies as well as thearmy, preferred the city. Between 1865 and 1870, theAfrican American population of the South’s ten largestcities doubled, while the white population increased byonly 10 percent.

Disgruntled planters had difficulty accepting AfricanAmerican independence. During slavery, they hadexpected obedience, submission, and loyalty from AfricanAmericans. Now many could not understand why somany former slaves wanted to leave, despite urgent pleasto continue working at the old place.The deference andhumility white people expected from African Americanscould no longer be taken for granted. Indeed, many freedpeople went out of their way to reject the old sub-servience. Moving about freely was one way of doing this,as was refusing to tip one’s hat to white people, ignoringformer masters or mistresses in the streets, and refusing tostep aside on sidewalks. When freed people stagedparades, dances, and picnics to celebrate their new free-dom, as they did, for example, when commemorating theEmancipation Proclamation, white people invariablycondemned them angrily for “insolence,” “outrageousspectacles,” or “putting on airs.”


African American Families, Churches,and SchoolsEmancipation allowed freed people to strengthen familyties. For many former slaves, freedom meant the opportu-nity to find long-lost family members. To track downthese relatives, freed people trekked to faraway places, putads in newspapers, sought the help of Freedmen’s Bureauagents, and questioned anyone who might have informa-tion about loved ones. Many thousands of family reunions,each with its own story, took place after the war. OneNorth Carolina slave, who had seen his parents separatedby sale, recalled many years later what for him had beenthe most significant aspect of freedom.“I has got thirteengreat-gran’ chilluns an’ I know whar dey ever’one am. Inslavery times dey’d have been on de block long time ago.”Thousands of African American couples who had livedtogether under slavery streamed to military and civilianauthorities and demanded to be legally married. By 1870,the two-parent household was the norm for a large major-ity of African Americans.

For many freed people, the attempt to find lost rela-tives dragged on for years. Searches often proved frustrat-ing, exhausting, and ultimately disappointing. Some“reunions” ended painfully with the discovery that spouseshad found new partners and started new families.

Emancipation brought changes to gender roles withinthe African American family as well. By serving in theUnion army, African American men played a more directrole than women in the fight for freedom. In the politicalsphere, black men could now serve on juries, vote, andhold office; black women, like their white counterparts,could not. Freedmen’s Bureau agents designated the hus-band as household head and established lower wage scalesfor women laborers. African American editors, preachers,and politicians regularly quoted the biblical injunctionthat wives submit to their husbands.

African American men asserted their male authority,denied under slavery, by insisting their wives work athome instead of in the fields. African American womengenerally wanted to devote more time than they hadunder slavery to caring for their children and to per-forming such domestic chores as cooking, sewing, gar-dening, and laundering. Yet African American womencontinued to work outside the home, engaging in sea-sonal field labor for wages or working a family’s rentedplot. Most rural black families barely eked out a livingand, thus, the labor of every family member was essentialto survival.The key difference from slave times was thatAfrican American families themselves, not white mastersand overseers, decided when and where women andchildren worked.

The creation of separate African American churchesproved the most lasting and important element of the ener-getic institution building that went on in postemancipation

Jourdon Anderson to HisFormer Master (1865) atwww.myhistorylab.com

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years. Before the Civil War, southern Protestant churcheshad relegated slaves and free African Americans to second-class membership. Black worshipers were required to sit inthe back during services, they were denied any role inchurch governance, and they were excluded from Sundayschools. Even in larger cities, where all-black congregationssometimes built their own churches, the law requiredwhite pastors.

In communities around the South,African Americansnow pooled their resources to buy land and build theirown churches. Before these structures were completed,they might hold services in a railroad boxcar, whereAtlanta’s First Baptist Church began, or in an outdoorarbor, the original site of the First Baptist Church ofMemphis. Churches became the center not only for reli-gious life but also for many other activities that definedthe African American community: schools, picnics, festi-vals, and political meetings. The church became the firstsocial institution fully controlled by African Americans. Innearly every community, ministers, respected for theirspeaking and organizational skills, were among the most

influential leaders. By 1877, the great majority of blackSoutherners had withdrawn from white-dominatedchurches. In South Carolina, for example, only a few hun-dred black Methodists attended biracial churches, downfrom over 40,000 in 1865. Black Baptist churches, withtheir decentralized and democratic structure and moreemotional services, attracted the greatest number of freedpeople. By the end of Reconstruction, the vast majority ofAfrican American Christians belonged to black Baptist orMethodist churches.

The rapid spread of schools reflected AfricanAmericans’ thirst for self-improvement. Southern stateshad prohibited education for slaves. But many free blackpeople managed to attend school, and a few slaves hadbeen able to educate themselves. Still, over 90 percent ofthe South’s adult African American population was illit-erate in 1860.Access to education thus became a centralpart of the meaning of freedom. Freedmen’s Bureauagents repeatedly expressed amazement at the numberof makeshift classrooms organized by African Americansin rural areas. A bureau officer described these “wayside

An overflow congregation crowds into Richmond’s First African Baptist Church in 1874. Despite theirpoverty, freed people struggled to save money, buy land, and erect new buildings as they organizedhundreds of new black churches during Reconstruction. As the most important African Americaninstitution outside the family, the black church, in addition to tending to spiritual needs, played a key rolein the educational and political life of the community.

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schools”: “A negro riding on a loaded wagon, or sittingon a hack waiting for a train, or by the cabin door, isoften seen, book in hand delving after the rudiments ofknowledge. A group on the platform of a depot, aftercarefully conning an old spelling book, resolves itselfinto a class.”

African American communities received importanteducational aid from outside organizations. By 1869, theFreedmen’s Bureau was supervising nearly 3,000 schoolsserving over 150,000 students throughout the South. Overhalf of the roughly 3,300 teachers in these schools wereAfrican Americans, many of whom had been free beforethe Civil War. Other teachers included dedicated northernwhite women, volunteers sponsored by the AmericanMissionary Association (AMA).The bureau and the AMAalso assisted in the founding of several black colleges,including Tougaloo, Hampton, and Fisk, designed to trainblack teachers.Black self-help proved crucial to the educa-tion effort. Throughout the South in 1865 and 1866,African Americans raised money to build schoolhouses,buy supplies, and pay teachers.Black artisans donated laborfor construction, and black families offered room andboard to teachers.

Land and Labor After SlaveryMost newly emancipated African Americans aspired toquit the plantations and to make new lives for themselves.Some freed people did find jobs in railroad building, min-ing, ranching, or construction work. Others raised subsis-tence crops and tended vegetable gardens as squatters.White planters, however, tried to retain AfricanAmericans as permanent agricultural laborers. Restrictingthe employment of former slaves was an important goalof the black codes. For example, South Carolina legisla-tion in 1865 provided that “no person of color shall pur-sue or practice the art, trade, or business of an artisan,mechanic, or shopkeeper, or any other trade employment,or business, besides that of husbandry, or that of a servantunder contract for service or labor” without a special andcostly permit.

The majority of African Americans hoped tobecome self-sufficient farmers. Many former slavesbelieved they were entitled to the land they had workedthroughout their lives. General Oliver O. Howard, chiefcommissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, observed thatmany “supposed that the Government [would] divideamong them the lands of the conquered owners, andfurnish them with all that might be necessary to beginlife as an independent farmer.”This perception was notmerely a wishful fantasy. Frequent reference in theCongress and the press to the question of land distribu-tion made the idea of “forty acres and a mule” not justa pipe dream but a matter of serious public debate. Butby 1866, the federal government had already pulled

back from the various wartime experiments involvingthe breaking up of large plantations and the leasing ofsmall plots to individual families. President Johnsondirected General Howard of the Freedmen’s Bureau toevict tens of thousands of freed people settled on con-fiscated and abandoned land in southeastern Virginia,southern Louisiana, and the Georgia and SouthCarolina Lowcountry.

In communities throughout the South, freed peopleand their former masters negotiated new arrangements fororganizing agricultural labor. In Hale County,Alabama, forexample, local black farmhands contracted to work onHenry Watson’s plantation in 1866 deserted him whenthey angrily discovered that their small share of the cropleft them in debt. Local Union League activists encour-aged newly freed slaves to remain independent of whitefarmers, and political agitation for freedmen’s rightsencouraged them to push for better working conditions aswell.Yet few owners would sell or even rent land to blacks.Watson, desperate for field hands, finally agreed to subdi-vide his plantation and rent it to freedmen, who wouldwork under their own supervision without overseers.Black families left the old slave quarters and began build-ing cabins scattered around the plantation. By 1868,Watson was convinced that black farmers made good ten-ants; like many other landowners, he grudgingly acceptedgreater independence for black families in exchange for amore stable labor force. By 1869, as one Hale County cor-respondent reported, “Many planters have turned theirstock, teams, and every facility to farming, over to thenegroes, and only require an amount of toll for the use ofthe land” (see Map 17.2).

By the late 1860s, sharecropping and tenant farminghad emerged as the dominant form of working the land.Sharecropping represented a compromise betweenplanters and former slaves. Under sharecropping arrange-ments that were usually very detailed, individual familiescontracted with landowners to be responsible for a specificplot. Large plantations were thus broken into family-sizedfarms. Generally, sharecropper fami-lies received one-third of the year’scrop if the owner furnished imple-ments, seed, and draft animals orone-half if they provided their own supplies. AfricanAmericans preferred sharecropping to gang labor, as itallowed families to set their own hours and tasks andoffered freedom from white supervision and control. Forplanters, the system stabilized the workforce by requiringsharecroppers to remain until the harvest and to employ allfamily members. It also offered a way around the chronicshortage of cash and credit that plagued the postwarSouth. Freed people did not aspire to sharecropping.Owning land outright or tenant farming (renting land)were both more desirable. But though black sharecroppersclearly enjoyed more autonomy than in the past, the vast

A Sharecrop Contract(1882) at www.myhistorylab.com

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majority never achieved economic independence or landownership. They remained a largely subordinate agricul-tural labor force.

The Origins of African American PoliticsHundreds of African American delegates, selected by localmeetings or churches, attended statewide political con-ventions held throughout the South in 1865 and 1866.Previously free African Americans, as well as black minis-ters, artisans, and veterans of the Union army, tended todominate these proceedings, setting a pattern that would

hold throughout Reconstruction. Convention debatessometimes reflected the tensions within African Americancommunities, such as friction between poorer formerslaves and better-off free black people, or between lighter-and darker-skinned African Americans. But most of thesestate gatherings concentrated on passing resolutions onissues that united all African Americans.The central con-cerns were suffrage and equality before the law.

The passage of the First Reconstruction Act in 1867encouraged even more political activity among AfricanAmericans.The military started registering the South’s elec-torate, ultimately enrolling approximately 735,000 black

Syll’s Fork

Wright’s Branch

Little R

iver

Branch Creek

Syll’s Fork

Branch Creek

W

right’s Branch

Little R

iver

1860 1881

MAP 17.2 The Barrow Plantation, Oglethorpe County, Georgia,1860 and 1881 (approx. 2,000 acres) These two maps, based on drawings from

Scribner’s Monthly, April 1881, show some of the changes brought by emancipation. In 1860, the

plantation’s entire black population lived in the communal slave quarters, right next to the white master’s

house. In 1881, black sharecropper and tenant families lived on individual plots, spread out across the

land. The former slaves had also built their own school and church.

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After the Civil War, northern journalists and illustratorswent south to describe Reconstruction in action. Theytook a keen interest in how the newly freed slaves werereshaping local and national politics. A drawing byHarper’s Weekly illustrator William L. Sheppard titled“Electioneering in the South” clearly approved of thefreedmen’s exercise of their new citizenship rights. “Doesany man seriously doubt,” the caption asked, “whether itis better for this vast population to be sinking deeper anddeeper in ignorance and servility, or rising into generalintelligence and self-respect? They can not be pariahs;they can not be peons; they must be slaves or citizens.”

Thomas Nast was the nation’s best-known politicalcartoonist during the 1860s and 1870s. During the CivilWar he strongly supported the Union cause and the

aspirations of the newly freed slaves. But by 1876, likemany Northerners originally sympathetic to guarantee-ing blacks full political and civil rights, Nast had turnedaway from the early ideals of Reconstruction. Nast usedgrotesque racial caricature to depict southern AfricanAmericans and northern Irish immigrants as undeserv-ing of the right to vote. The aftermath of the disputed1876 presidential election included charges of wide-spread vote fraud from both Republicans andDemocrats. Nast’s view—published in Harper’s Weeklyin December 1876, while the election’s outcome wasstill in doubt—reflected concerns among many middle-class Northerners that the nation’s political system wastainted by the manipulation of “ignorant” voters inboth the South and the North.

• How does the portrayal of the larger African American community in “Electioneering in the South” reflect thepolitical point being made?

• What do the caricatures in “The Ignorant Vote” suggest about Reconstruction era ideas about the meaningof “whiteness”?

Changing Images of Reconstruction

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and 635,000 white voters in the ten unreconstructed states.Five states—Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, andSouth Carolina—had black electoral majorities. Fewer thanhalf the registered white voters participated in the electionsfor state constitutional conventions in 1867 and 1868. Incontrast, four-fifths of the registered black voters cast ballotsin these elections. Much of this new African Americanpolitical activism was channeled through local UnionLeague chapters throughout the South.However, as the fateof Alex Webb in Hale County,Alabama, again makes clear,few whites welcomed this activism.

Begun during the war as a northern, largely whitemiddle-class patriotic club, the Union League nowbecame the political voice of the former slaves. UnionLeague chapters brought together local AfricanAmericans, soldiers, and Freedmen’s Bureau agents todemand the vote and an end to legal discrimination

against African Americans. It brought out AfricanAmerican voters, instructed freedmen in the rights andduties of citizenship, and promotedRepublican candidates. Not surpris-ingly, newly enfranchised freedmenvoted Republican and formed thecore of the Republican Party in theSouth. For most ordinary African Americans, politics wasinseparable from economic issues, especially the land ques-tion. Grassroots political organizations frequently inter-vened in local disputes with planters over the terms oflabor contracts. African American political groups closelyfollowed the congressional debates over Reconstructionpolicy and agitated for land confiscation and distribution.Perhaps most important, politics was the only arena whereblack and white Southerners might engage each other onan equal basis.

“The First Vote,” Harper’s Weekly,November 16, 1867, reflected the optimismfelt by much of the northern public asformer slaves began to vote for the firsttime. The caption noted that freedmen wentto the ballot box “not with expressions ofexultation or of defiance of their old mastersand present opponents depicted on theircountenances, but looking serious andsolemn and determined.”

Address from theColored Citizens ofNorfolk, VA (1865) atwww.myhistorylab.com

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Southern Politics and SocietyBy the summer of 1868, when the South had returned tothe Union, the majority of Republicans believed the taskof Reconstruction to be finished. Ultimately, they puttheir faith in a political solution to the problems facing thevanquished South. That meant nurturing a viable two-party system in the southern states, where no RepublicanParty had ever existed. If that could be accomplished,Republicans and Democrats would compete for votes,offices, and influence, just as they did in northern states.Most Republican congressmen were moderates, conceiv-ing Reconstruction in limited terms.They rejected radicalcalls for confiscation and redistribution of land, as well aspermanent military rule of the South.The ReconstructionActs of 1867 and 1868 laid out the requirements for thereadmission of southern states, along with the proceduresfor forming and electing new governments.

Yet over the next decade, the political structure createdin the southern states proved too restricted and fragile to sus-tain itself.To most southern whites, the active participationof African Americans in politics seemed extremely danger-ous. Federal troops were needed to protect Republican gov-ernments and their supporters from violent opposition.Congressional action to monitor southern elections andprotect black voting rights became routine. Despite initialsuccesses, southern Republicanism proved an unstable coali-tion of often conflicting elements, unable to sustain effectivepower for very long. By 1877, Democrats had regainedpolitical control of all the former Confederate states.

Southern RepublicansThree major groups composed the fledgling Republicancoalition in the postwar South. African American votersmade up a large majority of southern Republicansthroughout the Reconstruction era.Yet African Americansoutnumbered whites in only three southern states;Republicans would have to attract white support to winelections and sustain power.

A second group consisted of white Northerners, deri-sively called “carpetbaggers” by native white Southerners.Most carpetbaggers combined a desire for personal gainwith a commitment to reform the “unprogressive” Southby developing its material resources and introducingYankee institutions, such as free labor and free publicschools. Most were veterans of the Union army who stayedin the South after the war. Others included Freedmen’sBureau agents and businessmen who had invested capital incotton plantations and other enterprises.

Carpetbaggers tended to be well educated and fromthe middle class.Albert Morgan, for example, was an armyveteran from Ohio who settled in Mississippi after the war.When he and his brother failed at running a cotton planta-tion and sawmill, Morgan became active in Republicanpolitics as a way to earn a living. He won election to the

state constitutional convention,became a power in the statelegislature, and risked his life to keep the Republican orga-nization alive in the Mississippi Delta region. Althoughthey made up a tiny percentage of the population, carpet-baggers played a disproportionately large role in southernpolitics.They won a large share of Reconstruction offices,particularly in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana andin areas with large African American constituencies.

The third major group of southern Republicans wasthe native whites pejoratively termed “scalawags.”They hadeven more diverse backgrounds and motives than thenorthern-born Republicans. Some were prominent prewarWhigs who saw the Republican Party as their best chanceto regain political influence. Others viewed the party as anagent of modernization and economic expansion.“Yankeesand Yankee notions are just what we want in this country,”argued Thomas Settle of North Carolina. “We want theircapital to build factories and workshops. We want theirintelligence, their energy and enterprise.” Loyalists duringthe war and traditional enemies of the planter elite (mostwere small farmers), these white Southerners looked to theRepublican Party for help in settling old scores and relieffrom debt and wartime devastation.

Southern Republicanism also reflected prewar politi-cal divisions. Its influence was greatest in those regions thathad long resisted the political and economic power of theplantation elite. Thus, southern Republicans could domi-nate the mountainous areas of western North Carolina,eastern Tennessee, northern Georgia, and southwesternVirginia as much as Democrats controlled other areas.Yetfew white Southerners identified with the political andeconomic aspirations of African Americans. Moderate ele-ments more concerned with maintaining white control ofthe party, and encouraging economic investment in theregion, outnumbered and defeated “confiscation radicals”who focused on obtaining land for African Americans.

Reconstructing the States: A Mixed RecordWith the old Confederate leaders barred from political par-ticipation, and with carpetbaggers and newly enfranchisedAfrican Americans representing many of the plantation dis-tricts, Republicans managed to dominate the ten southernconstitutional conventions from 1867 to 1869.Most of theseconventions produced constitutions that expanded democ-racy and the public role of the state. The new documentsguaranteed the political and civil rights of AfricanAmericans, and they abolished property qualifications forofficeholding and jury service as well as imprisonment fordebt.They created the first state-funded systems of educationin the South to be administered by state commissioners.Thenew constitutions also mandated establishment of orphan-ages, penitentiaries, and homes for the insane. In 1868, onlythree years after the end of the war, Republicans came topower in most of the southern states.By 1869,new constitu-tions had been ratified in all the old Confederate states.

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Southern Politics and Society 477

Republican governments in the South faced a contin-ual crisis of legitimacy that limited their ability to legislatechange. They had to balance reform against the need togain acceptance, especially by white Southerners. Theirachievements were thus mixed. In the realm of race rela-tions there was a clear thrust toward equal rights andagainst discrimination. Republican legislatures followedup the federal Civil Rights Act of 1866 with variousantidiscrimination clauses in new constitutions and lawsprescribing harsh penalties for civil rights violations.

Segregation, though, became the norm in publicschool systems. African American leaders often acceptedsegregation because they feared that insistence on inte-grated education would jeopardize funding for the newschool systems. Segregation in railroad cars and other pub-lic places was more objectionable. By the early 1870s, asblack influence and assertiveness grew, laws guaranteeingequal access to transportation and public accommodationwere passed in many states. By and large, though, such civilrights laws were difficult to enforce in local communities.

In economic matters, Republican governments failedto fulfill African Americans’ hopes of obtaining land. Few

former slaves possessed the cash to buy land in the openmarket, and they looked to the state for help. Republicanstried to weaken the plantation system and promote blackownership by raising taxes on land.Yet even when stategovernments seized land for nonpayment of taxes, theproperty was never used to help create black homesteads.

Republican leaders envisioned promoting northern-style capitalist development—factories, large towns, anddiversified agriculture—through state aid.Much Republicanstate lawmaking was devoted to encouraging railroad con-struction. But in spite of all the new laws, it proved impossi-ble to attract significant amounts of northern and Europeaninvestment capital. The obsession with railroads withdrewresources from education and other programs. As in theNorth, it also opened the doors to widespread corruptionand bribery of public officials. Railroad failures eroded pub-lic confidence in the Republicans’ ability to govern.

White Resistance and “Redemption”The emergence of a Republican Party in the recon-structed South brought two parties, but not a two-partysystem, to the region.The opponents of Reconstruction,

The Ku Klux Klan emerged as a potent political and social force duringReconstruction, terrorizing freed people and their white allies. An 1868Klan warning threatens Louisiana governor Henry C. Warmoth withdeath. Warmoth, an Illinois-born “carpetbagger,” was the state’s firstRepublican governor. Two Alabama Klansmen, photographed in 1868,wear white hoods to hide their identities.

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the Democrats, refused to acknowledge Republicans’ rightto participate in southern political life. Republicans weresplit between those who urged conciliation in an effort togain white acceptance and those who emphasized consol-idating the party under the protection of the military.

From its founding in 1868 through the early 1870s,the Ku Klux Klan waged an ongoing terrorist campaignagainst Reconstruction governments and local leaders.Just as the institution of slavery had depended on violenceand the threat of violence, the Klan acted as a kind ofguerrilla military force in the service of the DemocraticParty, the planter class, and all those who sought therestoration of white supremacy. It employed a wide arrayof terror tactics: destroying ballot boxes, issuing deaththreats, beating and murdering politically active blacksand their white allies. Freedmen and their allies some-times resisted the Klan. In Hale County, Alabama, UnionLeaguers set up a warning system using buglers to signalthe activities of Klan raiders. But violence and intimida-tion decimated Union League leadership in the country-side by 1869.

In October 1870, after Republicans carried LaurensCounty in South Carolina, bands of white people drove150 African Americans from their homes and murderedthirteen white and black Republican activists. In March1871, three African Americans were arrested in Meridian,Mississippi, for giving “incendiary” speeches.At their courthearing, Klansmen killed two of the defendants and theRepublican judge, and thirty more African Americanswere murdered in a day of rioting. The single bloodiestepisode of Reconstruction era violence took place inColfax, Louisiana, on Easter Sunday 1873. Nearly100 African Americans were murdered after they failed tohold a besieged courthouse during a contested election.

Southern Republicans looked to Washington for help.In 1870 and 1871, Congress passed three EnforcementActs designed to counter racial terrorism.These declaredthat interference with voting was a federal offense. Theacts provided for federal supervision of voting and autho-rized the president to send the army and to suspend thewrit of habeas corpus in districts declared to be in a stateof insurrection. The most sweeping measure was the KuKlux Klan Act of April 1871, which made the violentinfringement of civil and political rights a federal crimepunishable by the national government. By the election of1872, the federal government’s intervention had helpedbreak the Klan and restore a semblance of law and order.

The Civil Rights Act of 1875 outlawed racial discrim-ination in theaters, hotels, railroads, and other public places.But the law proved more an assertion of principle than adirect federal intervention in southern affairs. Enforcementrequired African Americans to take their cases to the fed-eral courts, a costly and time-consuming procedure.

As wartime idealism faded, northern Republicansbecame less inclined toward direct intervention in southern

affairs.They had enough trouble retaining political controlin the North. In 1874, the Democrats gained a majority inthe House of Representatives for the first time since 1856.Key northern states also began to fall to the Democrats.Northern Republicans slowly abandoned the freedmenand their white allies in the South. Southern Democratswere also able to exploit a deepening fiscal crisis by blam-ing Republicans for excessive extension of public creditand the sharp increase in tax rates.

Gradually, conservative Democrats “redeemed” onestate after another.Virginia and Tennessee led the way in1869, North Carolina in 1870, Georgia in 1871,Texas in1873, and Alabama and Arkansas in 1874. In Mississippi,white conservatives employed violence and intimidationto wrest control in 1875 and “redeemed” the state thefollowing year. Republican infighting in Louisiana in1873 and 1874 led to a series of contested electionresults, including bloody clashes between black militiaand armed whites, and finally to “redemption” by theDemocrats in 1877.

Several Supreme Court rulings involving theFourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments effectively con-strained federal protection of African American civil rights.In the so-called Slaughterhouse cases of 1873, the Courtissued its first ruling on the Fourteenth Amendment.Thecases involved a Louisiana charter that gave a New Orleansmeatpacking company a monopoly over the city’s butcher-ing business on the grounds of protecting public health.Arival group of butchers had sued, claiming the law violatedthe Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibited states fromdepriving any person of life, liberty, or property withoutdue process of law.The Court held that the FourteenthAmendment protected only the former slaves, notbutchers, and that it protected only national citizenshiprights, not the regulatory powers of states. It separatednational citizenship from state citizenship and declaredthat most of the rights that Americans enjoyed on adaily basis—freedom of speech, fair trials, the right tosit on juries, protection from unreasonable searches, andthe right to vote—were under the control of state law.The ruling in effect denied the original intent of theFourteenth Amendment—to protect against state infringe-ment of national citizenship rights as spelled out in theBill of Rights.

Three other decisions curtailed federal protection ofblack civil rights. In United States v. Reese (1876) andUnited States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Court restrictedcongressional power to enforce the Ku Klux Klan Act.Future prosecution would depend on the states ratherthan on federal authorities. In these rulings, the Courtheld that the Fourteenth Amendment extended the fed-eral power to protect civil rights only in cases involvingdiscrimination by states; discrimination by individuals orgroups was not covered. The Court also ruled that theFifteenth Amendment did not guarantee a citizen’s right

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to vote; it only barred certain specific grounds for deny-ing suffrage—“race, color, or previous condition of servi-tude.”This interpretation opened the door for southernstates to disenfranchise African Americans for allegedlynonracial reasons. States back under Democratic controlbegan to limit African American voting by passing lawsrestricting voter eligibility through poll taxes and prop-erty requirements.

Finally, in the 1883 Civil Rights Cases decision, theCourt declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitu-tional, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment gaveCongress the power to outlaw discrimination by states butnot by private individuals.The majority opinion held thatblack people must no longer “be the special favorite of thelaws.” Together, these Supreme Court decisions markedthe end of federal attempts to protect African Americanrights until well into the next century.

King Cotton: Sharecroppers, Tenants,and the Southern EnvironmentThe Republicans’ vision of a “New South” remade alongthe lines of the northern economy failed to materialize.Instead, the South declined into the country’s poorest

agricultural region. Unlike midwestern and western farmtowns burgeoning from trade in wheat, corn, and live-stock, Southern communities found themselves almostentirely dependent on the price of one commodity. In thepost–Civil War years,“King Cotton” expanded its realm, asgreater numbers of small white farmers found themselvesforced to switch from subsistence crops to growing cottonfor the market (see Map 17.3).

A chronic shortage of capital and banking institutionsmade local merchants and planters the sole source ofcredit.They advanced loans and supplies to small owners,tenant farmers, and sharecroppers in exchange for a lien,or claim, on the year’s cotton crop. They often chargedextremely high interest rates on advances, while markingup the prices of the goods sold in their stores. Takingadvantage of the high illiteracy rates among poorSoutherners, landlords and merchants easily altered theirbooks to inflate the figures. At the end of the year, share-croppers and tenants found themselves deep in debt tostores for seed, supplies, and clothing. Despite hard workand even bountiful harvests, few small farmers couldescape from heavy debt.The spread of the “crop lien” sys-tem as the South’s main form of agricultural credit forcedmore and more farmers into cotton growing.

Southern Politics and Society 479

ATLANTIC

OCEAN

Gulf of Mexico

GEORGIA

NORTH CAROLINATENNESSEE

SOUTHCAROLINA

VIRGINIA

ALABAMA

MISSISSIPPI

LOUISIANA

T E X A S

ARKANSAS

FLORIDA

35%–80%20%–34%13%–19%0%–12%

Sharecropped farms (by county)

MAP 17.3 Southern Sharecropping and the Cotton Belt, 1880 The

economic depression of the 1870s forced increasing numbers of southern farmers, both white and black,

into sharecropping arrangements. Sharecropping was most pervasive in the cotton belt regions of South

Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and eastern Texas.

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Movements of the Mystic Klan, from the ShelbyCounty Guide, December 3, 1868

About a week ago Saturday night the Ku Klux came into town to reg-ulate matters.They were here from eleven p.m. to three o’clock a.m.—five hundred in all.They shot one very bad Negro, putting six ballsthrough his head. Many heard the noise, but did not know what wasgoing on. They also hung three or four Negroes nearly dead, andwhipped others severely in order to make them tell them about theirnightly meetings, and whattheir object was in holding thesame; also, as to who their lead-ers were. They made a cleanbreast of the whole matter,telling everything.The strongestthing about these Ku Klux wasthat they did not hesitate tounmask themselves when askedto do so; and out of the wholeparty none were identified.—Every one who saw them saystheir horses were more beauti-ful than, and far superior to, anyin the country round about.They spoke but little but always to a purpose. They went to severalstores and knocked; the doors were opened at once.They then calledfor rope, and at each place a coil was rolled out to them.They cut itin suitable length to hang a man with. No one asked for money andthey offered none. They did not disturb any one else, nor did theytake any thing except some few Enfield rifles which were found inpossession of some very bad Negroes.—They called on the revenueofficer and passed a few remarks with him. What transpired is notknown, but it has made a great improvement in his conversation.Thevisitants advent has been productive of much good and benefit tothe community, though all regret such steps should have to beresorted to, every one says “give us peace,” and really I believe themto be truly sincere.

SOURCE: Reprinted with permission from the Alabama Department of Archives and History,Montgomery, Alabama

During Reconstruction the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)

claimed as many as 12,000 members in Alabama,

or about one in every nine white male voters. The

KKK enjoyed deep and widespread support from many

whites, including women and children, who viewed the Klan

as the protector of white supremacy and a weapon against

the Republican Party. Democratic newspapers routinely

printed favorable accounts of Klan activities, as well as pro-

Klan advertisements, songs, and jokes—and threats

directed at intended Klan victims. The following excerpt

from a sympathetic newspaper report of Klan activities in

the central Alabama town of Florence was published in the

Shelby County Guide on December 3, 1868.

African Americans and their Republican allies, how-

ever, experienced the Klan as a terrorist organization

responsible for murder, beatings, arson, and violent

intimidation aimed at preventing African American politi-

cal organizing and economic advancement. This view is

vividly presented in a first-person account of Klan terror

given by George Houston, an ex-slave and tailor, who

had been elected to represent Sumter County in the

Alabama state legislature. Houston had helped organize

a Union League chapter and actively registered black

voters. After local Klansmen wounded his son and broke

down the door to his house, Houston grabbed his gun

and shot back. In this testimony to a congressional com-

mittee investigating the KKK’s terrorist campaign, he

describes the immediate scene and the campaign to

intimidate him.

• How do the documents revealprofoundly different understandings ofthe consequences of freedom forAfrican Americans?

• What do the sources tell us about theconnections between political dominanceand economic power in theReconstruction era South?

The Ku Klux Klan in Alabama

“They shot onevery bad

Negro. . . . [T]heyalso hung three

or four . . . nearlydead. . . .”

480

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Q: Opposed to what?A. Opposed to colored men being shot down like dogs,

when I knew that the officers of the county could stop it. Itold the sheriff that to his face. If they took exceptions to meon that account, that is all I can tell, for I was raised there, andthey never could put a scratch of a pen against me before, andnothing else could they have taken from it except that I tried

to hold up the men that had been shot down by violence;some at night, some by daylight; some were found in thestock pools with their guts cut out. All this came to my earsand the other men’s ears.

Q: How many colored men were assassinated inthat county?

A. I think eight or nine, before I was shot, were killeddead, according to the accounts of the white men and blackmen I got through the county. I stop at eight or nine, but Ireally think there were a few more.

Q: Is the bullet there now in the leg?A.Yes sir; and it will stay there until God Almighty takes

it out. I had a doctor fifteen minutes probing to get that out.The ball went through my child’s flesh, too. My child had togo fifteen miles to his grandfather and I had to suffer and gooff. I had to sacrifice my property. And yet I am aRepublican, and I will die one. I say the Republican Partyfreed me, and I will die on top of it. I don’t care who ispleased. I vote every time. I was register of my county, and mymaster sent in and lent me his pistols to carry around mywaist when I was register, to protect myself against my ene-mies. I am a Republican today, and if the Republican Partycan’t do me any good, I will never turn against it. I can workin the cotton patch and work at my trade, and get alongwithout any benefit from my party, and so I will stick to theRepublican Party and die in it.

SOURCE: “Affairs in Insurrectionary States: Report and Minority Reviews, Alabama,vol. 2,” Senate Reports, 42nd Congress, 2nd Session, vol. 2, pt. 9, no. 41.

George Houston’s Testimony, Montgomery,October 17, 1871

Q: How many were there in the crowd thatattacked your house?

A. I can’t tell. It looked like a great many men. It wasstarlight and before day.There was a good deal of cursingafter they got shot and broke down my door.The reason they were afraid to come in was, Ithink, because that shot was fired.They didn’tcome back.

Q: Did you notice whether they weredisguised?

A. Only the one that I shot at. He looked like he waswrapped up in some white cloth; it looked so by starlight.That is all I could see.

Q: Had you any trouble with your neighbors?A. Nothing more than some talk that I didn’t like from

some wealthy men of the county. One of them had come tome, and told me if I turned against them they would turnagainst me. They looked upon me as being the prominentNegro of the county. I know the men that told me that thingvery well. It was in a dry goods store in that town.

Q: What did they want you to do?A.They wanted me to deny what was called the Union

League.They had understood I belonged to it.The reasonthey took a great fancy to me was, I was a tailor in thatplace. My master had learned me this trade on account ofmy health and crippleness when I was a slave. I had run ashop for sixteen years there. They came to me, and said Imade my living off of them and not off of the damned nig-gers, and if I turned against them they would turn againstme. I said my belonging to the Union League didn’t dothem any harm.They said, ‘Yes, it does.’ I said, ‘It’s only toteach our ignorant colored men.’ This was our talk pri-vately, and this was only a few months before I was shot.That is all I could assign for the cause of it, and taking thefact that the other colored men were shot down justbefore, and I was a representative of that county.There wasa public meeting; we had made some public speeches, somewhite and some black men, and I told them I was opposedto this.

“[I was] opposed to colored menbeing shot down like dogs.”

481

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As the “crop lien” system spread, and as more andmore farmers turned to cotton growing as the only wayto obtain credit, expanding production depressed prices.Competition from new cotton centers in the world mar-ket, such as Egypt and India, accelerated the downwardspiral. As cotton prices declined alarmingly, to roughlyeleven cents per pound in 1875 to five cents by the early1890s, per capita wealth in the South fell steadily, equalingonly one-third that of the East, Midwest, or West by the1890s. Small farmers caught up in a vicious cycle of lowcotton prices, debt, and dwindling food crops found theirold ideal of independence sacrificed to the cruel logic ofthe cotton market.

To obtain precious credit, most southern farmers,both black and white, found themselves forced to pro-duce cotton for market and, thus, became enmeshed inthe debt-ridden crop lien system. In traditional cotton-producing areas, especially the black belt, landless farmersgrowing cotton had replaced slaves growing cotton. Inthe Upcountry and newer areas of cultivation, cotton-dominated commercial agriculture, with landless tenants

and sharecroppers as the mainworkforce, had replaced the morediversified subsistence economy ofthe antebellum era. These patternshardened throughout the late nine-

teenth century. By 1900, roughly half of the South’s2,620,000 farms were operated by tenants, who rentedland, or sharecroppers, who pledged a portion of the cropto owners in exchange for some combination of workanimals, seed, and tools. Over one-third of the whitefarmers and nearly three-quarters of the AfricanAmerican farmers in the cotton states were tenants orsharecroppers. Large parts of the southern landscapewould remain defined by this system well into the twen-tieth century: small farms operated by families who didnot own their land, mired in desperate poverty and debt.

Reconstructing the NorthAbraham Lincoln liked to cite his own rise as proof ofthe superiority of the northern system of “free labor”over slavery.“There is no permanent class of hired labor-ers amongst us,” Lincoln asserted. “Twenty-five yearsago, I was a hired laborer.The hired laborer of yesterday,labors on his own account today; and will hire others tolabor for him tomorrow. Advancement—improvementin condition—is the order of things in a society ofequals.” But the triumph of the North brought with itfundamental changes in the economy, labor relations,and politics that brought Lincoln’s ideal vision intoquestion. The spread of the factory system, the growthof large and powerful corporations, and the rapid expan-sion of capitalist enterprise all hastened the developmentof a large unskilled and routinized workforce. Ratherthan becoming independent producers, more and more


workers found themselves consigned permanently towage labor.

The old Republican ideal of a society bound by a har-mony of interests had become overshadowed by a grimmerreality of class conflict.A violent national railroad strike in1877 was broken only with the direct intervention of fed-eral troops.That conflict struck many Americans as a turn-ing point. Northern society, like the society of the South,appeared more hierarchical than equal.

The Age of CapitalIn the decade following Appomattox, the North’s econ-omy continued the industrial boom begun during theCivil War. By 1873, America’s industrial production hadgrown 75 percent over the 1865 level. By that time, too,the number of nonagricultural workers in the North hadsurpassed the number of farmers. Between 1860 and 1880,the number of wage earners in manufacturing and con-struction more than doubled, from 2 million to over4 million. Only Great Britain boasted a larger manufactur-ing economy than the United States. During the sameperiod, nearly 3 million immigrants arrived in America,almost all of whom settled in the North and West.

The railroad business both symbolized and advancedthe new industrial order. Shortly before the Civil War,enthusiasm mounted for a transcontinental line. Privatecompanies took on the huge and expensive job of con-struction, but the federal government funded the project,providing the largest subsidy in American history. ThePacific Railway Act of 1862 granted the Union Pacific andthe Central Pacific rights to a broad swath of land extend-ing from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California.An1864 act bestowed a subsidy of $15,000 per mile of tracklaid over smooth plains country and varying largeramounts up to $48,000 per mile in the foothills andmountains of the Far West. The Union Pacific employedgangs of Irish American and African American workers tolay track heading west from Omaha.

Meanwhile the Central Pacific, pushing east fromCalifornia, had a tougher time finding workers, and beganrecruiting thousands of men from China. In 1868, theSenate ratified the Burlingame Treaty, giving Chinese theright to emigrate to the United States, while specifiyingthat “nothing contained herein shall be held to confernaturalization.” The right to work in America, in otherwords, did not bestow any right to citizenship. Some12,000 Chinese laborers (about 90 percent of the work-force) bore the brunt of the difficult conditions in theSierra Nevada where blizzards, landslides, and steep rockfaces took an awful toll. Chinese workers earned a repu-tation for toughness and efficiency.“If we found we werein a hurry for a job of work,” wrote one of the CentralPacific’s superintendents,“it was better to put on Chineseat once.”Working in baskets suspended by ropes, Chineselaborers chipped away at solid granite walls and became

James T. Rapier,Testimony Before U.S.Senate (1880) atwww.myhistorylab.com

Read the Document

11926_18_ch17_p459-489 11/18/10 12:45 PM Page 482

expert in the use of nitroglycerin for blasting through themountains. But after completion of the transcontinentalline threw thousands of Chinese railroad workers ontothe California labor market, the open-door immigrationpledge in the Burlingame Treaty would soon be eclipsedby a virulent tide of anti-Chinese agitation among west-ern politicians and labor unions. In 1882, Congress passedthe Chinese Exclusion Act, suspending any furtherChinese immigration for ten years.

On May 10, 1869, Leland Stanford, the former gover-nor of California and president of the Central PacificRailroad, traveled to Promontory Point in Utah Territoryto hammer a ceremonial golden spike, marking the finishof the first transcontinental line. Other railroads went upwith less fanfare. The Southern Pacific, chartered by thestate of California, stretched from San Francisco to LosAngeles, and on through Arizona and New Mexico toconnections with New Orleans. The Atchison, Topeka,and Santa Fe reached the Pacific in 1887 by way of asoutherly route across the Rocky Mountains. The Great

Northern, one of the few lines financed by private capital,extended west from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Washington’sPuget Sound.

Railroad corporations became America’s first bigbusinesses. Railroads required huge outlays of investmentcapital, and their growth increased the economic power ofbanks and investment houses centered in Wall Street.Bankers often gained seats on the boards of directors ofrailroad companies, and their access to capital sometimesgave them the real control of the corporations. By theearly 1870s the Pennsylvania Railroad was the nation’slargest single company with more than 20,000 employees.A small group of railroad executives, including CorneliusVanderbilt, Jay Gould, Collis P. Huntington, and James J.Hill, amassed unheard-of fortunes.When he died in 1877,Vanderbilt left his son $100 million. By comparison, adecent annual wage for working a six-day week wasaround $350.

Some of the nation’s most prominent politiciansroutinely accepted railroad largesse. Republican Senator

Reconstructing the North 483

Chinese immigrants, like these section gang workers, provided labor and skills critical to the successfulcompletion of the first transcontinental railroad. This photo was taken in Promontory Point, Utah Territory,in 1869.

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William M. Stewart of Nevada, a member of theCommittee on Pacific Railroads, received a gift of50,000 acres of land from the Central Pacific for his ser-vices. The worst scandal of the Grant administrationgrew out of corruption involving railroad promotion.Asa way of diverting funds for the building of the UnionPacific Railroad, an inner circle of Union Pacific stock-holders created the dummy Crédit Mobilier construc-tion company. In return for political favors, a group ofprominent Republicans received stock in the company.When the scandal broke in 1872, it politically ruinedVice President Schuyler Colfax and led to the censure oftwo congressmen.

Other industries also boomed in this period, espe-cially those engaged in extracting minerals and process-ing natural resources. Railroad growth stimulatedexpansion in the production of coal, iron, stone, andlumber, and these also received significant governmentaid. For example, under the National Mineral Act of1866, mining companies received millions of acres of freepublic land. Oil refining enjoyed a huge expansion in the1860s and 1870s. As with railroads, an early period offierce competition soon gave way to concentration. Bythe late 1870s, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard OilCompany controlled almost 90 percent of the nation’soil-refining capacity.

Liberal Republicans and the Electionof 1872With the rapid growth of large-scale, capital-intensiveenterprises, Republicans increasingly identified with theinterests of business rather than the rights of freedmen orthe antebellum ideology of “free labor.” State Republicanparties now organized themselves around the spoils offederal patronage rather than grand causes such as pre-serving the Union or ending slavery. Republicans had nomonopoly on political scandal. In 1871 New York Citynewspapers reported the shocking story of howDemocratic Party boss William M.Tweed and his friendshad systematically stolen tens of millions from the citytreasury. But to many the scandal represented only themost extreme case of the routine corruption that nowplagued American political life.

By the end of President Grant’s first term, a largenumber of disaffected Republicans sought an alternative.The Liberal Republicans, as they called themselves,emphasized the doctrines of classical economics. Theycalled for a return to limited government, arguing thatbribery, scandal, and high taxes all flowed from excessivestate interference in the economy.

Liberal Republicans were also suspicious of expandingdemocracy. They believed that politics ought to be theprovince of “the best men”—educated and well-to-do menlike themselves, devoted to the “science of government.”

They proposed civil service reform as the best way to breakthe hold of party machines on patronage.

Although most Liberal Republicans had enthusiasti-cally supported abolition, the Union cause, and equalrights for freedmen, they now opposed continued federalintervention in the South.The national government haddone all it could for the former slaves; they must nowtake care of themselves. In the spring of 1872, a diversecollection of Liberal Republicans nominated HoraceGreeley to run for president. A longtime foe of theDemocratic Party, Greeley nonetheless won that party’spresidential nomination as well. All Americans, Greeleyurged, must put the Civil War behind them and “clasphands across the bloody chasm.”

Grant easily defeated Greeley, carrying every state inthe North and winning 56 percent of the popular vote.But the 1872 election accelerated the trend toward federalabandonment of African American citizenship rights.TheLiberal Republicans quickly faded as an organized politi-cal force. But their ideas helped define a growing conserv-ative consciousness among the northern public. Theiragenda included retreat from the ideal of racial justice,hostility toward trade unions, suspicion of immigrant andworking-class political power, celebration of competitiveindividualism, and opposition to government interventionin economic affairs.

The Depression of 1873In the fall of 1873, the postwar boom came to an abrupthalt as a severe financial panic triggered a deep economicdepression.The collapse resulted from commercial overex-pansion, especially speculative investing in the nation’srailroad system. By 1876, half the nation’s railroads haddefaulted on their bonds. Over the next two years morethan 100 banks folded and 18,000 businesses shut theirdoors.The depression that began in 1873 lasted sixty-fivemonths—the longest economic contraction in the nation’shistory until then.

The human toll was enormous.As factories began toclose across the nation, the unemployment rate soared toabout 15 percent. In many cities the jobless rate was muchhigher; roughly one-quarter of New York City workerswere unemployed in 1874. Many thousands of men tookto the road in search of work, and the “tramp” emerged asa new and menacing figure on the social landscape. ThePennsylvania Bureau of Labor Statistics noted that neverbefore had “so many of the working classes, skilled andunskilled been moving from place to place seekingemployment that was not to be had.” Farmers were alsohard hit by the depression.Agricultural output continuedto grow, but prices and land values fell sharply. As pricesfor their crops fell, farmers had a more difficult timerepaying their fixed loan obligations; many sank deeperinto debt.

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Reconstructing the North 485

Mass meetings of workers in New York and othercities issued calls to government officials to create jobsthrough public works. But these appeals were rejected.Indeed, many business leaders and political figuresdenounced even meager efforts at charity. They saw thedepression as a natural, if painful, part of the business cycle,one that would allow only the strongest enterprises (andworkers) to survive.The depression of the 1870s promptedworkers and farmers to question the old free-labor ideol-ogy that celebrated a harmony of interests in northernsociety. More people voiced anger at and distrust of largecorporations that exercised great economic power fromoutside their communities

The Electoral Crisis of 1876With the economy mired in depression, Democratslooked forward to capturing the White House in 1876.New scandals plaguing the Grant administration alsoweakened the Republican Party. In 1875, a conspiracysurfaced between distillers and U.S. revenue agents tocheat the government out of millions in tax revenues.The government secured indictments against more than

200 members of this “Whiskey Ring,” includingOrville E. Babcock, Grant’s private secretary. Thoughacquitted, thanks to Grant’s intervention, Babcockresigned in disgrace. In 1876, Secretary of War William W.Belknap was impeached for receiving bribes for the saleof trading posts in Indian Territory, and he resigned toavoid conviction.

Democrats nominated Governor Samuel J.Tilden ofNew York, who brought impeccable reform credentialsto his candidacy. In 1871 he had helped expose andprosecute the “Tweed Ring” in New York City. As gov-ernor he had toppled the “Canal Ring,” a graft-riddenscheme involving inflated contracts for repairs on theErie Canal. In their platform, the Democrats linked theissue of corruption to an attack on Reconstruction poli-cies.They blamed the Republicans for instituting “a cor-rupt centralism.”

Republican nominee Rutherford B. Hayes, governorof Ohio, also sought the high ground. As a lawyer inCincinnati he had defended runaway slaves. Later he haddistinguished himself as a general in the Union army.Hayes promised, if elected, to support an efficient civilservice system, to vigorously prosecute officials who

“The Tramp,” Harper’s Weekly, September 2, 1876. The depression that began in 1873 forced manythousands of unemployed workers to go “on the tramp” in search of jobs. Men wandered from town totown, walking or riding railroad cars, desperate for a chance to work for wages or simply for room andboard. The “tramp” became a powerful symbol of the misery caused by industrial depression and, as inthis drawing, an image that evoked fear and nervousness among the nation’s middle class.

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betrayed the public trust, and to introduce a system of freeuniversal education.

On an election day marred by widespread vote fraudand violent intimidation, Tilden received 250,000 morepopular votes than Hayes. But Republicans refused toconcede victory, challenging the vote totals in the elec-toral college. Tilden garnered 184 uncontested electoralvotes, one shy of the majority required to win, whileHayes received 165 (see Map 17.4).

The problem centered on twenty disputed votes fromFlorida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon. In each ofthe three southern states two sets of electoral votes werereturned. In Oregon, which Hayes had unquestionablycarried, the Democratic governor nevertheless replaced adisputed Republican elector with a Democrat.

The crisis was unprecedented. In January 1877,Congress moved to settle the deadlock, establishing anElectoral Commission composed of five senators, five rep-resentatives, and five Supreme Court justices; eight wereRepublicans and seven were Democrats.The commissionvoted along strict partisan lines to award all the contestedelectoral votes to Hayes. Outraged by this decision,Democratic congressmen threatened a filibuster to blockHayes’s inauguration.Violence and stalemate were avoidedwhen Democrats and Republicans struck a compromisein February. In return for Hayes’s ascendance to the presi-dency, the Republicans promised to appropriate more

money for southern internal improvements, to appoint aSoutherner to Hayes’s cabinet, and to pursue a policy ofnoninterference (“home rule”) in southern affairs.

Shortly after assuming office, Hayes ordered removalof the remaining federal troops in Louisiana and SouthCarolina.Without this military presence to sustain them,the Republican governors of those two states quicklylost power to Democrats. “Home rule” meantRepublican abandonment of freed people, Radicals, car-petbaggers, and scalawags. It also effectively nullified theFourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the CivilRights Act of 1866. The Compromise of 1877 com-pleted repudiation of the idea, born during the CivilWar and pursued during Congressional Reconstruction,of a powerful federal government protecting the rightsof all American citizens.

ConclusionReconstruction succeeded in the limited political sense ofreuniting a nation torn apart by the Civil War.The RadicalRepublican vision, emphasizing racial justice, equal civiland political rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth andFifteenth Amendments, and a new southern economyorganized around independent small farmers, neverenjoyed the support of the majority of its party or thenorthern public. By 1877, the political force of theseideals was spent and the national retreat from them nearlycomplete.

The end of Reconstruction left the way open for thereturn of white domination in the South.The freed peo-ple’s political and civil equality proved only temporary. Itwould take a “Second Reconstruction,” the civil rightsmovement of the next century, to establish full black citi-zenship rights once and for all. The federal government’sfailure to pursue land reform left former slaves without theeconomic independence needed for full emancipation.Yetthe newly autonomous black family, along with black-controlled churches, schools, and other social institutions,provided the foundations for the modern African Americancommunity. If the federal government was not yet fullycommitted to protecting equal rights in local communi-ties, the Reconstruction Era at least pointed to how thatgoal might be achieved. Even as the federal governmentretreated from the defense of equal rights for black people, ittook a more aggressive stance as the protector of businessinterests.The Hayes administration responded decisively toone of the worst outbreaks of class violence in Americanhistory by dispatching federal troops to several northerncities to break the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. In theaftermath of Reconstruction, the struggle between capitaland labor had clearly replaced “the southern question” asthe number one political issue of the day.“The overwhelm-ing labor question has dwarfed all other questions intonothing,” wrote an Ohio Republican. “We have homequestions enough to occupy attention now.”

PACIFICOCEAN

ATLANTICOCEAN

Gul f o f Mexi co

7

5

11

10

1335

712

12

111088

2 1

6

3

6

155

3

3

8

411

5

3

4

69

5

8521

1011

15 2229

RUTHERFORD B. HAYES(Republican)

Samuel J. Tilden(Democrat)

185(50)

184(50)

Electoral Vote

(%)

4,034,311(48)

4,288,546(51)

Popular Vote

(%)

Peter Cooper(Greenback)

Disputed

____

165(47)

184(53)

Uncontested

Electoral Vote(%)

____ 75,973(1)

Nonvotingterritories

MAP 17.4 The Election of 1876 The presidential

election of 1876 left the nation without a clear-cut winner.

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Review Questions 487

Review Questions1. How did various visions of a “reconstructed”

South differ? How did these visions reflect the oldpolitical and social divisions that had led to theCivil War?

2. What key changes did emancipation make inthe political and economic status of AfricanAmericans? Discuss the expansion of citizenshiprights in the post–Civil War years.To whatextent did women share in the gains made byAfrican Americans?

3. What role did such institutions as the family, thechurch, the schools, and the political parties play inthe African American transition to freedom?

4. How did white Southerners attempt to limit thefreedom of former slaves? How did these efforts suc-ceed, and how did they fail?

5. Evaluate the achievements and failures ofReconstruction governments in the southern states.

6. What were the crucial economic changes occurring inthe North and South during the Reconstruction era?

Suffragists split into National WomanSuffrage Association and AmericanWoman Suffrage Association

1870 Fifteenth Amendment ratified

1871 Ku Klux Klan Act passed

“Tweed Ring” in New York City exposed

1872 Liberal Republicans break with Grant and Radicals, nominate Horace Greeley for president

Crédit Mobilier scandal

Grant reelected president

1873 Financial panic and beginning of economicdepression

Slaughterhouse Cases

1874 Democrats gain control of House for firsttime since 1856

1875 Civil Rights Act

1876 Disputed election between Samuel Tildenand Rutherford B. Hayes

1877 Electoral Commission elects Hayes president

President Hayes dispatches federal troops to break Great Railroad Strike and withdraws last remaining federal troops from the South

1865 Freedmen’s Bureau established

Abraham Lincoln assassinated

Andrew Johnson begins PresidentialReconstruction

Black codes begin to be enacted insouthern states

Thirteenth Amendment ratified

1866 Civil Rights Act passed

Congress approves Fourteenth Amendment

Ku Klux Klan founded

1867 Reconstruction Acts, passed over PresidentJohnson’s veto, begin

Congressional Reconstruction

Tenure of Office Act

Southern states call constitutionalconventions

1868 President Johnson impeached by the Housebut acquitted in Senate trial

Fourteenth Amendment ratified

Most Southern states readmitted tothe Union

Ulysses S. Grant elected president

1869 Congress approves Fifteenth Amendment

Union Pacific and Central Pacifictracks meet at Promontory Point inUtah Territory

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Recommended ReadingDavid W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in

American Memory (2001). An elegantly written anddeeply researched inquiry into how Americans“remembered” the Civil War in the half-century afterAppomattox, arguing that sectional reconciliationcame at the cost of racial division.

Thomas J. Brown, ed., Reconstructions: New Perspectives onthe Postbellum United States (2006). A wide-rangingcollection of essays that explores Reconstruction froma broadly national perspective, including economic,political, and cultural impacts.

Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race inPostemancipation Virginia (2000). A fine study thatfocuses on the tension between the drive to establishwhite supremacy and the struggle for biracial coali-tions in post–Civil War Virginia politics.

Michael W. Fitzgerald, Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstructionin the American South (2007).A beautifully written one-volume overview of Reconstruction, focusing onnational politics and the slow but steady capitulation ofRepublican leaders to white supremacist public opin-ion in the North and South.

Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation andReconstruction (2005). An excellent, brief, one-volumeoverview that condenses Foner’s more comprehensivework on Reconstruction. It also includes several strik-ing “visual essays” by Joshua Brown, documenting thechanges in visual representations of African Americansin popular media of the era.

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution,1863–1877 (1988).The most comprehensive and thor-oughly researched overview of the Reconstruction era.


Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black PoliticalStruggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the GreatMigration (2003). This Pulitzer Prize–winning his-tory includes excellent chapters detailing thepolitical activism of recently freed slaves and theviolent resistance they encountered throughoutthe rural South.

Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died:The Colfax Massacre,the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction(2008).A riveting narrative account of the era’s singleworst incident of racist violence, along with its legaland political aftermath.

Elizabeth Regosin, Freedom’s Promise: Ex-Slave Familiesand Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation (2002). Athoughtful analysis of how freedmen and freed-women asserted familial relationships as a means toclaiming citizenship rights after emancipation, basedon research into federal pension applications madeby dependent survivors of Civil War soldiers.

Scott Reynolds Nelson, Iron Confederacies: SouthernRailways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (1999).Pathbreaking analysis of how conservative southernand northern business interests rebuilt the South’srailroad system and also achieved enormous politicalpower within individual states.

Mark Wahlgren Summers, A Dangerous Stir: Fear,Paranoia, and the Making of Reconstruction (2009). Athoughtful new interpretation by a leading scholarof nineteenth-century politics, emphasizing howdeep-seated, often unreasonable fears of conspiracyand revolution dominated much of the era’s politi-cal discourse.

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Recommended Reading 489

Read and ReviewChapter 17

Confederate Song, “I’m a Good Old Rebel” (1866)

Carl Schurz, Report on the Condition of theSouth (1865)

Mississippi Black Code (1865)

Jourdon Anderson to His Former Master (1865)

A Sharecrop Contract (1882)

Address from the Colored Citizens of Norfolk,VA (1865)

James T. Rapier, Testimony Before U.S.Senate (1880)

ReconstructionSee the Map

Read the Document

Study and Review

Research and Explore

Exploring America: Did Reconstruction Work forthe Freed People?

ProfilesTunis CampbellNathan Bedford Forrest

History Bookshelf: Ulysses S.Grant, Memoirs (1886)

Whose History Is it?: Flying the Stars and Bars: The Contested Meaning of the Confederate Flag

Reconstruction in Texas

The Promise and Failure of Reconstruction

Watch the Video

Read the Document

Reinforce what you learned in this chapter by studying the many documents, images,maps, review tools, and videos available at www.myhistorylab.com.

Trials of Racial Identity in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerica

Hear the audio files for Chapter 17 at www.myhistorylab.com.

Hear the Audio

Connections

11926_18_ch17_p459-489 11/18/10 12:46 PM Page 489

Documents

17 - Higher Education | Pearson · 460 CHAPTER 17 Reconstruction 1863–1877 in the wake of the Civil War. Communities throughout the South struggled over the meaning of freedom in