Reconstruction

Reconstruction, the attempt to rebuild and reform the South politically, economically, and socially after the Civil War, and to refashion race relations throughout the nation. Historians of the era have focused on four questions: How much change occurred between the antebellum and postbellum eras? Was Reconstruction too radical or too conservative? When did it start and end? How and why did it fail?

Background to Reconstruction.

Reconstruction proved as deeply political as the controversies over slavery and secession, and all three followed the same pattern: liberalism triumphed when reactionaries overreached. In 1861, southern secession freed Republicans from the pressure to compromise to preserve the Union. Over time, the Abraham Lincoln administration and the Republican majority in Congress repealed racist laws, freed secessionists' slaves, enrolled African‐American troops, and eventually passed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery throughout the country. Slaves effectively freed themselves by escaping to Union territory, and they fought valiantly against their former masters. The most deadly war in American history destroyed not only slavery but most of the South's physical and financial capital. Defeated, demoralized, and economically depressed, the South in 1865 seemingly lay helpless before the self‐confident, prosperous North, whose activist government, bathed in the moral authority of a patriotic, reformist war, appeared poised to remake what many northerners considered the country's nether region.

The Reconstruction Era: 1865–1877.

White southerners, however, behaved as though the war had settled nothing except the impracticality of secession and the nominal abolition of slavery. After Lincoln's assassination and accession of Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson to the presidency, southern states passed “Black Codes” that denied African Americans the right to vote, serve on juries, testify against whites in court, buy or lease real estate, or refuse to sign yearly labor contracts. Blacks were excluded from public schools, black orphans “apprenticed” to their former owners, and black “servants” required to labor from sunup to sundown for their “masters.” White southerners also demanded that former Confederate officers and politicians be immediately seated in Congress.

But the Republicans who controlled Congress refused to admit the erstwhile rebels and they took decisive control of Reconstruction. When Johnson vetoed a bill extending the Freedmen's Bureau, which provided food to destitute southerners of both races, supervised labor contracts, and started schools where ex‐slaves could be educated and courts where their rights could be protected, Republicans in Congress overrode his action, as they did his veto of a Civil Rights Bill that outlawed the Black Codes and mandated basic legal equality. Over unanimous Democratic opposition, Republicans passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which constitutionalized civil rights by guaranteeing due process and equality before the law for all.

In the critical 1866 election campaign, Johnson demagogically lambasted Congress, northern Democrats endlessly race‐baited, and white southerners rioted in Memphis and New Orleans, killing eighty‐nine African Americans in full view of the national press. Northern voters reacted by giving the Republicans a landslide victory, which turned Reconstruction more radical. Ten southern states were placed under temporary military rule, forced to enfranchise African‐American men, and granted congressional representation only after they had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and rewritten their state constitutions to make them more liberal. Because Johnson persisted in trying to subvert the antiracist settlement, he was impeached, almost convicted, and practically rendered powerless.

Although buttressed by federal troops; by the Fifteenth Amendment, which mandated racially impartial suffrage nationally; and by federal jobs with which to reward supporters, the new Republican governments of the South faced three obstacles that ultimately proved insuperable. First, they had to rebuild the southern infrastructure and satisfy a greatly increased demand for government services, especially education, by raising taxes in a devastated region that after 1873 also faced a severe economic depression. Second, they had to overcome two centuries of ingrained racism and convince one in four white men to vote for the party that had just defeated their section in a bloody war. Third, they had to compete at the polls against opponents willing to use any amount of fraud and violence to win elections and to employ election‐law trickery and discriminatory practices to retain power once they gained it. After northern voters reacted to the economic depression and northern ethno‐religious conflicts by electing a Democratic majority in the House in 1874, the survival of Reconstruction became increasingly problematic. Although Republicans rebounded to win the closest presidential election in U.S. history in 1876, part of the price for settling disputes over the election outcome was the implicit promise to stop using the army to protect southern Republicans. The Compromise of 1877, as the settlement came to be called, marked what is usually treated as the end of Reconstruction.

Evaluating Reconstruction.

Many historians believe that Reconstruction brought profound changes. As slaves, African Americans had worked very intensively, often in large groups or “gangs,” under the constant threat of physical punishment. They could not legally marry or learn to read and write. They could be sold or moved against their wills and their families could be broken up. Masters constantly intervened in their lives. After emancipation, blacks first worked in “squads,” usually headed by independent black contractors, and gradually convinced landowners to let them reside on small family plots, where they enjoyed a degree of privacy and independence. Through sharecropping arrangements, in which workers were paid a percentage of the value of crops after sale, landowners and workers shared the risk of crop failure and guarded against contract violations by either party. Ex‐slaves used their new freedom of mobility to bargain with employers. By 1900, 20 percent of black farm operators owned the land they worked.

The United States was the only large slave society that quickly enfranchised ex‐slaves, and the eagerness and skill with which the freedmen took to politics surprised and dismayed their former masters, who had expected docility and incompetence. Almost unanimously supporting the Republican party—the party of abolition and enfranchisement—the freedmen participated in the constitutional conventions of 1867–1868 and elected governments that launched statewide education systems, encouraged railroads, passed civil rights laws, protected the rights of laborers, established orphanages and other public institutions, and mandated universal manhood suffrage. African Americans sat in all southern legislatures and filled high state posts in Lousiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Several, mostly from South Carolina, were elected to the House of Representatives, and two went to the Senate: Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi. Most black males retained the vote until around 1900 when suffrage restrictions adopted by Democratic legislatures and constitutional conventions disfranchised the vast majority of African Americans and many poor whites.

Reconstruction‐era social changes were also striking. Blacks could now legally marry; worship as they wished; form private clubs; receive at least some education at public expense; and often patronize public accommodations such as restaurants, theaters, and railroads on a non‐segregated basis, if they could afford to pay. Absolute racial segregation of public places arrived only toward the turn of the century, and it was a matter of law, not custom.

Despite such transformations, however, historians who stress continuity between the antebellum and postbellum periods point to the persistent, often increased poverty of southern African Americans; the continuation of the plantation system; the survival of many former plantation owners or their sons among the postwar economic and social elite; the eventual disfranchisement and segregation of blacks; and the frequent outbreaks of racist violence, particularly the surge of lynching in the 1890s, which was horrifying enough, though far below the levels of the 1860s and 1870s The change‐or‐continuity question turns on which comparisons are made: One side emphasizes that post–Civil War blacks were far from being slaves; the other, that they were far from being fully equal citizens.

Historians who believe that Reconstruction was too radical contend that more gradual enfranchisement, a stronger Republican alliance with former southern Whigs, and less vigorous attacks on segregation and discrimination would have led to more lasting change. Critics of the conservative position respond that in the short interval when significant change was possible, Radical Republicans had to push for as much reform as they could get, and that the former Whigs, who were largely responsible for the 1865–1866 Black Codes, were hardly attractive allies for a party of blacks and poor whites. Those who criticize Reconstruction as too conservative hold that only widespread land redistribution from former masters to former slaves, and perhaps even the extermination of the planter class, would have achieved a true social revolution. Those who reject this position reply that a full‐scale radical assault on the southern order might have frightened northern voters into ending Republican dominance earlier and hazarded a holocaust of revenge violence. In any event, they suggest that to have given the freed slaves small, undercapitalized farms, most on marginal land, might only have shackled them and the South to even deeper poverty.

If the end of Reconstruction is placed in 1877, then violence, ballot‐box stuffing, and the repudiation of the Republicans for mostly economic reasons must figure prominently in explanations of its failure. If Reconstruction is thought to have collapsed a generation later, however, with the imposition of strict segregation and disfranchisement across the South, then a succession of incremental legal changes and their validation by the Supreme Court account better for its demise. The upsurge of civil rights legislation in the North in the 1870s and 1880s and the near‐passage of the Lodge Elections Bill, a measure strongly attacking fraud in southern congressional elections, in 1890 support the view that Reconstruction extended beyond 1877, and suggest that diffuse northern racism did not account for its waning. Throughout the later nineteenth century, almost all congressional Republicans, but not a single Democrat, supported civil rights measures. Reconstruction, in short, was born, evolved, and died in political struggle.
See also Agriculture: 1770s to 1890; Civil Rights Cases; Cotton Industry; Democratic Party; Depressions, Economic; Hayes, Rutherford; Impeachment; Sharecropping and Tenantry; Whig Party.

Bibliography

J. Morgan Kousser , The Shaping of Southern Politics, 1974.
C. Vann Woodward , The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 1974.
Thomas Holt , Black over White, 1977.
William Gillette , Retreat from Reconstruction, 1979.
Michael Wayne , The Reshaping of Plantation Society, 1983.
Michael Perman , The Road to Redemption, 1984.
Dan T. Carter , When the War Was Over, 1985.
Gerald David Jaynes , Branches without Roots, 1986.
Eric Foner , Reconstruction, 1988.
Heather Cox Richardson , The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901, 2001.

J. Morgan Kousser