RECONSTRUCTION

RECONSTRUCTION is the term applied to the restoration of the seceded states and the integration of the freedmen into American society during and especially after the Civil War.

The question of the restoration of the seceded states to the Union became an issue long before the surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, on 9 April 1865. According to the Crittenden-Johnson Resolutions of July 1861, the object of the war was to restore the Union with "all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired." But as the conflict progressed, it became evident that this objective was impossible to achieve. Congress refused to reaffirm its policy, President Abraham Lincoln appointed military governors for partially reconquered states, and moderate and radical Republicans debated the exact status of insurgent communities.

Presidential Reconstruction

The president viewed the process of wartime reconstruction as a weapon to detach Southerners from their allegiance to the Confederacy and thus shorten the war. Consequently, on 8 December 1863, he issued a proclamation of amnesty that promised full pardon to all disloyal citizens except a few leaders of the rebellion, former officers of the United States, and perpetrators of unlawful acts against prisoners of war. Whenever 10 percent of the voters of 1860 had taken the oath of allegiance, they were authorized to inaugurate new governments. All Lincoln required was their submission to the Union and their acceptance of the Emancipation Proclamation.

The president's plan encountered resistance in Congress. Perturbed by his failure to leave Reconstruction to the lawmakers and anxious to protect Republican interests in the South, Congress, on 2 July 1864, passed the Wade- Davis Bill, a more stringent measure than Lincoln's "ten-percent plan." Requiring an oath of allegiance from 50 percent, rather than 10 percent, of the electorate before new governments could be set up, the bill prescribed further conditions for prospective voters. Only those who were able to take an "iron-clad oath" of past loyalty were to be enfranchised, and slavery was to be abolished. When Lincoln pocket vetoed the measure, its authors bitterly attacked him in the Wade-Davis Manifesto. After the president's reelection, efforts to revive the Wade-Davis Bill in modified form failed. Congress refused to recognize the "free-state" governments established in accordance with Lincoln's plan in Louisiana and Arkansas, and so Lincoln's assassination of 14 April 1865 left the future of Reconstruction in doubt.

What Lincoln would have done if he had lived is difficult to establish. It is known that as soon as General Ulysses S. Grant had forced General Robert E. Lee to surrender, the president withdrew his invitation to members of the Confederate legislature to Virginia to reassemble: his wartime plans are evidently not necessarily a guide to his peacetime intentions. It is also clear that he was not averse to the enfranchisement of qualified blacks. He wrote to this effect to the governor of Louisiana and touched on the subject in his last public address on 11 April 1865. But, as he said in his second inaugural address, pleading for "malice toward none" and "charity for all," he was anxious for a speedy reconciliation between the sections.

With the end of the war, the problem of Reconstruction—both the restoration of the states and the integration of the freedmen—became more acute. If the seceded states were to be restored without any conditions, local whites would soon reestablish rule by the Democratic Party. They would seek to reverse the verdict of the sword and, by combining with their Northern associates, challenge Republican supremacy. Moreover, before long, because of the end of slavery and the lapse of the Three-Fifths Compromise, the South would obtain a larger influence in the councils of the nation than before the war.

The easiest way of solving this problem would have been to extend the suffrage to the freedmen. But in spite of an increasing radical commitment to votes for blacks, the majority of the party hesitated. Popular prejudice, not all of it in the South, was too strong, and many doubted the feasibility of enfranchising newly liberated slaves. Nevertheless, the integration of the blacks into American life now became one of the principal issues of Reconstruction.

Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, was wholly out of sympathy with black suffrage, especially if conferred by the federal government. A Southerner and former slave-holder, Johnson held deep prejudices against blacks, who, he believed, should occupy an inferior place in society. In addition, as a firm adherent of states' rights, he was convinced that voting rights were the exclusive concern of the states, not the federal government. He was willing to have the states concede the vote to very few educated or propertied African Americans, but only to stop radical agitation. Based on his Jacksonian conviction of an indestructible Union of indestructible states, his Reconstruction policies in time of peace resembled those of his predecessor in time of war. But they were no longer appropriate.

Johnson's plan, published on 29 May 1865, called for the speedy restoration of Southern governments based on the (white) electorate of 1861. His proclamation of amnesty offered pardons to all insurgents swearing an oath of allegiance to the United States except for certain exempted classes, including high officers of the Confederacy and those owning property valued at more than $20,000, but even they were eligible for individual pardons. Appointing provisional governors—executives who were to call constitutional conventions—first for North Carolina and then for the other states, Johnson expected the restored states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, nullify the secession ordinances, and repudiate the Confederate debt, although he did not even insist on these conditions.

In operation, the president's plan revealed that little had changed in the South. Not one of the states enfranchised even literate blacks. Some balked at nullifying the secession ordinances, others hesitated or failed to repudiate the Confederate debt, and Mississippi refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. Former insurgent leaders, including Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, were elected to Congress. Several states passed Black Codes that in effect remanded the freedmen to a condition not far removed from slavery.

Congressional Reconstruction

The reaction of Northerners to these developments was not favorable. When Congress met in December, it refused to admit any of the representatives from the seceded states, even the most loyal ones, and created a Joint Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction to which all matters pertaining to the restoration of the South were to be referred. It was clear that Congress would not acquiesce to Johnson's policy.

The president had to make a choice. As the Republican Party consisted of radicals, moderates, and conservatives, he could either cooperate with the moderate center of the party or, by opposing it, break with the over-whelming majority of Republicans and rely on the small minority of conservatives and the Democrats. Most Republicans were hoping to avoid a rift with Johnson, but the president left them little choice. When Lyman Trumbull, the moderate chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, framed a bill extending the powers and duration of the Freedmen's Bureau, an agency established during

Lincoln's administration to succor freedmen and refugees, he vetoed it and delivered a speech comparing the leaders of the radicals to Jefferson Davis. The veto was upheld, but when, unwilling to compromise on the subjects of race and federal relations—he also vetoed Trumbull's civil rights bill, a measure to protect African Americans—his veto was overridden, and Congress thereafter tended to override most of his vetoes.

Congress then developed a Reconstruction plan of its own: the Fourteenth Amendment. Moderate in tone, it neither conferred suffrage upon the blacks nor exacted heavy penalties from Southern whites. Clearly defining citizenship, it made African Americans part of the body politic, sought to protect them from state interference, and provided for reduced representation for states disfranchising prospective voters. If Johnson had been willing to accept it, the struggle over Reconstruction might have ended. But the president was wholly opposed to the measure. Believing the amendment subversive of the Constitution and of white supremacy, he used his influence to procure its defeat in the Southern states, an effort that succeeded everywhere except in Tennessee, which was readmitted on 24 July 1866. At the same time, he sought to build up a new party consisting of conservative Republicans and moderate Democrats. The rival plans of Reconstruction thus became an issue in the midterm elections of 1866, during which four conventions met, while Johnson, on a trip to a monument to Stephen Douglas in Chicago, campaigned actively for his program and once more denigrated the radical leaders. His claims of having established peace in the South were weakened by serious riots in Memphis and New Orleans.

The elections resulted in a triumph for the Republican majority. Since the president was still unwilling to cooperate—he continued his opposition to the amendment—Congress, overriding his veto or opposition, proceeded to shackle him by restricting his powers of removal (see Tenure of Office Act) and of military control (command of the army provisions of the Military Appropriations Act for 1867–1868). In addition, it passed a series of measures known as the Reconstruction Acts, which inaugurated the congressional, formerly called the "radical," phase of Reconstruction.

The first two Reconstruction Acts divided the South (except for Tennessee) into five military districts, enfranchised male African Americans, and required Southern states to draw up constitutions safeguarding black suffrage. The new legislatures were expected to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, and certain Confederate officeholders were for a time barred from voting and holding office.

The president refused to concede defeat. After his vetoes of the Reconstruction Acts were not sustained, he sought to lessen their effect. His attorney general's lenient interpretation of the law led to the more stringent third Reconstruction Act (19 July 1867). Reaffirming that the Southern governments were only provisional and conferring

powers of removal of officers and alleged voters upon the commanding generals, the law only spurred Johnson to further resistance. On 12 August he suspended Edwin M. Stanton, his radical secretary of war. After appointing Grant secretary ad interim, he also removed some radical major generals in the South. Always believing that in the end the popular majority would sustain him, he was greatly encouraged by Democratic successes in the fall elections.

Johnson's intransigence resulted in a complete break with Congress and to efforts to remove him. Because the radicals lacked a majority, and because the charges against the president were too flimsy, the first attempt to impeach him, on 7 December 1867, failed. But when the Senate reinstated Stanton, and Johnson dismissed him again, this time in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, as Congress was in session, the House acted. Passing a resolution of impeachment on 24 February 1868, it put the president on trial before the Senate. Because of the defection of seven moderate Republicans and the weakness of the case, on 16 and again on 26 May he was acquitted by one vote. His narrow escape once more encouraged Southern conservatives, so that it was difficult for Grant, elected president in November 1868, to carry congressional Reconstruction to a successful conclusion.

During 1867 and 1868 congressional Reconstruction had been gradually initiated. Despite conservative opposition—Congress had to pass a fourth Reconstruction Act requiring a majority of voters rather than of registrants before the constitution of Alabama was accepted—the electorate ratified the new charters in all but three states: Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia. Accordingly, in the summer of 1868 the compliant states were readmitted and the Fourteenth Amendment declared in force. Because Georgia later excluded African Americans from its legislature and because Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia, for various local reasons, did not ratify their constitutions on time, those four states were subjected to additional requirements. These included ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, prohibiting the denial of suffrage on account of race. After complying with the new demands, in 1870 these states too were restored to their place in the Union, and the amendment was added to the Constitution.

Historians have long argued about the nature of the governments Congress imposed upon the South. According to William A. Dunning and his school, they were characterized by vindictiveness, corruption, inefficiency, and ruthless exploitation of Southern whites. Northern Carpetbaggers, local scalawags, and their black tools supposedly trampled white civilization underfoot. Modern scholars have questioned these assumptions: pointing out that the governments imposed by Congress succeeded in establishing systems of public education, eleemosynary (charitable) institutions, and workable constitutions, they have discarded the concept of "black Reconstruction." Black legislators were in a majority only in South Carolina, and even there their white allies wielded considerable influence. Conceding the presence of corruption in the South, these historians have emphasized its nationwide scope. They have tended to show that the new governments deserved credit for making the first efforts to establish racial democracy in the South; that far from being vindictive, they speedily extended amnesty to former Confederates; and that many radical officeholders, black and white alike, did not compare unfavorably with their conservative colleagues. In addition, they no longer called congressional Reconstruction "radical," because the measures enacted by the moderate majority fell far short of radical demands. The Fourteenth Amendment did not

enfranchise African Americans, the Fifteenth did not protect them from interpretations designed to deprive them of the vote, and the Reconstruction Acts did not impose stringent restrictions on former Confederate leaders.

The Waning of Reconstruction

But the experiment could not last. The rapid disappearance, by death or retirement, of the radical Republicans, the granting of amnesty to former Confederates, the conservatives' resort to terror, and a gradual loss of interest by the North would have made Reconstruction difficult in any case. These problems were complicated by the blacks' lack of economic power—Johnson had gone so far as to return to whites lands already occupied by freedmen. Factionalism within the dominant party increased with the rise of the Liberal Republicans in 1872, and the panic of 1873 eroded Republican majorities in the House. The Supreme Court, which had refused to interfere with Reconstruction in Mississippi v. Johnson (1867) and Georgia v. Stanton (1867), began to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment very narrowly, as in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873). Such a tendency foreshadowed the Court's further weakening not only of the Fourteenth but also the Fifteenth Amendment in United States v. Cruikshank (1876) and United States v. Reese (1876) and its invalidation of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 in the Civil Rights Cases (1883).

The end of Reconstruction came at different times in several states. Despite the passage during 1870 and 1871 of three Force Acts seeking to protect black voting rights and to outlaw the Ku Klux Klan, the gradual collapse of the regimes imposed by Congress could not be arrested. In some cases terror instigated by the Klan and its violent successors overthrew Republican administrations; in others, conservatives regained control by more conventional means. By 1876 Republican administrators survived only in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, all of which returned disputed election results in the fall. After a series of economic and political bargains enabled Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate, to be inaugurated president, he promptly withdrew remaining federal troops from the Southern statehouses, and Reconstruction in those states, already weakened by Northern unwillingness to interfere further, also came to an end. For a time, African Americans continued to vote, although in decreasing numbers, but by the turn of the century they had been almost completely eliminated from Southern politics.

Reconstruction thus seemed to end in failure, and the myth of radical misrule embittered relations between the sections. But in spite of their apparent lack of accomplishment, the radicals, spurring on the Republican majority, had succeeded in embedding the postwar amendments in the Constitution, amendments that were the foundation for the struggle for racial equality in the twentieth century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Belz, Herman. Reconstructing the Union: Theory and Policy during the Civil War. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969.

Benedict, Michael Les. A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869. New York: Norton, 1974.

Cox, LaWanda, and John H. Cox. Politics, Principle, and Prejudice, 1865–1866: Dilemma of Reconstruction America. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963.

Donald, David Herbert, Jean Harvey Baker, and Michael F. Holt. The Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: Norton, 2001.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction, America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863– 1877. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

McKitrick, Eric L. Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.

Perman, Michael. Reunion without Compromise: The South and Reconstruction, 1865–1868. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

———. The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Stampp, Kenneth M. The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877. New York: Knopf, 1965.

Simpson, Brooks D. The Reconstruction Presidents. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998.

Trefousse, Hans L. Andrew Johnson: A Biography. New York: Norton, 1989.

Hans L.Trefousse

See alsoCivil War ; Georgia v. Stanton ; Impeachment Trial of Andrew Johnson ; Mississippi v. Johnson ; Race Relations ; Slaughterhouse Cases ; United States v. Cruikshank ; United States v. Reese ; andvol. 9:Black Code of Mississippi, November 1965 ; President Andrew Johnson's Civil Rights Bill Veto ; Police Regulations of Saint Landry Parish, Louisiana .

Reconstruction

Sources

Continuity. A few faiths had organizational systems that were not torn apart before the Civil War and therefore did not suffer a difficult period of reunion. Jews, for example, had a congregational polity in which each synagogue or temple usually shared the morality of its location. Catholicism had a different polity but the same outcome. Its unity, centered in Rome and not on American nationalism, survived the war. The Protestant Episcopal Church had an organizational structure which seemed to put it at risk because it was led by a national body of bishops. When the Civil War began, it followed the division between the two nations. However, right after the war ended, the reunited Protestant Episcopal Church met, receiving delegates from the former Confederate

States of America without problem. Thereafter, the Episcopalians did not divide over sectional issues, but over the degree of ritualism to be permitted in their denomination.

The Impossible Return. The Methodists found reunification impossible. Instead of reuniting with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, the Northern Methodists tried to colonize the South, bringing in northern ministers as pastors for southern (especially black) congregations. In June 1865 Missouri Methodists responded with the Palmyra Manifesto, calling for the Southern Methodists to take action to preserve the denomination. In 1866 Southern Methodist bishops met at New Orleans, rejected the possibility of reunion with others of the same faith, and laid out plans for a complete denominational structure. In 1873 “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt, a New Yorker married to a Southerner, gave $500,000 to Southern Methodists for the establishment of a denominational college and seminary (now Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee). By this time only one link with Northern Methodism remained. Beginning in 1848 the Southern Methodists had sent a “fraternal delegate” to attend annual meetings of the Northern Methodists; they continued to do so even as the denominations developed separate structures. In 1872 this became a reciprocal arrangement, with the Northern Methodists sending their own fraternal delegate to the Southerners’ annual meetings.

Presbyterians. In other denominations, forces combined with Reconstruction to shape church structure. The Presbyterians, for example, were still struggling with a split caused by differences over slavery, and in 1865 they remained divided into four groups: Southern and Northern Old and New Schools. During the Civil War, Southern Presbyterians had concluded that unity over slavery was more important than differences over polity and education, and they united. Similarly the Northern New and Old Schools merged in 1869, but the Northern and Southern Presbyterians remained separate.

Baptists. The Baptists had their own doctrinal differences. Prior to the Civil War, Hard Shell Baptists had refused to join with other Baptists in national organizations for the purposes of sending missionaries to places where the Gospel was not yet preached. During the 1850s, the Southern Baptists were more or less held together by the Southern Baptist Convention and by shared support of slavery, but they were divided by a controversy known as Landmarkism. The basic issue was common to every Christian denomination. Biblical scholars generally agreed that early Christians intended that there should be only one Christian church. While the Mormons claimed that this one true church stemmed from the new revelation given to Joseph Smith, most Christian denominations tried to trace their particular faith back in an unbroken line to apostolic times. This was particularly difficult for the Baptists, since there was a long period during which infant baptism, rather than the Baptists’ use of baptism as a sacrament of adult commitment to faith, prevailed. But Southern Baptist leader James R. Graves insisted it could be done, and in 1851 he got a Baptist meeting at Bolivar, Tennessee, to adopt the Cotton Grove Resolution, proclaiming the Baptist denomination to be the one true faith and refusing to accept any other church as an equal. The movement got the name of Landmarkism from an 1854 pamphlet titled Old Landmark Re-Set, written by one of Graves’s colleagues, James M. Pendleton. Proclaiming Baptism to be the one true faith made it impossible to continue cooperation with other denominations in the matter of foreign missions and difficult even to work with denominations that shared the Baptist name but not this particular doctrine. Moreover, there was some doubt about Graves’s and Pendleton’s historical accuracy. (The evidence against the Landmark theory of Baptist origins was not published until the 1890s.) Another conflict besetting the Baptists was ethnic, as exhibited by the creation of the North American Baptist Conference by German Baptists in 1865.

“O! LET MY PEOPLE GO”

The Lord by Moses to Pharoah said: O let my people go! If not, I’ll smite your firstborn dead, Then let my people go!

Chorus: O! go down, Moses, Away down to Egypt’s land, And tell King Pharoah, To let my people go!

No more shall they in bondage toil, O let my people go! Let them come out with Egypt’s spoil, O let my people go!

Haste, Moses, ’till the sea you’ve crossed, ? let my people go!

Pharoah shall in the deep be lost, O let my people go!

The sea before you shall divide, O let my people go! You’ll cross dry-shod to the other side, O let my people go!

Fear not King Pharoah or his host, O let my people go! They all shall in the sea be lost, O let my people go!

They’ll sink like lead to rise no more, O let my people go! And you’ll hear a shout on the other shore, O let my people go!

The fiery cloud shall lead the way, O let my people go! A light by night, a shade by day, O let my people go!

Jordan shall stand up like a wall, O let my people go! And the walls of Jericho shall fall, O let my people go!

Your foes shall not before you stand, O let my people go! And you’ll possess fair Canaan’s land, O let my people go!

O let us all from bondage flee, O let my people go! And let us all in Christ be free, O let my people go!

This world’s a wilderness of woe, O let my people go! O let us all to glory go, O let my people go!

Source: Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 367-370.

African American Evangelization. In theory, American faiths had a new field for evangelization among the four million blacks whose legal status had been changed from that of property to that of persons in 1865. Roman Catholic bishops urged evangelization among African Americans in their 1866 plenary council. The Congregationalists went further, using the AMA to provide charitable and spiritual aid to African Americans. Nevertheless, membership in these and other denominations did not increase, as was seen with AMA work among free people at Port Royal, South Carolina. A coalition of reformers under AMA auspices developed an ambitious program to assimilate former slaves into American society economically, politically, and spiritually. The reformers turned out to have conflicting approaches. Some thought they were assimilating freed people to a self-sufficient agricultural economy, which would ultimately lead to black ownership of land. Others thought they were assimilating blacks to the emerging capitalist economy, in which the blacks worked for wages and then used their wages to play the role of consumers. A more serious

problem was that neither faction of reformers reached common ground with the freed people they were trying to help. Former slaves wanted to own land, and they took advantage of the education offered, but they tried to distance themselves from too much white involvement in their community and they did not join the Congrega-tionalists. The project came to an end when it became clear that the federal government was not going to redistribute land to freed blacks.

Racism. Race, politics, economics, and religion all had a hand in the outcome of the Port Royal experiment. The experiences of Sara G. Stanley, an AMA missionary teacher, showed the primacy of race. Stanley was born a free black in North Carolina. She graduated from Ober-lin College with a teacher’s certificate and taught in Ohio from 1857 until 1864, when she volunteered for AMA service. She and the other blacks with whom she taught had many unpleasant experiences with white men and women who came south to teach and convert blacks but who did not accept their black colleagues as their equals. They also made the black teachers’ lives harder, assigning them to isolated rural schools with inadequate supplies and equipment. In Stanley’s case, the hard work and lack of support may have contributed to a breakdown in her physical health. In 1865 she left the mission field for a two-year rest. She returned in 1867 but ran into more racism when she became engaged to a colleague, a white Civil War veteran named Charles Woodward. She was at the time living in a house for AMA teachers, and when she expressed her desire to be married at this home, her colleagues were so opposed to the interracial romance that they unsuccessfully tried to make her marry elsewhere.

The Irony of Separatism. Racism, combined with some sincere efforts to shield blacks from prejudice and discrimination, produced a situation in which the greater the distance between blacks and whites in religious organizations, the more space there was for blacks to exercise religious self-government. For example, in 1866, as part of their effort to expand to the South, Northern Methodists organized a separate black conference, headed by a black bishop. Southern Methodists countered the Northern challenge and thus took responsibility for southern black faith. They exercised it by releasing all black members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, to form their own denomination. The result was the 1870 creation of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. Similarly, a Colored Cumberland Presbyterian Church was organized in 1869, and a Colored Presbyterian Church was organized by the Southern Presbyterians in 1874. Like the black Presbyterian organizations, black Baptist institutions were shaped not only by racism but by doctrinal differences within the faith. In 1866 the Colored Primitive Baptists organized, as did the North Carolina state convention of regular black Baptists, the first in the nation.

African American Religious Traditions. There was another reason that denominations made little headway among former slaves, which was that even during the years of slavery African Americans had developed their own religious organizations. Many slaveholders could not bring themselves to deny their slaves’ humanity so thoroughly as to deny them religion. They tried to regulate that religion, gathering slaves for owner-approved sermons on scriptural injunctions regarding obedience to masters, but, again, a sense of what religion was led them to leave their slaves some freedom to conduct their own funerals and prayer services. In these settings, African Americans combined various elements to create their own religious culture. That culture was characterized by some practices brought over from Africa, although none of those practices were preserved in their original setting. Instead, a combination of familiarity with Scripture, some common elements of Christianity, and African heritage shaped a particular understanding of religion. One important element of that understanding was the correlation between slavery and racism. Both were sins, that is, violations of God’s will. Scripture promised that God’s will would prevail, which meant that, by some means, slavery and racism would end. Scripture also promised that God would punish sinners, so that those afflicted by slavery and racism could depend on divine power to eventually mete out a deserved fate to everyone. Thus, while the churches were not necessarily advocates of active opposition to slavery and racism, they were advocates of faith in biblical promises and in watchful waiting for opportunities to cooperate with divine will.

African American Denominations. Two entirely black denominations existed at the beginning of Reconstruction—the African Methodist Episcopal Church (founded in 1816) and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Zion (1821). Between 1864 and 1868, the two denominations discussed cooperation in the mission field, but they were unable to reach a plan of union. Unity might have been more in accord with Christian ideals or with the goal of efficient, economic evangelization, but competition among the various black Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians had the advantage of bringing more people into contact with the church more quickly. The Protestant ministry became the profession in which black men could rise the fastest and farthest, and it became a starting point from which they could reach out toward political leadership. For example, in 1870 Richard Henry Boyd, son of a slave mother and white father, converted to the Baptist faith and entered its ministry. He made a career for himself as superintendent of its Sunday schools and later became leader of the American National Baptist Convention. Few denominations permitted the ordination of women, but the black church provided limited opportunities for female leadership in church-affiliated self-help and philanthropic organizations.

Lack of Theological Support. Both before and after Reconstruction, great events in American history were accompanied by theological reflection. The era of 1865-1877, however, did not produce such insight. Few people struggled with the morality of Reconstruction the way many had struggled with the morality of slavery. As it turned out, the theologians’ attention was elsewhere, on the rise of corporate capitalism and the challenge of Darwin. Racism remained unstudied, just when religious people most needed to understand the nature and extent of this sin.

Sources

C. Eric Lincoln, Race, Religion and the Continuing American Dilemma (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984);

Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978);

Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964).

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

RECONSTRUCTION

The term Reconstruction refers to the efforts made in the United States between 1865 and 1877 to restructure the political, legal, and economic systems in the states that had seceded from the Union. The u.s. civil war (1861–65) ended slavery, but it left unanswered how the 11 Southern states would conduct their internal affairs after readmission to the Union. Though some legal protections for newly freed slaves were incorporated into the Constitution by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, by 1877, conservative Southern whites had reclaimed power and had begun to disenfranchise blacks.

abraham lincoln took the first steps toward Reconstruction in 1863 when he announced a post-war plan for the Southern states. Under these terms, a state would have to renounce slavery and agree to comply with the Constitution. The states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee agreed to these conditions and asked that its senators and representatives be readmitted to Congress. Radical Republicans in Congress objected to this plan, contending that it would do nothing to change the Southern social system. They introduced a tougher bill that Lincoln vetoed, which left the state of Reconstruction uncertain at the time of Lincoln's assassination. The Freedmen's Bureau was established as a social welfare agency for the newly freed slaves, but little else was agreed upon. Lincoln's successor, President andrew johnson, came from Tennessee. As governor, he had championed his state's readmission to the Union under Lincoln's terms. As president, he revealed a hostility to the use of federal power to change the Southern way of life, in part because he wanted to rebuild the democratic party and ensure his election in 1868.

Radical Republicans became incensed when Johnson issued a general pardon for most Confederates and then issued proclamations that permitted the Southern states to rejoin the Union after holding a constitutional convention and agreeing to three conditions: repeal of the secession laws, repudiation of the Confederate debt, and ratification of the thirteenth amendment, which ended slavery in the United States. However, Johnson did not require the states to permit blacks to vote. In 1866, Southern whites took back the reins of government and proceeded to pass black codes, which restricted the freedoms of the newly freed slaves. Racial segregation was established, blacks were barred from serving on juries and as appearing as witnesses, and unemployed blacks were arrested and then auctioned off to employers to pay their fines.

In 1866, Congress passed the fourteenth amendment, which extended due process and equal protection rights to all persons and barred states from violating these rights. Over time, this amendment would be used to apply most of the bill of rights to the states, but, during the Reconstruction period, it was used as the basis of additional statutes that imposed federal control over the Southern states. In 1867, the Radical Republicans passed the First Reconstruction Act; three other acts would later be passed by Congress to further define the scope of Reconstruction. These acts abolished the Southern government that Johnson had authorized, placed the South back under military control, announced new state constitutional conventions, mandated that blacks be allowed to vote, and prevented former Confederate leaders from serving as public officials. By mid-1868, Congress readmitted representatives from six states, and then the remainder complied with the act's terms and were readmitted in 1870.

With these new constitutions in place, state and local elections took place. Though some blacks were elected to public office, most officeholders were white. However, most Southern whites opposed these governments and the idea of black equality. This prevalent attitude led to vigilantism and terrorism by various groups, including the ku klux klan (KKK). These groups used terror to discourage blacks from asserting their political rights and frighten whites who collaborated with the new governments. Congress sought unsuccessfully to impeach President Johnson, but Radical Republicans assumed conditions would improve with the election of General ulysses s. grant to the presidency in 1868.

Grant disappointed supporters of Reconstruction over the ensuing eight years. Though Congress passed and the states ratified the fifteenth amendment in 1870, it had very little impact in the South. The amendment prohibited voting discrimination based on race, but blacks were intimidated by the KKK and local employers and stayed away from the polls. Congress proceeded to pass three Force Acts in 1870 and 1871, wide-ranging criminal and civil laws that sought to curb vigilantism. Several parts of these Force Acts remain in effect, including the civil rights tort law 42 U.S.C.A. section 1983. These laws had some effect, but they required federal officers to enforce them. The desire of Northerners to continue this work had begun to ebb, and, by the end of Grant's term in 1877, it became apparent that federal efforts were grinding to a halt.

The 1876 presidential race between Republican rutherford b. hayes and Democrat samuel tilden ended in an electoral college deadlock due to disputed electors from Florida and Oregon. To avoid a constitutional crisis, a commission was appointed to review the contested states and decide on a winner. In the end, the Democrats allowed Hayes to be declared the winner in exchange for a promise that Hayes would withdraw all federal troops and give Democrats a portion of the patronage rights to federal jobs.

The withdrawal of the troops symbolized the end of Reconstruction, but an earlier Supreme Court case had made clear that the legal system would resist a broad reading of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the slaughterhouse cases, 83 U.S. 36, 21 L.Ed. 394 (1873), the Supreme Court read the amendment's privileges and immunities clause virtually out of the Constitution. The Court effectively closed the door on the concept of privileges and immunities as an enforcement tool against state laws that restricted individual civil rights. On a 5–4 vote, the Court interpreted the clause as protecting only rights of national citizenship from the actions of the state government. This restrictive reading robbed the Privileges and Immunities Clause of any constitutional significance.

Conservative white Democrats reasserted their authority in 1877 and began to disenfranchise blacks again. They enacted "Jim Crow" segregation laws that directly challenged the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court removed the last impediment to these efforts in the civil rights cases, 109 U.S. 3, 3 S.Ct. 18, 27 L.Ed. 835 (1883). The Court invalidated the civil rights act of 1875, the last piece of Reconstruction legislation. This act proclaimed "the equality of all men before the law," and promised to "mete out equal and exact justice" to persons of every "race, color, or persuasion" in public or private accommodations. The law sought to prohibit racial segregation of trains, trolleys, theaters, hotels, restaurants, and other places that are open to the public. The Supreme Court struck down the act, finding that the Fourteenth Amendment only prohibited official, state-sponsored discrimination. The Fourteenth Amendment could not reach discrimination practiced by privately owned places of public accommodation. This Fourteenth Amendment "state action" requirement remains a central tenet of modern civil rights law. The Court's holding meant that racial segregation could be imposed by private businesses. More troubling was the Court's belief, less than 20 years after the conclusion of the Civil War, that the time for concerns about equal treatment for blacks was over. The Court stated that blacks should no longer be "special favorite[s] of the law."

Reconstruction has come to be regarded as a missed opportunity for U.S. society. Many of the issues that concerned political leaders of that period returned a hundred years later in the modern civil rights movement. The Fourteenth Amendment would be revivified by the Supreme Court, and surviving parts of the Force Acts would be used again.

further readings

Collier, Christopher. 2000. Reconstruction and the Rise of Jim Crow, 1864–1896. New York: Benchmark Books.

Foner, Eric. 2002. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Perennial.

Peacock, Judith. 2003. Reconstruction: Rebuilding after the Civil War. Mankato, Minn.: Bridgestone Books.

cross-references

Civil Rights Acts; Discrimination; Jim Crow Laws; Racial and Ethnic Discrimination.

Reconstruction The process of reconstructing the Union began with the outbreak of the Civil War and lasted through the presidential election of 1876. It presented two challenges to the Union: the status of the seceded states and the future of African‐Americans. President Abraham Lincoln issued an executive order in 1863 that dealt with both by requiring that the constitutions of the seceded states undergoing Reconstruction had to abolish slavery as a condition of readmission to the Union. By 1865, Union military and civil authorities had begun a thorough reorganization of the South's political and social systems.

Lincoln appointed his secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, to replace Roger S. Taney as chief justice of the United States. Chase joined previous Lincoln appointees David Davis, Stephen J. Field, Samuel F. Miller, and Noah Swayne, but though the Court was dominated by Republican appointees, it split over questions involving executive power, federalism, and individual liberty. In the Prize Cases (1863), the Court sustained the president's powers to blockade Confederate ports. Though both cases presented Lincoln with political embarrassments, Ex parte Merryman (1861) and Ex parte Vallandigham (1864) upheld the national government's authority to arrest and detain civilians who posed security risks in states that had not seceded. In Gelpcke v. Dubuque (1864), the Court condemned state repudiation of public debts. On the whole, the Court moved circumspectly in the war years.

After Appomattox, however, the Court resolved constitutional issues in a more assertive spirit. In the Test Oath Cases of 1867 (Ex parte Garland and Cummings v. Missouri), the Court struck down federal and state requirements that individuals swear loyalty to the Union as a condition of practicing professions. This process had the effect of returning former secessionists to political power in the South. The 1866 decision in Ex parte Milligan raised again the Vallandigham question of the Supreme Court's jurisdiction to hear civilians' appeals from the decisions of courts martial and implicitly challenged the entire structure of military authority in areas removed from the theater of war (see Military Trials and Martial Law). These early Reconstruction decisions, combined with President Andrew Johnson's obstructive policies (such as his veto of all civil rights legislation and his amnesties and pardons for former Confederates), hobbled implementation of the Freedmen's Bureau Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867–1868. As a result federal efforts to aid the freed slaves became a politicized constitutional debate.

After these early confrontations, the Supreme Court sidestepped direct contests with Congress over Reconstruction policies. In Mississippi v. Johnson (1867) and Georgia v. Stanton (1868), the Court declined an invitation by counsel representing anti‐Reconstruction interests to hold the Military Reconstruction Acts unconstitutional. In Ex parte McCardle (1869), the justices accepted the constitutionality of a statute that excised their jurisdiction in some habeas corpus appeals (though in Ex parte Yerger, decided the same year as McCardle, the Court reaffirmed the original reach of its appellate jurisdiction over habeas appeals conferred by the Judiciary Act of 1789). Chief Justice Chase invoked the political‐question doctrine to uphold congressional authority over Reconstruction policy.

In a variety of cases that challenged the evasion of the Thirteenth Amendment by “apprenticeship” agreements (In re Turner, 1867), violation of the Civil Rights Act (United States v. Rhodes, 1866) and the Fourteenth Amendment's inhibitions on the states (Blyew v. United States, 1872, and United States v. Hall, 1871), lower federal court judges or justices of the Supreme Court on circuit suggested that the Reconstruction amendments and statutes that implemented them created the power and perhaps the obligation of the federal government to protect the full spectrum of civil rights against the acts of individuals.

The Supreme Court, however, quashed these initiatives. Asserting the values of traditional federalism over individual rights, the Court affirmed the power of a state to deny a female attorney admission to the bar in Bradwell v. Illinois (1873). Despite the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, the Court upheld the validity of a contract made before the war for the sale of a slave in Osborn v. Nicholson (1873). In the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873, the first decision that directly construed and defined the scope of the Reconstruction amendments, a 5‐to‐4 majority of the Court determined that the Constitution (including its recent amendments) created few federal civil rights and left most slaves at the mercy of the southern states for both the definition and the enforcement of their rights—cold comfort in view of the fact that the southern state governments were falling under the control of racist Democrats. The Court also rejected claims that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited the states from denying women the right to vote (Minor v. Happersett, 1875).

The Supreme Court was determined to protect economic interests, especially when states attempted to repudiate debt obligations (Gelpcke v. Dubuque, 1864). The effect of Gelpcke was to limit the states' capacity to control public indebtedness and to inhibit cities' efforts to build roads and bridges. In the License Tax Cases (1867), the Court, by upholding a federal statute licensing and taxing lotteries, rejected state claims that the federal government improperly intruded into local affairs and condoned immorality. The Court similarly upheld federal power in Veazie Bank v. Fenno (1869), sustaining a wartime tax that had the purpose and effect of abolishing banknotes issued by state‐chartered banks as a circulating medium.

The Court at first denied the federal government's power to issue paper notes as legal tender (Hepburn v. Griswold, 1871) but reversed itself that same year in Knox v. Lee (see Legal Tender Cases). At the same time, the Court also sustained a federal wartime income tax that presented problems of intergovernmental tax immunities (Collector v. Day, 1871).

Throughout Reconstruction, the Court usually deferred to congressional determinations of policy while reasserting its coordinate constitutional status. Still, the Chase Court held ten federal statutes unconstitutional, as compared with two such decisions between 1789 and 1864. Just as Gelpcke curtailed state control over state and local finance, the Test Oath Cases, Bradwell, and Slaughterhouse obstructed the cause of racial and gender equality.

See also History of the Court: Reconstruction, Federalism, and Economic Rights.

Bibliography

Harold M. Hyman and and William M. Wiecek , Equal Justice under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835–1875 (1982).
Robert J. Kaczorowski , The Nationalization of Civil Rights: Constitutional Theory and Practice in a Racist Society, 1866–1883 (1987).

Harold M. Hyman

reconstruction. Rebuilding of structures and their contiguous areas, as distinct from preservation. When the C14 Bredon Tithe Barn, near Tewkesbury, Glos., burned down in 1980, F. W. B. Charles persuaded the National Trust to permit a reconstruction based on his own records, and this helped to change purist attitudes opposed to such work. After the 1914–18 war, certain towns that had been pulverized during the fighting (such as Ieper (Ypres) ) were completely reconstructed, using photographs and other records: this was as much for Belgian national pride as anything. A similar (but greater) feat of reconstruction took place in Warsaw after the 1939–45 war, using pre-war surveys by architectural students of the Old Town, etc., as well as photographic evidence, and views of the city meticulously recorded in C18 by Bernardo Bellotto (1720–80), Canaletto's nephew: this was deemed essential to keep alive the memory of nationhood. Other celebrated feats of reconstruction include the rebuilding of the campanile in the Piazza San Marco after it fell at the beginning of C20, and in the same city the famous theatre of La Fenice was restored after it burned down in the mid-1990s. Gardens, too, can be subject to reconstruction, notably the C17 Het Loo, Apeldoorn, The Netherlands, and the late-C18 and early-C19 gardens at Arkadia, Poland. Modernists reject reconstruction out of hand.

Bibliography

Chamberlin (1979);
Garden History, xxiii/1 (Summer 1995), 91–112;
Journal of Garden History, viii/2&3 (Apr.–Sept. 1988), whole issue

Reconstruction, name applied to the reorganization of state governments in the South after the Civil War, the constitutional processes of their readmission to the Union, and the social adjustments made necessary by altered economic conditions, especially the emancipation and enfranchisement of blacks. The name also refers to the period of social, military, and political history in which, after Lincoln's assassination, power passed from the conservative group in the Republican party, inclined toward leniency and the rapid reinstatement of the seceded states, to the radical Republicans, who favored military rule and the suppression of civil rights in the conquered states. Reconstruction is considered to have terminated with the presidential election of 1876, despite the doubtful victory of Hayes over the Democratic candidate Tilden. Histories of the Reconstruction include Paul Buck's Road to Reunion and Claude Bowers's The Tragic Era, while events and social conditions in the South during this period are depicted in many novels, e.g. De Forest's Kate Beaumont (1872), Albion Tourgée's A Fool's Errand (1879) and Bricks Without Straw (1880), G.W. Cable's John March, Southerner (1894), Thomas Nelson Page's Red Rock (1898), Joel Chandler Harris's Gabriel Tolliver (1902), and Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907).

Reconstruction In US history, the process of restoring the former Confederate states to the Union after the Civil War. It was the cause of fierce controversy within Congress. The relatively pro-Southern approach of President Andrew Johnson led to his impeachment, which failed by one vote. The Republicans were determined to establish the political and civil rights of African Americans, and they succeeded in imposing the programme known as ‘Radical Reconstruction’ over presidential veto. It alienated many Southern whites, and growing violence in the 1870s required the presence of federal troops. When Rutherford B. Hayes became president (1877), he withdrew the troops, Southern Republican governments collapsed, and Reconstruction collapsed.

Reconstruction n. the Reconstruction the period (1865–77) following the Civil War, during which the states of the Confederacy were controlled by federal government and social legislation, including the granting of new rights to African Americans, was introduced. There was strong white opposition to the new measures, and when a new Republican administration returned power to white southern leaders a policy of racial segregation was introduced.

Reconstruction the period 1865–77 following the American Civil War, during which the Southern states of the Confederacy were controlled by federal government and social legislation, including the granting of new rights to black people, was introduced. There was strong white opposition to the new measures, and when a new Republican government returned power to white Southern leaders a policy of racial segregation was introduced.

RECONSTRUCTION

Reconstruction (1865–1877) was one of our most controversial political eras. It followed the American Civil War (1861–1865), the bloodiest war in U.S. history, and saw the South's transformation from a slave to a free society. The U.S. government had to decide how to reintegrate the Confederate states into the union and how to assimilate almost four million freed slaves into the war-torn and hostile society of the South. Its economy was in shambles at the end of the Civil War, with manufacturing and transportation systems in disarray, banks insolvent, and Confederate currency worthless. The agricultural labor pool of slaves, who represented the most valuable asset that the South had possessed prior to the war—more valuable even than all the land in the South, was no longer legally available and the planters had little on-hand cash to pay wages. The freed slaves faced destitution.

President Abraham Lincoln (1861–1865) was anxious to get the Confederate states back into the union. As early as December 1863 he had issued a "Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction" which detailed a lenient approach that he felt would receive wide acceptance in the South and hasten reunion of the eleven Confederate states. Prompted by considerations of how to smooth over the process of reunification of the nation, as well as by long-term political considerations for himself and the newly founded Republican Party, Lincoln's Reconstruction plan was called the "10 percent plan." Only ten percent of a state's electorate who had voted in 1860 had to take an oath of allegiance to the United States before its citizens could be granted pardons, their property restored, and their state governments recognized. Lincoln's plan did not include much in the way of provisions for post-war recovery of the South or safe-guards to protect the newly freed slaves from their former masters.

In July of 1864 Congress adopted a compromise Reconstruction plan which increased the requirements for reentry of the Southern states into the Union. Lincoln, however, vetoed this Wade-Davis bill, which proposed raising the 10 percent voter oath requirement to 50 percent and limiting participation of former Southern leaders in state constitutional conventions. Realizing that few safeguards existed to protect the new found liberty of former slaves, Congress also established the Freedmen's Bureau in 1865 to help feed, protect, and educate them.

Fearing that rebel leaders would regain control of the South, some "Radical Republicans" in Congress (Congressmen who advocated strong measures against the former Confederacy) sought to grant voting rights to former slaves and even spoke of confiscating the wealthy Southern planters' property. A precedent existed for this land reform idea: in a few cases during the war union troops had allowed former slaves to occupy and farm the plantations of rebel planters, including the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. A rumor arose among the former slaves that the federal government was going to redistribute the land and give each slave family "forty acres and a mule."

But after the surrender of the southern armies and in the wake of the uncertainty that accompanied Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, a dispute arose between Lincoln's successor, former Vice President Andrew Johnson, and the Radical Republicans in Congress. Johnson, a small farmer and slave owner from Tennessee, believed blacks were inferior and envisioned a South economically dominated by white farmers holding property redistributed from wealthy planter's land. He seemed to believe that a conspiracy existed between the large plantation owners and the slaves against the small white farmers. Johnson adopted contradictory policies—on the one hand formally declaring that the Confederate military leadership would be executed and that slave holders would be denied the vote, and on the other, pardoning an unending line of petitioners from the southern planter class who flattered him and received full exoneration.

During this period of confusion, the southern political elite adopted make-shift constitutions that abolished slavery and elected the surviving members of the pre-war political elite to Congress. At the same time, however, in their own state legislatures the former planter aristocracy was passing "black codes" that re-subjugated the former slaves to conditions that approximated slavery. Ex-slaves could were restricted to farming jobs, they could be rounded up, charged with vagrancy, and put to work without compensation. They had to carry passes. They lived under curfew laws. Major race riots instigated by whites broke out in 1866 in Memphis and New Orleans with blacks receiving little protection from local law authorities. As these conditions became known in the first months after the southern surrender, the Radical Republicans successfully led a movement to exclude the southern congressmen who were being elected and sent to serve in Congress. A prolonged struggle erupted between the executive and legislative branches of the federal government pitting the president and his conservative program of restoring pre-Civil War conditions in the South against the Radical demands for extensive social and political change in the South.

Angered by the South's persistent and violent resistance to restructuring and disappointed with Johnson's views, Congress adopted a Radical Reconstruction strategy. First, over Johnson's veto, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which recognized blacks as citizens and guaranteed equal protection under the law. Congress included the Act's key provisions in the Fourteenth Amendment, which was approved in 1866 despite rejection by most Southern states. The amendment granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and directed that states could not deprive citizens of due process of law and equal protection of the laws. Next came the Reconstruction Acts between 1866 and 1868, also over Johnson's veto. The acts firmly established military control over the South with the eleven Southern states divided into five military districts. State governments that were recognized under Lincoln and Johnson were thrown out and the black codes eliminated. A Major General controlled each district by holding extensive authority over state officials. Between 1868 and 1870 all states were readmitted to the Union with new governments that were controlled by blacks, carpetbaggers (Northerners who came to the South to carry out Reconstruction programs), and scalawags (Southern collaborators). Though violence temporarily ceased and a number of postwar recovery measures were instituted (including a lasting public school system for both races), most Southerners viewed the governments as artificially contrived.

In 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited states from restricting voting rights on the basis of race. Congress followed with a series of enforcement acts until 1871. However, Northern support for Reconstruction measures began to fade in the 1870s as a national economic recession captured attention. President Rutherford B. Hayes (1877–1881) withdrew the last federal troops in 1877 and Southern states once again assumed full control. Racism flourished. State Jim Crow laws established a racial caste system in the South during the last years of the nineteenth century. Some historians attributed the failure of Reconstruction to the failure to redistribute southern lands to poor farmers, both black and white. In any case, a new labor system involving sharecropping and crop liens replaced slavery. Black families farmed assigned portions of plantations in return for a share of the crop and necessary food and supplies. The new system, in which the new Southern ruling class of planters and merchants were subservient to Northern financiers, did not reestablish the prosperity seen before the war.

See also: Civil War (Economic Impact of), Confederate Dollar, Fourteenth Amendment, Freedman's Bureau, Jim Crow Laws, Sharecropping

FURTHER READING

Belz, Herman. Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era. New York: Fordham University Press, 1998.

Franklin, John Hope. Reconstruction After the Civil War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Harris, William C. With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.

Kennedy, Stetson. After Appomattox: How the South Won the War. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1995.

Schmidt, James D. Free to Work: Labor Law, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, 1815–1880. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998.

Simpson, Brooks D. The Reconstruction Presidents. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998.

in the end . . . the vast majority of southern blacks remained propertyless and poor. but exactly why the south, and especially its black population, suffered from dire poverty and economic retardation in the decades following the civil war is a matter of much dispute.

eric foner, american heritage, october/november 1983