TIME 5B (1861-1877)READINGS- RECONSTRUCTION, 1863-1877

Though slavery was abolished, the wrongs of my people were not ended. Though they were not slaves, they were not yet quite free. No man can be truly free whose liberty is dependent upon the thought, feeling, and action of others, and who has no means in his own hands for guarding, protecting, defending, and maintaining his liberty. – Frederick Douglass, 1882

The silencing of the cannons of war left the victorious United States with immense challenges. How would the South rebuild its shattered society and economy after the damage inflicted by four years of war? What would be the place in that society of 4 million freed African Americans? To what extent, if any, was the federal government responsible for helping ex-slaves adjust to freedom? Should the former states of the Confederacy be treated as states that had never really left the Union (Lincoln’s position) or as conquered territory subject to continued military occupation? Under what conditions wouldthe Confederate States be fully accepted as coequal partners in the restored Union? Finally, who had the authority to decide these questions of Reconstruction; the president or the Congress?

The conflicts that existed before and during the Civil War- between regions, political parties, and economic interests- continued after the war. Republicans in the North wanted to continue the economic progress begun during the war. The Southern aristocracy still desired a cheap labor force to work its plantations. The freedmen and women hoped to achieve independence and equal rights. However, traditional beliefs limited the actions of the federal government. Constitutional concepts of limited government and states’ rights discouraged national leaders from taking bold action. Little economic help was given to either whites or blacks in the South, because most Americans believed that free people in a dree society had both an opportunity and a responsibility to provide for themselves. The physical rebuilding of the South was largely left up to the states and individuals, while the federal government concentrated on political issues.

RECONSTRUCTION PLANS OF LINCOLN AND JOHNSONThroughout his presidency, Abraham Lincoln held firmly to the belief that the Southern states could not

constitutionally leave the Union and therefore never did leave. He viewed the Confederates as only a disloyal minority. After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson attempted to carry out Lincoln’s plan for the political Reconstruction of the 11 former states of the Confederacy.

Lincoln’s PoliciesBecause Lincoln thought the Southern states had never left the Union, he hoped they could be reestablished by

meeting a minimum test of political loyalty.

PROCLAMATION OF AMNESTY AND RECONSTRUCTION 1863: As early as December 1863, Lincoln set up an apparently simple process for political reconstruction- that is, for reconstructing the state governments in the South so that Unionists were in charge rather than secessionists. The president’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction provided for the following:

Full presidential pardons would be granted to most Confederates who (1) took an oath of allegiance to the Union and the US Constitution, and (2) accepted the emancipation of slaves.

A state government could be reestablished and accepted as legitimate by the US president as soon as at least 10% of voters in that state took the loyalty oath.

In practice, Lincoln’s proclamation meant that each Southern state would be required to rewrite its state constitution to eliminate the existence of slavery. Lincoln’s seemingly lenient policy was designed both to shorten the war and to give added weight to his Emancipation Proclamation (when Lincoln made this proposal in 1863, he feared that if the Democrats won the 1864 election, they would overturn the proclamation).

WADE-DAVIS BILL 1864: Many Republicans in Congress objected to Lincoln’s 10% Plan, arguing that it would allow a supposedly reconstructed state government to fall under the domination of disloyal secessionists. In 1864, Congress passed the Wade-Davis bill, which proposed far more demanding and stringent terms for Reconstruction. The bill required 50% of the voters of a state to take a loyalty oath and permitted only non-Confederates to vote for a new state constitution. Lincoln refused to sign the bill, pocket-vetoing it after Congress adjourned. How serious was the conflict between President Lincoln and the Republican Congress over Reconstruction policy? Historians still debate this question. In any case, Congress was no doubt ready to reassert its powers in 1865, as Congresses traditionally do after a war.

FREEDMEN’S BUREAU: In March 1865, Congress created an important new agency: the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, known simply as the Freedmen’s Bureau. The bureau acted as an early welfare agency, providing food, shelter, and medical aid for those made destitute by the war- both blacks (chiefly freed slaves) and homeless whites. At first, the Freedmen’s Bureau had authority to resettle freed blacks on confiscated farmlands in the South. Its efforts at resettlement, however, were later frustrated when President Johnson pardoned Confederate owners of the confiscated lands, and courts then restored most of the lands to their original owners. The bureau’s greatest success was in education. Under the able leadership of General Oliver O. Howard, it established nearly 3,000 schools for freed blacks, including several

colleges. Before federal funding was stopped in 1870, the bureau’s schools taught an estimated 200,000 African Americans how to read. LINCOLN’S LAST SPEECH: In his last public address (April 11, 1865), Lincoln encouraged Northerners to accept Louisiana as a reconstructed state (Louisiana had already drawn up a new constitution that abolished slavery in the state and provided for African Americans’ education). The president also addressed the question- highly controversial at the time- of whether freedmen should be granted the right to vote. Lincoln said: “I myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and those who serve our cause as soldiers.” Three days later, Lincoln’s evolving plans for Reconstruction were ended with his assassination. His last speech suggested that, had he lived, he probably could have moved closer to the position taken by the progressive, or Radical, Republicans. In any event, hope for lasting reform was dealt a devastating blow by the sudden removal of Lincoln’s skillful leadership.

Johnson and ReconstructionAndrew Johnson’s origins were as humble as Lincoln’s. A self-taught tailor, he rose in Tennessee politics by

championing the interests of poor whites in their economic conflict with rich planters. Johnson was the only senator from a Confederate state who remained loyal to the Union. After Tennessee was occupied by Union troops, he was appointed that state’s war governor. Johnson was a Southern Democrat, but Republicans picked him to be Lincoln’s running mate in 1864 in order to encourage pro-Union Democrats to vote for the Union (Republican) Party. In one of the accidents of history, Johnson became the wrong man for the job. As a white supremacist, the new president was bound to clash with Republicans in Congress who believed that the war was fought not just to preserve the Union but also liberate African Americans from slavery.

JOHNSON’S RECONSTRUCTION POLICY: At first, many Republicans in Congress welcomed Johnson’s presidency because of his animosity for the Southern aristocrats who had led the Confederacy. In May 1865, Johnson issues his own Reconstruction proclamation that was very similar to Lincoln’s 10% Plan. In addition to Lincoln’s terms, it provided for the disenfranchisement (loss of the right to vote and hold office) of (1) all former leaders and officeholders of the Confederacy and (2) Confederates with more than $20,000 in taxable property. However, the president retained the power to grant individual pardons to “disloyal” Southerners. This was an escape clause for the wealthy planters, and Johnson made frequent use of it. As a result of the president’s pardons, many former Confederate leaders were back in office by the fall of 1865.

SOUTHERN GOVERNMENTS OF 1865: Just eight months after Johnson took office, all 11 of the ex-Confederate states qualified under the president’s Reconstruction plan to become functioning parts of the Union. The Southern states drew up constitutions that repudiated secession, negated the debts of the Confederate government, and ratified the 13 th Amendment abolishing slavery. On the other hand, none of the new constitutions extended voting rights to African Americans. Furthermore, to the dismay of Republicans, former leaders of the Confederacy won seats in Congress. For example, Alexander Stephens, the former Confederate vice-president, was elected US Senator from Georgia.

BLACK CODES: The Republicans became further disillusioned with Johnson as Southern states legislature adopted Black Codes that restricted the rights and movements of the former slaves. The codes (1) prohibited African Americans from either renting land or borrowing money to buy lands: (2) placed freedmen into a form of semi-bondage by forcing them, as “vagrants” and “apprentices,” to sign work contracts; and (3) prohibiting blacks from testifying against whites in court. The contract-labor system, in which African Americans worked cotton fields under white supervision for deferred wages, seemed little different than slavery. Appalled by reports of developments in the South, Republicans began to ask, “Who won the war?” In early 1866, unhappiness with Johnson developed into an open rift when the Northern Republicans in Congress challenged the results of elections in the South. They refused to seat Alexander Stephens and other duly elected representatives and senators from ex-Confederate states.

JOHNSON’S VETOES: Johnson alienated even moderate Republicans in early 1866 when he vetoed a bill increasing the services and protection offered by the Freedmen’s Bureau and a civil rights bill that nullified the Black Codes and guaranteed full citizenship and equal rights to African Americans. The vetoes marked the end of the first round of Reconstruction. During this round, Presidents Lincoln and Johnson had restored the 11 ex-Confederate states to their former position in the Union, ex-Confederates had returned to high offices, and Southern states began passing Black Codes.

Presidential Vetoes, 1853-1880PRESIDENT VETOES

Franklin Pierce 9James Buchanan 7Abraham Lincoln 7Andrew Johnson 29Ulysses S. Grant 93Rutherford B. Hayes 13

SOURCE: “Summary of Bills Vetoed, 1789-Present.” US Senate, www.senate.gov

CONGRESSIONAL RECONSTRUCTIONBy the spring of 1866, the angry response of many members of Congress to Johnson’s policies led to the second

round of Reconstruction. This one was dominated by Congress and featured policies that were harsher on Southern whites and more protective of freed African Americans.

Radical RepublicansRepublicans had long been divided between (1) moderates, who were chiefly concerned with economic gains for the

white middle class, and (2) radicals, who championed civil rights for African Americans. Although most Republicans were moderates, several became more radical in 1866 partly out of fear that a reunified Democratic Party might again become dominant. After all, now that the federal census counted all people equally (no longer applying the old three-fifths rule for enslaved persons), the South would have more representatives in Congress before the war and more strength in the Electoral College in future presidential elections.

The leading Radical Republican in the Senate were Charles Sumner of Massachusetts (who returned to the Senate three years after his caning by Brooks). In the House, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania hoped to revolutionize Southern society through an extended period of military rule in which African Americans could be free to exercise their civil rights, would be educated in schools operated by the federal government, and would receive lands confiscated from the planter class. Many Radical Republicans, such as Benjamin Wade of Ohio, endorsed several liberal causes: women’s suffrage, rights for labor unions, and civil rights for Northern African Americans. Although their program was never fully implemented, the Radical Republicans struggled to extend equal rights to all Americans.

CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1866: Among the first actions in congressional Reconstruction were votes to override, with some modifications, Johnson’s vetoes of both the Freedmen’s Bureau and the first Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act pronounced all African Americans to be US citizens (thereby repudiating the decision in the Dred Scott case) and also attempted to provide a legal shield against the operation of the Southern states’ Black Codes. Republicans feared, however, that the law could be repealed if the Democrats ever won control of Congress. They therefore looked for a more permanent solution in the form of a constitutional amendment.

14th AMENDMENT: In June 1866, Congress passed and sent to the states an amendment that, when ratified in 1868, had both immediate and long-term significance for American society. The 14th Amendment:

Declared that all persons born or naturalized in the US were citizens Obligated the states to respect the rights of US citizens and provided them with “equal protection of the laws” and

“due process of law” (clauses full of meaning for future generations).

For the first time, the Constitution required states as well as the federal government to uphold the rights of citizens. The amendment’s key clause about citizenship and rights produced mixed results in 19 th-century courtrooms. However, in the 1950s and later, the Supreme Court would make “equal protections of the laws” and the “due process” clause the keystone of civil rights for minorities, women, children, disabled persons, and those accused of crimes. Other parts of the 14 th

Amendment applied specifically to Congress’ plan of Reconstruction. These clauses: Disqualified former Confederate political leaders from holding either state or federal offices Repudiated the debts of the defeated governments of the Confederacy Penalized a state if it kept any eligible person from voting by reducing that states’ proportional representation in

Congress and the Electoral College.

REPORT OF THE JOINT COMMITTEE: In June 1866, a joint committee of the House and the Senate issued a report recommending that the reorganized former states of the Confederacy were not entitled to representation in Congress. Therefore, those elected from the South as senators and representatives should not be permitted to take their seats. The report further asserted that Congress, not the president, had the authority to determine the conditions for allowing reconstructed states to rejoin the Union. By this report, Congress officially rejected the presidential plan of Reconstruction and promised to substitute its own plan, part of which was embodied in the 14th Amendment.

THE ELECTION OF 1866: Unable to work with Congress, Johnson took to the road in the fall of 1866 in his infamous “swing around the circle” to attack his opponents. His speeches appealed to the racial prejudices of whites by arguing that equal rights for African Americans would result in an “Africanized” society. Republicans counterattacked by accusing Johnson of being a drunkard and a traitor. They appealed to anti-Southern prejudices by employing a campaign tactic known as “waving the bloody shirt”- inflaming the anger of Northern voters by reminding them of the hardships of war. Republican propaganda emphasized that Southerners were Democrats and, by a gross jump in logic, branded the entire Democratic Party as a party of rebellion and treason. Election results gave the Republicans an overwhelming victory. After 1866, Johnson’s political adversaries-both moderate and Radical Republicans- had more than a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate.

RECONSTRUCTION ACT OF 1867: Over Johnson’s vetoes, Congress passed three Reconstruction acts in early 1867, which took the drastic step of placing the South under military occupation. The acts divided the former Confederate states into five military districts, each under the control of the Union army. In addition, the Reconstruction acts increased the requirements for gaining readmission to the Union. To win such readmission, an ex-Confederate state had to ratify the 14 th Amendment and place guarantees in its constitution for granting the franchise (right to vote) to all adult males, regardless of race.

Impeachment of Andrew JohnsonAlso in 1867, over Johnson’s veto, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act. This law, which may have been an

unconstitutional violation of executive authority, prohibited the president from removing a federal official or military commander without the approval of the Senate. The purpose of the law was strictly political. Congress wanted to protect the Radical Republicans in Johnson’s cabinet, such as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who was in charge of the military governments in the South.

Believing the new law to be unconstitutional, Johnson challenged it by dismissing Stanton on his own authority. The House responded by impeaching Johnson, charging him with 11 “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Johnson thus became the first president to be impeached (Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998). In 1868, after a three-month trial in the Senate, Johnson’s political enemies fell one vote short of the necessary two-thirds vote required to remove a president from office. Seven moderate Republicans joined the Democrats in voting against conviction because the thought it was a bad precedent to remove a president for political reasons.

Reforms After Grant’s ElectionThe impeachment and trial of Andrew Johnson occurred in 1868, a presidential election year. At their convention,

the Democrats nominated another candidate, Horatio Seymour, so that Johnson’s presidency would have ended soon in any case, with or without impeachment by the Republicans.

THE ELECTION OF 1868: At their convention, the Republicans turned to a war hero, giving their presidential nomination to General Ulysses S. Grant, even though Grant had no political experience. Despite Grant’s popularity in the North, he managed to win only 300,000 more popular votes than his Democratic opponent. The votes of 500,000 African Americans gave the Republican ticket its margin of victory. Even the most moderate Republicans began to realize that the voting rights of the freedmen needed federal protection if their party hoped to keep control of the White House in future elections.

15th AMENDMENT: Republican majorities in Congress acted quickly in 1869 to secure the vote for African Americans. Adding one more Reconstruction Amendment to those already adopted (the 13 th Amendment in 1865 and the 14th Amendment in 1868), Congress passed the 15th Amendment, which prohibited any state from denying or abridging a citizen’s right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It was ratified in 1870.

CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1875: The last civil rights reform enacted by Congress in Reconstruction was the Civil Rights Act of 1875. This law guaranteed equal accommodations in public places (hotels, railroads, and theaters) and prohibited courts from excluding African Americans from juries. However, the law was poorly enforced because moderate and conservative Republicans felt frustrated trying to reform an unwilling South- and feared losing white votes in the North. By 1877, Congress would abandon Reconstruction completely.

RECONSTRUCTION IN THE SOUTHDuring the second round of Reconstruction, dictated by Congress, the Republican Party in the South dominated the

governments of ex-Confederate states. Beginning in 1867, each Republican-controlled government was under the military protection of the US Army until such time as Congress was satisfied that a state had met its Reconstruction requirements. Then the troops were withdrawn. The period of Republican rule in a Southern state lasted from as little as one year (Tennessee) to as much as nine years (Florida), depending on how long it took conservative Democrats to regain control.

Composition of the Reconstruction Governments:In every Radical, or Republican, state government in the South except one, whites were in the majority in both

houses of the legislature. The exception as South Carolina, where the freedmen controlled the lower house in 1873. Republican legislators included native-born white Southerners, freedmen, and recently arrived Northerners.

“SCALAWAGS” AND “CARPETBAGGERS”: Democratic opponents gave nicknames to their hated Republican rivals. They called Southern Republicans “scalawags” and Northern newcomers as “carpetbaggers.” Southern whites who supported the Republican governments were usually former Whigs who were interested in economic development for their state and peace between the sections. Northerners went South after the war for various reasons. Some were investors interested in setting up new businesses, while others were ministers and teachers with humanitarian goals. Some went simply to plunder.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN LEGISLATORS: Most of the African Americans who held elective office in the reconstructed state governments were educated property holders who took moderate positions on most issues. During the Reconstruction era, Republicans in the South sent two African Americans (Blanche K. Bruce and Hiram Revels) to the Senate and more than a dozen African Americans to the House of Representatives. Revels was elected in 1870 to take the Senate seat from Mississippi once held by Jefferson Davis. Seeing African Americans and former slaves in positions of power caused bitter resentment among disfranchised ex-Confederates.

Evaluating the Republican RecordMuch controversy still surrounds the legislative record of the Republicans during their brief control of Southern state

politics. Did they abuse their power for selfish ends (plunder and corruption), or did they govern responsibly in the public interest? They did some of each.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS: On the positive side, Republican legislators liberalized state constitutions in the South by providing for universal male suffrage, property rights for women, debt relief, and modern penal codes. They also promoted the building of roads, bridges, railroads, and other internal improvements. They established such needed state institutions as hospitals, asylums, and homes for the disabled. The reformers established state-supported public school systems in the South, which benefited whites and African Americans alike. They paid for these improvements by overhauling the tax system and selling bonds.

FAILURES: Long after Reconstruction ended, many Southerners and some Northern historians continued to depict Republican rule as utterly wasteful and corrupt. Some instances of graft and wasteful spending did occur, as Republican politicians took advantage of their power to take kickbacks and bribes from contractors who did business with the state. However, corruption occurred throughout the country, Northern states and cities as well. No geographic section, political party, or ethnic group was immune to the general decline in ethics in government that marked the postwar era.

African Americans Adjusting to FreedomUndoubtedly, the Southerners who had the greatest adjustment to make during the Reconstruction era were the

freedmen and freedwomen. Having been so recently emancipated from slavery, they were faced with the challenges of securing their economic survival as well as their political rights as citizens.

BUILDING BLACK COMMUNITIES: Freedom meant many things to Southern African Americans: reuniting families, learning to read and write, migrating to cities where “freedom was free-er.” Most of all, ex-slaves viewed emancipation as an opportunity for achieving independence from white control. This drive for autonomy was most evident in the founding of hundreds of independent African American churches after the war. By the hundreds of thousands, African Americans left white-dominated churches for the Negro Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal Churches in the African American community. The desire for education induced large numbers of African Americans to use their scarce resources to establish independent schools for their children and to pay educated African Americans to become teachers. Black colleges such as Howard, Atlanta, Fisk, and Morehouse were established during Reconstruction to prepare African American black ministers and teachers. Another aspect of African Americans’ search for independence and self-sufficiency was the decision of many freedmen to migrate away from the South and establish new black communities in frontier states such as Kansas.

Percentage of School Age Children Enrolled, 1850-1880YEAR WHITE AFRICAN AMERICAN1850 56 21860 60 21870 54 101880 62 34

SOURCE: US Bureau of the Census, “Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970”

SHARECROPPING: The South’s agricultural economy was in turmoil after the war, in part because landowners had lost their compulsory labor force. At first, white landowners attempted to force freed African Americans into signing contracts to work the fields. These contracts set terms that nearly bound the signer to permanent and unrestricted labor- in effect, slavery by a different name. African Americans’ insistence on autonomy, however, combined with changes in the postwar economy, led white landowners to adopt a system based on tenancy and sharecropping. Under sharecropping the landlord provided the seed and other needed farm supplies in return for a share (usually half) of the harvest. While this system gave poor people of the rural South (white as well as African Americans) the opportunity to work a piece of land for themselves, sharecroppers usually remained either dependent on the landowners or in debt to local merchants. By 1880, no more than 5% of Southern African Americans had become independent landowners. Sharecropping had evolved into a new form of servitude.

THE NORTH DURING RECONSTRUCTION

The North’s economy in the postwar years continued to be driven by the Industrial Revolution and the pro-business policies of the Republicans. As the South struggled to reorganize its labor system, Northerners focused on railroads, steel, labor problems, and money.

Greed and CorruptionDuring the Grant administration, as the material inters of the age took center stage, the idealism of Lincoln’s

generation and the Radical Republicans’ crusade for civil rights were pushed aside.

RISE OF THE SPOILSMEN: In the early 1870s, leadership of the Republican Party passed from reformers (Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Benjamin Wade) to political manipulators such as Senators Roscoe Conkling of New York and James Blaine of Maine. These politicians were masters of the game of patronage- giving jobs and government favors (spoils) to their supporters.

CORRUPTION IN BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT: The postwar years were notorious for the corrupt schemes devised by business bosses and political bosses to enrich themselves at the public’s expense. For example, in 1869, Wall Street financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk obtained the help of President Grant’s brother-in-law in a scheme to corner the gold market. The Treasury Department broke the scheme, but not before Gould had made a huge profit. In the Credit Mobilier affair, insiders gave stock to influential members of Congress to avoid investigation of the profits they were making- as high as 348%- from government subsidies for building the transcontinental railroad. In the cause of the Whiskey Ring, federal revenue agents conspired with the liquor industry to defraud the government of millions in taxes. While Grant himself did not personally profit from the corruption, his loyalty to dishonest men around him badly tarnished his presidency. Local politics in the Grant years were equally scandalous. In New York City, William Tweed, the boss of the local Democratic Party, masterminded dozens of schemes for helping himself and cronies to large chunks of graft. The Tweed Ring virtually stole about $200 million from New York’s taxpayers before The New York Times and the cartoonist Thomas Nast exposed “Boss” Tweed and brought about his arrest and imprisonment in 1871.

The Election of 1872The scandals of the Grant administration drove reform-minded Republicans to break with the party in 1872 and

select Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, as their presidential candidate. The Liberal Republicans advocated civil service reform, and end to railroad subsidies, withdrawal of troops from the South, reduced tariffs, and free trade. Surprisingly, the Democrats joined them and also nominated Greeley. The regular Republicans countered by merely “waving the bloody shirt” again- and it worked. Grant was reelected in a landslide. Just days before the counting of the Electoral Vote, the luckless Horace Greeley died.

The Panic of 1873Grant’s second term began with an economic disaster that rendered thousands of Northern laborers both jobless

and homeless. Over-speculation by financiers and overbuilding by industry and railroads led to widespread business failures and depression. Debtors on the farms and in the cities, suffering from the tight money policies, demanded the creation of greenback paper money that was not supported by gold. In 1874, Grant finally decided to side with the hard-money bankers and creditors who wanted a money supply backed by gold and vetoed a bill calling for the release of additional greenbacks.

THE END OF RECONSTRUCTIONDuring Grant’s second term, it was apparent that Reconstruction had entered another phase, which provide to be its

third and final round. With Radical Republicanism on the wane, Southern conservatives- known as redeemers- took control of one state government after another. This process was completed by 1877. The redeemers had different social and economic backgrounds, but they agreed on their political program: states’ rights, reduced taxes, reduced spending on social programs, and white supremacy.

White Supremacy and the Ku Klux KlanDuring the period that Republicans controlled state governments in the South, groups of Southern whites organizes

secret societies to intimidate African Americans and white reformers. The most prominent of these was the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1867 by an ex-Confederate general, Nathaniel Bedford Forrest. The “invisible empire” burned black-owned buildings and flogged and murdered freedmen to keep them from exercising their voting rights. To give federal authorities the power to stop Ku Klux Klan violence and to protect the civil rights of citizens in the South, Congress passed the Force Acts of 1870 and 1871.

The Amnesty Acts of 1872Seven years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, many Northerners were ready to put hatred of the Confederacy

behind them. As a sign of the changing times, Congress in 1872 passed a general amnesty act that removed the last of the

restrictions on ex-Confederate, except for the top leaders. The chief political consequence of the Amnesty Act was that it allowed Southern conservatives to vote for Democrats to retake control of state governments.

The Election of 1876By 1876, federal troops had been withdrawn from all but three Southern states- South Carolina, Florida, and

Louisiana. The Democrats had returned to power in all ex-Confederate states except these. This fact was to play a critical role in the presidential election. At their convention, the Republicans looked for someone untouched by the corruption of the Grant administration and nominated the governor of Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes. The Democrats choose New York’s reform governor, Samuel J. Tilden, who had made a name for himself fighting the corrupt Tweed Ring. In the popular votes, the Democrats had won a clear majority and expected to put Tilden in the White House. However, in three Southern states, the returns were contested. To win the election, Tilden needed only one electoral voted from the contested returns of South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana.

A special electoral commission was created to determine who was entitled to the disputed votes of the three states. In a straight party vote of 8-7, the commission gave all the electoral votes to Hayes, the Republican. Outraged Democrats threatened to filibuster the results and send the election to the House of Representatives, which they controlled.

The Compromise of 1877Leaders of the two parties worked out an informal deal. The Democrats would allow Hayes to become president. In

return, he would (1) immediately end federal support for the Republicans in the South and (2) support the building of a Southern transcontinental railroad. Shortly after his inauguration, President Hayes fulfilled his part in the Compromise of 1877 and promptly withdrew the last of the federal troops protecting African Americans and other Republicans.

The end of a federal military presence in the South was not the only thing that brought Reconstruction to an end. In a series of decisions in the 1880s and 1890s, the Supreme Court struck down one Reconstruction law after another that protected African Americans from discrimination. Supporters of the New South promised a future of industrial development, but most Southern African Americans and whites in the decades after the Civil War remained poor farmers, and they fell further behind the rest of the nation.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES: DID RECONSTRUCTION FAIL?Reconstruction may be the most controversial period in US history. Generations of both northern and southern

historians, starting with William Dunning in the early 1900s, portrayed Reconstruction as a failure. According to this traditional interpretation, illiterate African Americans and corrupt Northern carpetbaggers abused the rights of Southern whites and stole vast sums from the states governments. The Radical Republicans brought on these conditions when, in an effort to punish the South, they gave the former slaves too many rights too soon. The Dunning school of historical thought provided a rationale for the racial segregation in the early 20 th century. It was given a popular expression in a 1915 movie, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, which pictured the KKK as the heroes coming to the rescue of Southern whites oppressed by vindictive Northern radicals and African Americans.

African American historians such as WEB DuBois and John Hope Franklin countered this interpretation by highlighting the positive achievements of the Reconstruction governments and black leaders. Their view was supported and expanded upon in 1965 with the publication of Kenneth Stampp’s Era of Reconstruction. Other historians of the 1960s and 1970s followed Stampp’s lead in stressing the significance of the civil rights legislation passed by the Radical Republicans and pointing out the humanitarian work performed by Northern reformers.

By the 1980s, some historians criticized Congress’ approach to Reconstruction, not for being too radical, but for not being radical enough. They argued that the Radical Republicans neglected to provide land for African Americans, which would have enabled them to achieve economic independence. Furthermore, these historians argued, the military occupation of the South should have lasted longer to protect the freedmen’s political rights. Eric Foner’s comprehensive Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988) acknowledged the limitations of Reconstruction in achieving lasting reforms but also pointed out that, in the post-Civil War years, the freedmen established many of the institutions in the African American community upon which later progress depended. According to Foner, it took a “second Reconstruction” after World War II (the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s) to achieve the promise of the “first Reconstruction.”

Reconstruction Controversy

The Union RestoredThe Reconstruction Era in the United States was, like other periods of postwar recovery, a decade of political, economic, and social

restoration. But, unlike other periods of postwar recovery, it was also a period of harsh partisan politics, of reform programs, and of demands made on the vanquished South by a victorious and vindictive North.

By the end of 1866, the Radical Republicans had won control of the Republican Party and has established congressional supremacy over the president in matters of reconstruction policy. The reconstruction program of the Radical Republicans aimed, among other things, at achieving civil and political rights for the freedmen and the establishment of a Republican Party stronghold in the South. But, in the long run, due to its vindictive method of treating the conquered South, the results it achieved were just the opposite. By the end of 1875, the southern whites had recaptured control of state governments in all but three southern states. And in the years from 1875 through well into the twentieth century, the real results of construction became clear: the postponement of the Negro’s advance toward political, economic, and social inequality, and the emergence of a strongly Democratic “Solid South.”

During Reconstruction there was much controversy and confusion over political, land, and education programs for the Negro. The readings for this chapter reveal this controversy. The Reconstruction political program for the Negro included the passage of the 13 th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery throughout the United States. The 14 th Amendment guaranteed citizenship and the equal protection of the laws, and the 15 th Amendment declared that the right to vote could not be denied to anyone “on account of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude.”

There were essentially two reconstruction programs dealing with land reform for the freedmen. One plan, based on General Sherman’s Special Field Order Number 15, was embodied in the first Freedmen’s Bureau Act of March 3, 1865. Under this plan, freedmen could occupy, rent, and eventually purchase up to forty acres of government-owned lands and lands abandoned by white owners. The other plan was President Johnson’s order in the spring of 1865 which said that all lands occupied by freedmen and refugees could be reclaimed by the original owners. The conflict over these two plans was finally resolved by the passage of the second Freedmen’s Bureau Act in July of 1866. According to this act, freedmen who had purchased or occupied government lands were allowed to keep or rent them, but those who had settled on abandoned lands under the authority of Sherman’s order and the first Freemen’s Bureau Act were evicted.

The Reconstruction program dealing with the education of the Negro was also embodied in the second Freedmen’s Bureau Act, which provided for some federal aid through the sale of government lands. Many schools were established under the Freedmen’s Bureau, which assumed the responsibility of educating the freedmen for a period of time after the war.

CHARLES SUMNER IN SUPPORT OF THE 13th AMENDMENT:The debates over the 13th Amendment took place during the course of the Civil War. Senator Charles Sumner (Mass.), the leader of

the Radical Republicans in the Senate, fought for “absolute human equality” for the [African Americans], and was a major proponent of the 13th Amendment. In his speech to Congress on April 8, 1864, Sumner explained why the passage of the 13 th Amendment was essential to the overthrow of slavery in the US. His speech is excerpted below:

People naturally find in texts of Scripture the support of their own religious opinions or prejudices; and, in the same way, they natural find in texts of the Constitution the support of their own political opinions or prejudices. And this may not be in either case because Scripture or Constitution, when truly interpreted, supports these opinions or prejudices; but because people are apt to find in texts simply a reflection of themselves. Most clearly and indubitably, whoever finds any support of slavery in the Constitution of the United States has first found such support in himself…

Let the people change, and the Constitution will change also; for the Constitution is but the shadow, while the people are the substance. But under the influences of the present struggle for national life, and in obedience to its incessant exigencies, the people have already changed, and in nothing so much as slavery. Old opinions and prejudices have dissolved, and that traditional foothold which slavery once possessed has been gradually weakened until now it scarcely exists… The time, then, has come when the Constitution, which has been so long interpreted for slavery, may be interpreted for freedom… How shall slavery be overthrown?

The answer is threefold: first, by the courts, declaring and applying the true principles of the Constitution; secondly, by Congress, in the exercise of the powers which belong to it; and, thirdly, by the people, through an amendment to the Constitution. Courts, Congress, people; all may be invoked, and the occasion will justify the appeal.

Let the appeal be made to the courts. But alas! One of the saddest chapters in our history has been the conduct of judges, who have lent themselves to the support of slavery. Injunctions of the Constitution, guarantees of personal liberty, and prohibitions against its invasion have all been forgotten… It has been part of the calamity of the times, that, under the influence of slavery, justice… has fled… But unhappily the courts will not perform the duty of the hour, and we must look elsewhere. An appeal must be made to Congress; and here, as has been fully developed, the powers are ample, unless in their interpretation you surrender in advance to slavery. By a dingle brief statute, Congress may sweep slavery out of existence… Of course we encounter here again the “execrable” [detestable] pretension of property in man, and the claim of “just compensation” for the renunciation of Heaven-defying wrongs… But even if Congress be not prepared for that single decisive measure which shall promptly put an end to this whole question and strike slavery to death, there are other measures by which this end may be hastened… the fugitive slave bill… may be repealed. The coastwise slave trade may be deprived of all the support in the statute-book. The traffic in human beings, as an article of “commerce among States,” may be extirpated. And, above all, that odious rule of evidence, so injurious to justice and discreditable to the country, excluding the testimony of colored persons in national courts, may be abolished.

Let these things be done… But all these will not be enough. The people must be summoned to confirm the whole work. It is for them to put the capstone upon the sublime structure. An amendment of the Constitution may do what courts and Congress decline to do, or, even should they act, it may cover their action with its panoply. Such an amendment in any event will give completeness and

permeance to emancipation, and bring the Constitution into avowed harmony with the Declaration of Independence. Happy day, long wished for, destined to gladden those beatified spirits who have labored on earth to this end, but died without the sight.

LAZARUS POWELL IN OPPOSITION TO THE 13th AMENDMENT:On April 8, 1864, Democratic Senator Lazarus Powell of Kentucky replied to Senator Sumner’s speech which had been delivered

earlier in the day. Powell’s speech, giving his reasons for opposing the 13 th Amendment, is excerpted below. It passed Congress in February 1865, and was ratified by the states in Dec 1866.

I do not believe it was ever designed by the founders of our Government that the Constitution of the United States should be so amended as to destroy property. I do not believe it is the province of the Federal Government to say what is or what is not property. Its province is to guard, protect, and secure, rather than to destroy. If you admit the principle contended for by the gentlemen who urge this amendment, logic would lead to the conclusion that the General Government could, by an amendment to its Constitution, regulate every domestic matter in the States…

I do not think, Mr. President, that those who are now urging this constitutional amendment have acted in good faith toward the adhering slave States… We were told by the Government in every form in which it could speak, at the beginning of this revolution, that whatever might be the result, the institutions of the States would remain as they were.

The President, in his inaugural address, announced that he had no constitutional power to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States. The Secretary of State announced it in a communication which he sent abroad. Congress, by a resolution, announced virtually the same thing when they declared that the object of the war was to restore the Union as it was and to maintain the Constitution as it is. All these measure and promises have been utterly repudiated by the party in power. It seems as if their sole objective was to deceive in order to obtain power, and the moment they obtain power they exercise it…

I oppose the proposition now pending before the Senate, in the first place, because I do not think we should enter into any such legislation at this time for the reasons that I have briefly stated. In the second place, I oppose it because I desire the Union to be restored, restored as it was with the Constitution as it is; and I verily believe that if you pass this amendment to the Constitution it will be the most effective disunion measure that could be passed by Congress. As a lover of the Union I oppose it. Adopt this amendment, say to the people of the southern States that they are to be deprived of their property and the earnings of their labor, that their whole domestic policy is to be overthrown… and do you think they will yield while they have arms to strike? Never, sir; and in my honest judgment (I always speak plainly what I think) those fanatical gentlemen on the other side of the House who desire the passage of this measure, intend to do one of two things- either to destroy the institution of slavery or to destroy the Union… Knowing that this will be the best disunion measure that was ever adopted, and desiring as I do a restoration of the Union to be restored as it was with the Constitution as it is, I oppose it, and shall oppose it here and everywhere, with all the power that I have. Those who favor it do not wish the Union to be restored as it was. They are willing, I suppose, to let the southern States come in as conquered provinces, bereft of all their property and rights, social and political.

THADDEUS STEVENS IN SUPPORT OF THE 14th AMENDMENTThe 14th Amendment was drafted by the 15-member Joint Committee on Reconstruction to ensure the African American his civil

rights when the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of April 1866 was questioned. The debates in Congress over the 14 th Amendment took place in the spring of 1866. On May 8, 1866, Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the House group of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction and the most powerful Radical Republican in Congress, delivered a speech on his reasons for supporting the 14th Amendment. This speech is excerpted below:

This proposition is not all that the committee desired. It falls far short of my wishes, but it fulfills my hopes. I believe it is all that can be obtained in the present state of public opinion… The first section prohibits the States from abridging the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, or unlawfully depriving them of life, liberty, or property, or of denying to any person within their jurisdiction the “equal” protection of the laws. I can hardly believe that any person can be found who will not admit that every one of these provisions is just. They are all asserted, in some form or other, in our DECLARATION or organic law. But the Constitution limits only the action of Congress, and is not a limitation on the States. This amendment supplies that defect, and allows Congress to correct the unjust legislation of the States, so far that the law which operates upon one man shall operate equally upon all. Whatever law punishes a white man for a crime shall punish the black man precisely in the same way and to the same degree. Whatever law protects the white man shall afford “equal” protection to the black man. Whatever means of redress is afforded to one shall be afforded to all. Whatever law allows the white man to testify in court shall allow the man of color to do the same. These are great advantages over their present codes. Now different degrees of punishment are inflicted, not on account of the magnitude of the crime, but according to the color of the skin. Now color disqualifies a man from testifying in courts, or being tried in the same way as white men. I need not enumerate these partial and oppressive laws. Unless the Constitution should restrain them those States will all, I fear, keep up this discrimination, and crush to death the hated freedmen. Some answer, “Your civil rights bill secures the same things.” That is partly true, but a law is repealable by a majority. And I need hardly say that the first time that the South with their copperhead allies obtain the command of Congress it will be repealed. The veto of the President and their votes on the bill are conclusive evidence of that…

The second section I consider the most important in the article. It fixes the basis of representation in Congress. If any State shall exclude any of her adult male citizens from the elective franchise, or abridge that right, she shall forfeit her right to representation in the same proportion. The effect of this provision will be either to compel the States to grant universal suffrage or so to shear them of their power as to keep them forever in a hopeless minority in the national Government, both legislative and executive. If they do not enfranchise the freedmen, it would give to the rebel States but 37 Representatives… True it will take 2, 3, possibly 5 years before they conquer their prejudices sufficiently to allow their late slaves to become their equals at the pools. That short delay would not be injurious. In the meantime the freedmen would become more enlightened, and more fit to discharge the high duties of their new condition. In that time, too, the loyal Congress could mature their laws and so amend the Constitution as to secure the rights of every human being, and render disunion impossible. Heaven forbid that the southern States, or any one of them, should be represented on this floor until such muniments [evidence of defense] of freedom are built high and firm. Against our will they have been absent for 4 bloody years; against our will they must not come back until we are ready to receive them…

The third section may encounter more difference of opinion here. Among the people I believe it will be the most popular of all the provisions: it prohibits rebels from voting for members of Congress and electors of President until 1870. My only objection to it is that it is too lenient… I would be glad to see it extended to 1876, and to include all State and municipal as well as national elections. In my judgment we do not sufficiently protect the loyal men of the rebel States from the vindictive persecutions of their victorious rebel neighbors. Still I will move no amendment, nor vote for any, lest the whole fabric should tumble to pieces.

WILLIAM FINCK IN OPPOSITION TO THE 14th AMENDMENT:On May 8, 1866, in the speech excerpted below, Democratic Rep. William Finck of Ohio replied to Rep. Stevens’ speech, giving his own reasons for

opposing the 14th Amendment. It passed Congress on June 16, 1866, and was submitted to the states legislatures for ratification. The Joint Committee on Reconstruction made the readmission of the southern states to Congress and the Union conditional upon their acceptance of the 14 th Amendment and under these conditions the amendment was finally ratified in July 1868.

At the commencement of this session a most extraordinary resolution was adopted, creating a joint committee of 15 on Reconstruction, and to which it was ordered that everything relating to the admission of members from the late insurgent States should be referred, and none of their representatives were to be admitted until this committee should report on the subject… Well, sir, we have waited, and the country has waited, with feverish anxiety for the period when this committee should report on these questions and the congressional plan should be finally presented… At last, after 5 months’ labor, this committee has brought in its report, and what information do they bring us? And what do they propose that Congress shall do? Do they tell us whether these States are in or out of the Union; or whether they have governments republican in form? Not a bit of it. But they report an amendment to the Constitution, containing 4 or 5 sections, with 2 bills accompanying it, and these are to constitute the congressional plan, as opposed to the policy of the President… Stripped of all disguises, this measure is a mere scheme to deny representation to 11 States; to prevent indefinitely a complete restoration of the Union and perpetuate the power of a sectional and dangerous party.

I am, Mr. Speaker, in the present attitude of our affairs, opposed to making any amendments to the Constitution; and, besides this objection, I am opposed to the measure under discussion, because it seeks to introduce into our system a principle which is wholly unauthorized, and will, if adopted, I fear, lead to serious difficulties in the future. What is the theory on which these propositions are based? This Union is composed of 36 States; and by law, in full force, but the provisions of which are defied and utterly disregarded, this House is legally and constitutionally to be composed of 241 members; but we have Representatives here from only 25 States, and only 148 members. The constitutional number of Senators is 2 for each States, and when full that body would now consist of 72, while it is in fact, composed of 50. So that 11 States are denied all representation in both branches of Congress, although the Constitution provides “that no State, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate;” and the right to representation in the House is equally clear…

… And it is, sir, in this strange and extraordinary condition of our affairs that we are gravely invited to proceed to change the Constitution in such a manner as to deeply and materially affect every States whose representatives are excluded from congress; and we are further asked to say to these States thus excluded that if they refuse to debase themselves as equal States in the Union and decline to ratify and approve by affirmative action these changes, that their exclusion shall be perpetual… Gentlemen cannot justify themselves in supporting this proposed legislation on the ground that these States are out of the union, and that therefore this Congress may require such conditions-precedent as they please to their admission. No, sir; these States are not out of the Union. They have never been out of the Union. They have been recognized by the executive and judicial departments of the Government as States in the Union, and Congress has, by its legislation, more than once during the war fully recognized them as States in the Union, and the very measure which is now proposed to them for their acceptance is a recognition of the fact that they are existing States of the Union… they are so far regarded by this committee as States as to be called upon to exercise one of the highest functions which a State can exercise, namely, to adopt or reject a proposed change in the organic law of the country.

But… these very States are deprived of all opportunity of discussing or voting upon these propositions in Congress, and are States which it is gravely proposed shall not be represented, unless they shall first adopt amendments presented to them by two-thirds of the representatives of 25 out of the 36 States of the Union. And more than all, these States are thus invited to deliberate on the modest demand made of them to disenfranchise a large majority of their own citizens, through Legislatures elected or to be elected, by the votes of the very men who are to be disfranchised under this amendment. Sir, the proposition need only be stated to condemn it as anti-republican and wholly at war with all the well-settled principles of a free representative Government.

HENRY WILSON IN SUPPORT OF THE 15th AMENDMENT:The Congressional debates over the 15th Amendment took place during the winter of 1868-69. On February 8, 1869, Sen. Henry Wilson (Mass), a

staunch defender of black rights, spoke in the Senate in support of the 15th Amendment. Excerpts from his speech follow.Sir, it is now past six o’clock in the morning- a continuous session of more than 18 hours. For more than 17 hours the ear of the

Senate has been wearied and pained with anti-republican, inhuman, and unchristian utterances, with the oft-repeated warnings, prophecies, and predictions, with petty technicalities, and carping criticisms…

In spite of the discomfitures of the past, the champions of slavery and of the ideas, principles, and policies pertaining to it are again doing battle for their perishing cause. Again, sir, we are arraigned, again misrepresented, again denounced… We, the friends of human rights, simply propose to submit to our countrymen an amendment of the Constitution of our country to secure the priceless boon of suffrage to citizens of the United States to whom the right to vote and be voted for is denied by the constitutions and laws of some of the States. This effort to remove the disabilities of the emancipated victims of the perished slave systems, to clothe them with power to maintain the dignity of manhood and the honor and rights of citizenship, spring from our love of freedom, our sense of justice, our reverence for human nature, and our recognition of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. This effort, sanctified by patriotism, liberty, justice, and humanity, is stigmatized [disgracefully marked] in this Chamber as a mere partisan movement. Who makes it a partisan movement? The men who are actuated by an imperative sense of duty, or the men who instinctively seize the occasion to arouse the unreasonable passions of race and caste and the prejudices of ignorance and hate?... This is not the first time that those who denounce the amendment as partisan have stigmatized great, patriotic, and healing measures as partisan. Did they not denounce the great measures for the suppression of the rebellion as partisan measures? Did the not denounce the immortal proclamation of emancipation as a partisan proclamation? Did they not denounce the 13th article of the amendments of the Constitution, by which slavery was made impossible in Christian America, as a partisan amendment? Did they not denounce the 14 th article of the amendments to the Constitution, by which the

citizenship and the civil rights of the emancipated race were forever assured, as a mere partisan affair? Yes, sir: every blow we have struck in defense of the Constitution and the Union, of the liberties of the people, the rights, privileges, and elevation of the poor and lowly, have been branded as partisan by passionate, vehement, and unreasoning partisanship…

Senators accuse us of being actuated by partisanship, by the love of power, and the hope of retaining power; yet they never tire of reminding us that the people have in several States pronounced against equal suffrage and will do so again. I took occasion early in the debate to express the opinion that in the series of measures for the extirpation of slavery and the elevation of enfranchisement of the black race the Republican Party had lost at least a quarter of a million of voters… But we have gone on prospering, and we shall go on prospering in spite of treacheries on the right hand and on the left. The time may chide us, the weak reproach us, and the bad malign us, but we shall strive on, for in struggling to secure and protect the rights of others we assure our own.

WILLIAM SAULSBURY IN OPPOSITION TO THE 15th AMENDMENT:On February 8, 1869, Democrat Willard Saulsbury of Delaware also addressed the Senate, giving his reasons for opposing the 15 th

Amendment. His speech is excerpted below. The 15th Amendment passed Congress in February 1869 and was ratified in March 1870.… Your amendment declares that there shall be no distinction in reference to the right to vote or the right to hold office within

the States, not only of voting for Federal officers and to hold offices created by the Federal Government, but to vote within the States for officers created by the States, including Governor, members of the Legislature, and every possible officer that exists under State law.

It is a perfectly legitimate mode of testing the soundness of a principle by carrying it out to its logical conclusions. If you have the authority to say who shall vote in a State you have the authority to say who shall not vote in a State. If you have the authority to say who shall not vote in a State, you have the authority to say that no one shall vote in a State. If you have authority to say who shall hold office within a State, you have authority to say that no one shall hold office within a State. If you have that authority, you have the authority to say what shall be the law of the State; how that law shall be enacted; by whom the functions of government shall by exercised… You can do anything; you can do everything. You can appoint members of the Legislature, if you choose to permit a State to have a Legislature, to make laws to govern me and my people. Do I know that you would not do it? I am afraid to trust you…

Mr. President, if Congress by a two-thirds vote can propose this amendment, and if three-fourths of the States can ratify it so as to make it binding upon the people of my State and the other States, you can go further, and you can blot out the existence of the States. When you have blotted out 2 or more than two-thirds of the remaining members of Congress may propose to three-fourths of the remainder of the States an amendment to blot out, destroy 4 or 5 other States, and the same process of proposing amendments and ratifying them may finally reduce your 37 States to 4 or 5 or 2 or 3. You can go further. If you can properly propose this amendment- and it is within the competency of three-fourths of the States to ratify it- you can propose an amendment to the Constitution to abolish the office of President of the United States, the judiciary of the United States, and the Congress of the United States, and provide for an emperor with absolute power. What would the framers of the Constitution and the men who lived in the days subsequent to our revolutionary struggle and up to a very recent date have thought of a proposition of that kind? What would the framers of the Constitution have thought of it, had it been proposed in the Convention which framed the Constitution? They would have thought of it just as they would of this proposition, that it was a thing not worthy to be entertained, and it would not have been entertained for one single moment…

Sir, I protest against the passage of this resolution. I protests against it in the name of the Constitution of the United States of America. I protest against it in the name of the constitution of my State. I protests against it in the name of civil liberty, which is dear and should be dear to the heart of every American citizen… Pause, Mr. President. Pause, Senators. The destruction of the Federal Union, the destruction of the State governments, the destruction of civil liberty are to be the consequences of your inconsiderate action.

SIDNEY ANDREWS ON THE FREEDMAN’S HOPESS FOR LAND REFORMFrom 1864 to 1869, Sidney Andrews, a newspaperman, traveled throughout the Carolinas and Georgia as a special

correspondence for the Boston Advertiser and the Chicago Tribune. In the following excerpts from his book, The South since the War, Andrews describes the misconceptions of the freedmen in South Carolina as to the land they were to receive, and the reactions of the freedmen when informed in October, 1865, that they were to be evicted from the Sea Islands they had settled under General Sherman’s order. The Sea Islands are off the coast of S.C., Georgia, and Florida. The contradictory nature of the reconstruction land programs thus caused much hardship to the freedmen.

There is among the plantation Negroes a widely spread idea that land is to be given the bottom of much idleness and discontent… Some of them believe that the land which they are going to have is on the coast; others believe that the plantations on which they have lived are to be divided among themselves… There is also a widely spread idea that the whites are to be drive out of the lower section of the States, and that the Negroes are there to live by themselves. That so absurd ideas as these could exist I would not believe till I found them myself. This latter notion I even found in Charleston among Negroes who had just come in from the back country. Other absurd notions well known to prevail are, that freedom can only be found “down-country,” i.e. in the neighborhood of Charleston; that it is inseparable from the presence of the army, etc…

That the original intention of the government in setting apart the Sea Islands was to either give or sell them to the freedmen I sincerely believe. That the Negroes were allowed to receive the impression that this was the purpose of the Government is beyond all question. That General Saxton colonized them in vast numbers on those islands, with this understanding on his part and theirs, is matter of record. If the faith of the nation was ever impliedly pledged to anything, it was to the assurance that the colored people should have a home there- as witness the famous order of General Sherman, approved by the Secretary of War, and practically endorsed for nearly nine months by all branches of the government…

Three days ago [October 18, 1865] General Howard went down to Edisto island in company with a representative of the old owners thereof. They were met at church by over two thousand freedmen, and a long and painfully interesting meeting was held. To say that the Negroes were overwhelmed with sorrow and dissatisfaction is to state a fact in sober phrase. General Howard explained to them in careful and sympathetic words what he believed to be the wishes of the President, and asked them to appoint a committee to consider the terms proposed by the planters. This they did; and while the committee were in consultation, the assembly sang several of the most touching and mournful of the Negro songs, and were addressed in broken and tearful words by some of their own preachers,. The scarcely concealed spirit of all was that the Government had deceived them, and it required the most earnest efforts of General Howard and his associates to keep this spirit from finding stormy outbreak. The result of the conference between representative Whaley and the

Freedmen’s committee does not promise a speedy reconciliation of the Negroes to their removal from the lands. They say that they will not, under any circumstances, work with overseers… Some few of them seemed willing to work for fair wages, but the great body were anxious to rent or buy the lands, to which the planters will not consent…

The planters believe that they ought to have their old estates, and they also believe that the President means that they shall have them; and hence the “fair terms” which they propose are such as will neither satisfy the freedmen nor the friends of the freedmen. The Negroes, on the other hand, almost universally believe that the islands have been given to them, and they are not likely to readily relinquish that belief… An attempt to force them from the islands at present, or to compel them to the acceptance of the terms proposed by the planters, will overthrow their faith in the Government, and there will be- bloodshed. WILLIAM SAULSBURY IN OPPOSITION TO RECONSTRUCTION LAND REFORM

The crucial debates in Congress over the land question were held during January of 1866. According to the land reform provisions in the second Freedmen’s Bureau bill, which extended the scope of the first Freedmen’s Bureau, three million acres of land in the South were to be purchased by the federal government and rented to freedmen. On January 23, 1866, Democrat Willard Saulsbury of Delaware addressed the Senate on his reasons for opposing the land reform provisions. Excerpts from his speech follow.

Mr. President, although the Freedmen’s Bureau, as originally established, was only intended according to its provisions, to extend to the States that had assumed to secede, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact what a great, what an extensive bureau it has become in the country. I shall enter into no computation of the cost which the country has already incurred in the support of that bureau. One thing we know, that hundreds and thousands of the Negro race have been supported out of the Treasury of the United States, and you and I and the white people of this country are taxed to pay that expense…

[One section of the bill]… requires that there shall be three million acres of land assigned in certain States in the South for these freedmen… and the bill provides that it shall be “good land.” No land is to be provided for the poor white men of this country, not even poor land; but when it comes to the Negro race three million acres must be set apart, and it must be “good land” at that… I estimate the rental value of those three million acres of your land at five dollars per acre, and the free Negroes of the country are to be entitled to $15 million more in the way of rental of lands; for no one can suppose that their benevolent and faithful friends of the Republican Party will even collect any rents from them, least of all that any such rents will ever be received into the Treasury of the United States.

The bill provides that these three million acres shall be in allotments of forty acres each, and each freedman is to have a farm of good land of forty acres; and you do not propose to put the Negro upon his little farm of forty acres without a house to live in, because your bill provides in another section that they shall be provided with shelter. Then, after having given him forty acres of good land to live upon, what will it cost to build a very moderate dwelling-house, with necessary out-houses, for this favorite of the legislation of Congress? Not less than $300… The erection of these buildings will require an additional expenditure of $22.5 million…

But, sir, this is not the only expense. You say in this bill that these Negros shall be furnished with provisions, medicines, etc… I estimate, then, that to these four million freedmen you would have to give the small sum of fifty dollars each; and that would be a very small sum. This would require a further expenditure of $200 million…

Then after the Negro has his house built for him and his forty acres of land allotted to him, he has not the means, you tell us, of providing for himself; his farm must be stocked, and your bill, under the clause for “furnishing the necessary provisions,” gives the power to stock it. What will that cost? I suppose it will cost $300 to each of the seventy-five thousand farms, which will amount to the further trifling sum of $22.5 million.

These, briefly, are some of my objections to this bill… What are the arguments presented in favor of this bill? I have heard none attempted, except by one Senator, upon this floor, and that was the honorable Senator from Illinois, [Mr. Trumbull]. The Senator from Illinois argues the right to make the appropriation contained in this bill from the fact that we have made appropriations for the Indians; on the ground, also, that this class of people has been thrown upon us by the results of the war, and are incapable of protecting themselves; and he claims for it authority under that provision of the Constitution which gives Congress the right to declare war, to raise and support armies, and to maintain a navy. He says it is not designed for times of peace, but that it is a branch of the War Department, and is meant only for times of war; and we are told by that honorable Senator that the war has not ceased, although hostilities have ceased… I should like to inquire what is war but a state of hostilities; and if a state of hostilities does not exist how can there be war?

WILLIAM FESSENDEN IN SUPPORT OF RECONSTRUCTION LAND REFORMOn January 23, 1866, Radical Republican William Fessenden, in a speech excerpted below, addressed the Senate in support of the

government’s purchase of three million acres of land for the freedmen under the second Freedmen’s Bureau bill. Senator Fessenden was the chairman of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. The second Freedmen’s Bureau bill passed Congress, was vetoed by President Johnson in February, but later passed over his veto in July, 1866.

It becomes necessary, in the judgment of the bureau that was then constituted, to make some amendments in the law and to extend its power. What is the outcry against it? It is said it is going to cost a great deal of money, and you tax the white people in order to meet this expense. This cry of taxation is all right enough. I do not complain of gentlemen for guarding the public Treasury carefully…

When gentlemen from any State which has been a confederate State undertake to tell me, “You are taxing the white man for the benefit of the Negro,” I will say, “Sir, you did this thing: had you not commenced this war and driven us to this necessity these would have been no taxation; you are responsible for it, not we; you have placed the necessity upon us; we have not place it upon ourselves.” And if there is any gentleman who encouraged the South… none in this Chamber, but many able men out of it- who did sympathize with them and aid them all they could. I say to them, “When you talk about the great expense of this thing, tell them that you were the authors of it, and that your measures and your sympathies brought it upon the country, and that the dominant party in the Congress of the United States are simply trying to do the best they can with the result of your wickedness”…

I listened with very great attention to the argument of the honorable Senator from Indiana. It was like all his arguments, directly to the point which he was discussing. He was attacking the bill. His argument was mainly confined to the question of expense. But, sir, is that really an argument? Ought not the thing to be done? That is the question. Will you make no appropriations for the benefit of these people…

With regard, therefore, to all these details of objection to the bill- and I rose principally to say this- I see nothing which should trouble anybody arising from the considerations which have been advanced to us with reference to the constitutionality of the bill itself. We must meet it, and we must meet it under some power. There is no positive prohibition. It is a thing to be dome. We have the power to appropriate money; and though we do not find a specific power to appropriate money for this particular purpose, it is yet an object of

Government, a thing that the Government and country must provide for, and there is no other way of doing it. If we may appropriate money for this purpose, I ask the Senator to tell me what the distinction is between money and land; for, much as the objection originally struck me, I have been obliged to inquire why if I found the power to do the one I did not find the power to do the other. We may give away the public lands, but it does not follow that we cannot purchase land…

… I cannot work the problem out, and nobody else can, to show that in the Constitution itself there is a clear power; but I can work the problem out to show that the power may be found when the positive necessity of the thing is apparent, where the thing must be done, and must be done by the Government as a consequence of other things that it was compelled to do, and that it had a perfect right to do. Otherwise, as I have said before, we are a Government without the necessary powers to carry out and effect our own objects.

REVERDY JOHNSON IN OPPOSITION TO RECONSTRUCTION EDUCATION REFORMSThe Radical Republicans made probably their most constructive contribution in the area of public education. During the Civil War,

teachers from the North, sponsored by various religious and philanthropic organizations, taught in the South, in areas occupied by federal troops, in an attempt to provide educational opportunities for the freedmen. After the war the Freedmen’s Bureau took over most of the responsibility for educating the freedmen. Under the educational provisions of the second Freedmen’s Bureau bill, debated in the Senate in January and February of 1866, some federal aid would be given to the education of freedmen through the sale of government lands. On January 23, 1866, Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, a Democrat, addressed the Senate on his reasons for opposing these educational provisions. His speech is excerpted below.

… I think the United States are under an obligation to provide for the freedmen to a certain extent, and to the entire extent of their constitutional power. The vote that I shall give, therefore, will be given reluctantly, and only because I more than doubt whether any such power exists in the Constitution…

The Constitution of the United States, as I think as it has always been interpreted, contains no power to buy lands except for certain specific purposes, for purposes connected with the administration of the Government and the exercise of the powers conferred upon the Government. You can buy land, therefore, for your arsenals, your navy-yards, your mint, and your banks; but I am not aware that it ever has been before held that it was in the power of the United States to buy land for any other purposes than those which are specifically made the subjects of the delegations of power to Congress. It may be true that that objection does not apply to the section which is not before the body, because, as I understand it, it merely appropriates or sets aside certain lands already belonging to the United States for the purposes stated in that section; but the difficulty that I have as regards that is, that I do not know where the power exists which enables us to educate or to provide for any citizen of the United States, white or black.

As slavery has been abolished… those who were before slaves are now citizens of the United States, standing upon the same condition with all who were citizens before, upon the same condition, therefore, with the white citizens. If there is an authority in the Constitution to provide for the black citizen, it cannot be because he is black; it must be because he is a citizen; and that reason being equally applicable to the white man as to the black man, it would follow that we have the authority to clothe and educate and provide for all citizens of the providing for… But I never heard… until now that it was supposed that the Congress of the United States could establish schools anywhere in the United States except in the territories, which, like the territory of the District of Columbia, are under the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States. Now you are about to set aside 3 million acres of public land within these States of the Union- I assume now that they are in the Union; if they are not, they will be- for the purpose of educating the blacks and providing for them; to establish schools; if necessary, to endow colleges; to do anything and everything that the Legislature of a State could do.

As far, therefore, as that objection is concerned- which, I am sorry to say, upon my mind, is insuperable [unsurmountable]; for I repeat, I am very anxious to make provision for these people- it seems to me that we are without the power to do what this bill proposes.

IGNATIUS DONNELLY IN SUPPORT OF RECONSTRUCTION EDUCATION REFORMSOn February 1, 1866, Republican Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota also addressed the Senate. Donnelly’s speech, giving his reasons

for supporting the education programs of the second Freedmen’s Bureau bill is excerpted below.

We cannot leave the population of the South, white or black, in the condition they are now it. We must educate them: When you destroy ignorance you destroy disloyalty; for what man with a free, broad scope of mind, and with a knowledge of all the facts, can fail to love this just, benevolent, and most gentle Government? … What chance is there for the black man in the South without the intervention of this bureau? We have liberated four million slaves in the South. It is proposed by some that we stop right here and do nothing more. Such a course would be a cruel mockery.

These men are without education, and morally and intellectually degrade by centuries of bondage. They have neither the arts nor the knowledge nor the power of combination to protect themselves against the… race from whose grasp they had just been forcibly wrested. That race did not willingly yield them up; to abandon them to their former masters would be to consign them once more to inevitable slavery. The master would have every inducement to re-enslave his former bondsman, and not a single barrier would stand in his way.

But it may be said the amendment to the Constitution prohibiting slavery would protect them. Sir, a grand abstract declaration, unenforced by the arm of authority, is not a protection. But gentlemen seem to forget that slavery is not confined to any precise condition. Every country tolerating slavery has affixed to it conditions peculiar to itself. The old Roman slavery was in many essentials different from the southern institution; and modern slavery has presented many different phases.

Slavery consists in a deprivation of natural rights. A man may be a slave for a term of years as fully as though he were held for life; he may be a slave when deprived of a portion of the wages of his labor as fully as if deprived of all; he may be held down by unjust laws to a degraded and defenseless condition as fully as though his wrists were manacled; he may be oppressed by a convocation of masters called a Legislature as fully as by a single master. In short, he who is not entirely free is necessarily a slave.

GEORGE HOAR IN SUPPORT OF RECONSTRUCTION EDUCATION REFORMThe education programs set up for the freedmen soon proved disappointing. The aid from federal land sales in the South was

insufficient, and embezzlement of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s school funds left the schools with hardly any support. After 1869 teachers were rarely even paid. On June 6, 1870, Representative George Hoar of Massachusetts, a Republican, offered a possible solution to the problem of

Negro education in the South. His speech to the House of Representatives, calling for federal support for a system of public education, is excerpted below. Great strides in the establishment of public schools in the South, however, did not come until after Reconstruction, and then only on a segregated basis.

… Education, the peaceful avenue to the attainment of each of the great objects of national desire, is also the true reconstruction policy. You have busied yourselves to devise barriers of paper… against the fires of treason and hate. I would not undervalue the strength of congressional legislation, or the inestimable blessings of the 15th Amendment; but I say that all these are a snare and a delusion unless they are followed by ample provision for the education of the people. You have to every rebel State save one, restored all State powers. No legislation, no constitutional provisions which must in the last resort depend for enforcement on courts and juries, can protect your newly enfranchised citizen in his constitutional rights unless you give him the defenses of intelligence and virtue.

I tell every Republican within the sound of my voice, it you flinch now all that you have already gained for republicanism, for Union, for democratic liberty will be lost… There is no middle ground between men educated and men enslaved. You have no right to shrink from the fulfillment of the duty you have undertaken, which is to secure to every man within your jurisdiction his full equality before the law and his full and equal share of political power. It is but a mockery to extend to him the ballot-box and then to put out his eyes that he cannot see it.

I cannot understand the state of mind of men who see in this effort to educate the people who attempt to accomplish partisan or political ends. Certainly no respectable number of American statesmen can be found to say that intelligence- that a knowledge of reading, writing, arithmetic, or the history of the country- will have an effect injurious to the doctrines or policy to which they hold. For myself, I utterly disclaim any such purpose… While others have learned the lesson that in popular education is to be found the key to national greatness… how is it with America? She presents the spectacle of a republic without national provision for education; her Representatives grudging a meager pittance of $15,000 for a bureau of public instruction, which she crowds into a room not large enough for a decent barber’s shop…

Compared with the magnitude of this question all matters of tariff, or finance, or currency are trifles. National poverty and national wealth are of little account compared with national ignorance and national education; rather let me say, with ignorance there can be no wealth, with education there can be no poverty. The term of office of this Congress has seen the accomplishment of the most important event in our civil history since the Constitution- the adoption by the American people of the last of the three great amendments. As our fathers accompanied the Constitution with the promulgation of the great Ordinance of 1787, in which they declare “schools and the means of education shall be forever encouraged,” let us, in extending the charter of freedom over a new race, reaffirm that declaration with wider and more beneficial scope. We invade no State rights; we destroy no power of self-government by a policy that extends to every citizen in every State and in every locality the capacity for local self-government, and the intelligence to appreciate whatever makes the State valued or dear.

SOURCE: Touhill, Blanche M. "The Union Restored." Readings in American History. River Forest, IL: Laidlaw Bros., 1970. 204-223. Print.

Reconstruction: The Revolution That Failed by: James MacGregor BurnsFor defeated southern whites, the loss of the Civil War was a monumental calamity. By turns, they were angry, helpless, resigned,

and heartsick. Their cherished South was not just defeated, it was annihilated. Some 260,000 soldiers, the flower of southern manhood, were dead and thousands more were maimed and crippled for life. The South’s major cities were in ruins, railroads and industry desolated, commerce paralyzed, and two-thirds of the assessed wealth, including billions of dollars in slaves, destroyed. As James MacGregor Burns says in The Workshop of Democracy (1985), from which the following selection is excerpted, “Many [white southerners] were already grieving over sons, plantations, and fortunes taken by war; losing their blacks was the final blow.” Some masters shot or hanged African Americans who proclaimed their freedom. That was a harbinger of the years of Reconstruction, for most white southerners were certain that their cause had been just and were entirely unrepentant about fighting against the Union. A popular ballad captured the current mood in conquered Dixie:

Oh, I’m a good ole Rebel, now that’s just what I amFor this fair land of freedom I do not care a damn,I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish’d we’d wonAnd I don’t want no pardon for nothin’ what I done.

I hates the Yankee nation and everything they doI hates the Declaration of Independence too I hates the glorious Union, ‘tis dripping with our bloodAnd I hate the striped banner, I fit it all I could…

I can’t take up my musket and fight ‘em now no mo’That I ain’t gonna love ‘em and that is certain sho’And I don’t want no pardon for what I was and amAnd I won’t be reconstructed and I don’t care a damn.

In Washington, Republican leaders were jubilant in victory and determined to deal firmly with southern whites in order to preserve the fruits of the war. But what about the new president, Andrew Johnson? A profane, hard-drinking Tennessee Democrat who bragged about his plebeian origins, Johnson had been the only southern senator to oppose secession openly. He had sided with the Union, served as war governor of Tennessee, and become Lincoln’s running mate in 1864, on a Union ticket comprising both Republicans and War Democrats. As a result of the assassination of Lincoln, Johnson was now president, and he faced one of the most difficult tasks ever to

confront an American chief executive; how to bind the nation’s wounds, preserve African American freedom, and restore the southern states to their proper places in the Union.

Lincoln had contemplated an army of occupation for the South, thinking that military force might be necessary to protect the former slaves and prevent the old southern leadership from returning to power. Now there was such an army in the South: some 200,000 Union troops had moved in to restore order there and to perform whatever reconstruction duties Johnson might ask of them.

Initially, Republican leaders were hopeful about Johnson, for in talking about his native region he seemed tough, even uncompromising. But as he set about restoring defeated Dixie, Johnson alarmed and then enraged congressional Republicans by adopting a soft, conciliatory reconstruction policy. The president not only opposed granting blacks the right to vote but allowed former Confederates to return to power in the southern states. He even urged southern states to reject the Fourteenth Amendment, pushed through Congress by the Republicans, which would protect southern blacks. The amendment would prevent the states from enacting laws that abridged “the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” It would also bar the states from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” or from denying any person the “equal protection of the law.” Johnson did more than just oppose the amendment; he damned Republican leaders like Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, calling them tyrants and traitors. He even campaigned against the Republican Party in the 1866 off-year elections. As a consequence, he alienated moderate as well as radical Republicans, who soon united against him. When the 1866 elections gave the Republicans huge majorities in both houses of Congress, they set out to take control of Reconstruction and to reform the South themselves.

This sets the scene for Burns’ account of Republican Reconstruction. Burns believes that it was a revolutionary experiment that failed. He does not, of course, subscribe to the outmoded interpretation of Reconstruction as a misguided attempt to “put the colored people on top” in the South and turn the region over to hordes of beady-eyed carpetbaggers and roguish scalawags intent on “stealing the South blind.” In the old view, Reconstruction was “a blackout of honest government,” a time when the “Southern people were put to the torch,” a period so rife with “political rancor, and social violence and disorder,” that nothing good came out of it. Since the 1930s, modern scholarship has systematically rejected this interpretation and the bigotry that underlay it. Drawing on modern studies of the period, Burns argues that the Republican Congress did go too far in trying to centralize power in the legislative branch. But he is sympathetic to Republican efforts to bring southern African Americans into the American mainstream, to grant them political, social, and educational opportunities for self-advancement. On this score, however, the Republicans did not go far enough, for they failed to provide African Americans with the economic security they needed to be truly free in America. Alas, that failure was to plague black Americans for generations to come.

For a brief fleeting moment in history- from late 1866 to almost the end of the decade- radical senators and congressmen led the Republican Party in an audacious venture in both the organization and the goals of political power. To a degree that would have astonished the constitution-makers of earlier years, they converted the 80-year-old system of checks and balances into a highly centralized, majoritarian system that elevated the legislative branch, subordinated the executive and judicial branches, and suspended federalism and “states’ rights” in the South. They turned the Constitution on its head. The aims of these leaders were indeed revolutionary- to reverse age-old human and class relationships in the South and to raise millions of people to a much higher level of economic, political, social, and educational self-fulfillment. That such potent means could not in the end produce such humane and democratic ends was the ultimate tragedy of this revolutionary experiment.

This heroic effort was not conducted by men on white horses, but rather by quarrelsome parliamentarians- by a Congress that seemed to one of its members as never “more querulous, distracted, incoherent and ignoble.” In the Senate, [Charles] Sumner had good reason to be distracted, for he had married a woman half his age shortly before the [1866] election and was preoccupied first by marital bliss and very soon by marital distress as he and his wife found themselves hopelessly incompatible. His colleagues found him more remote and unpredictable than ever. In the House, [Thaddeus] Stevens worked closely with his Radical allies, but he was now desperately anxious to move swiftly ahead, for he knew that time was running out for him and perhaps for his cause. Rising on the House floor, he now presented the countenance of death, with his dourly twisted mouth, deeply sunken eyes, parchment skin, and a body so wasted that he often conducted business from a couch just outside the chamber. But the old man never lost his ferocious drive to dominate; as he spoke, his eyes lighted up in a fierce gleam and his croaking voice turned thunderous, while he stretched his bony arm out in a wide sweep and punctuated his arguments with sudden thrusts of his long yellow forefinger.

The strength of the Republican Party lay in the advanced positions of these two men but even more in the quality and commitment of other party leaders in both houses. Some of these men- John Sherman, James A. Garfield, James G. Blaine- would gain fame in the decades ahead. Others… would fade into the mists of history. Occupying almost every hue on the party rainbow, these men differed sharply and disputed mightily, but they felt they had a clear election mandate to establish civil and other rights in the South; they had a strong sense of party solidarity; and they had the backing of rank-and-file senators and representatives and of party organizations throughout the North.

They also had a common adversary in Andrew Johnson. The President stewed over his election defeat, but he would make no fundamental change in his political and legislative strategy. Setbacks seemed only to mire him more deeply in his own resentments… He received little independent advice from his Cabinet, which appeared to believe that the beleaguered President needed above all their loyalty. [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton dissented on occasion but, characteristically, Johnson did not wholly trust him. As the President stuck to the disintegrating political center and the Republicans moved toward a radical posture, the legislative stage was set for drama and conflict. The upshot was a burst of legislative creativity in the “hundred days” of winter 1866-67:

December 14, 1866: Congress enacts black suffrage for the District of Columbia, later reenacts it over Johnson’s veto. January 7, 1867: the House adopts [James M.] Ashley’s resolution instructing the Judiciary Committee to “inquire into the conduct of Andrew Johnson.” January 22: Congress grants itself authority to call itself into special session, a right recognized until now as belonging only to the President. March 2: all on the same day, Congress passes a basic act laying out its general plan of political reconstruction; in effect deprives the President of command of the army; and enacts the Tenure of Office Act barring the Chief Executive from removing officials appointed by and with the advice of the Senate, without Senate approval. March 23: Congress passes a supplementary Reconstruction Act requiring military commanders to start registering “loyal” voters.

The heart of congressional strategy to democratize the South lay in the first Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867, as clarified, strengthened, and implemented in later acts. With the ostensible purpose of restoring social order and republican government in the South, and on the premise that the existing "Johnson” state regimes there could not realize these ends or even protect life or property, the

South was divided into five military districts subject to martial law. The commanders were empowered not only to govern- to suppress disorder, protect life and property, remove civil officeholders- but to initiate political reconstruction by enrolling qualified voters including African Americans, and excluding the disloyal. To be restored to the Union, the southern states must call new constitutional conventions that, elected under universal manhood suffrage, in turn must establish new state governments that would guarantee black suffrage and ratify the 14th Amendment. These states would be eligible for representation in the national legislature only after Congress had approved their state constitutions and after the 14th Amendment had become part of the Constitution.

It was a radical’s dream, a centralist’s heaven- and a states’-righter’s nightmare. Congress held all the governmental strings in its hands. No more exquisite punishment could have been devised for secessionists than to make them conform to national standards in reconstructing their own state governments and gaining restoration to the Union. Congress did not stop with upsetting the division of powers between nations and states; it overturned the separation of powers [between the executive and legislative branches of the national government]. In 1868, congressional Republicans sought to remove Johnson by a method never before used against an American president. The Republican-controlled House impeached Johnson on various partisan charges, including his defiance of the Tenure of Office Act and his efforts to undermine the Reconstruction Act, but the Senate failed to convict him by just one vote short of the two-thirds required for removal. Thus ended the first and last attempt [until Clinton] to impeach an American president for political reasons. Even so, Johnson’s presidency was irreparably damaged; he served out his last year in office, as truculent as ever. The Republicans, meanwhile, nominated war hero Ulysses S. Grant as their candidate in the 1868 presidential election. Because Grant had maintained ties with Congressional Republicans and seemed genuinely militant in his stance on Reconstruction, congressional Republicans were certain that he would cooperate with them. That November, Grant defeated Democratic candidate Horatio Seymour by winning all but three northern states and polling 52.7% of the popular vote.

Some Radical Republicans now were more optimistic than ever. Grant’s election, they felt, provided a supreme and perhaps final opportunity to reconstruct the South. Now the Republicans had their own men in the White House; they still controlled both houses of Congress; they had established their supremacy over the Supreme Court; they had considerable influence over the federal military and civilian bureaucracy in the South. They still had the power to discipline the Southern states, by admitting them to the Union or expelling them. The Republicans had pushed through the 13 th and 14th Amendments. They still possessed the ablest, most experienced political leadership in the nation. Stevens had died during the campaign, but Sumner had been handsomely reelected in Massachusetts. “So at last I have conquered; after a life of struggle,” the senator said.

Other Radicals were less sanguine. They knew that far more than Andrew Johnson had thwarted Reconstruction. The national commitment to black equality was weak, the mechanisms of government faulty, and even with the best of intentions and machinery, the connecting line between a decision in Washington and an actual outcome affecting an African American family in Virginia or Mississippi was long and fragile. Time and again, voters had opposed black wrongs without favoring black rights. Before the war, they had fought the extension of slavery but not slavery where it existed. During the war, they had come to approve emancipation only after Lincoln issued his proclamation. After the war, in a number of state elections- especially those of 1867- Northerners had shown that they favored black suffrage in the South but not at home.

Spurred by effective leaders, Americans were moving toward racial justice, but the journey was agonizingly slow and meandering. “It took America three-quarters of a century of agitation and four years of war to learn the meaning of the world ‘Liberty,’” the American Freedman editorialized. “God grant to teach us by easier lessons the meaning of the words ‘equal rights.’” How quickly and firmly American moved ahead on black rights could turn significantly on continuing moral and political leadership.

The crucial issue after Grant’s election was the right of blacks to vote. Republican leaders in Congress quickly pushed ahead with the 15th Amendment, which declared in its final form that the “right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It was a noble sentiment that had emerged out of a set of highly mixed motives. Democrats changed, with some reason, that the majority party was far less interested in legalizing the freedman’s vote in the South than in winning the black vote in the North. But the Republican leadership, known that countless whites in the North opposed black voting there, were responding to the demands of morality as well as practicality. Senator Henry Wilson reminded his colleagues that the “whole struggle in this country to give equal rights and equal privileges to all citizens of the United States had been an unpopular one; that we have been forced to struggle against passions and prejudices engendered by generations of wrong and oppression.” He estimated that the struggle had cost his party a quarter of a million votes. Another Republican senator, however, contended that in the long run adherence to “equality of rights among men” had been not a source of party weakness but of its strength and power…

If political morality in the long run meant political practicality, the 15 th Amendment nevertheless bore all the markings of compromise. To gain the two-thirds support constitutionality required in each chamber, the sponsors were compelled to jettison clauses that would have outlawed property qualifications and literacy tests. The amendment provided only that Congress could not deny the vote, rather than requiring them to take positive action to secure black suffrage; nor was there any provision against denial of vote by mobs or other private groups. And of course the amendment did not provide for female voting- and so the National Woman Suffrage Association opposed it.

Still, radicals in and out of Congress were elated when the 15 th cleared Congress, elated even more when the measure became part of the Constitution in March 1870, after Republican state parties helped drive it through the required number of legislatures…

The legal right of African Americans to vote soon produced a phenomenon in Southern politics- black legislators, judges, superintendents of education, lieutenant governors and other state officials, members of Congress, and even two United States senators. These, however, made up only a fraction of Southern officeholders: in none of the legislatures did blacks hold a majority, except briefly in South Carolina’s lower house. Usually black leaders shared power with “carpetbaggers”- white Northerners who came south and became active in politics as Republicans- and “scalawags”- white Southerners who cooperated with Republicans and African Americans. While many black leaders were men of “ability and integrity,” in [historian] Kenneth Stampp’s view, the whites and blacks together comprised a mixed lot of the corrupt and the incorruptible, moderate and extreme, opportunistic and principled, competent and ignorant. The quality of state government under such leadership also was mixed, but on the whole probably no worse than that of many state and local governments of that time. The state governments in the South bore unusually heavy burdens, moreover- demoralization and poverty in the wake of a devastating war, the need to build or rebuild public services throughout the region, the corrupting influence of contractors, speculators, and promoters seeking subsidies, grants, contracts, franchises, and land.

Far more important than the reality of black-and-white rule in the South was the perverted image of it refracted through the distorted lenses of Southern eyes. It was not easy for the white leadership to see newly freed men… occupy positions of prestige and powers; and it was perhaps inevitable that they would caricature the new rulers to the world. A picture emerged of insolent boors indulging in legislative license, lording it over downtrodden whites, looting the public treasury, bankrupting the state, threatening white traditions, womanhood, and purity…

The worse fear of the old white leadership- that black-and-white rule would produce a social revolution- turned out to be the least warranted of all. The mixed rule of African Americans, scalawags, and carpetbaggers produced a few symbolic and actual changes: rhetoric drawn directly from the Declaration of Independence proclaiming liberty, “equality of all persons before the law,” various civil and political rights; a mild effort in two or three states to integrate certain educational institutions; a feeble effort at land reform. [Southern state] constitutions were made somewhat more democratic, legislative apportionment less discriminatory, more offices elective; “rights of women were enlarged, tax systems were made more equitable, penal codes were reformed, and the number of crimes punishable by death was reduced,” in Stampp’s summation. The constitution of South Carolina- the state that had served as the South’s political and ideological heartland, and the state that now paradoxically had elevated the most African Americans to leadership positions- was converted almost into a model state charter, with provisions for manhood suffrage, public education, extension of women’s rights, and even the state’s first divorce law…

But what the black-and-white leadership failed to do was of far more profound consequence than what it did. Both radicals and moderates understood that education was a fundamental need for Southern blacks, but the obstacles were formidable and progress slow. Even the best educational system could hardly have compensated for decades of illiteracy and ignorance. “The children, James McPherson noted, “came from a cultural environment almost entirely devoid of intellectual stimulus. Many of them had never heard of the alphabet, geography, or arithmetic when they first came to school. Few of them knew their right hand from their left, or could tell the date of their birth. Most of them realized only vaguely that there was a world outside their own plantation or town.” In the early years, teachers sponsored by “Freedmen’s Aid” and missionary groups met the challenge, often finding to their surprise that African American children had a passion to learn, could be taught to read as quickly as white children, and might be found laboriously teaching their own parents the alphabet and the multiplication table.

These private educational efforts were never adequate, however, to teach more than a fraction of the South’s African American children. The question was whether the reconstructed black-and-white state governments would take over the task in a comprehensive way, and here they failed. The difficulties were at least as great as ever: inadequate facilities, insufficient money, lack of teachers, inadequate student motivation, discipline problems (African American teachers tended to be the harsher disciplinarians). But the biggest hurdle was the constant, pervasive, and continuing hostility of many Southern whites to schooling for African Americans. “I have seen many an absurdity in my lifetime,” said a Louisiana legislator on observing black pupils for the first time, “but this is the climax of absurdities.” A Southern white woman warned a teacher that “you might as well try to teach your horse or mule to read, as to teach these n*****s. They can’t learn.”

Behind these white Southern attitudes toward schooling for black children lay a host of fears. One was their old worry that African Americans would be educated above their station and out of the labor supply. “To talk about educating this drudge,” opined the Paducah (Kentucky) Herald, “is to talk without thinking. Either to ‘educate,’ or to teach him merely to read and write, is to ruin him as a laborer. Thousands of them have already been ruined by it.” Even more pervasive was the white fear of integration, although most black leaders made it clear that their main interest was education, whether segregated or not. Southern fears often took the form of harassing and humiliating teachers or, more ingeniously, depriving them of white housing so that some teachers lived with African Americans- and hence could be arrested as vagrants. Defending the arrest of a freedmen’s teacher, the mayor of Enterprise, Mississippi, said that the teacher had been “living on terms of equality with Negroes, living in their houses, boarding with them, and at one time gave a party at which there were no persons present (except himself) but Negroes, all of which are offenses against the laws of the state and declared acts of vagrancy.” Black-and-white governments could not overcome such deep-seated attitudes.

To many African Americans, even more important than education was land- “forty acres and a mule.” During the war, when workers on a South Carolina plantation had rejected a wage offer from their master, one of them had said, “I mean to own my own manhood, and I’m goin’ on to my own land, just as soon as I git dis crop in…” Declared a black preacher in Florida to a group of field hands: “It’s de white man’s turn ter labor now. He ain’t got nothin’ lef’ but his lan’, an’ de lan’ won’t be his’ n long, fur de Guverment is gwine ter gie ter ev’ry N****r forty acres of lan’ an’ a mule.” Black hopes for their own plots had dwindled sharply after the war, when Johnson’s amnesty proclamation restored property as well as civil rights to most former rebels who would take an oath of allegiance. His expectations dashed, a Virginia African American said now that he would ask for only a single acre of land- “ef you make it de acre dat Marsa’s house sets on.”

Black hopes for land soared again after the congressional Republicans took control of Reconstruction in the late 1860s, only to collapse when Republican moderates- and even some radicals- refused to support a program of land confiscation. Black hopes rose still again when black-and-white regimes took over state governments; some freedmen hear rumors that they need only go to the polls and vote and they would return home with a mule and a deed to a 40-acre lot. But, curiously, “radical” rule in no state produced systematic effort at land redistribution. Some delegates to the Louisiana constitutional convention proposed that purchases of more than 150 acres be prohibited when planters sold their estates, and the South Carolina convention authorized the creation of a commission to buy land for sale to African Americans, but little came of these efforts. One reason was clear: Southern whites who had resisted black voting and black education would have reacted with even greater fury to as radical a program as land redistribution, with all its implications for white pride, white property- and the white labor supply.

Black leaders themselves were wary of the freedmen’s lust for “forty acres and a mule.” In part, this caution may have been due to the class divisions between the black Southern masses and their leaders, many of whom had been artisans or ministers, had been free before the war, and had never experienced plantation life and closeness to the soil. Some of these leaders were, indeed, virtually middle-class in their attitudes toward property, frugality, “negative” liberty, and hard work, and in their fear that radical blacks might infuriate white power elites by talking “confiscation.” Such leaders preferred to bargain with the white power structure rather than threaten its control over land and other property. Prizing liberal values of individual liberty, the need for schooling, and above all the right to vote, they played down the economic and social needs of the African Americans. And they based their whole strategy on the suffrage, arguing that all the other rights that blacks claimed- land, education, homes- were dependent on their using the potential power inherent in their right to vote.

Would black voting make the crucial difference? Of the three prongs of black advance in the South- schools, land, and the vote- the limited success of the first and the essential failure of the second left black suffrage as the great battlefield of Southern reform. Certainly Southern whites realized this and, as the Republican commitment faltered during the Grant administration, they stepped up their efforts to thwart black voting. They used a battery of stratagems: opening polling places late or closing them early of changing their location; gerrymandering districts in order to neutralize the black vote; requiring the payment of a poll tax to vote; “losing” or disregarding black ballots; counting Democratic ballots more than once; making local offices appointive rather than elective; plying African American with liquor. These devices had long been used against white Americans, and by no means did all Southern whites use them now, but fraud and trickery were especially effective against inexperienced and unlettered African Americans.

When nonviolent methods failed, many Southern whites turned to other weapons against voting: intimidation, harassment, and terror. Mobs drove African Americans away from the polls. Whites blocked polling entrances or crowded around ballot boxes so blacks could not vote. Rowdies with guns or whips followed black voters away from the polling places. When a group of black voters in Gibson County, Tennessee, returned the fire of a band of masked men, the authorities put the African Americans in jail, from which an armed mob took them by force to a nearby riverbank and shot them down. 53 defendants were arrested by federal authorities and tried, none convicted.

Some of this violence erupted spontaneously as young firebrands, emboldened by liquor, rode into polling areas with their guns blazing. But as the stakes of voting rose, terrorists organized themselves. Most notable was the Ku Klux Klan, with its white robes and hoods, sheeted horses, and its weird hierarchies of wizards, genii, dragons, hydras, ghouls, and Cyclopes. Proclaiming its devotion to “Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy, and Patriotism,” the Klan proposed to protect the “weak, the innocent, and the defenseless”- and the “Constitution of the United States.” The Klan had allies in the Knights of the White Camelia, the White Brotherhood, and other secret societies.

Incensed by mob violence, the Republicans in Washington tried to counter it with legislation. The Enforcement Act of May 1870 outlawed the use of force, bribery, or intimidation that hindered the right to vote because of race in state and local elections. Two more enforcement acts during the next 12 months extended and tightened enforcement machinery, and in April 1871 Congress in effect outlawed the Klan and similar groups. But actual enforcement in the thousands of far-flung polling places required an enormous number of marshals and soldiers. As army garrisons in the South thinned out, enforcement appropriations dwindled, and the number of both prosecutions by white prosecutors and convictions by white juries dropped, black voting was more and more chocked off.

After his election to a second term Grant tried vigorously though spasmodically to support black rights for the sake of both Republican principle and Republican victories. In a final effort, the Republicans were able to push through the Civil Rights Act of 1875, designed to guarantee equal rights for blacks in public places, but the act was weak in coverage and enforcement, and later would be struck down by the Supreme Court.

By the mid-seventies Republicanism, Reconstruction, and reform were all running out of steam. Southern Democrats were extending their grip over political machinery; the Republican leadership was shaken by an economic panic in 1873, and the party lost badly in the 1874 midterm elections. The coup de grace for Reconstruction came after Rutherford Hayes’ razor-thin electoral-college victory in 1876 over [Democrat] Samuel J. Tilden. Awarded the office as a result of Republican control over three Southern states where voting returns were in doubt, and as a result too of a Republican majority on the Electoral Commission. Hayes bolstered his position by offering assurances about future treatment of the South. While these were in the soft political currency of veiled promises and Delphic utterances, the currency was hard enough for the Democrats- and for Hayes as well. Within two months of his inauguration, he ordered the last federal troops out of the South and turned over political control of Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida to the Southern [Democracy].

And what of the objects of this long political struggle- the black people of the South? The vast majority were in the same socioeconomic situation as ten years before, at the end of the war. They had gained certain personal liberties, such as the right to marry, and a modicum of legal and civil and political rights, including the right to vote in certain areas; but their everyday lot was much the same as before. Most sill lacked land, property, money, capital; they were still dependent on the planters, sometimes the same old “massa.” It was not a black man but a prominent white Georgian who said of the freedmen late in 1865: “The Negro’s first want is, not the ballot, but a chance to live, - yes, sir, a chance to live. Why, he can’t even live without the consent of the white man! He has no land; he can make no crops except the white man gives him a chance. He hasn’t any timber; he can’t get a stick of wood without leave from a white man. We crowd hi into the fewest possible employments, and then he can scarcely get work anywhere but in the rice-fields and cotton plantations of a white man who has owned him and given up slavery only at the point of the bayonet… What sort of freedom is that?”

Many a freeman had exchanged bondage for a kind of bargaining relationship with employers, but his bargaining position was woefully weak. If he held out for better terms, he could be evicted; if he left, he might be denied work elsewhere and arrested for vagrancy; if he struck, he had no unions or money to sustain him. So the “bargains” were usually one-sided; contracts sometimes literally required “perfect obedience” from employees. Some African Americans had had the worst of both worlds- they had left the security of old age and sickness in bondage, under masters who cared not for them because they were valuable property, for a strange “free-market” world in which they developed new dependencies on old masters.

Could Reconstruction have turned out differently? Many have concluded that the impotence of the African Americans was too deeply rooted, the white intransience too powerful, the institutions of change too faulty, and the human mind too limited to begin to meet the requirements of a genuine Reconstruction. Yet the human mind had already conducted a stupendous social revolution with the African Americans. For a hundred years and more, Southern planters, assisted by slave recruiters in Africa, masters of slaving ships, various middlemen, auctioneers, and drivers, had been uprooting African Americans by the hundreds of thousands out of far-off tribal civilizations, bringing most of them safely across broad expanses of water, establishing them in a new and very different culture, and converting them into productive and profit-creating slaves. Somehow the human mind seemed wholly capable of malign “social engineering,” incapable of benign.

Yet there were some Americans who did understand the kind of broad social planning and governmental action that was needed to reconstruct genuine democracy in the South and truly to liberate the freed people. [Abolitionist] Wendell Phillips understood the depth of the problem, the need for a “social revolution.” He said: “You must plant at the South the elements which make a different society. You cannot enact four millions of slaves, ignorant, down-trodden, and despised, into personal equals of the old leaders of the south.” He wanted to “give the Negroes land, ballot, and education and to hold the arm of the Federal government over the whole Southern Territory until these seeds have begun to bear fruit beyond any possibility of blighting.” We must see to it, said Senator Henry Wilson, that “the man made free by the Constitution is a freeman indeed; that he can go where he pleases, work when and for whom he pleases; that he can sue

and be sued; that he can lease and buy and sell and own property, real and person; that he can go into the schools and educate himself and his children…” [Black leader Frederick] Douglass and Stevens and Sumner took similar positions.

These men were not typical of Republicans or even of Radical Republicans, but many other radicals and moderates recognized that the freed people needed an array of economic, political, social and legal supports, and that these were interrelated. Congressman George Hoar lamented that African Americans had been given universal suffrage without universal education. Some radicals believed that voting was the African Americans’ first need and others that land or sustenance came first, but most recognized that no single “solution” was adequate. Anti-slavery men, said Phillips, “will believe the Negro safe when we see him with 40 acres under his feet, a schoolhouse behind him, a ballot in his right hand, the scepter of the Federal Government over his head, and no State Government to interfere with him, until more than one-half of the white men of the Southern States are in their graves…”

The critical failure of Reconstruction probably lay… in the realm of leadership- especially that of opinion-makers. Editors, ministers, and others preached liberty and equality without always comprehending the full dimensions of these values and the means necessary- in the South of the 1870s- to accomplish such ends. The radicals “seemed to have little conception,” according to Stampp, “of what might be called the sociology of freedom, the ease with which mere laws can be flouted when they alone support an economically dependent class, especially a minority group against whom is directed an intense racial prejudice.” Reconstruction could have succeeded only through use of strategy employed in a number of successful postwar reconstructions of a comprehensive nature- a strategy of combining ideological, economic, political, educational, and institutional forces in such a firm and coordinated way as truly to transform the social environment in which Southerners, both black and white, were trying to remake their lives after the Civil War. And such a strategy, it should be noted, would have imposed heavy intellectual, economic, and psychological burdens on the North as well.

Not only would such a strategy have called for rare political leadership- especially for a leader, in William Gillette’s words, able to “fashion a means and then persevere in it, bending men to his purpose by vigorous initiative, skillful influence, and masterful policy.” Even more it called for a rare kind of intellectual leadership- political thinkers who could translate the component elements of values such as liberty and equality into policy priorities and operational guidelines. But aside from a few radicals such as Phillips, most of the liberals and many of the radicals had a stunted view of the necessary role of public authority in achieving libertarian and egalitarian purposes. The Nation, the most influential liberal weekly in the postwar period, under Edwin L. Godkin shrank from using the only means- government- that could have marshaled the resources necessary for genuine reconstruction. “To Govern Well,” The Nation proclaimed, “Govern Little.” A decisive number of otherwise liberal-minded and generously inclined intellectual leaders held similar views… There were many reasons for the failure of Reconstruction, but the decisive one- because it occurred in people’s conceptualizing and analyzing processes and not merely in ineluctable social and economic circumstances- took place in the liberal mind. Most of the liberals were effective transactional leaders, or brokers; few displayed transforming leadership.

That liberal mind seemed to have closed itself off even to the results of practice experimentation. During the war, General Sherman had set aside for freedmen several hundred thousand acres on the Sea Islands south of Charleston and on the abandoned rice lands inland for thirty miles along the coast. Each African American family was to receive its 40 acres until Congress should rule on their final disposition. Federal officials helped settle 40,000 African Americans on these lands. When the whole enterprise was terminated by President Johnson’s pardon and amnesty program, and land turned back to former owners, the black farmers were incredulous. Some had to be driven off their land by force. The program had lasted long enough, however, to demonstrate that freed people could make a success of independent farming, and that “40 acres and a mule” could serve as the foundation of Reconstruction. But the lesson seemed lost on Northerners who shuddered at the thought of “land confiscation.”

Thus the great majority of black people were left in a condition of dependency, a decade after war’s end, that was not decisively different, in terms of everyday existence, from their prewar states. They were still landless farm laborers, lacking schooling, the suffrage, and self-respect. They achieved certain civil and legal rights, but their expectations had been greatly raised too, so the Golden Shore for many seemed more distant than ever. Said a black woman: “De slaves, where I lived, knowed after de war dat they had abundance of dat somethin’ called freedom, what they could not eat, wear, and sleep in. Yes, sir, they soon found out dat freedom ain’t nothin’, ‘less you is got somethin’ to live on and a place to call home. Dis livin’ on liberty is lak young folks livin’ on love after they gits married. It just don’t work.”

Or as an Alabama freedman said more tersely when asked what price tag he bore- and perhaps with two meanings of the word in mind: “I’se free. Ain’t wuf nuffin.”

SOURCE: Burns, James M. "Reconstruction, The Revolution That Failed." Portrait of America. By Stephen B. Oates. 6th ed. Vol. 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. 431-44. Print.

TIME 5B (1861-1877)Name: ______________________________________________________ Date: ____________________________

QUESTIONS- Reconstruction Readings

1. To what extent were constitutional reasons relied upon by those who opposed reconstruction political, land, and education programs for African Americans?

2. To what extent were economic reasons relied upon by those who opposed reconstruction political, land, and education programs for African Americans?

3. What evidence, if any, is found in the readings that racism underlay the reasons of those who opposed reconstruction programs for African Americans?

4. What was the motivation for those who supported reconstruction programs for African Americans?

5. Is it accurate to say that by the end of reconstruction, African Americans had only theoretically won the rights granted to them in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments? Why or why not?

6. Should the government should have provided all freedmen with land after the Civil War? Why or why not? Would the advantages would have outweighed the disadvantages of such a policy? Why or why not?

7. Why does Burns call Reconstruction a revolution? Why was Reconstruction “a radicalist’s dream, a centralist’s heaven, and a states’-righter’s nightmare”?