With all of the writings about the US CivilWar, there seems to be very little scholarly work about the post-civil war “reconstruction”. I belive that this period was from 1865 to around 1890…and (unfotunately) the chance for true racial equality was wasted! For example, Alabama, Mississipee and other southern states actually elected substantial numbers of balck politicians to statewide and national office-I beleiev that Alabam had two black senators at one point!
The Fedral governement madeit a prioroty to equalize that slaves with their neighbors.
So what went wrong? Why did the south revert to the worst period of racism in its history?
Was reconstruction sabotaged buy the Klan? Or was the south so backward that no effort by the government could change the area that much?
Anybody know a good book about the reconstruction period?
You might look into the 1876 presidential election, for one thing. No candidate had an electoral majority, throwing it into the House. The inside deal to resolve the election in favor of the Republican (then liberal, pro civil rights for blacks, Lincolnist reconstructors) Hayes over the Democrat (then with a strong conservative, segregationist Southern segment) Tilden involved the Republicans agreeing to end serious Reconstruction work and permitting segregationism to rule. In return for an ineffectual 4-year term for Hayes, the blacks were sold out for several generations to come.
While ElvisL1ves, response is correct, in that it points to a specific event that marked the definitive end of Reconstruction–the corrupt bargain that put Hays in the White House rather than Tilden, who had won the plurality of the votes. The corrupt bargain was the exchange of the votes of Southern Congressmen in favor of the Republican Hays for the Republicans’ promise of the formal abandonment of Reconstruction.
However, many of the proposed reconstruction and emancipation measures that had been proposed (and some which were implemented) were abandon early on because the Presidents from Johnson on, the Congress and the Federal Courts lacked the political will to implement them. In fact the will was lacking until TV put the brutal oppression of Black people right in the living rooms of complacent White people and Martin Luther King, Jr. managed to organize the Freedom Movement so that it attracted the attention of the general population that the national apathy with the country’s failure to carry through with the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution became a serious issue. That happened about 100 years later than it could have had Reconstruction of the Confederacy been vigorously and consistently pursued by any branch of the federal government.
An example of Reconstruction measures that were allowed to wither and die is the scheme to break up the vast plantations along the Carolina Coast and the Georgia Sea Islands into small farms owned and operated by the former slaves who worked the land before Uncle Billy Sherman came through the area (the 40-acres-and-a-mule plan). President Johnson was opposed to the plan and Congress wasn’t willing to fund the forced purchase of the necessary plantations. The result was a share cropper system that amounted to peonage and which was more efficient than slavery because the inefficient tenant could be dumped since the share cropper and his family did not represent a capitol investment by the land owner.
The best work is supposed to be Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 but I have only read the abridged version. I would definitely recomend it.
There was a lot of violence against blacks both before Congressional Reconstruction and after it faltered but it isn’t accurate to lay that at the feet of the Klan. Lynchings preceded the rise and resumed after the fall of the KKK. During the mid 1870’s Northern Republicans came to see support for black civil rights as a political liability and Reconstruction was on shaky ground no matter who won in 1876. The violence of 1876 ( when many blacks were having their guns taken from their cold dead fingers ) didn’t arouse the public outcry at the mob violence against blacks in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866. Spavined Gelding’s post makes me wonder if events such as the Hamburg Massacre ( 1876 ) were covered with less lurid detail in the North than the affronts of the earlier decade.
I join in 2sense’s recommendation of Foner’s book.
I think, however, that he/she missed my point about TV and the Civil Rights Movement. Once the emancipation of the Black population ceased to be a war measure or a measure to break the former Southern Confederacy, the North, which after all was calling the shots, lost interest in the plight of former slaves in the face of Southern intransigence and the expense of making the promise of the Reconstruction Amendments real. It was not until the 1950 and 1960, starting with the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School and following with the police riots occasioned by the Freedom Riders, the lunch counter sit ins, the marches and voter registration drives that the image of the Happy Piccaninny was revealed as a subterfuge that concealed a brutality and hatred that was beyond the conception and understanding of the vast majority of complacent Americans.
The change was the result of TV coverage and a Black leadership that understood the power of mass media. It was not a matter that the horrors that followed the Civil War and right up through the Civil Rights Movement were not reported (surely they were). It was that the reports were funned through the news papers of the day and lacked the gut impact of the TV films of screaming mobs baying for the blood of innocents seeking only what the country had long promised. For example, would you appreciate the full meaning of the decision to go to war with Iraq if all you had to rely on was the Wall Street Journal, or an appreciation of what a fiasco Vietnam was if all your information come from Stars and Stripes? So too with violence against Blacks in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. It took TV to reveal the scope of the inequity and violence.
2sense is a he.
I didn’t misunderstand your point, SG. It just sparked the thought that Northern papers probably didn’t follow the later violence as closely as they did when treatment of blacks was a central issue rather than something to be swept under the carpet.
I would not be surprised if that were true, especially when you consider this country’s attitude toward social and economic change as evidenced by government collusion in the suppression of organized labor and the Red Scare and the Anarchist Scare (Sacco and Vencetti). Much as free labor resented and feared the influx of ignorant and foreign Irish and German immigrants in the mid-19th century and saw them as a challenge to jobs for “native Americans,” the migration of rural Southern Blacks to Northern war plants during WWI and WWII gave rise to an antipathy toward Blacks that suppressed any impulse to see them afforded any opportunity to displace White labor and left working class people to be perfectly happy to leave Jim Crow alone as long as it kept the Black work force on Southern farms and the methods used to keep them there were not too apparent to residents of the Rust Belt. Remember also that from the Civil War up until WWII the country was hit by cycles of boom and bust that left Northern labor insecure and resentful of any competing class of workers who would do their job for less cost. It was to some extent a combination of hostility toward cheap Black labor and the old “out of sight, out of mind” that contributed to the failure to remedy the Black man’s second class status.
Interesting relationship between this post and another that speculated that human history turns on small acts perpetrated by individuals, not broad sweeping “tides of history”, a la Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. Fact of the matter is Reconstruction foundered the moment John Wilkes Booth pulled the trigger. Andrew Johnson of North Carolina was one of the most expressly and virulently racist political figures of any generation. He was deeply embittered by Lincoln’s efforts to make the Civil War a slavery issue and not a union issue. Furthermore, he was intent upon punishing the Confederate leadership for their transgressions. Johnson actively undercut through all means at his disposal the efforts of Congress and the Union military (or more specifically, U.S. Grant) to restore security and sovereignty to the governments of the Confederate states.
I cannot recommend highly enough the chapters on Reconstruction in a recent biography of Grant by Jean Edward Smith (ISBN: 0684849275). Grant’s political capital was such that during his first administration he almost single-handedly restored federal efforts at Reconstruction, only to have the government’s attentions diverted by a Wall Street gold bullion investment scandal (my, times have changed, eh?) that resulted in recession.
I concur with several posts that indicate a lack of political will as a cause of Reconstruction’s diminishing importance, but I question the assertion that lack of will is synonymous with lack of caring. The Reconstruction Acts were well-constructed to fully enfranchise southern blacks, and for a significant period of time well executed, too. Only the bad timing of the gold scandal prevented the Acts from being supported for a sufficient length of time to truly institutionalize them.
Andrew Johnson, vice-president in Lincoln’s second term, was of course a Unionist senator from Tennessee, not North Carolina. His racial attitudes were far from being a virulent aberration. They were pretty typical of mid-19th century America. It was his view that having abolished slavery the federal government had fully performed its duty and that it was up to the former slaves to lift themselves by their own bootstraps, much as he had done as an illiterate taylor. There was a general antipathy toward Black folks in the years following the Civil War and right up to today. Many were happy to see slavery ended but few wanted to see the former slaves become anything but cheap rural labor in the places they had been held in servitude. You call hardly blame the whole failure of Reconstruction to active a late 20th century level of equity and opportunity at the feet of Andrew Jackson. If any thing it was Jackson’s refusal to put the former Confederacy in a perpetual occupied territory status that got him in enough trouble with a largely Reconstruction Congress that he came within one vote of being convicted on a bill of impeachment.
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Did I say Johnson was a Senator from North Carolina? Nope. Johnson was a native of North Carolina, born in Raleigh, 1808. Pay attention, please.
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Your analysis of Johnson’s attitude and policy towards the freed slaves is grossly mistaken. Johnson publicly, explicitly, and repeatedly stated he would never support and would indeed actively work against the enfranchisement of blacks. Johnson in fact met personally with Frederick Douglass in February of 1866, where Johnson declared “he intended to support the interests of southern whites and to block voting rights for blacks.” http://www.history.rochester.edu/class/douglass/part5.html Johnson is also quoted in the memoirs of several Cabinet officials privy to his meeting with Douglass as referring to Douglass as a “monkey” trying to “trick” Johnson. Some bootstrapping.
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It was Johnson’s appointments of ex-Confederate politicians as governors of the southern states that led to the creation of “black codes” - expressly anti-black legislation intended to restore a legalized framework within which the black southern population could be maintained in servitude. The “occupation” to which you refer was a remedy to Johnson’s pro-slavery appointments to non-Reconstructed legislatures. Only Grant and the Army were able to create a sufficiently secure environment throughout the south that freed slaves were actually able to exercise their Constitutional rights. If I recall the facts correctly, military governance over former Confederate states would be terminated with a given state’s ratification of the 14th and 15th amendments and election of a state legislature.
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I do not presume to lay the entire blame at Johnson’s feet, but it is almost impossible to overestimate the impact of Johnson’s actions on the issue. This is pertinent to the OP in that “what went wrong with Reconstruction” has its roots in the fact that the strongest voice for emancipation and reconciliation in the federal government was assassinated at the outset and his leadership role assumed by an illiterate racist.
Johnson became President in April, 1865, when Lincoln was assassinated. Grant was elected in 1868 and took office the following March. Johnson spent most of his term fighting with the Republican Radicals in Congress and defending the impeachment action that was precipitated by Johnson’s dismissal of Stanton as Secretary of War. Johnson was extremely hostile toward the Southern Planter Aristocracy. The Army continued to occupy the former Confederate states through 1976 when Hays was elected. For instance Custer’s 7th Cavalry was on Reconstruction duty in Kentucky, running down KKK raiders and up-grading its horses, until 1875 (I think) when it was sent to the Dakota Territory when the peace policy toward the Northern Plains Indians was abandon.
You just cannot honestly make Johnson the whipping boy for the failure of the Reconstruction Acts to do things that did not get done until the Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations. The problem was not so much President Johnson as it was a general lack of political and moral will to follow through on the emancipation. Please note that there was no significant change of Reconstruction policy from the Johnson administration to the Grant administration. The big change, the point at which the federal government turned its back on the freed slaves, was with the election of Hays by the House of Representatives after the indecisive 1876 election.
Andrew Johnson was no paladin for the emancipation but he certainly was not the black hearted villain some make him out to be. Rather, chalk the failure up to a general national attitude of benign indifference to the fate, welfare and future of unskilled, uneducated and economically dependent Southern Blacks. Most people, and certainly most national legislators, were perfectly happy to keep Southern Blacks unskilled, uneducated and economically dependent and, most of all, in the South.
Your opinion is thoughtfully stated, which I respect, but your analysis just doesn’t match the historical record. If there was no political or moral will to follow through with emancipation, how do you explain the 14th and 15th Amendments? If the “benign indifference” you describe really existed, how did the Reconstruction Acts come to be? How did the northern states accept the continuous deployment of their sons in uniform for nearly a decade (a fact you just pointed out).
I’m not sure on what basis you’ve formed your impressions of the era, but the historical record is unequivocal that in the immediate post-war period, there was tremendous momentum, will, and political capital available to be brought to bear to permanently re-form the socio-political culture of the former Confederacy. A considerable amount of that momentum was blunted by Johnson’s opposition to Reconstruction, but even then, Grant’s first term very nearly put the effort back on track. But having been given life by Johnson’s early backing, southern Democrats were able to survive and fester until the gold scandal of Grant’s second term finally sapped whatever will to reform remained within Congress and the Executive. It is arguable that without the ensuing recession, Grant’s administration would have been able to maintain Congress’s focus on Reconstruction long enough to outlast the Democrats.
Every biography of Johnson (and I’ve read at least half of them), and every scrap of the historical record is unequivocal - Andrew Johnson was a racist who did not accept the premise that blacks would or should become participants in democratic society. Whether I think he was a “villain” is not at issue. The fact of this particular aspect of his character, the facts of the policies and decisions he instituted, the literal facts of the historical record, do not brook any doubt - Andrew Johnson as President had a significant and immediate negative impact on the process of Reconstruction.
I agree with you on one thing - the Hays administration was a turning point by the government against continuation of Reconstruction. Post-war momentum had finally worn off and the public will had been sapped by recession (not unlike the rapidly vanishing window of opportunity the U.S. now faces in Iraq).
Where you make a mistaken interpretation, however, is with regard to “no significant change of Reconstruction policy from Johnson to Grant”. From the standpoint of literal federal legislation, you are correct - the Congress had enacted the Reconstruction Acts during the Johnson administration and they were not repealed during his nor Grant’s administration. But the “significant change” is not in the policy itself, but its enforcement. Johnson actively subverted Congress’s will on multiple fronts (brought to head with the impeachment trial), Grant was a dedicated supporter of Reconstruction.
I encourage you to read at least two Johnson biographies, two Grant biographies, and whatever material you can find on “black codes” and the Reconstruction Acts. Your analysis does a disservice to the individuals who fought so hard to rebuild a better Union. They were neither indifferent nor a minority, and your assertion belies the historical record.
The problem was that the North never recognized that the Civil War was run by traitors to the United States who would continue their treason and rebellion if not stripped of all economic and political power. I say this as a born and bred Southerner. A few decades of truly Draconian measures against the former Southern leadership, combined with installing a new leadership and supervising them carefully to make sure they undid slavery thoroughly would have helped a lot. The old leaders would have resented it deeply but they couldn’t have resented it any more than they did anyway.
The South needed MORE carpetbaggers, not less. Granted, the carpetbaggers needed more supervision.
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I certainly hope that wasn’t intentional.
Another often-overlooked issue of the period is that a large number of whites were poor. The freeing of slaves meant that the poor working class suddenly had many more competitors for that same crumb of bread. This created a resentment which still echoes today.
For a look at the reconstruction period from a personal perspective I would recommend Jubilee by Margaret Walker… It’s rather Gone With the Wind-ish, but is based on the life of one of her ancestors, a freed slave. Part of what struck me while reading the book was the realization that the horrors of war touched everyone, both black and white.
First, the prevalent attitude, the progressive attitude, in the United States in 1865 and there after, North and West as well as South, was what we would unhesitatingly call racist if the same attitude was demonstrated to day. The prevalent attitude was that former slaves were not equipped for or capable of political or social participation let alone equal participation with White folk, even with ignorant, Catholic Irish or ignorant, beer swilling Germans. The historical position that some call racist was not unique to Andrew Johnson, it was the general and prevalent attitude. If it were not the prevalent attitude the Black Codes in the South would not have been tolerated. Look at Buckwheat from the Our Gang movies. That character is ian mage of the attitude that predominated for 60 or 70 years.
Second, there was a significant faction in the North that regarded the Secession of the Confederate States and the war as the acts of traitors. In Congress that faction was the Radical Republicans who were lead by Senator Sumner (the guy who was caned on the senate floor by Congressman Brooks shortly before the war), and by Senator Stevens. The radical faction sought to place the former Confederate States in a perpetual condition of occupied territories on the legalistic argument that having broken the Constitutional compact they were forever exiled from the union and had at best territorial status until such time as Congress in its sole discretion admitted them as new states. The position of the more moderate Republicans was that the Southern States had not committed suicide but that they had forfeited their status as states of the union until Congress determined that a republican form of government had been established in the Southern states. Johnson attempted to follow what he thought (probably rightly) would have been Lincoln’s policy of clemency and readmission as soon as a significant portion of the population swore allegence to the union. This was the source of the conflict between Congress and Andrew Johnson, not helped any by the fact that Johnson had an ungovernable temper and a tendency to take a drink too many at the worse time.
Third, because the Radical Republicans had considerable power in Congress and because their policy on the admission (or readmission) of the former Confederate states to full participation in the Union contradicted President Johnson’s, the initial Presidential Reconstruction Program fell victim to the power struggle between the Sumner and Stevens faction and President Johnson . The Act which prohibited the President from dismissing a cabinet off officer without Senate advise and consent was just one aspect of the fight displace Presidential prerogative with Congressional authority. As an off shoot, any thing the Radical Republicans wanted Johnson would veto and anything President wanted the radicals would vote down or delay to death in Congress.
In the 1866 elections the Radical Republicans gained a 2/3 majority in Congress, placing them in a position to over ride any Presidential veto and pretty much control government policy, including the process and policies of Reconstruction. The result was the enactment Reconstruction Acts of 1867 over President Johnson’s veto. The 1867 Reconstruction Acts implemented the Radical Republican agenda for the South. In general the Reconstruction Acts imposed an voter’s oath as a precondition to voting which most white Southerners could not take because of their participation in the Rebellion and required the registration of Blacks as voters in the Southern states. The net effect was to disenfranchise most Whites and, for the time being, to guarantee that the Southern states that were readmitted to the union would be solidly Republican states by virtue of the military occupation and the control of Black voters by the Union League. The Acts also purported to deprive the federal courts, and especially the Supreme Court of jurisdiction in cases evolving the Acts. By reason of the disenfranchisement of White Southerners, the control of the Black vote by agents for the Radical Republicans and the imposition of to martial law, the Reconstruction Acts were despised by White Southerners and served to preserve the sectional hostility that had instigated the war. It also meant that when Reconstruction was abandon in 1877, the Southern Blacks would become the whipping boy for that hostility.
The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 were a political power play by the Radical Republican faction which was designed to do three things. It was intended to punish the South and disenfranchise men who has held positions in the Confederate government or so much as carried a musket in its army. It was designed to assure a Republican dominance of the Southern states by requiring the franchise of Blacks and the disenfranchisement of most White voters. Only last was it intended to achieve civil rights for Southern Blacks, and then only to the extent that they voted Republican. In this connection it is worth noting that in the states of Connecticut, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Kansas, all strongly Republican states, propositions to enfranchise Blacks were rejected in the years immediately following the war.
There is a good, concise summery of the Johnson Administration and Reconstruction in Paul Johnson’s A History of the American PeopleHarper-Collins, 1997.
Fourth, a note of personal antagonism has creped into this thread. That seem a little strange in what is essentially an academic discussion.
I once started a thread asking what Lincoln’s reputation would be if he had not been assassinated. In a historical sense, he died a lucky man at the moment of his greatest triumph. If he had lived, he would have become embroiled in the controversies of reconstruction and, no matter what he did, he would have made enemies that would have bitterly denounced him.
You’re probably at least partly right, Little Nemo, but I think had Lincoln lived his stature, which Johnson lacked, political skills and dedication to properly reconstructing the Union would have helped make the process easier and more just for everyone involved.