The Freedmen and the Reconstruction

The Reconstruction took place after the Civil War beginning in 1865. The Union had just finished fighting a bloody four-year war to end slavery and preserve the United States. After the South's surrender at Appomattox, the US needed to restructure the South by eliminating all traces of slavery and destroying all remnants of the Confederacy. The US government had to contend with: how to reintegrate the former states of the Confederacy into the Union, what to do with former Confederate leaders, and how to handle the legal and constitutional status of the former slaves whom were now Freedmen. The most radical phase of the Reconstruction took place between 1863-1871.1  During these six years, the thirteenth, fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution were passed and ratified. The thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. The fourteenth Amendment gave the Freedmen citizenship, and granted them equal protection under the law. The Fifteenth Amendment gave former slaves the right to vote and declared that no citizen shall be denied that right based on color, race, or previous condition of servitude.2  It was an exciting time for African-Americans. With the Congressional authority behind them they beginning to vote and hold political office, and blacks and whites together worked to create the first public schools in the South. However, with the rising of African-Americans out of the depths of slavery there was an equal rising of hatred and tension among Southern whites who did not "take kindly" to the changes happening. 1874 gave witness to the birth of the Ku Klux Klan as well as other militant white groups.3  President Hayes withdrew all federal troops in 1877. With the occupiers out, the Southern states began mobilizing to reenact a modified form of their old way of life. As the last decade of the nineteenth century came to a close, the Southern state governments put statutes in place and amended their constitutions to limit the freedoms of Freedmen granted to them under the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments. To stop blacks from voting, poll taxes were put into place along with literacy tests. The systems of oppression and racial segregation implemented by a solid democratic South were so successful that it lasted all the way to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. I intend to provide a brief overview of the period stressing the events and issues during the Reconstruction which pertain to the African-American experience.4
         
         There were problems with Reconstruction right from the beginning. Republicans were split on how to handle the South. Some were radical, others favored a more moderate approach. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln (one of the moderates) enacted the Ten Percent Plan. This plan would allow a Southern State to rejoin the Union when 10 percent of its inhabitants pledged an oath of allegiance to the Union. After this happened, the states could regain a state government with a state constitution formally abolishing slavery. The Radical Republicans (led by Thaddeus Stevens & Charles Sumner) were not in favor of this plan. They tried to pass the Wade-Davis Bill which called for the majority of a state's inhabitants to take the oath. Though the bill passed in both houses of Congress, Lincoln vetoed the bill to the outrage of everybody else. However, Lincoln would not live to see his plan of forgiveness and mercy in reconstructing the South implemented. He was assassinated in April 1865, fresh after the Confederate surrender. Vice President Andrew Johnson (a Democrat) was now in charge of winning the peace.5

         Johnson, like Lincoln, was opposed to the Radical Republicans approach, but he was also sympathetic to the Southern cause. The assassination of Abe Lincoln outraged the North. The anger over the death of the president who managed to preserve the Union led to demands for harsher Reconstruction policies. Andrew Johnson would have none of it. He would ally himself with the Democrats and in effect wash his hands of Reconstruction. He thought that he didn't have the executive power to decide what to do since the war was over. He would let Congress decide how to proceed with reintegration. He consistently vetoed bills that came to his desk from the radicals.6 As I stated above, he was sympathetic to the South and would jockey in their favor. One example was his dictate that confiscated lands from plantation owners would be given back once they were pardoned and not be given to former slaves as the Freedmen's Bureau was prepared to do. In doing this he broke the mandate of the Confiscations Act of 1862 which said that these lands would not be given back to the plantation owners.7  The Congressional elections of 1866 marked the beginning of the end for Johnson. Republicans gained the two-thirds majority needed to override Johnson's vetoes, which they did...and then some. The Radical Republicans would lay the groundwork for the impeachment of Johnson. With Johnson effectively neutralized, the Republicans were now able to treat the South as harshly as they pleased. The Reconstruction Acts were passed in 1867. They divided the South into five military districts placing ten of the states (Tennessee had already been readmitted into the Union) under military control run by Army personnel until Union loyal governments could be established. One of the reasons the states were put under the control of the Army was to ensure that ex-slaves would be protected when voting, and for that matter allowed. These military governments imposed martial law. They supervised local governments, elections, and tried to keep violence against blacks to a minimum (I guess they gave up on ending violence against blacks completely). Lincoln's plan of a harmonious reunion was null and void.8

         The situation of newly freed slaves did not improve much right after the war. Black Codes were enacted right after the fighting stopped, but they were abolished in 1866 by the Civil Rights Act and really didn't do much since the Freedmen's Bureau handled the affairs of former slaves. However, these codes were an indication of what southern whites had in mind for the ex-slaves. With the backing of the Freedmen's Bureau, African-Americans were able to bargain for their labor with their ex-masters. This led to sharecropping. The ex-slaves gained more economic independence, but they did not own the means of production and therefore were forced to continue to plant cash crops.9 The falling price of cotton that would come led to widespread poverty, and many blacks found themselves in a difference kind of slavery, debt to their former masters. Violence was rampant toward the former slaves after the war. US officials routinely failed to actively pursue the perpetrators and in many cases were indifferent. A certain Captain Poillon describes an incident of white patrols in southwestern Alabama.10
         "....who board some boats; after the boats leave they hang, shoot, or drown the          victims they may find on them, and all those found on the roads or coming down          the rivers are almost invariably murdered. The bewildered and terrified freedmen          know not what to do--to leave is death; to remain is to suffer the increased burden          imposed upon them by the cruel taskmaster, whose only interest is their labor,          wrung from them by every device an inhuman ingenuity can devise; hence the          lash and murder is resorted to intimidate those whom fear an awful death alone          cause to remain....." 11

This quote demonstrates just how little freedom blacks actually had in the South. Whites would use force to make them stay in order to exploit their (still relatively cheap) labor. White southerners would not take their new situation laying down. The plantation owners and the average white farmer had different motives to go against black suffrage. The common white farmer now found himself competing with the ex-slaves and wanted to keep them inferior. The white planter class feared that black suffrage would eventually lead blacks to vote to raise taxes on these lands. The common white farmers and the plantation aristocrats joined up into "Conservative" parties. They would later just call themselves "Democrats" and devote themselves to the continuation of Southern tradition and to the oppression of the newly emancipated slaves. In addition to this, the Republican Party, which had made gains in the South and was helping the Freedmen, was staring to crack.  The tension inside the party was racial and political. In Georgia, 1868, some Republicans teamed up with the Democrats and expelled all of the twenty-eight black republicans holding office. They supported their actions by stating that blacks had the right to vote, but not to hold office. 12

         The situation of the former slaves would only get worse when paramilitary groups allied themselves with the Democratic Party. In Louisiana, 1874, the White League was created. Its goals were to overthrow Republican rule and suppress black voting as much as possible. They were widely supported by wealthy white men, who often supplied them with heavy firepower. In the same year (1874), five thousand White League members tried to overthrow the Republican governor of Louisiana. They overtook the state house and city hall, but eventually retreated when news that Federal reinforcements were arriving. In Mississippi, 1875, the Red Shirts were formed. They were similar to the White League in agenda and described themselves as the "military arm of the Democratic Party.

         The violence in Mississippi exploded in their state elections of 1875. Red Shirts, along with Democratic Rifle Clubs, intimidated or outright shot enough Republicans to give the vote to the Democrats. Governor Adelbert Ames pleaded with President Grant for more troops to fight back, but Grant refused, his reasoning being that public opinion was tired of hearing with the troubles of the South. Ames was forced to flee the state and the Democrats took control of Mississippi. Other election years and campaigns were marred by violence. In 1876, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida all saw their murder rates go up during election time. The Red Shirts are estimated to have killed 150 African-Americans in the Hamburg and Ellenton, South Carolina massacres. By doing this they stopped practically all black from voting in the counties where they were a majority.13

         The Presidential Election of 1876 was one of the most corrupt in history. In the South, intimidation at the polls and ballot stuffing made sure that the black vote was suppressed. Republican Rutherford Hayes would win the election, but his win was highly disputed and the South only agreed to accept his victory (who knows if the US would have faced another War of Succession if they hadn't) if he agreed to withdraw the last of the Federal troops. Hayes had little choice but to accept.14

         Reconstruction came to an end with the last Federal troops withdraw from the South in 1877. The North had had enough of occupying the former Confederate States. The aim of Lincoln to build a free and relatively racially calm South did not happen. White Democrats controlled almost all of the South (later called the Solid South because of its constantly voting democrat in every election for about the next hundred years). The Democrats would lay the groundwork for segregation in their state constitutions and state laws. They oppressed and denied the Africans Americans from exercising their rights as citizens for the next hundred years. The Reconstruction is considered a failure because the US government did not effectively enforce and protect the rights of blacks in the South. Instead, they allowed a lesser form of slavery to continue. In fact, one could say that Reconstruction was (in a way) postponed until the 1960s when blacks fought hard for their constitutional and civil rights and this time the government did make sure that their struggle was not in vain.15