References: 

The South: After the Civil War, the South faced a difficult period of rebuilding its government and economy and of dealing with over 3 million newly freed African Americans. The tragedy of Reconstruction was that blacks and whites who tried to form a more egalitarian society in the South lacked the means to achieve their aims.

Condition of the Former Slaves: Many slaves who had been restricted all their lives had no "where" to go—although they were elated to be free: the great day of jubilation, it was called—but this new state of freedom also caused confusion. Some stayed on old plantations, others wandered off in search of lost family. Many slave owners were glad to get rid of "burdensome slaves" and threw them out "just like Yankee capitalists."  Some celebrated their freedom openly, others, less trusting, approached their new status with caution.  As they quickly learned, there was more to being free than just not being owned as a slave.  When asked how it felt to be free by a member of an investigating committee, one former slave said, "I don’t know." When challenged to explain himself, he said, "I’ll be free when I can do anything a white man can do." One does not have to be a historian to know that degree of freedom was a long time coming.

The Meaning of Freedom: (See Foner and Smith) For African Americans, the most important single result of War was freedom—"the great watershed of their lives."  Pertinent phrases include: "I feel like a bird out of a cage ... Amen ... Amen ... Amen!"  Freedom came "like a blaze of glory."  "Freedom burned in the heart long before freedom was born." The search for lost families was "awe inspiring."  Some whites claimed that Blacks did not understand freedom and were to be "pitied."  But Blacks had observed a free society, and they knew it meant an end to injustices against slaves. Blacks in the South also had a workable society—church, family and later schools.  A Black culture already existed, and could be adapted to new conditions of freedom. Blacks also took quickly to politics. As one author has put it, they watched the way their former masters voted and then did the opposite. Remarkably, Southern Blacks exhibited little overt resentment against their former masters, and many adopted a conciliatory attitude. When they got into the legislatures they did not push hard for reform because they recognized the reality of white power.

Blacks in the South also had a workable society—church, family and later schools.  A Black culture already existed, and could be adapted, with difficulty, to be sute, to new conditions of freedom. Blacks also took quickly to politics. As one author has put it, they watched the way their former masters voted and then did the opposite. Remarkably, Southern Blacks exhibited little overt resentment against their former masters, and many adopted a conciliatory attitude. When they got into the legislatures they did not push hard for reform because they recognized the reality of white power.

Southern Attitudes: Many Southerners were enraged at the outcome of the war. Having suffered and bled and died to get out of the Union, they now found themselves back in it. A woman in Richmond wrote in her diary after the hated Yankees raised the American flag over the former Confederate capitol, “I once loved that flag, but now I hate the very sight of it!” Southerners recognized that they had to bow to the results of their loss, but did so with underlying hatred. Much ill feeling toward the North existed among the people who had stayed at home, especially in areas invaded by Sherman and others: wives, widows, orphans and those who had endured incredible hardships were particularly horrified to be back under federal control, ruled by their former enemies.

Many Southern whites, having convinced themselves in the prewar years that Blacks were incapable of running their own lives, were also unable to understand what freedom meant to Blacks. As one former slave expressed it, “Bottom rung on top now, Boss.” Many whites were still convinced slavery had been right. In a migration reminiscent of the departure of loyalists after the Revolution, many southerners took their slaves and went to Brazil, where the institution still flourished. Others went west to get as far away from “those damn Yankees” as they could.

Northern Attitudes: In the North, with the exception of thousands of shattered families, many with wounded veterans back in their midst, there was little to reconstruct, since most of the fighting was in the South. Northerners buried their dead, cared for the wounded and did their best to get on with their lives.  Although it is safe to say that the majority of Northerners were happy to see slavery gone, if for no other reason than the fact that the divisiveness of the issue had poisoned the political scene for decades, it cannot be assumed that the attitudes of all Northerners were friendly to the full incorporation of blacks into the national fabric. On the other hand, most Northerners did expect the South to accept the verdict of the war and to do whatever would be necessary to reconcile themselves to the end of that “peculiar institution” of slavery.

Northerners felt little vindictiveness toward their southern brethren, but they lacked a sense of patience. The punishment of the South was very mild by comparison with other lost rebellions: Only one man was hanged, and there were few jail sentences for what many considered outright treason. No one was fined and there was no confiscation of property. But the South did have to accept certain things: the end of secession doctrine; the end of slavery; and the end of control of the South by the old southern aristocracy, to be replaced for a time by northern control. 

Most Northerners generally did not want “special” treatment of Blacks. At least one writer has claimed that there was little of the misery, hatred and repression by which the South has been characterized, and that most of the South was peaceful and happy after the war. Northerners were obviously far less concerned with Reconstruction than South, but many northerners were not happy about prospects of millions of Blacks invading the job market and perhaps jeopardizing their economic security. Most white northerners wished Blacks well, but weren’t willing to do much to help them; yet many teachers, including women from New England, went South to help Blacks. These northerners included the so-called “carpetbaggers,” who were infamous in their time (and after) but who, according to recent studies, did much good as well.

Once Northerners had honored and mourned their dead and taken care of widows and orphans, they got back down to work building railroads, factories, businesses, settling the west, fighting the Indian wars and finding room for the 25 million immigrants who came to the United States between 1865 and 1910. One significant result of the war for the North was the fighting experience of thousands of soldiers who became laborers in the growing industries and often used the same tactics they employed on the battlefield against their bosses. 

Other Issues: Reconstruction was also part of the ongoing struggle over political power in the United States. An entire party—the Whigs—came into existence over this issue in the Jackson era, and a very powerful president had just been killed. The Radical Republicans included many old Whigs. Some felt a need to move toward a parliamentary system in order to reduce the power of the president, similar to what was going on with the monarchy in England at the time. (The crucial difference, of course, is that the U.S. president is elected.)

Constitutional Silence: In the absence of constitutional guidelines, the president and Congress waged a bitter fight over how best to reconstruct the Union. The North was split on the question of reconstructing the South. Some Northerners, led by the White House, wanted speedy Reconstruction with a minimum of changes in the South. Other Northerners, led by Congress, wanted a slower Reconstruction and demanded that the freed African-Americans be protected. In fact the struggle between Congress and the President went outside the context of Reconstruction and became a fight in its own right leading to the impeachment of Johnson in 1868.

Reconstruction was a complicated legal and political issue: What was the legal status of the former Confederacy? Were the rebellious states still in the Union? Lincoln encouraged states to rejoin the Union under liberal terms without increasing resistance in states still fighting. Reconstruction actually began before war started with the Crittenden Committee and attempts at compromise, but those attempts were bound to fail, given the mood in 1861. The Supreme Court eventually decided in 1869 (Texas v. White) that secession was unconstitutional, but that Congress could still dictate the terms under which the seceded states could rejoin the Union because of Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution.

Reconstruction: Lincoln’s View

President Lincoln had actually tried to start the reconstruction process before the Civil War ended. In 1863 Lincoln issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, which stated that states where 10% of the 1860 electorate would take an oath of loyalty to the Union and agree to emancipation might be readmitted. Congress refused to recognize Lincoln's plan and countered with the Wade-Davis Bill, a much harsher approach, which Lincoln vetoed.  But Lincoln did not back off from his intention to treat the South generously.  In his famous Second Inaugural Address, which is inscribed on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, he closed with the words:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan...to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox President Lincoln again outlined a generous plan for reconstruction.  Sadly, the President did not live to see his ideas realized.  On April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to Ford’s theater to attend to play with his wife. John Wilkes Booth, a Virginia actor enraged by the South’s defeat, made his way to the presidential box and shot the president in the head.  Lincoln was carried across the street and placed in a bedroom where he died the next morning. Lincoln’s assassination dealt a fatal blow to hopes for a more successful reconstruction effort than what actually occurred. His death also put the North in bad mood about the South, and wiped out much potential sympathy. Winston Churchill later wrote that the bullet that killed Lincoln did “more damage than all the Confederate cannonade put together.” Lincoln had been seen by many as a messiah, especially with his death coming on Good Friday, and even a few Southerners realized they had lost a friend.

Radical Reconstruction: The Republican radicals (ultra-liberals) in Congress had very different ideas about Reconstruction. They thought Lincoln was "too soft" on the South, and wanted to “revolutionize Southern habits, institutions and manners”; they wanted to see the South rebuilt according to a new order. Northern Republican newspapers such as the New York Tribune agreed. Radical believed that the South should be treated as "conquered provinces, and that the rebel states had committed "political suicide." They claimed that no state governments could exist in the South until Congress restored them under any conditions it deemed necessary. 

The Radicals: The radical Republicans, the liberal wing of the Republican Party, were idealists, many of then driven by an almost religious fervor. They did not accept the commonly held notion that Blacks were inferior and insisted on full political, social and civil rights for the former slaves. In this sense they were true reformers, in many ways far ahead of their time. After Lincoln’s death they held hearings on condition in the South which revealed widespread mistreatment of blacks in South. [See the "Black Codes" and other documents]. The Congressional moderates had more modest goals—to protect Blacks but not to grant them full equality or any special favors. Johnson’s reaction to Congressional initiatives, however, eventually drove many moderates into the radical camp.

The Physical Reconstruction of the South: Much of the South was physically devastated and demoralized after the war. The former plantation owners still had their land but had lost much if not all of their capital. The former slaves comprised a large and experienced labor force but had neither land nor capital. Many former slaves believed in the precedent set by general Sherman that the federal government was going to supply them with "Forty Acres and a Mule." Sherman, however, had exceeded his authority, and the Constitution inhibited the ability of the government to claim land "without due process of law." Some sort of system of production had to be worked out, and what evolved was a combination of various plans that on the surface seemed reasonable: sharecropping, tenant farming and the crop lien system. Each system had as its basis a bargain among laborers, those who had land and those who owned or controlled capital. Each system was potentially beneficial to all parties, but each also contained the possibility of exploitation and fraud, as was shown in practice. Even poor whites became sharecroppers or tenant farmers, so there was nothing inherently discriminatory in any approach. In fact, by 1880 a significant portion of the former slaves had become landowners, and despite exploitation and abuses, they system brought a moderate amount of cooperative self-reliance to the parties involved. (See also the Black Codes.)

The South also needed capital to rebuild railroads and make other internal improvements, and those needs generated a reawakening of the South in the post-Civil War years that slowly brought new prosperity to the region. It was hard won, however, and many of the losses suffered by the Confederacy were never regained. The economic ups and downs of the industrial era often hit the South especially hard.

Compromise of 1877

The Compromise of 1877 came about in a manner similar to that of most political compromises in American history: it left all parties at least partially unsatisfied; it was messy; and the closer one looks into it, the uglier it becomes.

By 1877 the only people who were probably not fed up with Reconstruction were the Freedmen, and even they had seen enough violence and experienced enough frustration that they must have wondered indeed whether all this was worth the trouble. Most Northerners were indifferent to Reconstruction because they had other things on their minds—the war had been over for 12 years, the dead were buried though not forgotten, and those wounds that could be healed had healed. The remainder continued to fester. The government—the United States Congress—was also tired of dealing with reconstruction because of other political issues that had to be resolved. The country had undergone a long-lasting financial recession beginning in 1873; Custer's men were wiped out at Little Bighorn in 1876; the transcontinental railroad had been completed in 1869, but labor discontent was rising; and immigrants were pouring into the country at an ever-increasing rate. Thus the problems of the South had become something of a distraction.

Because of the impact of the Ku Klux Klan and a general high level of corruption that attended the democratic process in America from North to South and East to West, the electoral process, including presidential elections, was rough at best. In the North political machines told their voters to “vote early and often”; in the South the Reconstruction governments were also touched by corruption, and both black-and-white leaders found themselves unequal to the task of furthering the rights of Freedmen without further enraging whites.

In the election of 1876 Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, who had been a Union major general in the Civil War, was matched against reform Governor Samuel Tilden of New York. To this day it is not clear who really won the election. When the electoral votes had been counted, it turned out that in three Southern states—South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana—the election returns were in question. Because of alleged intimidation and for other reasons charges arose that the election had been stolen in those three states. The apparent results gave those three states to Hayes, which meant that he would have won in the Electoral College by one vote; but if any of those results were overturned Tilden would have become the victor. The question was, how could the conflict be resolved?

Congress did what it usually does when faced with a messy problem that is very difficult to solve: it formed a committee. Originally the committee was comprised of seven Republicans seven Democrats and one independent, three Congressmen, three senators and three Supreme Court justices. But when it turned out that the independent became ineligible, he was replaced by a Republican, and they now had an 8-7 majority on the committee.

When the returns in the three states were examined, the committee decided not to “go behind the returns”—that is, they decided to accept the results as presented to Congress, in each case by a vote of 8 to 7. Thus all three states were given over to Hayes, but not without a fight. Democrats in Congress threatened to refuse to accept the committee recommendations, which would have thrown the nation into turmoil, with no new president to take office on March 4. Behind closed doors, in smoke-filled rooms, a deal was hatched: in return for allowing the committee's recommendations and giving the election over to Hayes, the Democrats exacted three promises in return. First, Reconstruction would be ended and all federal troops would be removed from the South. Second, the South would get a cabinet position in Hayes's government. And third, money for internal improvements would be provided by the federal government for use in the South.

The irony of the situation is the President Hayes was probably prepared to do those things in any case; but the Compromise of 1877 that ended Reconstruction was accepted. In April of that year federal troops marched out of the South, turning the Freedmen over, as Frederick Douglass put it, to the “rage of our infuriated former masters.”

All the advances that had been made for black people during Reconstruction slowly began to be undone. Through one means or another, voters were taken off the rolls, economic progress was thwarted, and although slavery was not restored, Freedmen and their descendents found life in the South growing increasingly difficult, a process that would not really begin to change until the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s.

Summary: Reconciliation of the two sections of the country came at the expense of southern blacks and poor whites. North and South reconciled after 1877, but only when it was agreed to strip African-Americans of their political gains and to turn the South back over to the "redeemers."

In the "New South" upper-class "Redeemers" took power in the name of white supremacy and industrial development. The economy was dominated by northern capital and southern employers, landlords, and creditors. Economic and physical coercion, including hundreds of lynchings, effectively disenfranchised people of color. Some blacks, justifiably bitter at the depth of white racism, supported black nationalism and emigration to Africa, but most chose to struggle for improvement within American society.

The Redeemer regimes, often corrupt, welcomed northern investment, and northern control of southern economy. These governments neglected the problems of small farmers, black or white, who suffered from unpayable debts. Eventually, the small farmer organized his own political party in the 1890s. The Redeemers also began the process of legal segregation and invented ways of denying blacks the right to vote. North and South united, but at a heavy cost to the newly freed blacks. Despite attempts at industrialization, the South produced a smaller share of manufactures in 1900 than in 1860. The South had 30% of the population, 50% of the farmers. By 1880 the average annual income in South was half of national. High rate of tenancy. Economic slavery for many.

The Legacy of reconstruction: It is hard but not impossible to say good things about Reconstruction. The goals were land, ballot, education for Freedmen. Congress never supported land confiscation; even Radical governments in South were unable to achieve that. There was no "Marshall Plan" for the South, but on the other hand, the South was not brutalized. The only criminal executed was Henry Wirz of Andersonville Prison. No fines, few imprisonments; military occupation was relatively mild. The restorative measures were not unreasonable: Renunciation of secession; Slavery abolished; Leadership of aristocracy undermined. Radicals didn't understand the degree to which Southern conservatives could conspire to flout laws. Corruption in the South was bad, but was typical of the time. Leadership was insufficient to meet challenges. Some feel radicals were not radical enough. There was hope—many understood the problems, but goals were unrealized. Black leadership in the South did not fully understand the land problem. Many were middle class, not connected to agriculture.

W. E.B. Du Bois

One of America’s great civil rights leaders, an eminent writer, sociologist and historian, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois became in 1895 the first Black man to earn a Ph.D. degree from Harvard. He was born in Massachusetts in 1868 and was well educated. He taught at various universities and gained public attention when he began to disagree openly with the ideas of Booker Washington. Although the two men respected each other and ultimately had the same goal—the improvement of the Black man and woman, they had very different opinions as to how this could best be achieved. Du Bois believed in full racial equality and integration of the races. He did accept what he saw as Washington’s "accommodationist" approach to race relations, exemplified in the Atlanta Compromise. Du Bois believed in a "talented tenth"—leaders of the Black population who would by precept and example life other members of their race to higher levels of achievement. 

Du Bois helped found the Niagara Movement, which became the NAACP in 1910, and he served for years as the NAACP Director of Publications and edited the Association’s newspaper, The Crisis. Du Bois visited Russia in 1926 and thereafter became more and more interested in Socialism as the means of advancing the Black cause. Du Bois became increasingly disenchanted with America and its capitalist system and eventually exiled himself to Ghana, where he died on 1963.

In 1896 the Plessy v. Ferguson decision upheld by a 7-1 vote a Louisiana Law of 1890 requiring separate (segregated) railroad facilities. As long as equality of facilities existed segregation did not constitute discrimination under the 14th Amendment. Recognition of differences in color "has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races." Harlan’s dissent ("Pernicious") foresees Brown, claims law should be color blind. Opened way for further Jim Crow laws. The key concept is "state action," which becomes the definer. Harlan also said that discrimination was a "badge of servitude" and therefore impermissible under the 13th Amendment.

In an 1898 case, Williams v. Mississippi, a man named Williams, who had been convicted of murder, appealed on the grounds that he was convicted by an all-white jury, and was therefore denied equal protection guaranteed under the 14th Amendment. In Mississippi one had to be qualified to vote in order to serve on a jury. Court upholds literacy tests, poll taxes and grandfather clauses because they did not on their face indicate racial discrimination. By 1892 only 8,000 blacks were left on voter rolls in Mississippi, and those soon disappeared.

1899 Cumming v. Richmond County [Ga.] Board of Education. Carried separate but equal one step further. Richmond County closed a black high school and sent black students elsewhere to get schooling. The Court did not grant relief to black parents who demanded that the white school be closed as well—closing white school won't help black students, the Court said.

Return to History 121 Part 1

Updated January 18, 2007

Copyright © Henry J. Sage 1996-2005