Reconstruction (U.S. history)

III

Implementation of Reconstruction

As Reconstruction was implemented, an intense struggle was underway in the South over the nature of the new social order. On opposite sides were the freed people (former slaves), who sought to make sure that the freedom they now enjoyed included more than token benefits, and their former owners, who sought to preserve as many of their old privileges as possible. Many, although not all, whites who had not owned slaves also found it difficult to imagine a society in which blacks had the same rights as they did. Representatives of the federal government, including army officers and Freedmen's Bureau officials, typically took a position between the two sides. These representatives insisted that blacks be treated as free people with the same legal rights as whites, but they often found it difficult to understand, let alone endorse, all the aspirations of the freed people.

At the heart of these aspirations was the desire to get as far from slavery as possible. Determined to make freedom real, freed people resisted relationships reminiscent of slave-like dependence, for example working under overseers, and struggled to maximize their social autonomy. Well before the establishment of the new state governments mandated by the Reconstruction Act, black Southerners made it clear that they were determined not to accept the establishment of a system in which they would be free in name but slave in fact.

Although they did not achieve all of their goals, the freed people were successful in securing some of the independence they sought. In the process, they also forced fundamental changes in Southern social relations. In the crucial area of labor relations, these changes included the speedy disappearance throughout most of the South of elements of supervised control, such as slave quarters, gang labor, and overseers, that had characterized life under slavery. Instead, many blacks became family farmers, often working land they rented through various sharecropping arrangements. Meanwhile, unwilling to be second-class members of white churches, most blacks seceded from those institutions and set up their own black churches, headed by black ministers. Throughout the South, blacks eagerly sought the educational opportunities that had been denied to them as slaves, and enthusiastically supported numerous freed people's schools opened by Northern philanthropic organizations, often with Freedmen's Bureau assistance.

From 1865 to 1867, freed people struggled for their rights in a hostile political environment. Beginning in 1867, that environment changed substantially, as one state after another, in conformity with the Reconstruction Act, rewrote its laws to provide for black suffrage. The result was the establishment in the Southern states of new Reconstruction governments dominated by the Republican Party.

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A

Republican State Governments

These Republican governments, which varied from state to state in composition, accomplishments, and endurance, were based on shaky coalitions of three main groups. The smallest, although its members often occupied key government positions, were Northerners called carpetbaggers; these were frequently, although not always, Freedmen's Bureau officials or other army officers who entered Southern politics. More numerous were the so-called scalawags, the minority of Southern whites who, whether out of principle or pragmatism, supported the Reconstruction process. (Both “carpetbaggers” and “scalawag” were originally terms of derision used by political opponents, but are now widely used by historians in a neutral sense.)

By far the most important participants in the Republican coalitions, however, were Southern blacks. Firmly committed to the party of Lincoln, blacks provided the bulk of Republican votes. They were increasingly active in Republican Party politics, and served at almost every level of government, from the U.S. Congress (two senators and 14 representatives) to state legislatures, city councils, and county commissions. In general, black officeholders were more numerous in the Deep South than in the upper South, and more prevalent in state and local than in national government. The largest number of black officeholders was in South Carolina, where throughout Reconstruction they formed a majority in the state house of representatives. Although elsewhere in the South blacks did not hold political office in numbers equal to their proportion of the population, the image of blacks helping to govern states that had until recently held them in bondage was an indication of the changes that had swept the South, and a powerful symbol to both supporters and opponents of those changes.

Supporters of the new Reconstruction administrations saw them as bringing to the South the kind of republican government guaranteed by the Constitution. They typically enacted laws providing civil and political rights regardless of race and sponsored economic development, including the construction of new railroads, that would modernize a region long degraded by slavery. Among the most important accomplishments of the Republican governments in the South was the establishment of public school systems (racially segregated, except in parts of Louisiana). Until Reconstruction few Southerners, white or black, had access to public schools.

B

Opposition to Reconstruction

Despite these accomplishments, Reconstruction aroused intense opposition. Former slaveholders were bitter over the loss of their slaves, and former Confederates, slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike, were equally bitter over the loss of their war. Angry and humiliated, they lashed out at the Reconstruction imposed upon them and denounced white Republicans as traitors to their race. Uniting most Southern whites in opposition to the Reconstruction governments was not only shared racism, but also hostility to the steep rise in taxation to pay for newly enacted Reconstruction programs. This rise seemed doubly burdensome in the wake of economic hardships caused by the war.

Most white Southerners were also convinced that Reconstruction politicians were hopelessly corrupt. In fact, the era's corruption was not limited to either a particular ideology or geographic region: it was widespread among members of both parties and in both North and South. Many white Southerners, however, came to associate this corruption with Reconstruction itself and with black politicians. These Southerners argued that overthrowing Reconstruction would bring an end to the tyranny, oppression, and corruption and reestablish orderly, responsible government.

IV

The End of Reconstruction

The process of overthrowing Reconstruction governments varied. Everywhere, however, Reconstruction's opponents called for white racial unity and denounced scalawags as traitors to their race and region, and appealed to these scalawags to come home to the “white man's party.” In states with substantial white majorities, mainly those in the upper South, convincing most whites to vote Democratic was enough to defeat Reconstruction, a process that white Southerners called redemption. By 1871 Republican governments had yielded to conservative Democratic rule in the upper South states of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, as well as in Georgia, where Republican mismanagement undercut what should have been a more promising political environment for Republicans, given the large black population.

In the lower South, however, even the defection of virtually all scalawags was not enough to ensure Republican defeat; there, conservatives could win only by convincing some blacks either to vote Democratic or to stay home on election day. In those states black voters were subjected to an unprecedented level of fraud, intimidation, and violence. Terrorist organizations—the Ku Klux Klan, which was formally suppressed in 1871, and other Klan-like bodies that emerged—played a major role in this campaign. Most blacks continued to vote Republican, but in states where blacks formed about half the population, the loss of even a small fraction of black voters, combined with fraud at the ballot box, could be decisive. Throughout the lower South, Democrats returned to power in the mid-1870s. In the last three states to be redeemed, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, Reconstruction ended as part of an apparent political compromise. Both Democrats and Republicans claimed victory in those states in the elections of 1876, but leaders of the national Republican Party agreed to recognize Democratic claims to state offices after receiving the electoral votes of those states for Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, who thereby won the election.

As Republicans had feared, Democratic victory in the South led to a massive scaling back of Reconstruction's accomplishments. Taxes were slashed; so too was spending on education, especially for black schools. Throughout the South, a campaign ensued to put blacks in “their place,” which culminated around the turn of the century when one state after another passed laws providing for the rigid segregation of the races and for the disfranchisement of blacks through such devices as literacy tests, poll taxes, and political primaries that were open only to whites. These devices prevented almost all Southern blacks and some poor whites from voting or choosing candidates. During the first half of the 20th century, the South became a rigidly segregated society dominated by an all-white Democratic Party.

The Reconstruction effort to transform the South and turn freed people into citizens, although not entirely successful, was remarkable for its time. Even an unequal freedom was very different from slavery; the free-labor South that emerged in the late 19th century was not the South that blacks wanted, but it was not the South that their former masters wanted either. Despite its overthrow, Reconstruction left an important legacy: commitment to a republican society based on equality under the law, as exemplified in the Reconstruction-era legislation that remained on the books even when unenforced. A century later, during the civil rights movement, Americans, both black and white, would build on that legacy, as they renewed their struggle for equality.