African American History

XI

Reconstruction

Even before the war ended, the government had begun discussing how to deal with the aftermath of the war. In March 1865 the U.S. War Department established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly called the Freedmen’s Bureau. The bureau was headed by Union General Oliver Otis Howard and furnished food and medical supplies to former slaves. It also established schools and helped former slaves negotiate fair wages and working conditions.

But when the war ended, the national government had not yet determined how best to reunite the country. Views on how to treat the defeated Confederacy varied. Some people felt that the South could be reconciled with the Union by simply acknowledging the abolition of slavery, while others were convinced that the region’s social, economic, and political systems would have to be thoroughly reconstructed.

President Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee, advocated leniency for the South. He granted amnesty freely to Southern whites, and his only requirement for readmitting a state to the Union was the adoption of a state constitution that outlawed slavery and disavowed secession. Encouraged by Johnson, Southern planters maintained much of their political power and passed black codes to restrict blacks’ land ownership and freedom of movement.

People in the North became upset by the ease with which the Southern planters were reestablishing their dominance. Republicans in Congress fought with the president to change his Reconstruction policies. After the Democratic Party suffered a major defeat in the elections of 1866, the Republican Party took charge of Reconstruction, pursuing a more radical course. Congress passed the 14th Amendment in 1866 (ratified by the states in 1868). It extended citizenship to blacks and protected their civil rights by forbidding the states to take away “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

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In March 1867 Congress passed the Reconstruction Act which was strengthened by three supplemental acts later the same year and in 1868. The Reconstruction acts divided the former ten Confederate states into five military districts, each headed by a federal military commander. This created a federal military occupation of the former Confederate states. (Tennessee was exempt because it had ratified the 14th Amendment and was considered reconstructed.) Before applying for readmission to the Union, the Southern states were required to ratify the 14th Amendment and revise their constitutions to ensure that blacks had citizenship rights, including the right to vote.

In 1870 the states ratified the 15th Amendment. This amendment prohibited the denial of the right to vote based on race. Finally, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which forbade racial discrimination in “inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of amusement.”

Federal occupation temporarily extended democracy in the South, assuring former slaves the vote and thereby enabling them to elect black leaders to political office. In states with the largest black populations, African Americans and their white Republican allies established and improved public education for white and black students, ended property qualifications for voting, abolished imprisonment for debt, and integrated public facilities.

In 1868 John W. Menard became the first African American elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana, where nearly 50 percent of the population was black. Congress refused to seat Menard, but others followed. In 1870 Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first black person to sit in the U.S. Senate. In all, 20 blacks from Southern states served in the U.S. House of Representatives and 2 in the U.S. Senate during Reconstruction.

In addition, hundreds of African Americans were elected to state and local offices in the South. In South Carolina, African Americans were almost 60 percent of the population, and at times they held the offices of lieutenant governor, secretary of state, treasurer, and speaker of the house. Although no state elected a black governor, Louisiana's lieutenant governor, P.B.S. Pinchback, who had once been denied a seat in the U.S. Senate, served as acting governor after the white governor was removed from office on charges of corruption.

Southern Democrats were determined to restore conservative Southern government. They charged Republican officials, especially blacks, with corruption. They cited rising taxes as evidence of wasteful spending. In reality, however, taxes rose as services such as public education were instituted for the first time or expanded in the South. The political corruption that characterized this era was led primarily by Northern business interests exploiting the government for their own ends, not by black Southern politicians.

To regain power in state governments, Southern Democrats used violence to keep black voters away from the polls. Throughout Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups conducted terrorist attacks on African Americans and their allies to limit Republican political power and restrict black opportunities. Hundreds of blacks were killed for attempting to vote, for challenging segregation, for organizing workers, or even for attending school. In 1871 President Ulysses S. Grant declared martial law in nine South Carolina counties because of the proliferation of lynchings and beatings. In 1873 white terrorists massacred more than 60 blacks on Easter Sunday in Colfax, Louisiana, and killed 60 Republicans, both blacks and whites, during the summer of 1874 in nearby Coushatta. They killed 75 Republicans in Vicksburg, Mississippi in December 1874.

Even as Reconstruction ended, blacks continued to make some gains. In 1877 former slave and abolitionist, John Mercer Langston, became U.S. minister to Haiti, and Frederick Douglass served as federal marshal of the District of Columbia. During the late 1870s and the 1880s, several additional black colleges founded in the South joined Howard University in Washington, D.C., Morehouse College in Georgia, and Morgan State University in Maryland in broadening educational opportunities for black students. In 1888 Capital Savings Bank of Washington, D.C., opened as the first African American bank in the United States, and others followed in Richmond, Virginia; Birmingham, Alabama; and elsewhere in the South.

XII

Erosion of Black Rights

Reconstruction came to an end gradually, as Democrats took over state governments from Republicans. In the last three states, 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. However, leaders of the national Republican Party agreed to recognize Democratic claims to state offices in return for receiving the electoral votes of those states for Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, who thereby won the election.

After 1877 Democratic governments were in power in all the Southern states, and they continued taking away black rights. This was done in many different ways—laws that enforced the separation of blacks and whites, the sharecropping system that kept blacks economically dependent on whites, and the increased disenfranchisement of blacks. Northern whites were tired of spending time and money on the South. As a result, the discrimination and oppression of the African Americans in the South went largely unchallenged.

A

Emigration from the South

By the late 1870s much of the optimism of emancipation had faded to the reality of the post-Reconstruction South. Thousands of blacks, landless and poor, decided to leave the South. In 1878 over 200 blacks sailed from Charleston harbor for Liberia in Africa. Many others decided to move west to the new territories that had been opened to settlement. In the 'Exodus of 1879,' sometimes called the Exoduster Movement, almost 20,000 blacks left Mississippi and Louisiana for the frontiers of Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and Oklahoma. They established a number of all-black towns like Langston, Oklahoma, and Nicodemus, Kansas, planted farms, settled in cities, and worked in mines.

Some blacks, especially those with Native American ancestry, found homes with Native American nations, and a few followed in the footsteps of black explorer and mountainman James Beckwourth, who had traveled throughout the West. In 1856 Beckwourth had published his memoirs entitled Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, Mountaineer, Scout, and Pioneer. Some African Americans went west with the U.S. military, as part of the all-black Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Units that Native Americans called Buffalo Soldiers. Others went with wagon trains or as cowboys, moving cattle to market.

B

Jim Crow Laws

The 1880s witnessed a profusion of segregationist legislation, separating blacks and whites. The system of Southern segregation was often called the Jim Crow system, after an 1830s minstrel show character. This character, a black slave, embodied negative stereotypes of blacks. One after another, Southern states passed laws segregating blacks and restricting African American rights in almost every conceivable way. For example, Tennessee initiated segregated seating on railroad cars in 1881. Florida (1887), Mississippi (1888), and Texas (1889) followed. In Alabama, laws prohibited blacks and whites from playing checkers together; in Louisiana, statutes ordered that there be separate entrances for blacks and whites at circuses. All Southern states prohibited interracial marriages.

Conditions for blacks in the South deteriorated further when the Supreme Court ruled against federal guarantees of African American rights. In 1883 the Court declared the Civil Rights Law of 1875 unconstitutional. In a series of cases, the Court also drastically undermined the 14th Amendment's protection of black citizenship rights and narrowed federal protection of the right to vote guaranteed by the 15th Amendment. Finally in 1896 the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation was legal.

C

Sharecropping

Reconstruction failed to eliminate black economic dependency largely because it did not provide African Americans with the land they needed to be independent. During the war, former slaves believed that they had earned the right to abandoned or confiscated Confederate lands through generations of uncompensated labor. Holding land might bring economic independence, and initially, it seemed as if the government might support their claim.

In January 1865 Union General William T. Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, setting aside abandoned lands on the sea islands and the coastal region of South Carolina and Georgia for exclusive use of the region's freed population. Former slaves were given temporary titles to 40-acre plots of land with the promise that the titles would be made permanent by appropriate legislation. However, President Johnson reversed Sherman's order and ordered the abandoned plantations to be returned to their former owners.

By the 1880s a majority of former slaves had become sharecroppers, often working land that belonged to their former masters for a share of the profits. As Republicans in the South were driven from office or killed by terrorists, sharecroppers were left without protection and were frequently cheated by white landowners. Laws forced debtors to work the land until debts were paid, and landowners often manipulated credit to insure that sharecroppers ended each year in debt. Those who questioned the landowner’s accounting might be arrested for bad debt. Those convicted were often leased out to work on the same plantation, but without wages. Landowners in need of laborers might have local police invoke vagrancy laws against blacks who refused low-paying jobs.

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