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.

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.