The Politics of Reconstruction

• The Reconstruction Era comprised the effort to restore southern states to the Union and to redefine African Americans’ place in American society

• President Abraham Lincoln began planning for the reunification of the United States in the fall of 1863

  • With a sense that Union victory was imminent and that he could turn the tide of the war by stoking Unionist support in the Confederate states, Lincoln issued a proclamation allowing southerners to take an oath of allegiance

• Initially proposed as a war aim, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation committed the United States to the abolition of slavery, but only in areas of rebellion

  • To cement the abolition of slavery, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865

• Reconstruction changed when John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln on April 14, 1865, during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater

  • The assassination of Abraham Lincoln propelled Vice President Andrew Johnson into the executive office in April 1865

    • Johnson offered southern states a quick restoration to the Union, only requiring that they ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, void their ordinances of secession, and repudiate their Confederate debts

• Many southern governments enacted legislation that reestablished antebellum power relationships

  • South Carolina and Mississippi passed laws known as Black Codes to regulate Black behavior and impose social and economic control

    • They denied fundamental rights, forbade Black men from serving on juries or in state militias, refused to recognize Black testimony against white people, apprenticed orphaned children to their former enslaver, and established severe vagrancy laws

• Republicans in Congress responded with legislation aimed at protecting freedmen and restructuring political relations in the South

  • They wanted to grant voting rights to freedmen in order to build a new voting bloc

  • Republicans in Congress responded to the codes with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first federal attempt to constitutionally define all American-born residents (except Native Americans) as citizens

  • The Fourteenth Amendment developed concurrently with the Civil Rights Act to ensure its constitutionality, granting citizenship to all people born in the United States

  • The first Reconstruction Act dissolved state governments and divided the South into five military districts

    • Under these new terms, states would have to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, write new constitutions enfranchising African Americans, and abolish repressive “Black Codes” before rejoining the union

• African Americans served at every level of government during the Reconstruction Era

  • African American officeholders came from diverse backgrounds, with some born free and some who gained freedom before the war, but most African American officeholders gained their freedom during the war

The Meaning of Black Freedom

• Land was one of the major desires of the freed people

  • Initially, freedmen were promised land from Georgia and South Carolina would be set aside as homestead for them, but it was not granted to them

• The Freedmen’s Bureau would tell newly freed slaves to go work for their former enslavers, often through coercion

  • However, the bureau also instituted courts where African Americans could seek redress if their employers were abusing them or not paying them

• Another aspect of the pursuit of freedom was the reconstitution of families, many freedpeople immediately left plantations in search of family members who had been sold away

• Freedpeople placed a great emphasis on education for their children and themselves, and many churches served as schoolhouses and as a result, became central to the freedom struggle

  • Liberated from white-controlled churches, Black Americans remade their religious worlds according to their own social and spiritual desires

    • Black churches provided centralized leadership and organization in post-emancipation communities

Reconstruction and Women

• Reconstruction involved more than the meaning of emancipation, women also sought to redefine their roles within the nation and in their local communities

• The abolitionist and women’s rights movements simultaneously converged and began to clash

• As Congress debated the meanings of freedom, equality, and citizenship for formerly enslaved people, women’s rights leaders saw an opening to advance transformations in women’s status

• in 1866, the National Women’s Rights Convention officially merged with the American Anti-Slavery Society to form the American Equal Rights Association (AERA)

  • The AERA was split over whether Black male suffrage should take precedence over universal suffrage, given the political climate of the South

    • Some worried that political support for freedmen would be undermined by the pursuit of women’s suffrage

• For all of their differences, white and Black southern women faced a similar challenge during the Reconstruction

Racial Violence in Reconstruction

• Violence was used in the post-emancipation period to stifle Black advancement and return to the old order

  • Much of life in the antebellum South had been premised on slavery since social order rested on a subjugated underclass, and the labor system required unfree laborers

  • The foundation of southern society had been shaken, but southern whites used Black Codes and racial terrorism to reassert control over formerly enslaved people

  • Racial violence in the Reconstruction period took three major forms: riots against Black political authority, interpersonal fights, and organized vigilante groups

    • In nearly every conflict, white conservatives initiated violence in reaction to Republican rallies or conventions, or elections in which Black men were to vote

• The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was organized in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, and had spread to nearly every state of the former Confederacy by 1868

  • The Klan drew heavily from the antebellum southern elite, but Klan groups sometimes overlapped with criminal gangs or former Confederate guerrilla groups

• The federal government responded to southern paramilitary tactics by passing the Enforcement Acts between 1870 and 1871, making it criminal to deprive African Americans of their civil rights

  • The acts also deemed violent Klan behavior as acts of rebellion against the United States and allowed for the use of U.S. troops to protect freedpeople

    • But, by 1876, as southern Democrats reestablished “home rule” and “redeemed” the South from Republicans, federal opposition to the KKK weakened

Economic Development during the Civil War and Reconstruction

• The Civil War destroyed and then transformed the American economy

  • The Civil War, like all wars, interrupted the rhythms of commercial life by destroying lives and property

• Emancipation was the single most important economic, social, and political outcome of the war

  • The South:

    • Freedom empowered African Americans in the South to rebuild families, make contracts, hold property, and move freely for the first time

    • Republicans in the South attempted to transform the region into a free-labor economy like the North, but the transition from slave labor to free labor was never so clear

      • Well into the twentieth century, white southerners used a combination of legal coercion and extralegal violence to maintain systems of bound labor

  • The North:

    • Victory did not produce a sudden economic boom for the rest of the United States, with the North unable to regain its prewar pace of industrial and commodity output until the 1870s

    • But the war did prove beneficial to wealthy northern farmers who could afford new technologies

The End of Reconstruction

• Reconstruction ended when northerners abandoned the cause of the formerly enslaved and Democrats recaptured southern politics

  • Eventually, economic issues supplanted Reconstruction as the foremost issue on the national agenda

    • War-weary from a decade of military and political strife, so-called Stalwart Republicans turned from the idealism of civil rights to the practicality of economics and party politics

• On the eve of the 1876 presidential election, the nation still reeled from depression

  • Meanwhile, Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, won a landslide victory in the Ohio gubernatorial election without mentioning Reconstruction, focusing instead on fighting corruption and alcohol abuse and promoting economic recovery

  • Democrats chose Samuel J. Tilden, who ran on honest politics and home rule in the South

  • With the election results contested, a federal special electoral commission voted along party lines—eight Republicans for, seven Democrats against—in favor of Hayes

  • Democrats threatened to boycott Hayes’s inauguration, and rival governments arose claiming to recognize Tilden as the rightfully elected president

  • In what became known as the Compromise of 1877, Democrats conceded the presidency to Hayes on the condition that all remaining troops would be removed from the South and the South would receive special economic favors

• After 1877, Republicans no longer had the political capital—or political will—to intervene in the South in cases of violence and electoral fraud