Reconstruction Era (1863-1877)

Overview

Reconstruction is the period after the Civil War (roughly 1863-1877) during which the United States grappled with the aftermath of the deadliest conflict in its history.
- The war resulted in 600,000-700,000 deaths.
- The South's economy, infrastructure, and environment were devastated.
- It led to the revolutionary freeing of 4,000,000 formerly enslaved African Americans.
The term "Reconstruction" refers to:
- Reconstructing the devastated South.
- Binding the nation's metaphorical wounds.
- Reconciling the North and South.
- Remaking Southern society after slavery's demise.
Slavery's significance:
- It was not just an economic system but a comprehensive system of social arrangements.
- It gave Southerners undue political power at the federal level.
- It created enormous wealth for an elite planter class via unpaid black labor.
Popular culture often frames Reconstruction as a period of failure and corruption (e.g., Gone With The Wind).
In reality, Reconstruction was a moment of immense (revolutionary) promise:
- African Americans, particularly men, were briefly protected by the federal government.
- They were involved in American political and economic life in unprecedented ways.
- It was unique in world history for enslaved individuals to quickly transition to holding significant political power.
- Reconstruction saw the election of the first African Americans to Congress (2 senators, 16 congressmen).

Key Questions

What did freedom mean for different groups in the South?
- Southern whites (wealthy and poor).
- 4,000,000 newly freed African American men and women.
This question is central to Reconstruction and leads to both promise and conflict/suffering.

Freedmen's Bureau

Established by the federal government in March 1865.
Tasked with helping transition African Americans from slavery to citizenship and freedom.
It lasted only five years due to being underfunded and given an impossible task:
- Organizing and overseeing the remaking of Southern society.
The image of a Freedmen's Bureau agent mediating a conflict between angry Southern whites and African Americans is idealized.
The Freedmen's Bureau:
- Successfully set up schools and hospitals.
- Ultimately failed to permanently safeguard African American civil rights in the South after the Civil War.

Visual Analysis: A Visit From the Old Mistress by Winslow Homer

Painted at the end of Reconstruction.
Winslow Homer was a keen observer of the Civil War and major changes in American society.
The image indicates that the end of slavery radically altered social arrangements between white and black in the South.
The painting shows a former plantation mistress visiting formerly enslaved people.
Observations:
- The mistress still has money, indicating that the planter class was not necessarily economically ruined.
- The relationship between the mistress and formerly enslaved has dramatically changed.
  - African American women meet her at eye level without deference.
  - One woman stands taller, occupying more of the image than the mistress.
  - Their eyes are on the same pictorial plane.
  - The mistress occupies a secondary place, not the primary focal point.
- There is no affection between the women and the mistress.
- The woman in the far left corner remains seated, demonstrating contempt.
  - This would have been punished before the war.
The old order is gone, but the replacement is unclear.
The image summarizes Reconstruction:
- Americans of all colors and classes confronted the end of the war with questions:
  - Could whites and the formerly enslaved live together peacefully?
  - What rights were African Americans entitled to?
  - Who would guarantee these rights?
- The answers revealed different ideas about the future, leading to a bitter struggle over defining freedom.

Frederick Douglass's Perspective

Douglass said the work does not end with the abolition of slavery; it merely begins.
He foresaw the challenges of Reconstruction.

Competing Visions of Freedom

History is subjective and depends on the perspectives of those who experienced it.
Differing perspectives do not make either right or wrong; the job is to tease out the context to get closer to the truth.

Susan Bradford (Slave Owner)

In 1865, she noted, "Never before had I a word of impudence from any of our black folk, but they are not ours any longer."
The end of slavery meant the end of an entire way of living for wealthy planters, posing existential questions.

Formerly Enslaved Person

For 4,000,000 newly freed African Americans, the end of slavery was a moment of great promise.
They knew that without land redistribution, black voting rights and political participation would mean little.
A South Carolina freedman said, "Give us our land and we take care of ourselves."
Citizenship was clearly linked with economic security and independence.
In 1865, land ownership was key to economic independence.

Defining Reconstruction

Reconstruction technically began during the war in areas under Union control.
It generally refers to the period when the U.S. attempted to address the political, economic, and social realities brought about by the defeat of the Confederacy.
This involved the end of slavery and the integration of 4,000,000 formerly enslaved people into American life.
The U.S. formulated radical new definitions of citizenship and freedom constitutionally, economically, and socially.
The stakes were highest for the 4,000,000 African Americans freed by the end of slavery.

Key Questions (Revisited)

Was Reconstruction a failure or a success?
Is it still ongoing? Have the problems raised by Reconstruction and the end of slavery been truly resolved in the U.S.?

African Americans' Actions During the War

Thousands of African Americans took advantage of the war to liberate themselves.
They fled to Union lines, abandoning plantations and making clear their desire for freedom.
These actions forced the Lincoln administration to grapple with the end of slavery and postwar reconstruction during the war itself.

Test Cases for Reconstruction

Sea Islands (South Carolina and Georgia)

In November 1861, some Sea Islands were in Union hands.
The Union Navy found about 10,000 formerly enslaved individuals living off the land on their own.
For African Americans, the end of slavery meant living as independent farmers, free of white control.
However, Union soldiers and Northerners brought their racial prejudices to bear.
The lands were taken away from African Americans, who were put to work for a wage without land ownership.
This was a patriarchal/paternalistic approach to African Americans.

Mississippi River Delta

As Union armies drove into Mississippi and Louisiana, they found abandoned plantation land.
Union generals were tasked with formulating policies regarding the tens of thousands of formerly enslaved individuals who came to Union lines.
One interesting case arose on Jefferson Davis's plantation in Mississippi, Davis Bend.
Ulysses S. Grant broke up the plantation and allowed Davis's former slaves to own individual plots.
Davis Bend became radically different from the Sea Island experiments, with African Americans establishing a community, owning the land, and being free from white oversight.
By the end of the war, Davis Bend had a profit of over $100,000$ . A more expansive vision of Reconstruction.

Lincoln's Reconstruction Policy

In December 1863, Lincoln issued the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction (10% Plan).
It was remarkably lenient, not requiring Confederate states to guarantee African Americans civil, political, or economic rights.
It only required states to renounce slavery and 10% of the state's voting population to take an oath of loyalty to the Union.
After that, a state could call a convention, ratify a new constitution, and apply for readmission.
This upset many of Lincoln's Republican colleagues in Congress, especially the radical faction.

Wade-Davis Bill (1864)

Pushed through Congress by two Republican congressmen.
It would have required Southern states to guarantee equality for all freedmen/women before the law.
It would also require at least $50%$ of a state's voters to declare loyalty to the Union and renounce secession.
It banned ex-Confederates from taking part in state constitutional conventions.
Lincoln quietly let the bill die (pocket veto), enraging his Republican colleagues.
It exposed fractures within the Republican party over Reconstruction policy.

Sherman's Field Order Number 15

As William Tecumseh Sherman marched through Georgia and South Carolina, his army attracted tens of thousands of African Americans.
Sherman ordered Field Order Number 15, dividing about $100,000$ acres of former plantation land and redistributing it to $40,000$ African Americans.
This gave rise to the expectation of "40 acres and a mule."
Economic independence and land ownership were critical to African Americans' conception of freedom.

Assassination of Lincoln

Lincoln was assassinated five days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House.
It is unknown what Lincoln would have done, but his last speech hinted at including limited suffrage for African American men.
His Reconstruction policies likely would have evolved over time.

The Meaning of Freedom

African Americans' conception of freedom extended into the very ground on which they walked.

Competing Definitions of Freedom

Reconstruction revolves around competing definitions of freedom.
For many, freedom is taken for granted.
For others, freedom is a lifelong pursuit and struggle.
This steers the competing definitions of freedom between African Americans and Southern whites.

African Americans

Freedom from slavery.
What slavery had long denied them:
- The ability to move and see what was beyond the plantation.
- Sleeping through sunrise.
- Starting a family (freedom from the multi-generational assault on the black family).
- Worshipping in black churches and reading passages from the Bible.
  - The story of Exodus was seen as a metaphor for African Americans escaping to their own promised land.
- Education and learning to read.
  - Knowledge is power.
- Political rights:
  - Voting.
  - Partaking in the political process.
  - Running for office.
- Freedom as a right endowed at birth, God-given, and not to be abridged by humans.

Southern Whites

Freedom as a privilege bestowed only on those who could exercise it responsibly.
Freedom as hierarchical.
Freedom as a legal status.
A former slave owner noted that a former slave was "free, but only free to labor."

Family and Media After the War

Pictures of African American families were used to illustrate what freedom meant to newly freed African Americans.
Thousands of formerly enslaved African Americans hit the road to find family members separated years or decades earlier.
African Americans took out notices in black newspapers asking for information about loved ones.
Power of media, the power of African Americans to have their own information sources.
Nancy Jones in Ottawa, Kansas, sought information about her son who was sold 12 years earlier, highlighting the limited transportation and communication of the time.

Freedmen's Bureau Schools

One of the Bureau's jobs was to establish public schools across the South for African American children.
Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper showed a positive image of what the Freedmen's Bureau was doing.
Northern commitment to the South and African Americans was conditional.
School teachers were white women (illustrating the importance of women in the abolitionist cause).
The Freedmen's Bureau, even with noble intentions, still believed that African Americans needed white help to reach a level of educational attainment, a level of civilization that they could not reach on their own.
Studious children at work; it was an image designed to tell northern audiences to keep going and don't give up on this project.

The Republican Party's Task

The Republican Party faced the daunting task of mediating between the two visions of freedom espoused by African Americans and Southern whites.
The Freedmen's Bureau often had to do this.
*The Freedmen's Bureau wanted to remake the South in the North's image.
The North focused its economic energies around industry, around free labor, around wage labor, around capitalism.
Northerners brought a certain economic vision down to the South that had limitations.
Every man was entitled to the fruits of his labor & Everyone was responsible for their own success based on hard work, sobriety, thrift. Therefore, the Freedmen's Bureau approaches African Americans and gives them only limited tools to overcome a profoundly racist and unequal southern society.
The Freedmen's Bureau built schools and hospitals in keeping with the idea that education was something that you were responsible for as an individual.
The Freedmen's Bureau failed to do what it had originally been tasked, which was to redistribute land, secure land for newly freed African Americans.
The Freedmen’s Bureau never successfully redistributes land.

Successes and Failures of the Freedmen's Bureau

The Freedmen's Bureau did succeed in establishing hundreds of schools for African Americans across the South, including institutions of higher education like Howard University.
The failure to redistribute land meant that plantation owners maintained control of their land.

Sharecropping

The ideal of 40 acres and a mule never happened for most African Americans.
Many African Americans had to go back to work for those who once enslaved them.
Most African Americans and poor whites were consigned to work on former plantation land under sharecropping.
Sharecropping was an exploitative system that caught both white and black sharecroppers in a pernicious cycle of debt, dependence, and poverty.
Landowners would rent out pieces of their land to families for a set period of time.
- In exchange, those tenants would pay the landowner a yearly quota of their crops, somewhere between 30 to 50% (rent).
It gives freedmen and women a degree of autonomy (no longer were black families threatened with, you know, having their families broken up, no longer are black families and black workers threatened with violence from overseers, they could work at their own pace,
It also meant that they didn't own that land.
Exorbitant rents Sharecroppers are already eking out a very meager existence, 50% of what sharecroppers grow is paid immediately in rent). Merchants loan clothing, food, materials and animals to sharecroppers in exchange for a certain percentage of their crops.
Sharecroppers get deeper into debt with them from year to year and it creates more poverty. It also opens them to economic exploitation and sometimes economic blackmail. If you go to the election office you'll be removed from this property, etc. Because of their dependence on white landowners it creates a cycle of political and/or economic blackmail for black sharecroppers.

Federal Reconstruction: Two Periods

Lincoln and Congress clashed over Reconstruction terms during the war.
*That division and the controversy over whether Reconstruction policy should be dictated by the presidency by the executive or by congress does not go away when Lincoln dies. It gets worse as as Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, has no friends to African Americans.He was initially supportive of the South, but it turns out it was because Johnson hated African Americans and trusted the planter class.

Andrew Johnson's Policies

Johnson takes over Reconstruction in the spring of 1865,Congress adjourns and will not reconvene until December.
Johnson's Reconstruction policy was remarkably lenient.
Southern states needed to call a constitutional convention, ratify the 13th amendment (abolishing slavery), renounce Confederate war debts, repudiate secession, and hold elections. By the fall of 1865, most Southern states had met all requirements. And although he hated the planter class, he was willing to pardon thousands of high-ranking former officials, wealthy planters, etc.

By the end of 1865, most Southern states had met Johnson's lenient requirements.
Congress was outraged by Johnson's disregard of black civil rights.
Johnson said, "White men alone must manage the South."
Ultimately, Johnson's plan would backfire, It would push a lot of moderate Republicans to the radical camp. Southerners drew up black codes (laws to keep African Americans economically downtrodden, restrict their movement, and recreate conditions of slavery as closely as possible). Black code governments sent to the Senate former confederates who took action and did all they could to split this country apart.

Congress would refuse to let these representatives take their seats and reassert its authority over the Reconstruction process (Civil Rights Act of 1866).
He vetoed a bill that basically outlawed what black codes were designed to do. All citizens black or white had equal equality under the law. The vagrancy laws, African Americans prevented from voting were now illegal. Congress will overrule this and try to shut Johnson out of the reconstruction policy
Johnson goes around the country talking about Black Republicans who are trying to foist colorblind policy unto the country.
Graves mistake! Johnson suffers a variety of defeats in 1866 midterm elections.
It is really important because that will allow the Republican Party to dictate Reconstruction policy going forward from 1867 onwards.

Johnson is almost impeached due to violating federal tenure office. By one vote he doesn't get removed from office. Johnson has no political power and has essentially a lame duck president.
Part of the reasons why Republicans are joining radical groups has to do with images of waves of violence against African Americans in cities like Louisiana that portray very sympathetic unarmed African Americans running for their lives in newspapers. What's changed? What has the war been been for if we are still being slaughtered for no reason?
An image of African Americans being stolen by the Vandergriff laws (laws that meant you could be sold off to the bidder) What has changed? Especially when compared to a veterans lost leg that fought for the army, etc. This is unfair!

Radical Reconstruction (Congressional Reconstruction)

Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments passed by Congress.
The first time moderates and factions are working together to advocate major changes in society through politicians like Thaddeus Stevens, influential advocates in American society.
*The 14th amendment is a very important document that guaranteed equality under the law regardless of color. Anyone born in this country is privileged as Americans.
*The 14th Amendment does several things, it establishes birthright citizenship
Reconstruction acts, such as Military Reconstruction Act of 1867, divided the South into five military districts each under a general or commander of the United States Army.
*African America men had to be included in voting, it had to be part of that process, and there had to be ratification of the 14th and later 15th Amendment with much stricter requirements implemented.
*Ulysses S Grant was better than Andrew Jackson, Jackson, however, would prove to be a much less successful president than general and finally the 15th Amendment gets ratified that outlawed voting based on race.
By the end of 1868 republicans and largely washed their hands of the reconstruction (they had given them the tools at least they believed to be successful).
And in the process economic tools of freedom/political pains that they had made will be extremely vulnerable since federal government wouldn't protect them, if black populations wouldn't be properly protected
These will eventually be proven to be right to an extent!
A lot of those who were in Northern state positions during this process, are wary of in fringding too much on what state do with regards to political and economic right. (they had their own groups to protect or didn't want to protect)
Eric Foner - The 14 15 16th Amendments are a part of a great constitution of Revolution!. Expands power of the federal government with newfound commitments to equality.
A lot of African Americans would state their claims on government, and stake their livelihood on the government.
Reconstruction completely changed the rights of the federal government. Before the Civil War most of the decisions were in state, but now things were different.
Before the War the citizen was linked explicitly to race in sect. A right all are supposed to enjoy, the federal power overstate is fundamentally and irrevocably stated

Women During Federal Reconstruction

These new amendments did not include gender or sex as a protected group for women during votes
Elizabeth Stanton - This led to a widespread disenchantment with the feminist movement. Saying how is it possible that black men get the right to vote over women!!?
A lot of the laws that were put for women that held second-class citizens and now no longer have any basis. (Coverture laws in short) Does not happen
Because it's okay to take things one step at one process or or one problem at at a time because women should have waited as Charles Suner said and women have gotten a voice at a time
Sadly Susan B Anthony was correct that what men be inserted, it would take a century to get it out. (This is for both sides as well!!)
What the 14 members to the Reconstruction Act did was it unleashed a torrent of BLACK political activity, where African America see their political power grow exponentially. Black communities were very important in both activity from what they had previously done and in helping invigorate these new areas
They immediately recognized that political and economic issues needed to happen at the same time, and so its know coinsidence that was done pouring in in the political and economical protest
By 1870 all the former Confederate states of that in the union of new state constitution that protect the interest of black American, at least on paper. This is because during of 10 year period, the South will embarked on a really radical experiment with biracial democracy
Harper's Weekly the Farmers, the member the Black middle class and of course, the Black union veterans. The 3 are all casting their first vote. To see how many African Americans get elected to to local, state and federal office. Out of 2000 black election during reconstruction
Congress, state houses, governorship, local law officials (county sheriffs or what have you), and its actually local officers are much more important
Most white southerns believed that African Americans have no right to to participate in the political process, the resent the Black soldiers, sheriffs, serving on juries
They were resentment when white northerners come down who are known as carpetbaggers, to help advocate to the Republican constituency!! (There are also other southerns who have different political goals at the time of which is extremely important)
Neither of these were true however or did there reality. Where were they basically trying to build and come back, as stated on the reconstruction laws?
All of those were trying to find the reconstruction era to build something better!
Was schools in the South so that everything would work out, no it was not that was corrupt. The tax Burden felt haviest on small farmers. Public investments were almost non existent.
Half of the children, white and black, are enrolled in the school (this may not seem much to us in this time but it was an amazing success!)

The Redeemer Era

Those developments we’re see as problematic and these images that we’re there were designed or portrayed that white southerns who supported the Republican ticket were political opportunists, who are basically taking advantage of literate ignorant, uneducated, whatever stereotype you wanna use, black Southerners and the are by manipulating their vote that they could get ahead
The planter class bitterly opposed those Reconstructions!
KKK - Was not white clothes! It was decentralized for goal was to terrorism
By the early 1870s, there was a consensus that they had been given enough chances. Northern willingness to continue. Military presence wouldn't help and death had taken major figures
This economic repression devastated
Supreme court cases whittle away from the 14th amendment with regards to citizen!
A vote for Hayes also pulled all of the last federal troops from the area with it!
Racism and the North is a major as racism is no longer some a bad it's what policies are back then. Saying those of the Democratic Party and are return!