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Reconstruction was the period in United States history, 1865–1877, that resolved the issues of the American Civil War when both the Confederacy and its system of slavery were destroyed. The period of Reconstruction addressed the return of the southern states that had seceded, the status of ex-Confederate leaders, and the integration of the African-American Freedmen into the legal, political, economic and social system. Violent controversy arose over how to accomplish those tasks.

Republican leaders agreed that slavery and the Slave Power had to be permanently destroyed, and all forms of Confederate nationalism had to be suppressed. Moderates said this could be easily accomplished as soon as Confederate armies surrendered and the southern states repealed secession and ratified the 13th Amendment — all of which happened by September 1865. However the Radical Republicans were much more skeptical of southern intentions and demanded far more stringent federal action. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson were the leaders of the moderate Republicans; Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner led the Radical Republicans. Radicals judged the moderate policies to be a failure, especially Johnson's opposition to civil rights for the Freedmen.

Winning the election of 1866, the Radicals took full control in Washington. The House of Representatives impeached Johnson, who was subsequently acquitted by a single vote in the Senate. Radicals used the Army to take over the South and give the vote to black men, who had never been permitted to vote or attend school under antebellum Southern governments, and took the vote away from an estimated 10 or 15,000 white men who had been Confederate officials or soldiers. The Radical stage lasted for varying lengths in the different states, where a Republican coalition of Freedmen, Scalawags and Carpetbaggers took control and promoted modernization through railroads and public schools. They were charged with corruption by their opponents, the conservative–Democratic coalition, calling themselves "Redeemers" after 1870. Violence sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan was countered by federal intervention.

By 1877, however, Redeemers regained control of every state, and President Rutherford Hayes withdrew federal troops, causing the collapse of the remaining three Republican state governments. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were permanent legacies. Bitterness from the heated partisanship of the era lasted a century.

Loyalty Issue

The loyalty issue emerged in the debate over the Wade-Davis Act of 1864, which Lincoln vetoed. Wade-Davis required voters to take the "Ironclad Oath," swearing that in the past they never had supported the Confederacy or been one of its soldiers. Lincoln ignored the past and asked voters to swear that in the future they would support the Union. The Radical lost support following Lincoln's pocket veto, but they regained strength in 1866.

Suffrage issue

Suffrage was a central issue. On the one hand was the question of allowing some or all ex-Confederates to vote. The moderates wanted virtually all of them to vote, but the Radicals repeatedly tried to impose the Ironclad oath that would allow none to vote. Thaddeus Stevens proposed, unsuccessfully, that all ex-Confederates lose the vote for five years. The compromise that was reached was vague because no one knew how many Confederate leaders temporarily lost the vote; one estimate was 10,000 to 15,000.^[1].

Second was the issue of whether blacks should vote. Northern states that had referenda on the subject rejected allowing their own blacks to vote. Conservatives (including most white Southerners, Northern Democrats, and some Northern Republicans) opposed black voting. Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson took a middle position, that would allow some black men to vote, especially army veterans. Lincoln proposed giving the vote to "the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks" ^[2], while Governor Johnson said, "The better class of them will go to work and sustain themselves, and that class ought to be allowed to vote, on the ground that a loyal negro is more worthy than a disloyal white man" ^[3]. As President Johnson wrote the governor of Mississippi recommending, "If you could extend the elective franchise to all persons of color who can read the Constitution in English and write their names, and to all persons of color who own real estate valued at not less than two hundred and fifty dollars, and pay taxes thereon, you would completely disarm the adversary [Radicals in Congress], and set an example the other states will follow." ^[4]

Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, leader of the Radical Republicans, was initially hesitant to enfranchise the largely illiterate ex-slave population. However Sumner decided it was necessary for blacks to vote for three reasons: ^[5]

1. for their own protection;
2. for the protection of white Unionists (i.e. "scalawags");
3. for the peace of the country.

The Radicals said the only way to get experience was to get the vote first, and they passed laws allowing all male freedmen to vote. In 1867, black men voted for the first time and, over the course of Reconstruction, more than 1,500 African Americans held public office. (The question of women's suffrage was also debated, but was rejected.)

the South's pre-Civil War political leaders nearly all renounced secession and gave up slavery, but they were angered in 1867 when their state governments were ousted by federal military forces, and replaced by Republican lawmakers elected by blacks, Scalawags and Carpebaggers.

Wartime plans and legislation

Planning for Reconstruction began in 1861, at the onset of the war. The Radical Republicans, seeking strict policies, used as their base the Congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln pursued a lenient plan for reconstruction, especially in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas. In those states, he proposed a ten percent plan that required 10 percent of the voters from the 1860 election to swear an oath of future loyalty to the Union. He never succeeded in getting compliance with his plan ^[6].

Lincoln opposed the Radicals on Reconstruction issue, and in Juy 1864 vetoed their key legislation, the Wade Davis Bill. It would allow a state to be rehabilitated only if a majority of voters swore the "Ironclad Oath" which stated they had never in the past supported the Confederacy. Observers at the time--and historians since--agree that probably no state would have qualified, leaving them under military control indefinitely. By vetoing the act (which had been passed by Congress on July 2, 1864), Lincoln blocked the Radicals from a dominant role. (They became dominant again in 1866.) Historian William Gienapp explains Lincoln's veto:^[7]

Lincoln, in contrast, shrank from inaugurating a fundamental upheaval in southern society and mores, and by stressing future over past loyalty, he was willing to allow recanting Rebels to dominate the new southern governments. Moreover, Lincoln believed that the best strategy was to introduce black suffrage in the South by degrees in order to accustom southern whites to blacks voting. How far he was willing to go in extending rights to former slaves remained unclear, but his gradualist approach to social change remained intact, just as when he had tried to get the border states in 1862 to adopt gradual emancipation. Finally, the radicals and Lincoln held quite different views of the relationship of Reconstruction to the war effort. By erecting impossibly high standards that no southern state could meet, the Wade–Davis bill sought to postpone Reconstruction until the war was over. For Lincoln, in contrast, a lenient program of Reconstruction would encourage southern whites to abandon the Confederacy and thus was integral to his strategy for winning the war.

Lincoln thus wanted to bring the Southern states back into good standing as fast as possible and with a minimum of vengeance. Insisting as well that there be new rights for the Freedmen, he created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedmen's Bureau. In one experiment in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Freedmen were allowed to farm plantations seized by the Army; they never received ownership ^[8].

Presidential Reconstruction: 1865–66

Northern anger over the Confederate John Wilkes Booth's assassination of Lincoln and the immense human cost of the war led to demands for harsh policies. Vice President Andrew Johnson had taken a hard line, and spoke of hanging rebel Confederates but when he succeeded Lincoln as President, Johnson took a much softer line, pardoning many Confederate leaders and allowing ex-Confederates to maintain their control of Southern state governments, Southern lands, and black people ^[9]. Jefferson Davis was held in prison for two years, but not the other Confederate leaders; there were no treason trials. Only one person — Captain Henry Wirz, the commandant of the prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia — was executed for war crimes.

Black Codes

The Johnson governments quickly enacted "black codes", effectively giving freedmen only a limited set of second-class civil rights, and no voting rights. Southern plantation owners feared they would lose their labor force, making the cotton lands worthless. Many Southern whites feared that blacks would consider themselves their equals. Mississippi and South Carolina black codes have been described:^[10]

"Negroes must make annual contracts for their labor in writing; if they should run away from their tasks, they forfeited their wages for the year. Whenever it was required of them they must present licenses (in a town from the mayor; elsewhere from a member of the board of police of the beat) citing their places of residence and authorizing them to work. Fugitives from labor were to be arrested and carried back to their employers. Five dollars a head and mileage would be allowed such negro catchers. It was made a misdemeanor, punishable with fine or imprisonment, to persuade a freedman to leave his employer, or to feed the runaway. Minors were to be apprenticed, if males until they were twenty-one, if females until eighteen years of age. Such corporal punishment as a father would administer to a child might be inflicted upon apprentices by their masters. Vagrants were to be fined heavily, and if they could not pay the sum, they were to be hired out to service until the claim was satisfied. Negroes might not carry knives or firearms unless they were licensed so to do. It was an offense, to be punished by a fine of $50 and imprisonment for thirty days, to give or sell intoxicating liquors to a negro. When negroes could not pay the fines and costs after legal proceedings, they were to be hired at public outcry by the sheriff to the lowest bidder.…

"In South Carolina persons of color contracting for service were to be known as "servants," and those with whom they contracted, as "masters." On farms the hours of labor would be from sunrise to sunset daily, except on Sunday. The negroes were to get out of bed at dawn. Time lost would be deducted from their wages, as would be the cost of food, nursing, etc., during absence from sickness. Absentees on Sunday must return to the plantation by sunset. House servants were to be at call at all hours of the day and night on all days of the week. They must be "especially civil and polite to their masters, their masters' families and guests," and they in return would receive "gentle and kind treatment." Corporal and other punishment was to be administered only upon order of the district judge or other civil magistrate. A vagrant law of some severity was enacted to keep the negroes from roaming the roads and living the lives of beggars and thieves."

The Black codes outraged northern opinion and apparently were never put into effect in any state.

Moderate responses

In response to the Black codes and worrisome signs of Southern recalcitrance, the Radical Republicans blocked the readmission of the ex-rebellious states to the Congress in fall 1865. Congress also renewed the Freedman's Bureau, but Johnson vetoed it. Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, leader of the moderate Republicans, took affront at the black codes. He proposed the first Civil Rights Law because, he explained:^[11]

Of what avail, he asked, is the Thirteenth Amendment "if in the late slaveholding States laws are to be enacted and enforced depriving persons of African descent of privileges which are essential to freemen?" The legislatures of the Southern States have by law discriminated against the negroes. "They deny them certain rights and subject them to severe penalties. …Although they do not make a man an absolute slave they yet deprive him of the rights of a freeman; and it is perhaps difficult to draw the precise line to say where freedom ceases and slavery begins but a law that does not allow a colored person to go from one county to another, and one that does not allow him to hold property, to teach, to preach, are certainly laws in violation of the rights of a freeman.… The purpose of this bill is to destroy all these discriminations and to carry into effect the constitutional amendment;" it is to give the negro "the right to acquire property, to go and come at pleasure, to enforce rights in the courts, to make contracts, and to inherit and dispose of property." The constitutional warrant for the bill was the second section of the Thirteenth Amendment, "Congress shall have power to enforce this article [abolishing slavery] by appropriate, legislation."

The key to the bill was the opening section:

"All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign Power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall have the same right in every State and Territory in the United States, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, and penalties and to none other, any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom to the Contrary notwithstanding."

Congress quickly passed the Civil Rights bill; the Senate on February 2 voted 33–12; the House on March 13 voted 111–38.

Johnson vetoes; Democrats regroup

Although strongly urged by moderates in Congress to sign the Civil Rights bill, Johnson broke decisively with them by vetoing it on March 27. His veto message objected to the measure because it conferred citizenship on the Freedmen at a time when eleven out of thirty-six States were unrepresented and attempted to fix by Federal law "a perfect equality of the white and black races in every State of the Union." Johnson said it was an invasion by Federal authority of the rights of the States; it had no warrant in the Constitution and was contrary to all precedents. It was a "stride toward centralization and the concentration of all legislative power in the national government." ^[12]

The Democratic party, proclaiming itself the party of white men, north and south, supported Johnson. ^[13] However the Republicans in Congress overrode his veto (the Senate by the close vote of 33:15, the House by 122:41) and the Civil Rights bill became law. The last moderate proposal was the Fourteenth Amendment, also authored by moderate Trumbull. It was designed to put the key provisions of the Civil Rights Act into the Constitution, but it went much further. It extended citizenship to everyone born in the United States (except visitors and Indians on reservations), penalized states that did not give the vote to Freedmen, and most importantly, created new federal civil rights that could be protected by federal courts. It guaranteed the Federal war debt (and promised the Confederate debt would never be paid). Johnson used his influence to block the amendment in the states, as three-fourths of the states were required for ratification. (The Amendment was later ratified.) The moderate effort to compromise with Johnson had failed and an all-out political war broke out between the Republicans (both Radical and moderate) on one side, and on the other Johnson and his allies in the Democratic party in the North, and the conservative groupings (which used different names) in each southern state.

Radical Reconstruction: 1866–77

Radicals win 1866 election

The Congressional elections of 1866 were fought over the issue of Reconstruction. The Southern states were not allowed to vote, having not yet been re-admitted to the Union; the result was solid Republican gains in Congress ^[14]. The Radicals under Stevens and Sumner, for the first time now took full control of Congress and passed the first Reconstruction Act in March 1867.

Constitutional Amendments

Three new Constitutional Amendments were adopted. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery and was ratified in 1865. The 14th Amendment was rejected in 1866 but ratified in 1868, guaranteeing citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and granting them federal civil rights. The 15th Amendment passed in 1870, decreeing that the right to vote could not be denied because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude (it did not grant the right to vote, as electoral policies are defined by the states).

Military reconstruction

The first Reconstruction Act placed ten Confederate states under military control, grouping them into five military districts: ^[15]

• First Military District: Virginia, under General John Schofield
• Second Military District: The Carolinas, under General Daniel Sickles
• Third Military District: Georgia, Alabama and Florida, under General John Pope
• Fourth Military District: Arkansas and Mississippi, under General Edward Ord
• Fifth Military District: Texas and Louisiana, under Generals Philip Sheridan and Winfield Scott Hancock

Tennessee, which had been readmitted to full status on July 24, 1866, was not made part of a military district, and federal controls did not apply.

The ten Southern state governments were re-constituted under the direct control of the US Army. There was little or no fighting, but rather a state of martial law in which the military closely supervised local government, supervised elections, and protected office holders from violence ^[16]. Blacks, for the first time in history, and whites were enrolled as voters; former Confederate leaders were excluded.[Foner 1988 p 274–5] No one state was representative. Here is what happened in Texas:^[17]

The first critical step … was the registration of voters according to guidelines established by Congress and interpreted by Generals Sheridan and Griffin. The Reconstruction Acts called for registering all adult males, white and black, except those who had ever sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and then engaged in rebellion.… Sheridan interpreted these restrictions stringently, barring from registration not only all pre-1861 officials of state and local governments who had supported the Confederacy but also all city officeholders and even minor functionaries such as sextons of cemeteries. In May Griffin … appointed a three-man board of registrars for each county, making his choices on the advice of known Unionists and local Freedmen's Bureau agents. In every county where practicable a freedman served as one of the three registrars.… Final registration amounted to approximately 59,633 whites and 49,479 blacks. It is impossible to say how many whites were rejected or refused to register (estimates vary from 7,500 to 12,000), but blacks, who constituted only about 30 percent of the state's population, were significantly overrepresented at 45 percent of all voters.

Elections in 1867 returned a Republican victory in every state (except Virginia, where Conservative Democrats won). These governments then agreed to the Congressional conditions for readmission to the Union, including ratification of the Constitutional Amendments. With most ex-Confederates ineligible because they could not take the Ironclad oath, the majority of delegates in every state but South Carolina were African Americans.

Source: Rhodes (1920) v 6 p. 199

All Southern states were readmitted to the Union by the end of 1870, the last being Georgia, gaining re-admission on July 15, 1870. All but 500 top Confederate leaders were pardoned when President Ulysses Grant signed the Amnesty Act of 1872.

Black Reconstruction

One by one, the Southern states held new elections in which Freedmen voted. In most cases, the result was a Republican state government; the state was readmitted, the Congressional delegation was seated, and most soldiers were removed. Most Republicans were organized into clubs called Union Leagues. The Republican coalition in each state comprised Freedmen (the largest group) and local white Republicans (called "scalawags"), the second largest group. In addition two groups of northerners were important, African Americans and whites (called "carpetbaggers", The black politicians were not unlettered slaves, but free blacks, especially from the North — "mostly freeborn urban mulattoes." ^[18]

The old political élite of the Democratic Party, mostly former Confederates, were (temporarily) frozen out of power (although some, like General James Longstreet, joined the Republicans).

Black Officeholders

Republicans took control of all Southern state governorships and state legislatures, leading to the election of numerous African-Americans to state and national office, as well as to the installation of African-Americans into other positions of power ^[19].

"No more than 137 officeholders lived outside the South before the Civil War," Eric Foner wrote in the introduction to Freedom's Lawmakers, a biographical directory, with many photographs, of more than 1500 black officeholders during Reconstruction.

Of the less than 10 percent of more than 1,500 black officeholders listed in the directory who lived outside the South before the Civil War, Foner wrote, "Most were individuals born in the North (where about 220,000 free blacks lived in 1860), but their numbers also included free Southerners whose families moved to the North, free blacks and a few privileged slaves sent North for education, several immigrants from abroad, and fugitives from bondage."

Public schools and Railroads

As modernizers the Republicans believed that education was a long-term solution to the economic poverty and ignorance of the South. They created a system of public schools, which were segregated by race everywhere except New Orleans. Most blacks approved the segregated schools because they provided jobs for black teachers. In general elementary and a few secondary schools were built in the cities. But the South had few cities and in the rural areas the public school was a one-room affair that attracted about half the younger children. The teachers were poorly paid and their pay was often in arrears ^[20]. Conservatives contended the rural schools were too expensive and unnecessary for a region where the vast majority of people were cotton or tobacco farmers. One historian found that the schools were not very effective, because of "poverty, the inability of the states to collect taxes, and inefficiency and corruption in many places prevented successful operation of the schools." ^[21]

Numerous private academies and colleges for Freedmen were established by northern missionaries. Every state created state colleges for Freedmen, such as Alcorn State University in Mississippi; in 1890 the black state colleges started receiving federal funds as land grant schools ^[22]. They received state funds after Reconstruction ended because, as Lynch explains, "there are very many liberal, fair-minded and influential Democrats in the State who are strongly in favor of having the State provide for the liberal education of both races." ^[23]

Every state (and many localities) subsidized railroads, which modernizers felt could haul the South out of isolation and poverty. Millions of dollars in bonds and subsidies were fraudulently pocketed. One ring in North Carolina spent $200,000 in bribing the legislature and obtained millions in state money for its railroads. Instead of building new track, however, it used the funds to speculate in bonds, reward friends with extravagant fees, and enjoy lavish trips to Europe. ^[24]. Taxes were quadrupled across the South to pay off the railroad bonds and the school costs, leading to intense complaints among taxpayers ^[25]. Nevertheless thousands of miles of lines were built as the Southern system expanded from 11,000 miles in 1870 to 29,000 in 1890. The lines were owned and directed overwhelmingly by Northerners. Railroads helped create a mechanically skilled group of craftsmen, and indeed broke the isolation of much of the region. Passengers were few, however, and apart from hauling the cotton crop when it was harvested, there was little freight traffic ^[26]. As Franklin explains, "numerous railroads fed at the public trough by bribing legislators...and through the use and misuse of state funds." The effect, according to one businessman, "was to drive capital from the State, paralyze industry, and demoralize labor." ^[27]

The new spending on schools and especially on railroad subsidies, combined with fraudulent spending and a collapse in state credit because of huge deficits, forced the states to dramatically increase tax rates — up to ten times higher — despite the poverty of the region. Angry taxpayers revolted, as the conservatives shifted their focus away from race to taxes ^[28]. Former Congressman John Lynch, a black Republican leader from Mississippi, concluded, "The argument made by the taxpayers, however, was plausible and it may be conceded that, upon the whole, they were about right; for no doubt it would have been much easier upon the taxpayers to have increased at that time the interest-bearing debt of the State than to have increased the tax rate. The latter course, however, had been adopted and could not then be changed." ^[29]

Views of the Conservatives in the South

The white Southerners who lost power reformed themselves into "Conservative" parties that battled the Republicans throughout the South. The party names varied, and by the late 1870s they called themselves simply "Democrats." Their views on national policy were reflected later by the historians of the Dunning School.

Historian Walter Lynwood Fleming was representative of the Dunning School in that he was sympathetic to southern conservatives and contemptuous of Radical corruption, and paternalistic toward the African Americans: he wrote:

The Negro troops, even at their best, were everywhere considered offensive by the native whites. General Grant, indeed, urged that only white troops be used to garrison the interior. But the Negro soldier, impudent by reason of his new freedom, his new uniform, and his new gun, was more than Southern temper could tranquilly bear, and race conflicts were frequent. A New Orleans newspaper thus states the Southern point of view: "Our citizens who had been accustomed to meet and treat the Negroes only as respectful servants, were mortified, pained, and shocked to encounter them … wearing Federal uniforms and bearing bright muskets and gleaming bayonets.… They are jostled from the sidewalks by dusky guards, marching four abreast. They were halted, in rude and sullen tones, by Negro sentinels. … The lawlessness of the Negroes in parts of the Black Belt and the disturbing influences of the black troops, of some officials of the Bureau, and of some of the missionary teachers and preachers, caused the whites to fear insurrections and to take measures for protection. Secret semi-military organizations were formed which later developed into the Ku Klux orders. [3]

Representative also of the Dunning School is the analysis of Ellis Oberholtzer (a northern scholar) in 1917: ^[30]

Outrages upon the ex-slaves in the South there were in plenty. Their sufferings were many. But white men, too, were victims of lawless violence, and in all portions of the North as well as in the late "rebel" states. Not a political campaign passed without the exchange of bullets, the breaking of skulls with sticks and stones, the firing of rival club-houses. Republican clubs marched the streets of Philadelphia, amid revolver shots and brickbats, to save the negroes from the "rebel" savages in Alabama. The "very spirit of Cain," the New York Nation said in the summer of 1866, seemed to stalk over the land. Noble motives which earlier had governed men were swept aside and were lost in the general saturnalia of malignity. The troops serving in the South were there not so much to protect the negroes as to punish their old masters; not so much to guard the imperiled interests of the Southern "loyalists," of whom a deal had been said, as to exasperate the President and the members of his party in the North. The project to make voters out of black men was not so much for their social elevation as for the further punishment of the Southern white people —for the capture of offices for Radical scamps and the entrenchment of the Radical party in power for a long time to come in the South and in the country at large. One Northern state had followed another in refusing to give the ballot to its own negroes.

Reaction by conservatives included the formation of violent secret societies especially the Ku Klux Klan. Violence occurred in cities and in the countryside between white former Confederates, Republicans, African-Americans, representatives of the federal government, and Republican-organized armed Loyal Leagues.

Redemption and the end of Reconstruction in 1870s

Republicans split: election of 1872

As early as 1868 Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, a leading Radical during the war, concluded that:

"Congress was right in not limiting, by its reconstruction acts, the right of suffrage to whites; but wrong in the exclusion from suffrage of certain classes of citizens and all unable to take its prescribed retrospective oath, and wrong also in the establishment of despotic military governments for the States and in authorizing military commissions for the trial of civilians in time of peace. There should have been as little military government as possible; no military commissions; no classes excluded from suffrage; and no oath except one of faithful obedience and support to the Constitution and laws, and of sincere attachment to the constitutional Government of the United States."^[31]

By 1872, President Grant had alienated large numbers of leading Republicans, including many Radicals by the wanton corruption of his administration and his use of federal soldiers to prop up Radical state regimes. The opponents, called "Liberal Republicans", included founders of the party who expressed dismay that the party had succumbed to corruption. Leaders included editors of some of the most powerful newspapers. Charles Sumner, embittered by Grant's corruption, joined the new party, which nominated editor Horace Greeley. The badly disorganized Democratic party supported Greeley.

Grant made up for the defections by new gains among Union veterans, as well as strong support from the "Stalwart" faction of his party (which depended on his patronage), and the Southern Republican parties. Grant won a smashing landslide, as the Liberal Republican party vanished and many former supporters — even ex-abolitionists — abandoned the cause of Reconstruction ^[32].

Likewise in the South political–racial tensions built up inside the Republican party. In 1868, Georgia Democrats, with support from some Republicans, expelled all 28 black Republican members (arguing blacks were eligible to vote, but not to hold office.) In state after state the more conservative scalawags fought for control with the more radical carpetbaggers, and usually lost. Thus in Mississippi the conservative faction led by scalawag James Lusk Alcorn was decisively defeated by the radical faction led by Carpetbagger Adelbert Ames. The party lost support steadily as many scalawags left it; few new recruits were acquired. Meanwhile the Freedmen were demanding a much larger share of the offices and patronage, and thus squeezing out their carpetbagger allies ^[33]. Finally some of the more prosperous Freedmen were joining the Democrats, angered at the failure of the Republicans to help them acquire land ^[34]. Although some Marxist historians, especially W.E.B. DuBois, looked for and celebrated a cross-racial coalition of poor whites and poor blacks, such a coalition rarely formed, Congressman Lynch explains that, "While the colored men did not look with favor upon a political alliance with the poor whites, it must be admitted that, with very few exceptions, that class of whites did not seek, and did not seem to desire such an alliance." Lynch explains that poor whites resented the job competition from Freedmen. Furthermore the poor whites "with a few exceptions, were less efficient, less capable, and knew less about matters of state and governmental administration than many of the ex-slaves.… As a rule, therefore, the whites that came into the leadership of the Republican party between 1872 and 1875 were representatives of the most substantial families of the land." ^[35] Thus the poor whites became Democrats and bitterly opposed the black Republicans.

Democrats try a "New Departure"

By 1870, the Democratic–Conservative leadership across the South decided it had to end its opposition to Reconstruction as well as to black suffrage in order to survive and move on to new issues. The Grant administration had proven by its crackdown on the KKK that it would use as much federal power as necessary. The Democrats in the North concurred. They wanted to fight the GOP on economic grounds rather than race. The New Departure offered the chance for a clean slate without having to refight the Civil War every election. Furthermore many wealthy landowners thought they could control part of the newly enfranchised black electorate to their own advantage. Not all Democrats agreed; a hard core element wanted to resist Reconstruction no matter what. Eventually a group called Redeemers took control of the party in state after state ^[36]. They formed coalitions with conservative Republicans, including scalawags and carpetbaggers, emphasizing the need for economic modernization. Railroad building was seen as a panacea, for northern capital was needed. The new tactics were a success in Virginia as William Mahone built a winning coalition. In Tennessee the Redeemers formed a coalition with Republican governor DeWitt Senter. Across the South Democrats switched from the race issue to taxes and corruption — charging that Republican governments were corrupt and inefficient, as taxes began squeezing cash-poor farmers who rarely saw $20 in currency a year, but had to pay taxes in currency or lose their farm.

In North Carolina, Republican governor William Woods Holden used state troops against the Klan, but the prisoners were released by federal judges, Holden became the first governor in American history to be impeached and removed from office. Republican political disputes in Georgia split the party and enabled the Redeemers to take over ^[37]. Violence was a factor in neutralizing Republican leaders in the deep South, with its larger black Republican population. In the North a live-and-let-live attitude made elections more like a sporting contest. But in the deep South it was life or death. Explained an Alabama scalawag, "Our contest here is for life, for the right to earn our bread … for a decent and respectful consideration as human beings and members of society." ^[38]

Panic of 1873 weakens GOP

The Panic of 1873 hit the Southern economy hard, and disillusioned many Republicans who had gambled that railroads would pull the South out of its poverty. The price of cotton fell by half; many small landowners, local merchants and cotton factors (wholesalers) went bankrupt. Sharecropping, for both black and white farmers, became more common as a way to spread the risk of owning land. The old abolitionist element in the North was aging away, or had lost interest, and was not replenished. Many carpetbaggers returned to the North or joined the Redeemers. Blacks had an increased voice in the Republican party, but across the South it was divided by internal bickering and was rapidly losing its cohesion. Many local black leaders started emphasizing individual economic progress in cooperation with white elites, rather than racial political progress in opposition to them, a conservative attitude that foreshadowed Booker T. Washington. ^[39]

Nationally, President Grant took the blame for the depression, as his Republican party lost 96 seats in all parts of the country in the 1874 elections. The Bourbon Democrats took control of the House and were confident of electing Samuel J. Tilden president in 1876. President Grant was not running for re-election and seemed to be losing interest in the South. State after state fell to the Redeemers, with only four in Republican hands in 1873, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina; Arkansas then fell after the Brooks–Baxter War in 1874. Political violence was endemic in Louisiana, but efforts to seize the state government were repulsed by federal troops who entered the state legislature and hauled away several Democratic legislators. The violation of tradition embarrassed Grant, and some of his cabinet recommended against further intervention ^[40]. By now all Democrats and most northern Republicans agreed that Confederate nationalism and slavery were dead — the war goals were achieved — and further federal military interference was an undemocratic violation of historic republican values. The victory of Rutherford Hayes in the hotly contested Ohio gubernatorial election of 1875 indicated his "let alone" policy toward the South would become Republican policy, as indeed happened when he won the 1876 GOP nomination for president. The last explosion of violence came in Mississippi's 1875 election, in which Democratic rifle clubs, operating in the open and without disguise, threatened or shot enough Republicans to decide the election for the Redeemers. The Republican governor Adelbert Ames asked Grant for federal troops to fight back; Grant refused, saying public opinion was "tired out" of the perpetual troubles in the South. Ames fled the state as the Democrats took over Mississippi ^[41].

1876 Election

Reconstruction continued in South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida until 1877. After Republican Rutherford Hayes won the disputed U.S. Presidential election of 1876 the South agreed to accept Hayes's victory if the President withdrew the last Federal troops from the South. By this point everyone had agreed that slavery and Confederate nationalism were dead, and the war goals had been achieved. However, the African-Americans who wanted their legal rights guaranteed by the Federal government were repeatedly frustrated for another 75 years; they considered Reconstruction a failure ^[42]

The end of Reconstruction marked the beginning of a period, 1877–1900, that saw the steady reduction of many civil and political rights for African-Americans, and ushered in the nadir of American race relations. The exact process varied state by state and town by town. In Virginia, the Redeemers gerrymandered cities to minimize Republican seats; reduced the number of polling places in black precincts; made local officials appointees of the state legislature; and did not allow the vote to felons or to people who failed to pay their annual poll tax; see Jim Crow laws. Blacks would legally and socially remain second-class citizens until Jim Crow was abolished by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

South under Redeemers

The initial flurry of Reconstruction civil rights measures was eroded and converted into laws that expanded racial segregation and discrimination throughout Southern institutions and everyday life. In exchange for its acceptance of reintegration into the Union, the South (along with the rest of the country) was allowed to reestablish a segregated, race-discriminatory society.

Much of the civil rights legislation was overturned by the Supreme Court. Most notably, the court suggested in the Slaughterhouse Case (1873), then held in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), that the 14th amendment only gave Congress the power to outlaw public, rather than private, discrimination. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) went even further, announcing that state-mandated segregation was legal as long as the law provided for "separate but equal" facilities.

The Supreme Court maintained "separate but equal" as the "law of the land" for another six decades, until finally reversing it in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). Congress also belatedly restored the eroded rights of the descendants of Freedman. With the backing of President Lyndon Johnson, it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in "public accommodations" (i.e., restaurants, hotels and businesses open to the public, as well as in private schools and workplaces), terminology which originated in the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

Newspapers and Magazines

• DeBow's Review major Southern conservative magazine; stress on business, economics and statistics
• Harper's Weekly leading New York news magazine; pro-Radical
• Nast, Thomas. magazine cartoons pro-Radical editorial cartoons
• The New York Times daily edition online through ProQuest at academic libraries

Laws passed by Congress

• Reconstruction Act March 2, 1867
• Reconstruction Act March 23, 1867
• Reconstruction Act July 19, 1867
• Reconstruction Act March 11, 1868

Legacy and Historiography

Reconstruction was initially viewed as a failure by most observers North and South because of its corruption.^[43] Booker T. Washington, who grew up in West Virginia during Reconstruction, concluded that, "the Reconstruction experiment in racial democracy failed because it began at the wrong end, emphasizing political means and civil rights acts rather than economic means and self-determination." ^[44] His solution was to concentrate on building the economic infrastructure of the black community.

Two novels by Thomas Dixon — The Clansman and The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden — 1865–1900 — romanticized white resistance to Northern/black coercion, hailing vigilante action by the Ku Klux Klan. Other authors romanticized the benevolence and happiness of the antebellum plantation regarding to the treatment and disposition of African-Americans. These sentiments were expressed on the screen in D.W. Griffith's anti-Republican 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation.

The Dunning School of scholars based at the history department of Columbia University analyzed Reconstruction as a failure, at least after 1866, for quite different reasons. They claimed that it took freedoms and rights from qualified whites and gave them to unqualified blacks who were being duped by corrupt carpetbaggers and scalawags. As one scholar notes, for the Dunning School, "Reconstruction was a battle between two extremes: the Democrats, as the group which included the vast majority of the whites, standing for decent government and racial supremacy, versus the Republicans, the Negroes, alien carpetbaggers, and renegade scalawags, standing for dishonest government and alien ideals. These historians wrote literally in terms of white and black."^[45]

In the 1930s, "revisionism" became popular among scholars. As disciples of Charles A. Beard, they focused on economic causation. They argued that the Radical rhetoric of equal rights was mostly a smokescreen hiding the true motivation of Reconstruction's real backers. While conceding that a few men like Stevens and Sumner were thoroughly idealistic, Howard Beale argued Reconstruction was primarily a successful attempt by financiers, railroad builders and industrialists in the Northeast, using the Republican party, to control the national government for its own selfish economic ends. Those ends were to continue the wartime high protective tariff, the new network of national banks, and to guarantee a "sound" currency. To succeed the business class had to remove the old ruling agrarian class of Southern planters and Midwestern farmers. This it did by inaugurating Reconstruction, which made the South Republican, and by selling its policies to the voters wrapped up in such attractive vote-getting packages as northern patriotism or the bloody shirt. Historian William Hesseltine added the point that the Northeastern businessmen wanted to control the South economically, which they did through ownership of the railroads. ^[46] However, historians in the 1950s and 1960s refuted Beale's economic causation by demonstrating that Northern businessmen were widely divergent on monetary or tariff policy, and seldom paid attention to Reconstruction issues. ^[47]

In the 1960s, neoabolitionist historians emerged, led by John Hope Franklin, Kenneth Stampp and Eric Foner. Strongly aligned with the Civil Rights Movement, they rejected the Dunning school and found a great deal to praise in Radical Reconstruction. The primary advocate of this view, Eric Foner, argued that it was never truly completed, and that a Second Reconstruction was needed in the late 20th century to complete the goal of full equality for African-Americans. The neo-abolitionists followed the revisionists in minimizing or the corruption and waste created by Republican state governments, saying it was no worse than Tweed's Ring in New York City. ^[48] Instead they emphasized that poor treatment of Freedmen was a worse scandal and a grave corruption of America's republican ideals. They argued that the real tragedy of Reconstruction was not that it failed because blacks were incapable of governing, but that it failed because the civil rights and equalities granted during this period were but a passing, temporary development. These rights were suspended in the South from the 1880s through 1964, but were restored by the Civil Rights Movement that is sometimes referred to as the "Second Reconstruction."

Significant dates