9. The Ordealof Reconstruction
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in theright as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish thework we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him whoshall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphan, to do allwhich may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace amongourselves and with all nations.
--ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1865
CONTENTS:
- The Problems of Peace
- Radical Reconstruction of the South
- Undoing Reconstruction
1. The Problems of Peace
Questions: As you read, note items in bold.
- What problems—both practical and attitudinal—confronted the defeated South?
- Note the various ways freedmen responded to their new condition of freedom. What role did the Freedmen’s Bureau play? Assess its successes and failures.
- Why was Andrew Johnson the “wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time?”
- Contrast “Presidential Reconstruction” with the ideas proposed by Congress. Contrast the perspectives of moderate vs. radical Republicans.
The battle was done, the buglers silent. Bonewearyand bloodied, the American people,
North and South, now faced the staggering challengesof peace. Four questions loomed large. Howwould the South, physically devastated by war andsocially revolutionized by emancipation, be rebuilt?How would the liberated blacks fare as free men andwomen? How would the Southern states be reintegratedinto the Union? And who would direct theprocess of Reconstruction—the Southern statesthemselves, the president, or Congress?
Other questions also clamored for answers. Whatshould be done with the captured Confederate ringleaders,all of whom were liable to charges of treason?During the war a popular Northern song hadbeen “Hang Jeff Davis to a Sour Apple Tree.” Davis was arrested and imprisoned for two years. But he and his fellow“conspirators” were finally released, partly becausethe odds were that no Virginia jury would convictthem. All rebel leaders were finally pardoned byPresident Johnson as sort of a Christmas present in
1868. But Congress did not remove all remainingcivil disabilities until thirty years later and onlyposthumously restored Davis’s citizenship morethan a century later.
The war ravaged the South’s economic and itssocial structure. The “moonlight-and magnolia” OldSouth, largely imaginary in any case, had forevergone with the wind.
Handsome cities such asCharleston and Richmond, were rubble-strewn andweed-choked. Economic life had creaked to a halt. Banks andbusiness houses had locked their doors, ruined byrunaway inflation. Factories were smokeless, silent,dismantled. The transportation system had brokendown completely. Before the war five different railroadlines had converged on Columbia, South Carolina;now the nearest connected track was twenty-ninemiles away.
Agriculture—the economic lifeblood of theSouth—was almost hopelessly crippled. Cotton fields now yielded a lush harvest of nothing butgreen weeds. The slave-labor system had collapsed,seed was scarce, and livestock had been driven off byplundering Yankees. Not until 1870 didthe seceded states produce as large a cotton crop as
that of the fateful year 1860, and much of that yieldcame from new acreage in the Southwest.The princely planter aristocrats were humbledby the war—at least temporarily. They faced charred and gutted mansions,lost investments, and almost worthless land. Theirinvestments of more than $2 billion in slaves, theirprimary form of wealth, had evaporated withemancipation.
Many whiteSoutherners remained dangerously defiant. Theycursed the “damn-yankees” and spoke of “your government”in Washington, instead of “our government.”Conscious ofno crime, these former Confederates continued tobelieve that their view of secession was correct andthat the “lost cause” was still a just war. Such attitudes boded ill for the prospects of painlesslybinding up the Republic’s wounds.
Freedmen Define Freedom
Confusion abounded in the still-smoldering Southabout the precise meaning of “freedom” for blacks.Emancipation took effect haltingly and unevenly indifferent parts of the conquered Confederacy. AsUnion armies marched in and out of various localities,many blacks found themselves emancipatedand then re-enslaved.
Some planters resisted emancipation legalistically, stubbornly protesting that slavery was
lawful until state legislatures or the Supreme Courtdeclared otherwise. For many slaves the shackles ofbondage were not struck off in a single mighty blow;long-suffering blacks often had to wrench free oftheir chains link by link.
Prodded by the bayonets of Yankee armies ofoccupation, all masters were eventually forced torecognize their slaves’ permanent freedom. Theonce-commanding planter would assemble his formerhuman chattels in front of the porch of the “bighouse” and announce their liberty. Though someblacks initially responded to news of their emancipationwith suspicion and uncertainty, they sooncelebrated their newfound freedom.
Tens of thousands of emancipated blacks tookto the roads, some to test their freedom, others tosearch for long-lost spouses, parents, and children.Emancipation thus strengthened the black family,and many newly freed men and women formalized
“slave marriages” for personal and pragmatic reasons,including the desire to make their childrenlegal heirs. Other blacks left their former masters towork in towns and cities, where existing black communitiesprovided protection and mutual assistance.
Whole communities sometimes movedtogether in search of opportunity. From 1878 to
1880, some twenty-five thousand blacks fromLouisiana, Texas, and Mississippi surged in a massexodus to Kansas.
The church became the focus of black community life in the years following emancipation. Asslaves, blacks had worshiped alongside whites, butnow they formed their own churches pastored bytheir own ministers. The black churches grewrobustly. The 150,000-member black BaptistChurchof 1850 reached 500,000 by 1870, while the AfricanMethodist Episcopal Church quadrupled in size in the first decade afteremancipation. These churches formed the bedrockof black community life, and they soon gave rise toother benevolent, fraternal, and mutual aid societies.All these organizations helped blacks protecttheir newly won freedom.
Emancipation also meant education for manyblacks. Learning to read and write had been a privilegegenerally denied to them under slavery. Freedmenwasted no time establishing societies forself-improvement, which undertook to raise fundsto purchase land, build schoolhouses, and hireteachers. Southernblacks soon found, however, that the demand outstrippedthe supply of qualified black teachers. Theyaccepted the aid of Northern white women sent bythe American Missionary Association, who volunteeredtheir services as teachers. They also turned tothe federal government for help. The freed blackswere going to need all the friends—and the power— they could muster in Washington.
The Freedmen’s Bureau
Abolitionists had long preached that slavery was adegrading institution. Now the emancipators werefaced with the brutal reality that the freedmen wereoverwhelmingly unskilled, unlettered, withoutproperty or money, and with scant knowledge ofhow to survive as free people. To cope with thisproblem throughout the conquered South, Congresscreated the Freedmen’s Bureau in1865.On paper at least, the bureau was intended tobe a kind of primitive welfare agency. It was to providefood, clothing, medical care, and educationboth to freedmen and to white refugees. Headingthe bureau was a warmly sympathetic friend of theblacks, Union general Oliver O. Howard, who laterfounded and served as president of HowardUniversityin Washington, D.C.
The bureau achieved its greatest successes ineducation. It taught an estimated 200,000 blackshow to read. But in other areas, the bureau’s accomplishmentswere meager—or even mischievous. Althoughthe bureau was authorized to settle formerslaves on forty-acre tracts confiscated from the Confederates,little land actually made it into blacks’hands. Instead local administrators often collaboratedwith planters in expelling blacks from townsand cajoling them into signing labor contracts towork for their former masters. Still, the white Southresented the bureau as a meddlesome federal interloperthat threatened to upset white racial dominance.President Andrew Johnson, who shared thewhite-supremacist views of most white Southerners,repeatedly tried to kill it, and it expired in 1872.
Northern view of the Freedmen’s Bureau
Andrew Johnson
Few presidents have ever been faced with a moreperplexing sea of troubles than that confrontingAndrew Johnson. What manner of man was this man from Tennesseenow chief executive by virtue of the bullet that killedLincoln?
No citizen, not even Lincoln, has ever reachedthe White House from humbler beginnings. Born toimpoverished parents in North Carolina and earlyorphaned, Johnson never attended school but wasapprenticed to a tailor at age ten. Ambitious to getahead, he taught himself to read, and later his wifetaught him to write and do simple arithmetic. Elected to Congress, he attracted much favorableattention in the North (but not the South) whenhe refused to secede with his own state. After Tennesseewas partially “redeemed” by Union armies,he was appointed war governor and served courageously
in an atmosphere of danger.
Political exigency next thrust Johnson into thevice presidency. Lincoln’s Union party in 1864 neededto attract support from the War Democrats and otherpro-Southern elements, and Johnson, a Democrat,seemed to be the ideal man. Unfortunately, heappeared at the vice-presidential inaugural ceremoniesthe following March in a scandalous condition.
He had recently been afflicted with typhoidfever, and although not known as a heavy drinker, hewas urged by his friends to take a stiff bracer ofwhiskey. This he did—with unfortunate results.
Johnson was intelligent, able,forceful, and gifted with homespun honesty. Steadfastlydevoted to duty and to the people, he was adogmatic champion of states’ rights and the Constitution.He would often present a copy of the documentto visitors, and he was buried with one as apillow.Yet the manwas a misfit. ASoutherner who did not understand the North, aTennessean who had earned the distrust of theSouth, a Democrat who had never been accepted bythe Republicans, a president who had never beenelected to the office, he was not at home in a RepublicanWhite House. Hotheaded, contentious, andstubborn, he was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. A Reconstruction policy devisedby angels might well have failed in his tactlesshands.
Presidential Reconstruction
Even before the shooting war had ended, the politicalwar over Reconstruction had begun. AbrahamLincoln believed that the Southern states had never legally withdrawn from the Union. Their formalrestoration to the Union would therefore be relativelysimple. Accordingly, Lincoln in 1863 proclaimedhis “10 percent” Reconstruction plan. Itdecreed that a state could be reintegrated into theUnion when 10 percent of its voters in the presidentialelection of 1860 had taken an oath of allegianceto the United States and pledged to abide by emancipation.
The next step would be formal erection ofa state government. Lincoln would then recognizethe purified regime.Lincoln’s proclamation provoked a sharp reaction
in Congress, where Republicans feared therestoration of the planter aristocracy to power andthe possible re-enslavement of the blacks. Republicanstherefore rammed through Congress in 1864the Wade-Davis Bill. It required that 50 percent of astate’s voters take the oath of allegiance anddemanded stronger safeguards for emancipationthan Lincoln’s as the price of readmission. Lincoln“pocket-vetoed” this bill by refusing to sign it after
Congress had adjourned.
Republicans were outraged.They refused to seat delegates from Louisianaafter that state had reorganized its government inaccordance with Lincoln’s 10 percent plan in 1864.The controversy surrounding the Wade-Davis Billhad revealed deep differences between the presidentand Congress. Unlike Lincoln, many in Congressinsisted that the seceders had indeed left the Unionandhad therefore forfeited all their rights. They could bereadmitted only as “conquered provinces” on suchconditions as Congress should decree.
This episode further revealed differencesamong Republicans. Two factions were emerging.The majority moderate group tended to agree withLincoln that the seceded states should be restoredto the Union as simply and swiftly as reasonable—though on Congress’s terms, not the president’s. Theminority radical group believed that the Southshould atone more painfully for its sins. Before theSouth should be restored, the radicals wanted itssocial structure uprooted, the haughty planterspunished, and the newly emancipated blacks protectedby federal power.
Johnson agreedwith Lincoln that the seceded states had neverlegally been outside the Union. Thus he quicklyrecognized several of Lincoln’s 10 percent governments,and on May 29, 1865, he issued hisown Reconstruction proclamation. It disfranchisedcertain leading Confederates, thoughthey might petition him for personal pardons. Itcalled for special state conventions, which wererequired to repeal the ordinances of secession,repudiate all Confederate debts, and ratify the slave-freeingThirteenth Amendment. States that compliedwith these conditions, Johnson declared,would be swiftly readmitted to the Union.
Johnson grantedpardons in abundance. Bolstered by the politicalresurrection of the planter elite, the recently rebelliousstates moved rapidly in the second half of 1865to organize governments. But as the pattern of thenew governments became clear, Republicans of allstripes grew furious.
2. Radical Reconstruction of the South
Questions:As you read, note the items in bold.
- Evaluate the purpose and impact of the Black Codes.
- Why did Northern politicians fear the return of the South to Congress?
- What were the provisions of the 14th Amendment and how did it become an issue between North and South?
- Contrast the aims of the moderate and radical Republicans. In the short term, whose plan for Reconstruction won. In the longer term, did this vision prevail?
- What were the short-term gains for blacks under radical Reconstruction?
- Assess the performance of the radically reconstructed governments of the South.
- What motivated the impeachment of Johnson? Why was the not-guilty verdict an important precedent?
Among the first acts of the new Southern regimeswas the passage of the iron-toothedBlack Codes. These laws were designed toregulate the affairs of the emancipated blacks,
much as the slave statutes had done in pre–Civil Wardays. Mississippi passed the first such law inNovember 1865, and other Southern states soon followedsuit. The Black Codes varied in severity fromstate to state (Mississippi’s was the harshest andGeorgia’s the most lenient), but they had much incommon. The Black Codes aimed, first of all, toensure a stable and subservient labor force.
Dire penalties were therefore imposed by thecodes on blacks who “jumped” their labor contracts,which usually committed them to work for the sameemployer for one year, and generally at pittancewages. Violators could be made to forfeit backwages or could be forcibly dragged back to work bya paid “Negro-catcher.” In Mississippi the captured
freedmen could be fined and then hired out to paytheir fines—an arrangement that closely resembledslavery itself.
The codes also sought to restore as nearly aspossible the pre-emancipation system of race relations.Freedom was legally recognized, as weresome other privileges, such as the right to marry.But all the codes forbade a black to serve on a jury;some even barred blacks from renting or leasingland. A black could be punished for “idleness” bybeing sentenced to work on a chain gang. Nowherewere blacks allowed to vote.
The worstfeatures of the Black Codes would eventually berepealed, but their revocation could not by itself lift the liberated blacks into economic independence.Lacking capital, and with little to offer but theirlabor, thousands of impoverished former slavesslipped into the status of sharecropper farmers. Luckless sharecroppersgradually sank into a morass of virtual peonage andremained there for generations. Formerly slaves tomasters, countless blacks as well as poorer whites ineffect became slaves to the soil and to their creditors.
The Black Codes made an ugly impression inthe North. If the former slaves were being re-enslaved,people asked one another, had not the war been in vain? Had theNorth really won the war?
Congressional ReconstructionThese questions grew more insistent when the congressionaldelegations from the newly reconstitutedSouthern states presented themselves in the Capitolin December 1865. To the shock and disgust of theRepublicans, many former Confederate leaderswere on hand to claim their seats.
The appearance of these ex-rebels was a naturalbut costly blunder. Voters of the South, seeking ablerepresentatives, had turned instinctively to theirexperienced statesmen. But most of the Southernleaders were tainted by active association with the“lost cause.” Among them were four former Confederategenerals, five colonels, and various members
of the Richmond cabinet and Congress. Worst of all, it included AlexanderStephens, ex–vice president of the Confederacy, stillunder indictment for treason.