History Review December 2009 | Issue: 65 | Words: 2990 | Author: Spiller, John
African Americans After the Civil War
John Spiller surveys race relations in the United States during Reconstruction and constructs a balance sheet.
Introduction
Before 1861 the vast majority of African Americans had been slaves and had no legal rights of which to speak. The formal abolition of slavery in 1865 was clearly a landmark in the progress of black Americans, but once freed they wanted land, education, and the vote, essentially in that order. Reconstruction and the aftermath undoubtedly brought gains for them (although some were short-lived), which can be broken down into economic, social/legal and political areas.
Economic Progress
In January 1865 an early attempt by General Sherman to redistribute 400,000 acres of abandoned rice plantations to African Americans was abruptly curtailed by President Johnson, and the self-sufficient African American community established under Tunis Campbell’s leadership on St Catherine’s Island, Georgia, also had to give up their land to its former owner in January 1866. Economic progress for African Americans would be slow, especially given that cotton remained the biggest export of the USA after the war, which meant that blacks needed to be kept in the field somehow. Most former slaves became wage-earning labourers and tenants. Various forms of sharecropping, share-renting, and crop-lien systems ensured that black tenants and croppers remained permanently in debt, and rarely got the chance to actually own their own land. When the price of cotton fell by nearly 50 per cent, between 1872 and 1877, the southern economy remained impoverished, and African Americans remained a deprived group within that context.
Some freedmen did obtain land in the west offered by the Homestead Act of 1862 which provided 160-acre plots to settlers if they stayed on it for five years, while the Southern Homestead Act (1866) set aside 44 million acres in five Southern states, handed out to about 4,000 former slaves. The land itself was often of poor quality, with former slaves lacking the capital to invest in equipment and seed. There were, however, some success stories. A community was established at Davis Bend in Mississippi where Benjamin Montgomery, a former slave and plantation manager of Jeff Davis’s brother Joseph, had bought two plantations from his former master. In the 1870s the ‘Exoduster’ movement helped former slaves in search of new land. By 1874 former slave Benjamin Singleton had formed the Edgefield Real Estate and Homestead Association in Tennessee which encouraged and helped thousands of blacks (frustrated at being unable to obtain land in the South) to migrate to the best locations for settlement in Kansas in the late 1870s, albeit with some mixed results.
A kind of equality in the workplace was achieved in the military arena. By the end of the war 186,000 black soldiers and sailors (134,000 of whom had been recruited in slave states) had served in Union forces. In 1877 Henry Flipper became the first black man to graduate from West Point, and following the war black regiments (‘Buffalo Soldiers’) in the 9th and the 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry had been set up. Black historian Rayford Logan wrote of the pride that black families took in their exploits, such as their contribution to the victory at San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War, although ironically the black cavalry regiments in particular were also used out West in the continued subjugation of Native Americans, another oppressed minority.
In 1881 Booker T. Washington took charge of the Tuskegee Negro Normal Institute where he concentrated on providing black boys with practical skills in farming. By appearing to accept the inferior lot of the black person and segregation, rather than campaigning for political rights, Washington attracted much investment from white benefactors, including the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Washington argued that Reconstruction had failed in terms of creating a racial democracy because it had emphasised political and civil rights rather than concentrating on economic issues and self-determination. In 1895 in his ‘Atlanta Compromise’ speech, he reassured his audience that African Americans would be ‘patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful’. He also said: ‘It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top’, and that in the purely social arena blacks and whites could be ‘as separate as the fingers’. Such utterances led to his being consulted by presidents Roosevelt and Taft, but criticised by black radicals such as W.E.B. Du Bois who disliked Washington’s ‘accommodationist’ approach. By 1900, however, despite Washington’s stance, blacks had also entered the professions and become doctors, teachers, writers and ministers.
Maldwyn Jones maintains that substantial improvements in the living standards of African Americans took place in the 50 years after the war, as well as a reduction in mortality rates, a dramatic rise in black per capita agricultural income, an increase in land ownership (by 1910, 20 per cent of black farmers owned their land,) and a growth in black businesses with the greatest advances being in areas which catered for black customers who were discriminated against by white enterprises, such as banking and insurance, shops and undertakers.
Social and Legal Progress
Soon after the war, the Southern states introduced the so-called ‘Black Codes’, a series of laws which were effectively aimed at keeping former slaves in a subordinate position by restricting their legal status, not allowing them to vote or hold office, and introducing apprenticeship and vagrancy rules. Within a year, however, the Black Codes had been suspended by federal officials.
Violence against blacks in the immediate postwar period was also endemic, Eric Foner estimating that in 1865 in the Shreveport area of Louisiana over 2,000 African Americans were killed, as fears of black uprisings spread in the South. In May 1866, in Memphis, a collision between two carriages resulted in rioting in which 46 blacks died and five black women were raped by white civilians and the police. 90 houses in the black shantytown were burned, 12 schools, and four churches. In 1866 the ‘Ku Klux Klan’ was established in Tennessee. It possibly contained over half a million members at its peak, and aimed to intimidate blacks and white collaborators, and to limit blacks’ educational opportunities, economic progress, voting rights and their bearing of arms. Jack Dupree, black and politically active in Mississippi, who had spoken out in favour of equal rights, had his throat cut by the Klan and was disembowelled in front of his wife.
The Freedmen’s Bureau headed by Union General Oliver O. Howard, which had initially been set up in March 1865, did offer some hope to blacks after the war. Under Howard’s direction, the Bureau spent five million dollars on schools between 1865 and 1871. Despite there being one million Northern troops on Southern soil in May 1865, by autumn 1866 only 38,000 were left, which meant that Freedman’s Bureau officials became increasingly reliant on their own ability to persuade or to ‘do deals’ with local officials, to protect former slaves. A Democratic campaign poster from 1866 described the Freedmen’s Bureau as ‘an agency to keep the Negro in idleness at the expense of the white man’.
Despite such opposition the Freedmen’s Bureau co-ordinated the spending of 17 million dollars on setting up 100 hospitals and 4,000 schools in the immediate postwar years, as well as establishing the first black institutions of higher education. By 1876 there were 70,000 blacks at school in the South compared to none in 1860. In 1865 95 per cent of Southern blacks could not read nor write, in 1870 the figure was 81 per cent, and in 1890 it was still 64 per cent, with a shortage of schools and patchy attendance; but by 1876 a third of teaching staff in South Carolina’s black schools was black, a result of the setting up of black colleges. By 1900 75 such colleges existed in the South. A reflection of the increased literacy among blacks is the fact that by 1900 150 black newspapers existed in the country.
The growth of independent black churches, which set up law courts and provided schools and social activities, is another good example of black progress. In 1867 the first racially-mixed jury in the South was impanelled to hear the charges against Jefferson Davis, though the case never came to trial, and blacks were allowed to marry legally, have their own names, and give evidence in court.
The panic of 1873, however, had a damaging effect on the Southern economy with the price of cotton falling by half, and Bourbon Democrat ‘redeemers’ started to win seats on southern state legislatures. Some leading Radical Republicans (such as Thaddeus Stevens in August 1868) died, and the political will to enforce Reconstruction at the barrel of a gun waned. In September White League members seized the Republican-run legislature in New Orleans but the next day Grant ordered the army to occupy the city. Nevertheless white redeemers sensed the changing mood in the north, and in 1874 Democrats devised the Mississippi Plan to push the remaining scalawags into the Democrat party or clubs and persuade blacks to vote Democrat, or prevent them from voting. Charles Caldwell, the first black man to be found not guilty by an all-white jury of the murder of a white man, became a member of the Mississippi state senate but was shot over 30 times by whites and killed near Clinton on Christmas day 1875. Rifle clubs and semi-military groups marched openly. Politically-active blacks were refused jobs, charged higher prices in shops and denied tenancies. In the Clinton Massacre of September 1875 another 20 blacks were killed. Grant told black politician John Roy Lynch that if he had intervened in Mississippi following the New Orleans incident, the Republicans would have lost the White House. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 guaranteeing equal rights in public places (except in schools) was never enforced and Grant became increasingly reluctant to use the Force Acts.
White supremacist groups, such as the ‘Knights of the White Camellia’ and ‘the Red Shirts’, often accused black men of rape before they lynched them. Between 1880 and 1940 it is estimated that 4,000 died this way, and it was not until 1918 that a Southern white was convicted for his part in a lynching. In 1892 Ida Wells published her exposé of Memphis lynchings but was forced out of the area as a result. In April 1899 more than 2,000 white Georgians, some having come by train, watched the lynching of Sam Hose near the town of Newman. His guilt had not been proven in court, but his burnt and dismembered remains were displayed in a shop window. It is estimated that 184 blacks were lynched in 1885, and in 1915 the figure was still as high as 69. By 1908 the trade in postcards depicting lynching scenes was so popular that the US postmaster-general banned them from the mail; but it did not stop the lynchings.
Decisions of the Supreme Court unfortunately served to undermine the social equality which the 14th Amendment and Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 had sought to achieve. In the 1873 Slaughterhouse cases the Supreme Court decreed that the ‘privileges and immunities’ clause of the 14th Amendment did not protect state citizenship rights which were so defined as to include all civil rights, but only the narrow group of rights flowing from national citizenship. In the 1875 case ‘US v Cruikshank’ the Court determined that the 14th Amendment protected the rights and privileges of the citizen only when they were infringed by the action of a state.
‘Jim Crow’ laws existed from the 1870s according to some, although others see the 1890s laws segregating railroad cars in New Orleans as the first genuine Jim Crow legislation. In 1896 Homer Plessy (an octoroon, i.e. having one eighth black ancestry) went to Court. In ‘Plessy v Ferguson’ the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana law requiring ‘separate but equal’ accommodation on the railways. An eight to one majority held that the 14th Amendment did not mandate social equality but only the literal ‘equal protection of the laws’. Blacks soon had their own ‘equal’ lunch counters, hotel rooms, bus seats, cemeteries, hospitals, park benches and water fountains. In Alabama ‘Jim Crow’ laws included the rule that no female white nurse should have to work in wards in which negro men were placed; Florida banned interracial marriage; Georgia stipulated the minimum distance between white and black amateur baseball fields. In 1898, in ‘Williams v Mississippi’, the Court upheld a state law requiring a literacy test for voting. In 1899 ‘separate but equal’ was officially extended to schools in ‘Cunningham v The Board of Education’.
Segregation tended to become the norm for most blacks in the South after Reconstruction, although African-American entertainers, musicians and writers seem to have been much more widely accepted. Scott Joplin, the son of a former slave, composed ragtime tunes, and the sheet music for the ‘Maple Leaf rag’ sold in large numbers at the turn of the century, although some writers such as Ernest Hogan contributed to the continued stereotyping of their race by writing songs such as ‘All Coons Look Alike to me’, a big hit in 1896. Sportsmen, however, seemed to face greater obstacles, with the first black major league baseball player, Jackie Robinson, not being appointed until 1947.
Political Progress
Immediately after the war, during ‘Presidential Reconstruction’, prospects did not look good for blacks hoping to win the vote. Andrew Johnson by December 1865 had fast-tracked back into the Union every southern state apart from Texas. These states had refused to enfranchise blacks, and in state and Congressional elections proceeded to vote for more than 60 prominent ex- Confederates, including Alexander Stephens, the former vice-president of the Confederacy.
The ‘radical’ backlash was not long in coming. With the backing of a majority of northern opinion which had turned against the South, Congress, when it reassembled for the first time since the end of the war in December 1865, refused to allow those who had been voted in by the Southern states to take their seats. Readmission of the former Confederate states would effectively have to start all over again. Johnson’s hostility towards granting civil rights to blacks pushed many moderates into the hands of the Radicals who were able to gain the two-thirds majority needed to re-pass civil rights laws over Johnson’s veto. The subsequent impeachment failed to remove him from the presidency by one vote, but it meant that Congressional- style reconstruction had effectively won the day.
The South, apart from Tennessee (which had ratified the 14th Amendment and was readmitted to the Union in 1866), was divided up into five military districts and run by Union generals whose troops would ensure that elections were conducted ‘fairly’. Thousands of southern whites were barred from voting and holding office, while the Union League often tampered with ballot boxes for blacks. Elections for the state conventions brought Republican victories in every Southern state, except Virginia.
In 1868 the 14th Amendment was ratified, giving blacks citizenship and providing penalties for any state which refused to allow them to vote. States did, however, find ways round the 14th Amendment, while lack of experience, education and organisation also conspired to keep blacks underrepresented. White leadership was also accepted to an extent with even the Republicans usually putting up white candidates, but in 1868 Robert Elliott a black carpetbagger who had studied at Eton College in England, trained in Law and was fluent in French and Spanish, went to Washington at the age of 26 as a congressman for South Carolina. In 1869 the first black diplomat Ebenezer Bassett was appointed minister to Haiti, which set a trend of appointing blacks as ministers to Haiti and Liberia. In the same year Abram Colby, one of Tunis Campbell’s black colleagues on the Georgia legislature, having turned down bribes from Democrats, was targeted by the Ku Klux Klan and nearly whipped to death. Despite a badly injured back and losing the use of his left hand he returned to the Georgia legislature and in 1871 testified before a Congressional committee. This sort of pressure forced President Grant to act and he took action in 1870/71 with three Force Acts (the first protected black voters from intimidation, the second authorised federal supervision of elections, and the third – or ‘Ku Klux Klan act’ – dealt with terrorism and allowed the use of martial law and suspension of habeas corpus). By the end of 1871 the Klan had effectively been suppressed.
Under Grant the 15th Amendment, specifically confirming the right of black men to vote, was ratified in 1870. Mississippi’s Hiram Revels became the first black Senator at Washington in 1870 by taking the old seat of Jefferson Davis, and by 1877 two blacks had won seats in the Senate and 15 in the Representatives. Between 1865 and 1877 about 70 black teachers and over 100 black ministers of religion entered politics, securing seats on state legislatures. Well over 600 blacks would sit on state legislatures during Reconstruction, ‘a stunning departure’ in American politics according to Eric Foner, who has also emphasized how more than 90 per cent of black officeholders during Reconstruction came from the South, with hundreds serving as local officials, sheriffs and JPs, as well as on school boards, juries, and councils.