The Reconstruction period is comparatively ignored, when judged
by how much interest there is in other periods in American History like the
Civil War upon which massive amounts of books have been and continue to be
written. The Reconstruction was the
struggle of the American Republic to once again re-integrate the South. A
vicious war was fought in which hundreds of thousands were killed in battle and
many more wounded as well. The North was vindictive and wanted to punish the
South for the rebellion. The South wanted to return to the pre-war economic and
political system. They agreed to relieve the Black man from involuntary
servitude. They concurred with President Johnson (1865-1868) that reunion should
be simple. The Southerner should once again proclaim allegiance to the
Constitution and concede the destruction of institution of slavery. And all
would be good. The economic system would remain same as it was just without
involuntary servitude and the Southerner would begin to govern as he saw fit.
The states largely sovereign and retaining a measure of autonomy, leaving the
Federal government the powers delimited in the Constitution.
Thus soon after the surrender in the Spring of 1865, the
Southerner setup governments, proclaimed allegiance to the Federal government
and legislated laws designed to consign the black to the plantation system: the
plantation system that was the back bone of the economy. These laws were called
the Black Codes. The Southerner was content that the Freedman had been granted
right to own property, inherit, sit on a jury. The idea that the Freedman was a
social equal was abhorrent to him, something unthinkable. The idea that you
would invite the Freedman into your house to have social intercourse or worse
yet the Freedman could consort with his daughter, would put the Southerner into
apoplexy. Northern attitudes were not all that more different, it must be
noted.
The Black codes, instituted just after the Civil War, included
vagrancy laws for blacks who couldn’t demonstrate they were employed, whereby
they would be consigned to convict leasing then they might find themselves
back on the plantation. These laws required that Blacks sign Annual labor
contracts and present them to authorities, at the risk of vagrancy. A special
tax was levied on Blacks, left unpaid it placed the black in a legal state of
vagrancy. Incidentally, Mississippi, Kentucky and Delaware first rejected the
13th Amendment prohibiting slavery. In Mississippi blacks were
restricted to being only able to rent land within the city. The significance of
these laws was to consign the Freedman back to a state of involuntary
servitude.
Once the North was apprised of the Southern disposition
towards the Freedman, it immediately saw these actions as a betrayal of a
bloody, terrible Civil War, where hundreds of thousands died. The Southerner continued a pre-War
understanding, claiming sovereignty of the states; meaning the Federal
government should have little purview over the political compact of any
particular state. In response the North enacted the 14th Amendment
guaranteeing Civil Rights to the citizens of each state, the 15th
Amendment granting voting rights to Blacks without regard to race, color or
previous condition of servitude. The Freedman’s Bureau, hated by the White
Southerner, was extended in 1866, as well. This provided protection, aid and
education among other things to the Freedman. The White Southerner argued it
fostered idleness and shiftlessness and fomented an overly aggressive Negro.
The Southerner saw the largely illiterate Freedman as in no
condition to exercise the suffrage nor to lead politically. They were largely
correct, but the backward state of the Freedman was due to the Southerner
keeping them in a state of ignorance, poverty and servitude that was slavery.
It could be surmised that a cultured black slave was not the most advantageous
thing to be in Ante-Bellum South.
The Republican governments were universally corrupt.
Practicing jobbery, selling off favors, funding large bond issues to benefit
political allies, meant to be paid off by the White disenfranchised taxpayer.
Taxes largely assessed on land rose dramatically in multiples. Large debt and
deficits were run up by these states. In the Ante-Bellum political system the
Planters kept taxation on land minimal. Funding Public schools was deemed an
expensive burden. Once the Republicans began to govern Public Schools were
established, although Whites refused to be educated with the Black, deemed
their brutish, social inferiors. The White Southerner was soured with Republican rule for a century; even the Pro-Union Whigs went over to the Conservative/Democrats. The White Southerner was convinced that the Radical reform of suffrage to Blacks was a contrivance to insure Republican rule over the nation.
The White Southern Confederate sympathizer was disenfranchised,
under the Iron Clad oath. The Iron Clad Oath insisted the voter had never given
help or granted assistance to the Rebellion, the Confederacy, which would
encompass virtually all White males in the South. This was far harsher standard
than the 14th Amendment which excluded the political and military
leadership of the Confederacy.
The Federal military, at one point in time after the Civil
War composed of enlisted Black regiments, gave a measure of protection to the
Freedman, from the unremitting hostility of the White. The militarized White
supporter of the Confederacy had faced death and injury in the Civil War, then
came home to live in a country in which the Black could lord over them. There
were some 100,000 Black soldiers in the South shortly after the war. In South
Carolina these Black regiments demonstrated their predominance on occasion, marching
down Main Street driving the White citizens off the side walk. These would
infuriate the White Southerner, the White Southerner fully militarized that had
fought the North in an exhausting war for four years until conquered in a
campaign of total war. Hostility was such these Black regiments were disbanded eventually.
The pace and depth of the attempt at Reconstruction varied
for each state. However it all finished the same with Blacks disenfranchised. The
White southerner struck back violently at first after the Civil War, then more sophisticated political methods were employed not to encounter the wrath of the North. The Ku Klux Klan and
the Knights of the White Camelia wrecked terror on the Black population for a
brief period in the late 1860s. The Black population no longer created havoc. Later in South Carolina in 1870’s and
elsewhere the Southerner organized himself in armed political groups wearing
Red Shirts. They would show up at Republican rallies, largely Black and insist
equal time. Later in the Century rabid racism was used in a strange concoction
to rally an all-White Populism in the late Nineteenth Century. The Black soil
conservatives (Democrats), heir of Plantation political sensibilities, used Black votes
either paid for or fraudulently obtained to secure political hegemony. In response by excluding Blacks a block of White votes was formed that allowed the
Progressives to gain power at the turn of the next century. See the Strange Case of Jim Crow by C. Vann
Woodward for the interesting story how the South became segregated. Woodrow Wilson, sympathetic to Southern Progressives,
a friend of Thomas Dixon who inspired Birth
of a Nation, waged a campaign of segregation in the Federal government once
he became President. Wilson went to John Hopkins University with his friend, Thomas Dixon, author of Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Klu Klux Klan. It’s odd how academics rate his Presidency so high.
Of all the tragedies
of the Southern race relations was the obliviousness of the fact in a
significant way the American Black is a cousin to the White Southerner. Your
cousin has 25% of the genes you do. Geneticists estimate the Afro-American is
something like 30% Caucasian. Blacks today when they take the now popular DNA
tests discover much to their shock they might be 50% or more European. In Ante-Bellum
South there really had been a large of measure racial admixture, subsequently deemed
so abhorrent to the White. The Supreme Court in 1967 finally struck down the
anti-miscegenation laws of State of Virginia. This of course was an ironic joke
based on the ample mixing of races in the Ante-Bellum South. The Southern Overseer callously used his
position of authority to extract sexual favors. In other cases female chattel might became a recipient of the Plantation owner’s attentions, frustrated with the
mother of his children who refused to once again risk the perils of child birth.
The Southerner should have known the closeness of relation to his Black servant,
but treated the Black as nearly a sub-species. The new Freedman, who was left
ignorant and infantile, was hardly in position to run a state; but that was due
to the condition in which they were subjected in Ante-Bellum South for
generations; left in a condition of ignorance and poverty.
The depth of the notions of racial superiority can be weighed by the following quote:
The Delaware legislature resolved in 1866, “The
immutable laws of God have affixed upon the brow of the white races the
ineffaceable stamp of superiority, and that all attempts to elevate the negro
to a social or political equality of the white man is futile and subversive of
the ends and aims of the which the American Government was established.”
I suspect the newly disseminated ideas of Darwin (Origin of
the Species, 1859) had a significant impact on this type of thinking, as well.
The same kind of thinking that could lead an entire German political party
several decades later to surmise an Eastern European Slav was racially inferior;
someone, whose physical characteristics appeared virtually identical to the German
individual across the Polish border.
Southerners complaints of the Freedman were plentiful. There
was enough report by the White Southerner of mis-behavior of the Freedman to grant
credence to it being widespread. The Freedman left the Plantation for a life of
freedom and largely undisciplined. The Freedman was not the submissive
Step-n-fetch-it portrayed in early 20th Century cinema; he was loath
to take instruction. But previously on the Ante-Bellum plantation the Black
slave was brutalized into submission and the fruits of his labor stolen from
him and was excluded from any profitable independent opportunities. If you
wanted to dis-incentivize someone against industry and entrepreneurial
activities, this is the system. Release
from that system tended toward idleness, lawlessness, criminality and mischief.
Thievery from such things as vegetable gardens and livestock were common. There were mysterious fires as well that
burned down house and barn.
One attempt to recover order was the establishment of the
Klu Klux Klan that did so much to terrorize the Freedman. The economy was in
ruin from war and the loss of the free labor of millions of Blacks. The White
Southern, impoverished and disenfranchised saw their all too violent activities
as justifiable attempt to restore order and suppress the power of the Freedmen
and their Freedman Bureau and Union and Loyal Leagues. The terror restored
order but also enlisted a response from the North in the enactment of the
Enforcement acts 1870 to 1871. The Enforcement acts authorized the use of the
Army to combat these para-legal groups. Military Districts were set up in
authority above the state governments. The
KKK was suppressed, as a result.
The racial violence in the post-Civil War is shocking. The
KKK is well known but actually operated only for a short while; it was never
centralized and quickly became infested with criminal elements detached from
the original intentions at least as described by the good Southerner. Overt
expressions of it were suppressed by the Federal military in the early 1870’s.
The KKK aside, there were out breaks of violence and additional violent
political movements in the Reconstruction period.
The riots in Memphis in May, 1866 and New Orleans in July
saw dozens of Freedmen killed and driven away. In Louisiana some 1,081,
virtually all, Blacks were killed between April and November 1868 in Louisiana
in political violence. Later in the 1875-1876 Red Shirts acted as a
paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party in Mississippi and South Carolina. They broke up Republican meetings,
disrupted their organizing, and intimidated black voters at the polls.
During
Reconstruction 1867-1877 there were several Radical administrations of course, that had a large number of Black representatives in the Legislatures, supported
by the Federal Military districts that might incorporate disenfranchisement of White Southerner
under the Iron Clad oaths. Plus there was a great deal of attempts at black voter suppression that required Federal intervention to counter act them. National politics ultimately intervened to take the focus off the plight of the Black. The sabotage of the Supreme Court insured that Blacks in America would remain a race apart and denied opportunity.
Republicans
were insistent on the suffrage for Blacks. Ultimately the Republicans didn’t
deliver on a significant improvement in the economic situation of the Freedman.
The idea of 40 acres and a mule was still born, despite Pennsylvania Senator
Thaddeus Stevens’s support. Even the suffrage was taken away eventually.
An astonishingly huge
200,000,000 acres were given to the rail roads. 1862 Homestead Act eventually
gave away some 270,000,000 acres. 70,000 Plantation owners were said to have
owned over 300,000,000 acres in the South. Yet, nothing was granted to the Freedman,
left destitute and dependent on the Plantation for work. Nonetheless, the idea that
land could be simply confiscated was a violation of property rights guaranteed
by the Constitution. In contrast Radical Senator Thaddeus
Stevens deemed the South a conquered province, not rebellious States that had
NO right to succeed. Confiscation of the Planters, initiators of the Rebellion,
was right and proper. Yet if a State couldn’t succeed then how could it lose
its status as one, others retorted. Land grants to Blacks were left a fantasy.
Great blame must be laid on the Supreme Court, much revered
in today’s society as a champion of social progress, for the crippling of the
Civil Rights Legislation passed in the Reconstruction period. In 1876 Supreme Court
pontificated in U.S vs. Cruishank that the Federal Enforcement Acts met to protect
the Freedman were void. This was in
response to the Easter Sunday April 13, 1873 Colfax, Louisiana massacre, where
over a hundred Blacks were murdered as they convened in the Colfax Court house.
Arrests of the perpetrators were made under these same Enforcement Acts. The
convictions were annulled under this ruling.
Later in 1883 the provisions of the 1875 Civil Rights
legislation, banning discrimination in public venues like hotels and
restaurants, were deemed Unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruled from its
Olympian wisdom that The 14th Amendment pertained only to the actions
of the States NOT to individuals within the States, thus opening the way to
legalized segregation.
A democratic system in which in most cases Whites were in
the majority didn’t induce a situation in which great social renovations could
be allowed that would advantage the minority Black. Neither would a government
of limits and laws allow for social revolution. Sadly, today we have a system
that places the inner city Black in a state of dependency; schools failing and
families in disarray and drugs and crime rampant. I can only wonder if a
Radical plan of land distribution had been attempted and absent the Supreme
Courts gutting of the 14th Amendment and the Reconstruction Civil
Rights Laws, the racial divisions and social division could have been avoided. But
it likely would have taken a military regime decades to accomplish it against
virulent opposition of the Southern White.
