Reconstructing the Nation 1865-1877

Shortly after the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, fell to Union troops in April 1865, an ex-slave, whose name is recorded only as "Cyrus," decided he would no longer work in the fields. Emma Mordecai, the mistress of Rosewood plantation where Cyrus lived, questioned him about his refusal. Cyrus responded with a radically new interpretation of the relationship between former slaves and their former masters. He rejected a regime under which " it seems like we 'uns do all the work and [only] gets a part." Now, he continued, "there ain't going to be no more Master and Mistress, Miss Emma. All is equal. I done hear it from the courthouse steps. . . . All the land belongs to the Yankees now, and they gonna divide it among the colored people. Besides, the kitchen of the big house is my share. I help build it."

Cyrus's eloquent response to Miss Emma raised a fundamental question -whether those who had "built" America would share in the fruits of their labor. Such questions would echo through not only the dozen years that followed the end of the Civil War but also the century and a quarter after that, from Reconstruction's end to the new millennium - the period covered in this volume of Who Built America? For those who begin the story in Volume 2, this prologue briefly summarizes some of the key developments in the dozen years following the end of the Civil War. It focuses particularly on matters of labor and politics and especially on three key events -Reconstruction, the Centennial celebration of 1876, and the great railroad strikes of 1877.

Reconstruction: The Second American Revolution

The South's defeat in 1865 settled two major debates-the nation was preserved and slavery was dead. But everything else was in doubt. Who would hold economic and political power in the South in the war's aftermath? How would the land be worked and how would labor be organized? What would freedom mean for the four million former slaves? The answers to these momentous questions would define the era known as Reconstruction.

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African Americans' unceasing efforts to secure economic, political, and familial rights made them central players in the Reconstruction drama. Ex-slaves expressed their newfound freedom in diverse ways, For some, it was as specific and personal as the decision to take a new name; for others, as fundamental as uniting their family in a single household. Freedom was dressing as one pleased, perhaps wearing a colorful shirt or hat. And it was also refusing to be deferential to one's former owner. Soon after the Confederacy's final defeat freedpeople in Richmond, Virginia, for example, held meetings without securing white permission, and they walked in Capitol Square, an area previously restricted to white residents, refusing to yield the sidewalks to approaching white men and women. Freedom also meant that thousands of freed slaves could travel unrestricted and search for loved ones sold away or displaced during the war's upheavals. Emancipation enabled these and other black Americans to formalize longstanding relationships, officially registering and solemnizing their marriages.

The first years after emancipation also saw a tremendous upsurge in African- American demands for education and control over their churches. Freedpeople built schools and hired black teachers. They also challenged white domination of biracial congregations and founded their own churches, such as the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. These independent churches became the moral and cultural center of African -American life, and their preachers -along with schoolteachers and ex-soldiers- emerged as community leaders. The churches often hosted black political meetings, including dozens of conventions, meetings, and rallies where freedmen raised demands for full civil equality.

The newly free Americans saw land ownership as the key to realizing their independence and ensuring their freedom. "Every colored man will be a slave, and feel himself a slave," one soldier argued, "until he can raise his own bale of cotton and put his own mark upon it and say this is mine." Many believed they were entitled to land in return for their years of unpaid labor, which had created the wealth of the cotton South and the industrialized North. They knew all too well that without land, they would remain fundamentally subservient to the economic power of their former owners.

Many southern blacks trusted the federal government, acting through the Freedmen's Bureau (which Congress had set up just before the end of the war), to help them achieve economic self-sufficiency. The bureau's nine hundred agents and officials, many of them idealistic Union army officers, did much to aid the freedpeople with education and medical care in the war's aftermath. And though the Freedmen's Bureau adopted extremely coercive labor policies throughout the South, the freedpeople continued to turn to bureau agents to protest brutality, harsh working conditions, and the hostility and inattention of local courts and police.

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The struggles over the meaning of emancipation generated constant conflicts between black and white southerners. The realities of daily life and the enduring power of white southerners set boundaries on black freedom. These boundaries were especially narrow in rural areas still dominated by whites, who reacted badly to any assertion of personal freedom by former slaves. During the first year of freedom, countless incidents of violence were directed against freed slaves for simply expressing their personal independence.

Plantation owners especially opposed lack southerners' efforts to secure land. Planters and freedpeople alike understood that black landownership would destroy white control of labor in the South and would lead to the collapse of the plantation economy. If even a few independent black farmers succeeded, concluded one Mississippi planter, "all the others will be dissatisfied with their wages no matter how good they may be and thus our whole labor system is bound to be upset." To maintain control, planters looked to their state governments. The struggle over the meaning and extent of freedom for African Americans would now shift to the political arena.

Presidential Reconstruction and Its Critics

By the end of 1865, state governments would once again be under the control of former supporters and leaders of the Confederacy. These men were able to reassert their dominance largely because of the lenient pardoning policies of President Andrew Johnson. Johnson, a tailor from Tennessee, had been the only southerner who chose to remain in his seat in the U.S. Senate after his home state seceded from the Union. His reward for that decision was selection as Lincoln's running mate in 1864, and he became president when Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865. As president, Johnson believed that only the planters possessed the experience, prestige, and power to "control" the volatile black population and that they were therefore the best hope for the South's future. In May 1865, he offered total amnesty to white southerners who would swear basic loyalty to the Union. He allowed the Confederate states to be rapidly readmitted to the Union, encouraging them to organize state elections and reestablish governments, a process completed in nearly all

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southern states by the fall of 1865. For Johnson, Reconstruction was now complete.

Many ex-Confederates were returned to office in the fall elections, and the new state governments immediately passed legislation favoring the interests of planters. Among them were the Black Codes, a series of rigid labor control laws defining the status of newly freed African Americans as landless agricultural laborers with no bargaining power and restricted mobility. A freedman found without "lawful employment," for example, could be arrested. The laws were an attempt to ensure that planters would have an ongoing immobile and dependent supply of cheap labor.

The Black Codes were never fully enforced, largely because labor was scarce throughout the South and African American workers and Freedmen's Bureau agents opposed the laws. Nonetheless, their passage enraged Radical Republicans, a group of congressmen whose political roots lay in the antebellum antislavery movement. Led by Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the Radicals sought a vast increase in federal power to obtain new rights for the freedpeople and to revolutionize social conditions in the South. Although Republicans held a three-to-one majority in Congress, most were moderates. But even they were profoundly disturbed by the Black Codes and by the restored power and influence of the exConfederate leaders who had passed these laws, In December 1865, moderates joined Radicals in refusing to seat the newly elected southern congressional representatives. This action initiated a confrontation with President Johnson and, in the process, transformed the meaning and nature of Reconstruction.

One of the first steps in this transformation occurred in early 1866, when Congress passed a civil rights bill that conferred U.S. citizenship on the freedpeople. This bill marked a dramatic break from the deeply rooted American tradition of states' rights and placed the federal government squarely on the side of extending citizenship and defending individual rights. President Johnson was outraged and vetoed the legislation as an unconstitutional infringement of states' rights. But the Republican Congress overrode Johnson's veto in April 1866, the first time in U.S. history that a major piece of legislation was passed over a president's objection. Three months later, Congress also overrode Johnson's veto of a bill to extend the life and power of the Freedmen's Bureau.

The Radicals in Congress sought an even more sweeping approach. Stevens and Sumner en-

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visioned not just civil rights for African Americans but a total transformation of southern society. Echoing the demands of freedpeople, Stevens called in 1866 for confiscating the land of the planters and distributing it among the ex-slaves. "The whole fabric of southern society must be changed," he proclaimed, "and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost." The best the Radicals could achieve, however, was the Fourteenth Amendment, which passed both houses of Congress in June 1866 and was then sent to the states for ratification. When finally approved in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment granted full citizenship to African Americans and prohibited states from denying them "equal protection of the laws." This was a stunning transformation of the constitutional balance of power.

President Johnson issued an appeal to southern legislatures to reject the new amendment. Encouraged by Johnson's position, all southern states but one (ironically, Tennessee) refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. The Union had won the war but now appeared to be losing the peace. The fall 1866 congressional elections thus became a referendum on the Fourteenth Amendment and on Johnson's opposition to extending Reconstruction. As voters considered the issues, increasing anti-black violence was reported throughout the South. In Memphis in May and in New Orleans in July, local authorities stood by or actively participated as white southerners slaughtered African Americans. In the wake of this racist brutality, Republicans scored a landslide victory in the November 1866 elections, and the biggest winners among them were the Radicals.

Radical Reconstruction

The Republican mandate encouraged the Radicals to present an even bolder agenda, which became known as Radical Reconstruction. The centerpiece of this agenda, the Reconstruction Act of March 1867, passed over President Johnson's veto, and it divided the former confederate states into five military districts. Each state was required to hold a constitutional convention and to draft a new state constitution. African Americans, protected by federal troops, would participate in the conventions, and the new constitutions would include provisions for black suffrage. The act also required newly elected state legislatures to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment as a condition for their readmission to the Union. The guarantee of black voting rights seemed to many Americans to represent the final stage of sweeping political revolution.

Passage of the Reconstruction Act in March 1867 undercut the political and economic power of the planter class and fostered political activity among freedpeople. A massive and unprecedented movement of freedpeople into the political arena soon followed. Black southerners created Union (or Loyal) Leagues, which helped build schools and churches. The

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leagues also organized militia companies to defend communities from white violence and called strikes and boycotts for better wages and fairer labor contracts. A number of local chapters were even organized on an interracial basis.

In the fall of 1867, southerners began electing delegates to the state constitutional conventions. The participation of freedpeople was truly astonishing. Women joined in local meetings to select candidates. Between 70 and 90 percent of eligible black mates voted in every state in the South, and they elected a total of 265 African Americans as delegates. For the first time in American history, blacks and whites met together to prepare constitutions under which they would be governed. The constitutions they produced were among the most progressive in the nation. They created social-welfare agencies, reformed the criminal law, and more equitably distributed the burden of taxation. Most important, the constitutions guaranteed civil and political rights to both black and white Americans.

The intensity and extent of black political participation transformed southern politics. After 1867 the southern Republican party, with heavy support from African Americans, dominated all the new state governments. Although they represented an actual majority only in South Carolina's legislature, black Americans captured a total of six hundred legislative seats in southern states. Between 1868 and 1876, southern states elected fourteen black representatives to the U.S. Congress, two black U.S. senators, and six black lieutenant governors. In addition, thousands of African Americans served local southern communities as supervisors, voter registrars, aldermen, mayors, magistrates, sheriffs and deputies, postal clerks, members of local school boards, and justices of the peace.

White allies were essential to black political success. With African Americans in a majority only in South Carolina and Mississippi, the Republican party needed to develop a coalition that included some white support. White "carpetbaggers" -- northerners who traveled to the South to participate in Reconstruction -- were perhaps most visible, but the "scalawags", the native white southerners who supported the Republican party, were most critical to Republican successes in the South. Most scalawags were poor yeoman farmers from the southern mountains who had long resented the large planters' monopoly on land, labor, and political power. Most of the Republican party's southern adherents, then, were poor people, black and white, with a strong hostility to the planter aristocracy.

During their period in power -- from two years in Tennessee to eight in South Carolina -- the Republican

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governments made important economic and legal gains for black and white working people. They created a public school system where none had existed before. These schools -- although segregated by race and better in the cities than in the countryside -- were nonetheless a symbol of real progress. By 1876, about half of all southern children were enrolled in school. Several Radical governments also passed laws banning racial discrimination in public accommodations, notably streetcars, restaurants, and hotels.

New laws, helped landless agricultural laborers, both black and white. Radical Republicans passed lien laws that gave farm laborers a first claim on crops if their employers went bankrupt. And the repeal of the notorious Black Codes enabled some people to achieve their dream of land ownership. By 1876, fourteen thousand African-American families in South Carolina (about one-seventh of the state's black population) had acquired homesteads, as had a handful of white families.

Freedpeople were now able to negotiate a new kind of compromise with planters on how the land would be worked and who would reap its bounty. Rather than working in gangs for wages, individual families now tended small plots independently, renting land from planters for cash or, more commonly, for a fixed share of the year's crop. By 1870, "sharecropping" had become the dominant form of black agricultural labor, especially in the vast cotton lands. The system was a far cry from the freedpeople's first objective, which was to own land, and it became connected to a credit system that drastically reduced workers' economic freedom later in the century. But in the short run, sharecropping freed black workers from the highly regimented gang-labor system, allowing them a good deal of control and autonomy over their work, their time, and their family arrangements.

These very real economic and legal gains did not occur without cost. The southern Republican party experienced constant tensions within the fragile coalition that was its base. Large increases in state spending on schools and social programs, combined with the ongoing promotion of transportation and industry, led to tremendous hikes in taxes. This tax burden fell increasingly not only on wealthy planters but also on poor whites who owned little property. Revelations of political corruption among Republican officials compounded the growing disaffection of white voters.

The End of Reconstruction

The Republican party's loss of political power and influence among its white constituents was clear in 1869, when Tennessee and Virginia became the first states to return to conservative Democratic control. This

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political retreat a process conservatives called "redemption" - could not have happened without a sharp change in northern public opinion and the movement of the northern Republican party away from the original goals of Radical Reconstruction.

The commitment of ordinary northerners to the political and civil rights of African Americans was limited, and after 1867 Republicans were defeated in a number of states in the North. Many northerners claimed they were simply worn out by the long military battles of the Civil War and the political battles that followed. With the removal of the most overt signs of southern intransigence, their support for further change weakened. Waning enthusiasm for Reconstruction was evident in the failure to drive Andrew Johnson from office after his impeachment by the House of Representatives in 1868; the U.S. Senate failed by one vote to remove Johnson from office for his efforts to undermine Reconstruction.

Moderate Republican leaders who came to power in the late 1860s were willing to abandon southern blacks in order to cultivate northern business support. That support depended on revitalizing the southern economy and retreating from the social and political experimentation that had defined Reconstruction's early years. Northern politicians were now prepared to leave the fate of the South, economically if not yet politically, in the hands of the former slaveowners. Northern Republicans thus began removing federal troops from the region, leaving large planters free to "redeem" the South as they saw fit.

The presence of black voters stood as the remaining major obstacle to the return of conservative rule. The large planters first tried to limit freedpeople's political activities by using economic power to threaten them with loss of employment. When economic pressure proved unsuccessful, the planters turned to more violent methods of intimidation. The Ku Klux Klan provided their most effective weapon. Founded by Confederate veterans in Tennessee in 1866, the Klan grew rapidly after the advent of Radical Reconstruction. Many of its rank-and-file members were poor men, but its leaders tended to be prominent planters and their sons. The Klan was in essence the paramilitary arm of the southern Democratic party, systematically employing violence against freedpeople and their organizations. Klan nightriders terrorized individual freedmen who refused to work for their employers or complained about low wages. They targeted black Civil War veterans and freedpeople who had succeeded in breaking out of the plantation system. Hooded Klansmen broke up meetings, threatened, shot, and lynched Radical and Union League leaders, and drove black voters away from the polls all across the South. Such targeted violence profoundly affected postwar politics in the South. Even though African Americans fought back valiantly, the Klan succeeded in destroying Republican organizations and demoralizing entire communities of freedpeople.

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In the face of such incredible violence, Congress finally acted. In 1869 it approved the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The amendment (which was ratified in 1870), stated that the states could not deny or abridge the right to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." It did allow numerous "nonracial" means of limiting suffrage: southern states would later introduce poll (voting) taxes and literacy tests to restrict black voting. Nevertheless, the Fifteenth Amendment demonstrated that moderate Republicans were not yet willing to stand by and allow their party in the South to be terrorized and destroyed by violence.

In March 1871, a series of grisly events shook the nation and galvanized Congress to take further action. In the small town of Meridian, Mississippi, Klansmen and their supporters had brutally murdered thirty African Americans. Congress appointed a committee to investigate. Aghast at the tales of carnage they heard, members of Congress passed a series of enforcement acts imposing harsh penalties on those who used organized terrorism for political purposes. The Ku Klux Klan Act, for example, made certain crimes against a citizen's rights punishable under federal, not state, law. President Ulysses S. Grant, who had been a victorious Union army general before being elected president in 1868, declared martial law in parts of South Carolina and dispatched U.S. Army troops to the area in 187 1. Hundreds of Klansmen were indicted and tried by the U.S. attorney general in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Mississippi. The federal government had broken the Klan's back, at least temporarily.

But 1872 marked the beginning of the end of the federal presence in the South. Groups similar to the Klan multiplied, using violence and in-

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timidation to achieve Democratic victories. The Democrats assumed, correctly as it turned out, that neither Congress nor the president would again act decisively to prevent political violence and fraud in the South.

The political retreat was made worse by the economic panic of 1873, which launched a severe nationwide depression that would last more than five years. Across the South, the depression drove many black landowners and renters back into the ranks of laborers, sharply reduced wage levels, and eventually helped transform sharecropping into a system of peonage. In the North, the depression encouraged businessmen to abandon the last remnants of Reconstruction. White working people, focusing their attention on immediate problems in their own workplaces and communities and still unconvinced by arguments for racial equality, also turned away from the biracial promise of Reconstruction.

Only federal intervention could have prevented the renewed violence that reinstalled white Democratic regimes throughout the South. But President Grant's administration, which had acted forcefully against the Klan in 1871, turned down requests for federal troops in 1875. The North no longer seemed outraged by political violence directed against freed people. Most white Americans wanted to turn their attention elsewhere.