Reconstruction

RECONSTRUCTION. One of the most controversial and misunderstood eras in American history, Reconstruction began during the Civil War and ended in 1877. Traditionally portrayed by historians and in popular culture as a time when vindictive Radical Republicans fastened Black supremacy upon the defeated Confederacy, producing an orgy of corruption and misgovemment, Reconstruction has come to be viewed by scholars as a laudable experiment in interracial democracy. During Reconstruction, for the first time in American history, the national government assumed the responsibility for defining and protecting Americans’ civil rights, Blacks were recognized as American citizens, and Black men were given the right to vote and hold office. These were revolutionary changes in the nature of American democracy. Yet at the same time, Blacks’ quest for economic autonomy, symbolized by their desire for ownership of land, proved unsuccessful.

The Confederacy’s defeat in 1865 placed Reconstruction at the center of the national political agenda and inaugurated a complex political and social struggle over the reuniting of the nation and the degree of freedom to be enjoyed by the former slaves. To African Americans, freedom meant autonomy from white control in every aspect of their lives. Throughout Reconstruction, former slaves as well as those Blacks who had been free before the Civil War reunited families separated under slavery, withdrew from white-controlled churches to create independent Black congregations, established schools, and sought the economic independence associated with landownership. In addition, Blacks organized political meetings demanding the right to vote and equality before the law. These efforts to breathe substantive meaning into the promise of freedom did much to shape the political agenda of Reconstruction.

Most southern whites sought to retain as much as possible of the old order. Planters desired, above all, the maintenance of a readily-controlled labor force, and few white southerners of any class were willing to recognize Blacks as equal citizens. During the period of Presidential Reconstruction, inaugurated in 1865 by Andrew Johnson, the white South was given a free hand in shaping local affairs. The new southern governments responded by passing the Black Codes, which sought to force Blacks back to work on the plantations and severely limited their civil rights and economic opportunities.

To the victorious North, these measures suggested that the white South did not accept the reality of emancipation. By 1866, northern Republicans had turned against Johnson’s policies. Most vocal in opposition were the Radical Republicans, led by Charles Sumner, senator from Massachusetts, and Thaddeus Stevens, congressman from Pennsylvania, both longtime proponents of the rights of African Americans. Drawing their support largely from small entrepreneurs and farmers in the rural North, Radical Republicans had, before the war, been the most outspoken opponents of slavery’s expansion. During the conflict they pressed for emancipation and the arming of Black troops. Now, they insisted that without equality before the law for Blacks and suffrage for Black men, there could be no lasting Reconstruction. Some, like Stevens, went even further, proposing that land belonging to the planter class be confiscated by the federal government and distributed in forty-acre plots to families of former slaves and white Unionists. Only this, Stevens insisted, would break the planters’ power and create the economic conditions for political democracy in the South. Stevens’s plan won wide support among the former slaves. But even among Radical Republicans only a handful favored it. Most deemed political equality for Blacks more important than land-ownership and shrank from the precedent that would be set by seizing the property of one class to distribute it to another. More moderate Republicans believed that once guaranteed the right to compete equally as free laborers in the economic marketplace, resourceful and diligent Blacks would be able to save money and acquire property on their own.

This lack of concern for the economic plight of the former slaves was shared by the northern labor movement, which experienced a major revival in these years. Few white workers in the North appreciated that the former slaves’ struggles for economic autonomy and political equality formed an integral part of the “labor question” in post–Civil War America. Traditionally, unions had excluded Black workers from membership, viewing Blacks mainly as low-wage competitors for jobs. While welcoming emancipation, organized labor made few efforts to incorporate the freed people into unions and had little sympathy for the Republican Party, with which nearly all Blacks identified.

The economic revolution envisioned by Stevens never came close to accomplishment. But in 1866 and 1867, the political revolution of Reconstruction proceeded apace. Over Johnson’s veto, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866, spelling out the rights all American citizens were to enjoy regardless of race. Then, it approved the Fourteenth Amendment, prohibiting the states from denying any citizen the equal protection of the laws. These measures marked a fundamental change in the American political system, establishing the federal government, not the states, as the arbiter and protector of the rights of American citizens, and for the first time incorporating into the Constitution the principle that all citizens should enjoy equal rights regardless of race. Finally, in 1867, Congress provided that new governments, based on manhood suffrage, be established in the South. Three years later, in the Fifteenth Amendment, the right to vote for Blacks was extended to the entire nation. Although it left the door open to suffrage restrictions not explicitly based on race—literacy tests, property qualifications, poll taxes—the Fifteenth Amendment marked the culmination of four decades of agitation on behalf of the slave. As late as 1868, only eight northern states had allowed Black men to vote. “Nothing in all history,” exclaimed veteran abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, equaled “this wonderful, quiet, sudden transformation of four millions of human beings from … the auction-block to the ballot-box.”

Granting the vote to Black men marked a major expansion of American democracy, a repudiation of the racial definition of citizenship that had prevailed before the Civil War. But the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment for the first time added the word “male” to the Constitution (in a clause providing that a state that barred any group of men from voting would lose part of its congressional representation), and the Fifteenth allowed continued disenfranchisement on the basis of sex, alienated many supporters of women’s rights. So too did Radical Republicans’ insistence that Reconstruction was the “Negro’s hour” and that agitation for women’s suffrage would injure the prospects of equal rights for Blacks. The result was a bitter split in the women’s rights movement. Woman’s rights leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony now repudiated the abolitionist and Radical allies with whom they had worked closely before and during the war. On the other hand, Lucy Stone, Abigail Kelley, and most Black suffragists supported the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as indispensable, if partial, steps toward securing the results of the Civil War. Out of this debate would come two rival national associations for women’s suffrage, which would not unite until the 1890s.
The Reconstruction Act of 1867 inaugurated the period of Radical Reconstruction, during which the Republican Party came to power throughout the South. Blacks formed the overwhelming majority of the Republican electorate, their votes supplemented by white newcomers from the North (dubbed “carpetbaggers” by the political enemies) and native white southerners, mostly Unionist small farmers (reviled by critics as “scalawags”). For the first time in American history, Blacks occupied political offices ranging from members of Congress to justice of the peace. The Reconstruction governments profoundly altered traditions of southern government. They established the region’s first public school systems, outlawed racial discrimination in public transportation and accommodations, and sought to attract railroads and industry to the South. But activist government meant higher taxes, which alienated many white southerners. More importantly, the majority of southern whites could not accept the idea of former slaves voting and holding office. Increasingly, Reconstruction’s opponents turned to violence to weaken and overthrow the new governments. As the North’s commitment to equal rights waned in the 1870s, the prospect of renewed federal intervention became increasingly remote. By 1877, the last Republican governments in the South had been replaced by Democratic regimes committed to a restoration of white supremacy.

The collapse of Reconstruction deeply affected the future course of American development. The South long remained a bastion of one-party Democratic rule under the control of a reactionary elite who used the same violence and fraud that had helped defeat Reconstruction to stifle internal dissent. The federal government stood by indifferently as the southern states effectively nullified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and, beginning in the 1890s, stripped African Americans of the right to vote. By the turn of the century, southern Blacks found themselves enmeshed in a complex system of oppression, each of whose components—segregation, economic inequality, political disempowerment, and the pervasive threat of violence—reinforced the others. Although the Black institutions created or strengthened after the Civil War—the family, church, and schools—survived the end of Reconstruction, southern governments fell far behind the rest of the nation in meeting their public responsibilities. Long into the twentieth century, the South would remain the nation’s foremost economic problem, a region of low wages, stunted economic development, and widespread poverty. Not until the 1960s would the nation again attempt to come to terms with the political and social agenda of Radical Reconstruction.

DuBois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935.

Foner, Eric. Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. New York: Penguin/Random House, 2005.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: HarperCollins, updated 2014 [1988].

Montgomery, David. Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967.

Trefousse, Hans L. The Radical Republicans. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.