The Legacies of Reconstruction

Writing in 1884 Albion Tourgee, who would go on to be the plaintiff’s lawyer in Plessy V. Ferguson, wrote that “only fools forget the causes of war.” Writing a decade earlier Frederick Douglass would say that “War among the whites had brought peace and liberty to blacks.” He would go on to ask “What would peace among the whites bring?” In many ways, the story of reconstruction is the story of how peace and reconciliation among whites led to the subjugation and second class citizenship of blacks. By 1877, what Lincoln had characterized as a “new birth of freedom” would end with the institution of “redeemer” governments. If the south was in any way redeemed, then, ultimately, it was redeemed by the sacrifice of black freedom upon the altar of white supremacy. Reconstruction, that “brief shining moment,” as Dubois once called it where the nation had hoped to forge a new national identity “with malice towards none and charity for all,” was led like a lamb to the slaughter where the bodies, hopes, and dreams of African-Americans would be wounded for the national transgression of reconciliation.

It had not always been thus, three days before he was shot Lincoln had hoped to preserve the fundamental and astounding results brought about by the war. His policy on reconstruction was to shape a policy ”from disorganized and discordant elements with all.” Indeed in Lincolns’s view “So new and unprecedented is the whole case that no exclusive and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to detail, but important principles must be inflexible.” As a result on December 8, 1863 Lincoln had issued his ten percent plan as a model for reconstruction. He would have pardoned most ex confederates with the exception of those who had resigned posts in the judiciary or in congress, or those convicted of mistreating black soldiers. Lincoln’s basic plan was that if ten percent of the population of former confederate states could be convinced to swear an oath of allegiance to the union a political process could then be put in place that would then serve as a model for reuniting the country. Eventually, Lincoln governments would be established in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas.

However, almost immediately congressional republicans reacted angrily. Led by Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner they introduced the Wade-Davis bill in 1864. The Wade-Davis bill, with its ironclad oath and provision that all officers above the rank of lieutenant would be permanently debarred from citizenship, was intended to send a clear message to the south that the road to reunion would not be easy, and Lincoln wisely gave it a pocket veto. Fundamentally, the two sides disagreed on the nature of reconstruction. In Lincoln’s mind reconstruction was a way to win the war, but to the radical Republicans reconstruction represented the founding of a new nation. Ultimately this debate would continue under Johnson.

In the meantime however, both sides cooperated on the thirteenth amendment. The emancipation proclamation had only freed the slaves in rebellion so an amendment was necessary to preserve black freedom. It passed on January 31st 1865 by a vote of 119-56 with 8 democrats providing the necessary votes. As Lewis Douglass wrote to his father, “Father, you should have been here today. Today was your day.” In addition congress worked hard to pass the Freedman’s Bureau bill, the first displaced person’s act in U.S. history, to aid the approximately 250,000 starving whites and the soon to be freed 4 million blacks, and to manage confiscated and abandoned land.

All of this was changed by the assassination of Lincoln, which brought Johnson to the forefront of national politics. Andrew Johnson, that unreconstructed Jacksonian Democrat, who showed up drunk to his inauguration, and of whom Frederick Douglass said “there goes no friend of our race.” Johnson believed that the United States should remain a “white man’s country forever,” and his basic policy on reconstruction was “the constitution as it is and the union as it was.” Johnson converted Lincoln’s ten percent plan into “that portion which are loyal,” and by December of 1865 all the seceded states except Texas had been re-admitted to the union. From Georgia, as senator,  came no less a personage than Alexander H. Stephens, former vice-president of the confederacy, the very symbol of everything the war had sought to change.

 As a reaction to these insults the republicans took control of reconstruction away from Johnson. A joint committee on reconstruction was established with 15 members, 12 republicans and 3 democrats. The Conclusions of the Reconstruction committee led to the Civil Rights act of 1866, which was the first statutory definition of the rights of citizenship, giving full citizenship to all Americans regardless of race, creed, or color and would lead directly to the 14th amendment.

The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in June 1866 marks the great watershed in American history, with it begins the great attempt to make the Bill of Rights applicable to all Americans. In the first part it defined citizenship by birth, in part two it repudiated all confederate war debts, and in part three the equal protection clause it guaranteed all citizens the equal protection of the laws. Out of which would eventually grow the modern civil rights movement.

Almost immediately Johnson, began to resist the fourteenth amendment. He went on his great swing around the circle tour, where in the wake of huge riots in New Orleans and Memphis he said “I stand upon the constitution.” At one point he even compared himself to Jesus. At the heart of Johnson’s resistance to reconstruction was his inherent belief in white supremacy. He had said in his state of the union adress in 1867 that “In the progress of nations Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other people. No independent form of government has ever been successful in their hands. Wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into Barbarism.”

As a result of Johnson’s inherent opposition to reconstruction, he vetoed all 15 bills pertaining to reconstruction, using the veto more times in a year and a half than all previous presidents combined. Nevertheless, the four reconstruction acts between 1867 and 1868 were passed over Johnson’s veto. The south was divided into 5 military districts each commanded by a major general. Each state drew up constitutions, which guaranteed African American suffrage, and when a majority of voters approved the constitution and ratified the 14^th amendment the state was re-admitted to the union. Between 1866 and 1870 the eleven former states of the confederacy were all admitted under congressional reconstruction, and Johnson for his obstinacy was impeached for violating the tenure of office act.

                Unfortunately, by 1868 the year Grant was elected to the presidency white supremacy was finding its voice again. In 1868, in 22 Georgia counties with 9,300 registered African American voters Grant received only 87 votes. In Louisiana in 1868 only 501 black votes were cast. This was a portent of things to come. As former confederate general Robert Richardson wrote “The emancipated slaves own nothing because nothing but freedom has been given to them.”

 In some ways overcoming the cultural legacies of slavery would be the hardest task of Reconstruction. As Nedd Cobb says in All God’s Dangers when he speaks of the cultural legacies of slavery handed down from his father, “My daddy was blindfolded didn’t look to the future, just throwin’ his money in a dead hogs ass and takin shit.” Overcoming these cultural legacies of slavery would be among the hardest, most enduring, most successful, and most tragic legacies of the second American Founding that was reconstruction.  Over 4,000 freedman’s schools were created with 9,300 teachers. By 1870 black literacy increased from 7 to 15 percent. In 1880 it was 30 percent, and by the end of the century black literacy rates was comparable with southern white literacy. Thaddeus Stevens attempted to pass bill modeled on Sherman’s field order # 15 that would have given free Negroes 40 acres of land and 50 dollars. Frederick Douglass was president of a Freedman’s bank that failed in 1874 with obligations to 61,000 depositors.

 However despite these failures there were some notable successes to settle free blacks upon land of their own choosing, and to provide a modicum of independence to African Americans. South Carolina in 1868 set up a land commission that lasted until 1890. By 1876 14,000 families had participated and by 1890 even with “redeemer governments in control 13,000 blacks still owned land in South Carolina a full quarter of whom had purchased land through the land commission. In addition sixteen African Americans were elected to congress and Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce both  served as senators from Mississippi.

Unfortunately, the national experiment that was reconstruction would begin to close by 1870 with the passage of the 15^th amendment that prohibited states from denying freed people the right to vote, but tragically left enforcement up to the states. In that tragic year of 1870 Horace Greely said “Let us have done with reconstruction, let us have peace.”

Thaddeus Stevens dies in 1869, Charles Sumner in 1874, the old leadership of the radical republicans was no longer in place by 1874. As a result the national desire for reconciliation among whites brought with it every year renewed violence to blacks. The Colfax Massacre in 1873 where between 80 and 150 people were killed, which would lead to a Supreme Court decision in Cruikshank where the supreme court ruled that the bill of rights did not apply to states and that the equal protection clause did not apply to individuals. In the entire south, with its myriad number of burnings, whippings, and abuses by white supremacist groups only 65 people were ever prosecuted under the Enforcement Act of 1870.

            Ultimately reconstruction was dealt its final blow in 1877 at the Wormely Hotel when in exchange for 19 electoral votes Rutheford B. Hayes took up the presidency and the last of the reconstruction governments were removed from Louisianna South Carolina and Florida. The Hatchet had been firmly planted in the back of the black man. Peace among the whites would bring with it every year more misfortune for blacks, and the burden of history would be with them for 90 years. In 1896 in Plessey the Supreme Court upheld segregation, In 1912 W.E.B. Dubois would write in Crises Magazine, the same year that 72 African Americans were lynched that “This country has had its appetite for facts on the Civil War spoiled by sweets.”

            In 1965 on the nation’s centennial of the civil war Bruce Catton wrote in an essay that “the legend of the Lost Cause has been an asset to the entire nation.” So thoroughly had Lincoln’s idea of a New Birth of Freedom, been forgotten that two years before Dr. King had had said to the nation that “America has given the Negro a bad check, a check that had come back insufficient funds.” The tragedy of reconstruction was that its failure in 1877 meant that it would have to be resumed a century later. The promise of 1863, when Lincoln stood at Gettysburg and proclaimed a new birth of freedom, was not fully “redeemed” until 1964 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The 90 years of peace among the whites had wrought a society so strong in its feeling of color prejudice that the 1960’s brought with it, throughout the south, same type of terror tactics that had been used during reconstruction. For a century the lost cause had triumphed, and the nation had foolishly forgotten the causes of civil war. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the failure of Reconstruction was expressed by Dubois in the The Souls of Black Folk, where he speaks of the legacies of the failure of freedom for white and black that “no man clasped the hands of these passing figures of the present-past; but hating they went to their long home, and hating their children’s children live today.”