United States History

A

Congress vs. Johnson

The process of reconstruction (the process by which the divided nation was reunited) had in fact begun in 1863 when President Lincoln announced a plan to restore the Southern states to the Union. Radical Republicans in Congress opposed Lincoln’s plan. After Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, they turned hopefully to President Andrew Johnson. In May 1865 Johnson announced his restoration plan, called Presidential Reconstruction. His plan disqualified former Confederate civil and military officers from holding office but brought the ex-Confederate states back into the Union on undemanding terms.

Presidential Reconstruction took effect in the summer of 1865. Johnson gave pardons to thousands of Southerners, and former Confederate states passed “black codes” that curtailed the freed slaves’ rights. Enraged Republicans united in opposition to Johnson, denouncing the black codes and the president. When the 39th Congress, dominated by Republicans, convened in December 1865, Republicans planned to revoke the black codes and to replace Johnson’s program.

In 1866 they passed two laws over the president’s vetoes: the Civil Rights Act to protect the rights of freed slaves and an act that extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The bureau was designed as a relief organization for blacks and whites who were left destitute by the war. It also helped blacks by establishing schools, supervising labor relations, and protecting them from violence and intimidation.

Johnson’s vetoes provoked Republicans to pass the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed the civil rights of all citizens, whatever their race, and restricted the political power of former Confederates. Johnson denounced the proposed amendment because he believed it was an unconstitutional invasion of states’ rights. After the congressional elections of 1866, Republicans maintained enough power to pass their own reconstruction program.

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In 1867 Congress passed the Reconstruction Act, followed by three supplemental acts passed later the same year and in 1868. These acts invalidated the state governments formed under Lincoln’s and Johnson’s plans and divided the ex-Confederacy into five military districts. The acts also provided that voters—all black men and white men not disqualified by the 14th Amendment—could elect delegates to write new state constitutions that ensured black male suffrage. A state could be readmitted to the Union once it had met a series of requirements, including ratification of the 14th Amendment. Black enfranchisement made Congressional Reconstruction more radical than Johnson’s plan. Still, even Congressional Reconstruction provided only a temporary period of military rule, and it did not take property away from former Confederates or punish them for treason.

When President Johnson tried to block the new Reconstruction laws, Republicans again united, this time in order to remove him from office. The House approved 11 charges of impeachment, but Johnson escaped conviction in the Senate by one vote. Congress then passed the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed black suffrage. Women’s rights advocates complained that the new amendment ignored their demands for enfranchising women, but to Republican leaders the woman suffrage issue was not vital. Black suffrage, in contrast, was imperative: Only with the votes of African Americans could Republicans control the former Confederate states.

B

Political Developments in the South

With Congressional Reconstruction in place, the Southern states, supervised by federal troops, formed new state governments that were dominated by Republicans. By the end of March 1870 all of the former Confederate states had been readmitted to the Union. Black male suffrage was vital to the Congressional plan. By giving 700,000 former slaves the right to vote, Congressional Reconstruction created a new electorate in the South; blacks held voting majorities in five states.

Reconstruction-era voters provided support for a Southern Republican Party, a fragile coalition made up of carpetbaggers (Northerners who moved south after the war), scalawags (Southerners, usually former Whigs who joined the Republicans), and African Americans. Under Republican rule, Southern states built roads and bridges, promoted railroad development, funded state institutions, started state school systems, enlarged state government, and increased state budgets. Republican rule, however, was brief, less than five years in most states.

Southern Democrats, white landowners, and white voters generally opposed Republican rule. They tried to dismantle Republican power by terrorizing blacks to prevent them from voting. Without black votes, the Democrats would be able to defeat the Republican Party and reclaim their power. The best-known terrorist group was the Ku Klux Klan, formed in 1866 to suppress black suffrage and restore white supremacy. Klan members attacked Freedmen’s Bureau officers, white Republicans, and black voters. Republicans in Congress tried to combat terrorism with three “enforcement acts” of 1870 and 1871. The acts sought to protect voters, supervise elections, and punish those who impeded black suffrage. Federal efforts virtually suppressed the Ku Klux Klan, but violence and intimidation continued, and ex-Confederate hostility to emancipation seethed.

C

Freedom for Blacks

Emancipation was a momentous experience; to former slaves, it represented autonomy and freedom from white control. Freedom brought waves of migration within the former Confederacy. Newly freed peoples moved to cities or to other plantations, sought out family members from whom they had been separated, and secured legal marriages, sometimes in mass ceremonies. They also formed new institutions. Black churches provided former slaves with spiritual support. Seeking literacy for themselves and their children, former slaves started freedmen’s schools. The Freedmen’s Bureau and Northern philanthropy helped establish more than 4,000 African American schools and some advanced institutions, such as Howard University in Washington, D.C. In several locales, blacks strove for integrated public facilities. In 1875 Congress passed a Civil Rights Act to bar segregation in public places. Typically, former slaves sought not integration with whites but freedom from white interference.

A paramount black goal was to own land, which signified independence, but Southern whites retained control over the land. Reconstruction did not redistribute land in the South, and most former slaves lacked the resources to buy it. From 1865 to 1866, newly freed African Americans began to sign labor contacts with planters to do field work in exchange for wages, housing, food, and clothing. But they found the new system too similar to slavery, and planters disliked it, too. The labor system that evolved, sharecropping, seemed preferable. Under this system, landowners divided plantations into small units and rented them to blacks for a portion of the crop, usually one-third or one-half. Former slaves favored the new sharecropping system, which provided more independence than the wage system. Planters also appreciated the sharecropping system because they retained control of their land and split the risk of planting with sharecroppers. Owners of large plantations held on to their powerful positions in society.

A major depression in 1873 drove many white farmers into sharecropping as well. By 1880 sharecroppers, black and white, farmed four-fifths of the land in the cotton states. Many sharecroppers were forced into a cycle of debt; rural merchants who loaned money to buy supplies charged high interest rates for the loans and secured them with liens or claims on the next year’s crop. Frequently the loans could not be repaid, and sharecroppers fell into debt.

Sharecropping bound the South to easily marketable cash crops that brought in the most income. Southerners did not diversify their crops or protect their land against soil depletion. As a result, the productivity of Southern agriculture declined over the years.

D

Political Developments in the North

While Southern Republicans struggled to keep Reconstruction afloat, their Northern counterparts faced a changing economy and other problems. During the Reconstruction years, the North industrialized rapidly and also endured a massive depression. At the same time, political corruption became commonplace. These problems distracted Northerners from the goals of Reconstruction.

The administration of Ulysses S. Grant, who won the presidential election of 1868 on the votes of newly enfranchised freedmen, was ridden with scandal. But fraud, bribery, and corruption in office were not limited to the Grant administration. In New York City, Democratic boss William M. Tweed looted the city treasury. In the election of 1872 the Republican Party split over corruption in the Grant administration, and some Republicans formed the Liberal Republican Party. The split failed to dislodge Grant, but it meant dwindling support for Reconstruction policy.

A devastating five-year depression that began with the panic of 1873 also shifted the focus of Republicans in the North. Banks closed, jobs were destroyed, and businesses went bankrupt. Labor protests multiplied, and violent incidents occurred; industrial conflict began to replace regional conflict. Disputes also arose over currency, notably over inflationary greenbacks, first issued during the Civil War. As a result of the depression, prices for farm products fell. Forced to take on more debt, farmers began to call for an increase in the amount of money in circulation. They believed that a larger money supply would cause prices to rise, increase the price of their crops, and raise their incomes. Those who favored a stable currency, in contrast, urged withdrawal of greenbacks from circulation.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court began to roll back Reconstruction policy. In the Slaughterhouse Cases in 1873, the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment did not give the federal government control over the entire domain of civil rights. The cases are historically important because they first posed the problem of defining how state citizenship related to U.S. citizenship.

The Supreme Court of the 1870s and 1880s discarded other Reconstruction policies. In 1876 and 1883, the Court upset two out of three of the enforcement acts. The Court also ruled in 1883 that Congress could not impose a national ban on discrimination in public accommodations, thus overturning the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The Court’s decisions reinforced Republican willingness to shed the obligations of Reconstruction, which many now considered a political liability.

E

“Redemption”

In the 1870s Republican rule in the South faltered. After 1872, membership in the Republican Party fell, as terrorist groups used violence and intimidation to diminish black votes and curb Republican support. Mobilizing white votes, Democrats sought to regain control of state governments. Redemption, the Democrats’ term for their return to power, followed swiftly, as the Republican coalition collapsed.

Once in office, Democrats dismantled the changes that Republicans had imposed. They rewrote state constitutions, cut state budgets and social programs, and lowered taxes. They also imposed laws to curb the rights of sharecroppers and tenants and to ensure a powerless black labor force. One such law forced debtors to work the land until their debts were paid.

By the fall of 1876, Democrats had returned to power in all Southern states except South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. The presidential election that year ended in a dispute over the electoral votes of these three states. Each party claimed victory. A special electoral commission gave the contest to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. But the commission’s decision had to be ratified by Congress. To secure the election of their candidate, Republican Party leaders struck a bargain with Southern Democrats. Republicans vowed, among other promises, to remove federal troops from Southern states. Democrats promised to accept Hayes and treat blacks fairly. Under the Compromise of 1877, Hayes became president, the last federal troops left the South, and the era of Reconstruction ended.

The 1877 bargain ended federal occupation of the South and Northerners’ efforts to ensure the rights of Southern blacks. “Today … the Government of the United States abandoned you,” the Republican governor of South Carolina told his African American supporters, as the last federal soldiers departed. The Southern Republican Party virtually vanished. Black voting was not completely extinguished, but violence and intimidation caused it to decline.

Southern Democrats had triumphed. They remained in firm control of Southern states without Northern interference. Ex-Confederates, although humiliated by defeat in the Civil War, regained power. But the South was now tied to racial oppression and economic backwardness.

The Republicans’ ambitious plan for Reconstruction failed, although it did leave two positive legacies: The 14th and 15th Amendments ensured black rights and gave the vote to black men. To maintain the rights of Southern blacks, however, would have meant a far longer period of military rule—which both Republicans and Democrats of the 1870s wished to avoid—and postponed any hope of national reunion. Only in the 1960s would the nation begin to confront the consequences of failing to protect the rights of black citizens. In the last third of the 19th century, Americans turned to their economic future—to developing the nation’s vast resources, to wrestling profit from industry, and to the settlement of the trans-Mississippi West.