Reconstruction era

In the history of the United States, Reconstruction refers to both the period after the American Civil War when the states of the breakaway Confederacy were reintegrated into the United States of America, and to the process by which this was accomplished.

Northern moderates and radicals alike agreed that for the war to be declared a victory three points had to be achieved: the Confederacy had to be truly dead, slavery had to be truly dead, and the possibility of either being revived had to be eliminated. How to achieve these three goals, and who would decide when they were achieved, caused great controversy. From the point of view of Radical Republicans, reaching these goals was an essential part of the destruction of the Slave Power, and necessary to guaranteeing perpetual union, as well as a solution to the problem of the Freedmen.

The "moderates" saw success in achieving the goals by assurances that the former Confederates had totally renounced secession and completely abolished slavery. Most moderates, like Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, wanted suffrage for black army veterans. Southerners political leaders thought they had indeed complied and had renounced secession and given up slavery, and were angry when a series of new requirements were imposed on them that they considered a violation of the principles of republicanism. Especially resented was the ouster of white state governments by federal military forces, and their replacement by Radical Republican governments.

Plans and legislation

Planning for Reconstruction began in 1861, at the onset of the war. The Radical Republicans, seeking harsh policies, used as their base the Congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln pursued a lenient plan for reconstruction, especially in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas. In those three states, he proposed a ten percent plan that required 10% of the voters from the 1860 election to swear an oath of loyalty to the Union. These states did not comply until well after the end of the war and so were not immediately readmitted to the Union and to representation in Congress.

Lincoln wanted to bring the Southerners back into good standing as fast as possible, with a minimum of vengeance. He also insisted there be new rights for the Freedmen so he created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedmen's Bureau. However, his goal of land for blacks, often commonly referred to as "40 acres and a mule", was not pursued by his successors. The phrase "40 acres and a mule" was coined after General Sherman issued Special Field Order 15, which temporarily gave freedmen land owned by their previous masters.

Presidential Reconstruction

Northern anger over John Wilkes Booth's assassination of Lincoln and the immense human cost of the war led to demands for a harsher policy. Vice President Andrew Johnson had originally taken a hard line, talking openly about hanging rebels; however, as President, he took a much softer line, pardoning many Confederate leaders and allowing ex-Confederates to maintain their control of Southern state governments, Southern lands and blacks.

These governments quickly enacted "black codes", effectively giving "freedmen" (freed black slaves) only a limited set of second-class civil rights, and no voting rights, while pursuing a goal of re-admission to the Union. The fears among the Southern Plantation owners were that they would lose their land or, if not, that blacks would not do their field work; the fear among all Southern whites was that blacks would consider themselves equal to whites.

The Democratic party, proclaiming itself the party of the white workingman, north and south, supported Johnson.

In response, the Radical Republicans blocked the readmission of the ex-rebellious states to the Congress. Congress also renewed the Freedman's Bureau, but Johnson vetoed it. Congress then passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, to create and protect black civil rights in the South. This led to a decisive break with President Andrew Johnson, who vetoed the bill: his veto was promptly overridden and the bill became law.

The last moderate proposal was the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed the Federal war debt, extended citizenship to everyone born in the United States, except visitors and Indians on reservations, penalized states that did not give the vote to Freedmen, and most importantly, created new federal civil rights that could be protected by federal courts. Johnson used his influence to block ratification in the States as three-fourths of the states had to ratify the measure.

Radical Reconstruction

The Constitutional amendments

The Congressional elections of 1866 were fought over the issue of Reconstruction. Many Southern states were not allowed to vote, having not yet been re-admitted to the Union; the result was solid Republican gains in Congress. The Radicals, for the first time, took full control of Congress and passed the first Reconstruction Act in March 1867.

The 13th, 14th, and 15th Constitutional Amendments were adopted in the wake of the Civil War. The 13th abolished slavery, the 14th granted federal civil rights to every person born in the United States, as well as to naturalized citizens, and guaranteed repayment of the American war debts and repudiation of the Confederate debts. The 15th decreed that the right to vote could not be denied because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. (It did not grant the right to vote, as electoral policies are defined by the states.) The 14th and 15th Amendments were opposed by the Southern states, but, as a pre-condition of readmission to the Union, the Southern states were required to ratify them.

Southern state governments were re-constituted, with the help of the US Army, under Republican control, with the exclusion of former confederates. These governments then agreed to the necessary Congressional conditions for readmission to the Union, including ratification of the Constitutional Amendments.

All Southern states were readmitted to the Union by 1870, with Georgia being the last, on July 15 of that year, and all but 500 Confederate sympathizers were pardoned when President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Amnesty Act of 1872.

Military reconstruction

The first Reconstruction Act divided ten Confederate states, excluding Tennessee, which had been readmitted on July 24, 1866, into five military districts:

First Military District: Virginia, under General John Schofield

Second Military District: The Carolinas, under General Daniel Sickles

Third Military District: Georgia, Alabama and Florida, under General John Pope

Fourth Military District: Arkansas and Mississippi, under General Edward Ord

Fifth Military District: Texas and Louisiana, under Gen. Philip Sheridan and several others.

State governments that had been established under Johnson's plan were abolished. Tens of thousands of federal soldiers were stationed in the South to oversee the process of Reconstruction. Every state was placed in a district under military command. There was little or no fighting, but rather a state of martial law in which the military closely supervised local government, supervised the elections, and protected the office holders from violence.

Black Reconstruction

One by one, the Southern states held new elections in which Freedmen voted. In most cases, the result was a Republican state government; the state was readmitted, the Congressional delegation was seated, and most soldiers were removed. Most Republicans were organized into clubs called Union Leagues. The Republican coalition in each state comprised Freedmen, African Americans who came from the North, Northerners recently arrived (called "carpetbaggers"), and local whites (called "scalawags"). The old political elite of the Democratic Party, mostly former Confederates, were out of power (although some, like General James Longstreet, joined the Republicans). Republicans took control of all Southern state governorships and state legislatures, often installing African Americans into positions of power.

Reaction by elite southern whites took the form of public unrest and included the formation of secret societies, of which the Ku Klux Klan, operating from 1866 until the present (operations are more covert, but the Klan is still intact as an organization, although the public awareness of their violence has subsided since the 1970s), was the most notorious. Political violence led to violence in cities and in the countryside. The Republicans fought back but usually suffered more casualties.

Redemption and the end of Reconstruction

Though events, such as the Brooks-Baxter War in Arkansas, ended Reconstruction earlier in some states, it nevertheless continued in three states (South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida) until 1877. After Republican Rutherford B. Hayes won the disputed Presidential election the South agreed to accept Hayes' victory if the President withdrew the last Federal troops from the South. Some historians have speculated that the disputed election was handed to Hayes in a political exchange for an end to Reconstruction in three states; this theory characterizes the settlement of that election as the Compromise of 1877. Not all historians agree with that theory; some see the election as coinciding with a decreased desire for conflict between the elites of the North and South, and an increased will to integrate the Southern social hierarchy with the larger American society.

The end of Reconstruction marked the beginning of the end of most civil, political, and economic rights and opportunities for African Americans, and ushered in an era some historians refer to as the nadir of American race relations. The exact process varied state by state and town by town. In Virginia, the Redeemers gerrymandered cities to minimize Republican seats; reduced the number of polling places in black precincts; made local officials appointees of the state legislature; and did not allow the vote to felons or to people who failed to pay their annual poll tax. See Jim Crow law. Blacks would legally and socially remain second-class citizens until change began with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In exchange for its acceptance of reintegration into the Union, the South (along with the rest of the country) was allowed to eventually reestablish a segregated, race-discriminatory society. By reestablishing a firm racial hierarchy, the white elites not only controlled the black population, but also maintained effective control of white workers and working conditions.

The initial flurry of Reconstruction civil rights measures was eroded and converted into laws that expanded racial segregation and discrimination throughout Southern institutions and everyday life.

With the demise of Reconstruction, much of the civil rights legislation was overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Most notably, the court suggested in the Slaughterhouse Case (1873), then held in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), that the Fourteenth Amendment only gave Congress the power to outlaw public, rather than private discrimination. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) went even further, announcing that state-mandated segregation was legal as long as the statute or ordinance provided for "separate but equal" facilities.

The Supreme Court maintained "separate but equal" as the "law of the land,", until finally reversing it in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in "public accommodations" (i.e., restaurants, hotels and businesses open to the public, as well as in private schools and workplaces), terminology which originated in the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

Historiography of Reconstruction

The legacy of Reconstruction was initially viewed as a failure by most observers North and South because of its corruption. Novels of the early 20th century (such as The Clansman and The Leopard's Spots) glorified the white supremacist and Redeemer governors, as well as vigilante organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, and romanticized the antebellum South, especially in regard to the treatment and disposition of African-Americans. These sentiments found outlets in the form of D.W. Griffith's classic 1915 movie (based on The Clansman), The Birth of a Nation. The Dunning School of scholars based at the history department of Columbia University in New York City, viewed Reconstruction as a failure, at least after 1866, claimed that it took freedoms and rights from qualified whites and gave them to unqualified blacks who were being duped by corrupt carpetbaggers and scalawags.

In the 1940s, a differing approach was pioneered by Howard Beale and C. Vann Woodward. As disciples of Charles A. Beard, they focused on greed and economic causation, in the context of the centrality of corruption. They argued that the rhetoric of equal rights was a smokescreen hiding their true motivation, which was promoting the interests of industrialists in the Northeast. Despite the lack of a unified business policy, the South was exploited by a wide range of business interests. However, scholars in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrated that Northern businessmen were widely divergent on monetary or tariff policy. While Pennsylvania businessmen wanted high tariffs, those in other states did not; the railroads, for example, were consumers who were hurt by the tariffs on steel, which they purchased in large quantity. (Foner 1982; Montgomery, vii-ix)

In the 1960s, neoabolitionist historians, with strong alignment with the Civil Rights Movement, rejected the Dunning school and found a great deal to praise in Congressional reconstruction. The primary advocate of this view, Eric Foner, argued that it was never truly completed, and that a Second Reconstruction was needed in the late 20th century to complete the goal of full equality for African Americans. Foner and the neoabolitionists minimized or ignored the corruption and waste caused by Republican state governments, and emphasized that poor treatment of Freedmen was a worse scandal and a grave corruption of America's republican ideals. They argued the real tragedy of Reconstruction was not that it failed because blacks were incapable of governing, but that it failed because the civil rights and equalities granted during this period were but a passing temporary development. These rights were suspended in the South (1880s to 1964). They were restored by the Civil Rights Movement that is sometimes referred to as the "Second Reconstruction." These historians downplay the argument that corrupt business interests had undermined the cause of Reconstruction.

Significant dates

State	Seceded from Union	Admitted as Confederate State	Readmitted into Union	Democratic Party Establishes Control
South Carolina	December 20, 1860	February 4, 1861	July 9, 1868	November 28, 1876
Mississippi	January 9, 1861	February 4, 1861	February 23, 1870	January 4, 1876
Florida	January 10, 1861	February 4, 1861	June 25, 1868	January 2, 1877
Alabama	January 11, 1861	February 4, 1861	July 14, 1868	November 16, 1874
Georgia	January 19, 1861	February 4, 1861	July 15, 1870	November 1, 1871
Louisiana	January 26, 1861	February 4, 1861	June 25 or July 9, 1868	January 2, 1877
Texas	February 1, 1861	March 2, 1861	March 30, 1870	January 14, 1873
Virginia	April 17, 1861	May 7, 1861	January 26, 1870	October 5, 1869
Arkansas	May 6, 1861	May 18, 1861	June 22, 1868	November 10, 1874
North Carolina	May 21, 1861	May 16, 1861	July 4, 1868	November 28, 1876
Tennessee	June 8, 1861	May 16, 1861	July 24, 1866	October 4, 1869

References

Secondary sources

Belz, Herman. Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era (1978) pro-moderate.
Belz, Herman. A New Birth of Freedom: The Republican Party and Freedman's Rights, 1861-1866 (2000) pro-moderate.
Brock, W. R. An American Crisis: Congress and Reconstruction, 1865-1867 (1963)
Benedict, Michael Les. The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (1999), pro-Radical.
Benedict, Michael Les. A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction (1974) pro-Radical
Benedict, Michael Les. "Preserving the Constitution: The Conservative Bases of Radical Reconstruction," 61#1 Journal of American History pp 65-90. in JSTORY
Blaine, James. Twenty Years of Congress: From Lincoln to Garfield. With a review of the events which led to the political revolution of 1860, this article incorporates public domain text.
Bright, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2000) uses neoabolitionist perspective to examine national memory of Civil War, Reconstruction, and Redemption, North-South reunion, and the retreat from equality for African Americans.
Castel, Albert E. The Presidency of Andrew Johnson (1979)
Coulter, E. Merton. The South During Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (1947), important synthesis from the Dunning School
Donald, David. Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (1970) Major critical analysis.
Donald, David. Lincoln(1996), pro-moderate.
Dunning, William Archibald. Reconstruction: Political & Economic, 1865-1877 (1905), classic statement of Dunning School.
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (1935), Marxist interepretation by a notable black scholar.
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt "The Freedmen's Bureau," (1901), by a notable black scholar using a Marxist interpretation.
The Sequel of Appomattox, A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States by Walter Lynwood Fleming, (1918) full text of short overview from Dunning School.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988), an influential recent scholarly synthesis from neoabolitionist perspective.
Foner, Eric. "Reconstruction Revisited" in Reviews in American History, Vol. 10, No. 4, The Promise of American History: Progress and Prospects (Dec., 1982) , pp. 82-100
Garner, James Wilford. Reconstruction in Mississippi (1901)] reflects [[Dunning School]
Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005), best-seller; pro-moderate.
Hahn, Steven. A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration Pulitzer Prize
Harris, William C. With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union (1997) portrays Lincoln as moderate and opponent of Radicals.
Harris, William C. The Day of the Carpetbagger: Republican Reconstruction in Mississippi (1979)
Hyman, Harold M. A More Perfect Union (1975), constitutional history of Civil War & Reconstruction
Hyman, Harold M., & William Wiecek Equal Justice Under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835-1875 (1982)
McKitrick, Eric L. Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (1961), balanced.
Montgomery, David. Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (1981), emphasis on labor unions in North
Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxson. A History of the United States since the Civil War . Vol 1: (1917) covers 1865, Dunning School
Olsen, Otto H. ed., Reconstruction and Redemption in the South (1980), state by state, neoabolitionist
Perman, Michael Emancipation and Reconstruction (2003), a short survey
Randall, James G. Lincoln the President: Last Full Measure (1955) pro-moderate.
Rhodes, James G. History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896. Volume: 6. (1920). 1865-72 highly detailed narrative by leading historian.
Simkins, Francis Butler, and Robert Hilliard Woody. South Carolina during Reconstruction (1932). Dunning School
Simpson. Brooks D. Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861-1868 (1991), balanced.
Trefousse, Hans L. Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian (2001).
Stampp, Kenneth M. The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (1967); early neoabolitionist survey; pro-Radical
Summers, Mark Wahlgren.The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865-1878 (1994)
Trefousse, Hans L. Andrew Johnson: A Biography (1989). pro-Radical
Wilson, Woodrow. The Reconstruction of the Southern States (1901) written before he became president

Primary sources

History of the Thirty-ninth Congress of the United States.edited by William H. Barnes. (1868) invaluable collection of primary documents.
Fleming, Walter L. Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational, and Industrial (1906) anti-radical, Southern white perspective.
Hyman, Harold M., ed. The Radical Republicans and Reconstruction, 1861-1870. (1967), pro-radical.
Harper's Weekly leading New York magazine; pro-Radical
Charles Sumner, "Our Domestic Relations: or, How to Treat the Rebel States" Atlantic Monthly September 1863, early Radical manifesto
DeBow's Review major magazine
Reconstruction Act March 2, 1867
Reconstruction Act March 23, 1867
Reconstruction Act July 19, 1867
Reconstruction Act March 11, 1868
Thomas Nast cartoons, pro-Radical; amazing quality editorial cartoons

External links

Mr. Lincoln and Freedom: Reconstruction
Reconstruction: The Second Civil War 2004 PBS film (180min) & transcript, examines the Reconstruction era and exposes northern discomfort with free blacks -- which contributed to the denial of their civil rights after Reconstruction -- for an additional 100 years until the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
"Reconstructing the Poetry of John Willis Menard" by Gilbert Wesley Purdy. Book review/essay with considerable historical information about the Reconstruction South.
Explore an in-depth timeline of Reconstruction
Jensen's Guide to Reconstruction History, 1861-1877 (2005)
American Civil War Research & Discussion Group - Fields Of Conflict - Containing 1500+ Links And 400+ Articles.