Aftermath: post-war Reconstruction

Freedmen voting in New Orleans, 1867

The North had won a mighty victory. How could it make it permanent?

Reconstruction: the first phase

One issue was resolved: secession was dead. But the war was also about an idea of democracy and the victory would be hollow if the system of racial oppression were allowed to continue. As one northern newspaper editor wrote

Canon conquer, but they do not necessarily convert.

On 3 March 1865, in the closing weeks of the war, Congress set up within the War Department the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (the ‘Freedmen’s Bureau’) to feed freedmen, organise hospitals and schools for them and supervise the terms in which they were to be hired as labourers. With the war over, the defeated South would require a fundamental reconstruction - in politics, race relations and the economy.

But Andrew Johnson (a Jacksonian Democrat) and a Southerner from Tennessee, was not the man to oversee the delicate politics required. In May 1865 his Proclamation of Amnesty issued pardons to Southern leaders, enabling some former Confederates to re-enter politics. But though the South seemed to have accepted defeat, racial oppression intensified, and whites used violent intimidation to prevent the blacks achieving equality. 

On Christmas Eve 1865, Confederate veterans founded the Ku Klux Klan at Pulaski, Tennessee. It began comparatively innocuously as a drinking society with costumes and secret rituals, but by 1867 it had become a brutal and sinister organisation. Its aims were to prevent blacks from voting and to drive them from their landholdings, and its methods included beatings and lynchings. 1866 saw riots in Memphis and a massacre of blacks in New Orleans. As the Southern legislatures were reconstituted, they passed the ‘Black Codes’, which denied many civil liberties to former slaves. Freedmen were forbidden the use of weapons of any kind, they were required to hire themselves out by the year and were thus denied permanent employment, and no provision was made for black schooling. 

The Republicans dominate Congress

All this outraged Congressmen in the North. In response, a Joint Committee on Reconstruction comprising nine members from the House and six from the Senate, was set up to propose a programme of Reconstruction. It provided that until the programme had been worked out, none of the Southern Congressmen would be allowed to take their seats in state legislatures, a move denounced by Johnson as unconstitutional.

In the winter and spring of 1865-6 the huge Republican majority in Congress passed three measures. The Fourteenth Amendment established in law the right of all citizens of the United States to equal protection under the law and declared that anyone ‘born or naturalised’ in the US was an American citizen. (But Indians were excluded.) The Dred Scott decision was thus repealed. Certain classes of ex-Confederates were excluded, which meant that whereas all black men now had the vote, some whites were excluded. Two further laws extended the life of powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau and reinforced the Fourteenth Amendment with a civil rights law. 

Johnson vetoed the last two measures, but they were later passed by a two-thirds majority in both houses. His intransigence united the Republican party in support of a radical programme which Lincoln would probably not have allowed. The congressional election of 1866 reinforced their hold on both houses. They unsuccessfully impeached Johnson in 1868, and in the same year, General Ulysses S. Grant was elected president on the Republican ticket. (A bitter Johnson refused to attend Grant’s inauguration and his last act as president was to issue a pardon to Jefferson Davis.)

Radical Reconstruction

With their control of the presidency and both houses, the Republicans were able to embark on the programme of Radical Reconstruction. This would involve a fundamental re-ordering not only of race relations, but of the whole Southern economy. Both were to present intractable problems.

Under the Military Reconstruction Act (March 1867), the South had been divided into five districts, each to be governed by a US army general, who had the duty of enrolling all qualified voters (all adult males) and setting up new state governments. From June 1868 the Southern states began to meet the conditions for readmission and by 1870 every Southern state was represented in Congress. In March 1870  the Fifteenth Amendment ordained that the vote could not be denied on grounds of colour. 

The mythology of Radical Reconstruction has focused on two groups that emerged to carry out the programme. Scalawags were Southerners who were prepared to break ranks and cooperate with Reconstruction. Carpetbaggers were outsiders from the North, many of them former Union soldiers who came south after the war. Both groups have acquired bad reputations.

The programme of Radical Reconstruction has often been seen as a failure, but in fact it achieved some significant reforms. Property qualifications for the vote were abolished and schools were set up for whites as well as blacks. Railroads were renewed and extended. But much of the programme was defeated by Southern intransigence, such as the refusal of Mississippi to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment and by mounting violence. (Mississippi finally ratified the Amendment in 2013!)

The economy of the South

With the abolition of slavery, the income  of the planters declined, as the freed labourers refused to work the long hours that had been imposed under slavery. The economic situation might have been eased if the blacks had been given land and training, but in practice the land that was given them was of poor quality, often barely able to sustain them. Agricultural production declined - food production was about 50 per cent less than before the war - and race relations were fraught.

In the reduced economy of the South, the great estates of the old plantation system were broken up into small farms. Southern agriculture was dominated by debt, and by the system of sharecropping in which tenants agreed to farm the land for a share of the crops they raised. Debt slavery became the norm for poor farmers, black as well as white.

The Compromise of 1877 and the end of Reconstruction

By the mid-1870s Reconstruction was running out of steam. The attention of the North shifted from the south to western expansion, to wars with the Indians and to new economic activities. The outrageously rigged election of the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes for president was won at the cost of an unwritten deal known as the Compromise of 1877.  Under the Compromise, military rule in the South was ended, and as federalist troops withdrew, white supremacists regained control. 

The black experience of Reconstruction

The ending of the Civil War brought immediate gains to the former slaves. They were now free to marry, and by 1870 a majority now lived in two-parent households. For all its problems, sharecropping was preferable to slave labour, and with most blacks becoming tenant farmers, whites began to complain about a servant problem. Blacks also asserted their autonomy in the establishment of independent black churches, the first appearing in Charleston, SC, immediately after the war. By 1890 there were over a million black Baptists in the South. Religion gave the former slaves autonomy and a language in which to protest at their oppression. Blacks also founded their own schools and colleges, and by 1877, some 600,000 black pupils were in school.

However, even before the 1877 Compromise, the old planter class,  known as the Redeemers, were back in power, and many of the gains won by Radical Reconstruction were eroded. Democratic governors instituted Jim Crow laws officially segregating blacks and whites. New voter registration laws in effect disenfranchised blacks. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments became dead letters in the South and were to remain so until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Conclusion

1. History is not always written by the victors. Sometimes the romance of a defeat can cast an appealingly melancholy light on events, and the ‘lost cause of the Confederacy’ is one such example, seen most memorably in films such as Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind and Gods and Generals, as well as and in the proliferation from the late nineteenth century of statues to Confederate generals. 
2. 'Lost cause' history has involved an exaggeration of the mistakes of the Radical Republicans, who are portrayed not as idealists but as corrupt and vengeful outsiders. 
3. At the moment, ‘lost cause’ ideology is on the retreat. Contemporary historians are largely agreed that slavery was the prime cause of the Civil War and the previously peerless reputation of Robert E. Lee is being scrutinised, sometimes harshly. The present pulling down of Confederate statues is simply the latest round in a culture war that is now over 150 years old.

The Civil War (1) 1861-3

For this huge topic I am indebted primarily to the Ken Burns TV documentary on the Civil War and to the following books.
Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA, 2nd edn. (Penguin, 1999) 
David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (Touchstone, New York, 1995)
Amanda Forman, A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided (Penguin, 2010)
George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History, 6th end. vol 1(W. Norton, 2004)

There is also the first episode of Ken Burns' incomparable series on the Civil War.

Robert E. Lee
Confederate general

What was the war about?

Although the draft had to be introduced later, men from both sides initially flocked to volunteer. What were they fighting for? From the start Lincoln argued that it was a war for the union and against a rebellion.  In August 1862 he was to say: 

‘My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union. It is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that’. 

Jefferson Davis also implicitly denied that the war was about slavery. He asserted that it was a war to protect the right of a state to secede and to defend itself against a tyrannous majority. Yet ‘states rights’ had only evolved as a doctrine because of slavery. Without slavery it is unlikely that Virginia, the state that had done so much to create the Union, would have seceded. Would the war have been fought if slavery had not existed?

In their Declarations of Causes, the Confederate states made their reasons for secession perfectly clear. You can access two stirring versions of the Confederate song, The Bonnie Blue Flag, here and here.

Lincoln's war

However, Lincoln continued to define the war according to his terms. He called the conflict a rebellion rather than a civil war. He refused to identify the enemy as the Confederate States of America. The prosecution of the war was primarily a function of the Chief Executive, who exercised powers normally belonging to the legislature. He suspended habeas corpus as an executive decision.

The balance of advantage

In retrospect it is clear that the North had most of the advantages.  It had an industrialised economy, good transport links, and a population of 22 million against the South’s 9 million (that included 3. 5 million slaves).  Salmon P. Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury, was always able to borrow the money he needed to pay for the war. The Confederacy, on the other hand, produced just seven per cent of the nation’s manufacture.  Its leaders relied on cotton and hoped for British support, but though British relations with the North were often difficult the British government never recognised the Confederacy. Moreover the North had a better transport infrastructure – more wagons, horses and ships and a superior railroad system.

The Civil War (2) 1863-5

Women in the war

Dorothea Dix

Civilians, especially women, played a large part in the war. Women sewed uniforms, composed poetry and songs, and raised money and supplies. Southern women managed plantations and farms in their husbands’ absence. Northern women organised ‘Sanitary Fairs’ to supply medical and sanitary supplies for the troops. In the North alone some 20,000 women served as nurses or health-related volunteers.  Dorothea Dix became the Union army’s first Superintendent of Women Nurses. Clara Barton set up field hospitals on the battlefield.  On the Confederate side, Sally Tompkins of Richmond nursed wounded men in her private hospital. However the Confederacy never found enough women to serve as nurses.

In November 1861 Julia Ward Howe wrote the lyrics for ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’.  It was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1862. It became sung to the words of ‘John Brown’s Body.

The coming of the Civil War (2)

The Dred Scott Case

Dred Scott

Dred Scott was born a slave in Virginia in about 1800. In 1830 he was taken to St Louis and sold to an army surgeon, who took him to Illinois, then to Wisconsin Territory (later Minnesota) and finally returned him to St Louis in 1842. His master died in 1843 and in 1846 Scott filed a suit in the Missouri courts claiming that residence in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory made him free. A jury decided in his favour but the state Supreme Court decided

Chief Justice Taney

against him. The case of Scott v. Sandford  finally came to the Supreme Court.  On 6 March 1857 the Court delivered its decision.  Speaking for his colleagues, the majority of whom were from the South, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland argued that Scott had no legal standing because he lacked citizenship. At the time of the Constitution, he stated, blacks

had for more than a century been regarded as …so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.  

Very controversially he also ruled that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional since it deprived citizens of their property in slaves. This meant that Congress had no power to exclude slavery from a territory.  As the Missouri Compromise was dead anyway, this was a pointless provocation. The South was delighted, but the North was now convinced that the Supreme Court had been subverted by a slave conspiracy. 

The coming of the Civil War (1)

The United States after the Compromise of 1850

The Fugitive Slave Act

Slave kidnap poster, Boston 1851

On 9 September 1850 California became the 31st state of the Union. On 18 September President Millard Fillmore signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act. This deeply controversial provision of the Compromise of 1850 called for federal jurisdiction over runaway slaves and for their prompt return to their southern owners. The law also denied them a trial by jury or the right to testify on their own behalf. Any white man who attempted to help a slave escape its owner would be subjected to a heavy fine and/or six months’ imprisonment.  The federal commissioner who returned a slave to his owner was to receive $10 but only $5 dollars if he did not return the slave.  

In the North, particularly New England, the Fugitive Slave Act  was bitterly denounced.  Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: ‘This filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century by people who could read and write', and he urged his neighbours to break the law. 

One aspect of this law-breaking was the Underground Railroad 

Harriet Tubman

whereby fugitive slaves were hidden and smuggled into Canada. The escaped slave Harriet Tubman was already actively engaged in rescuing slaves. However, in spite of protests, the law seemed to be working. In the first six years of the act only three fugitives were forcibly rescued from the slave-catchers.  On the other hand, fewer than two hundred slaves were captured and returned. 

Harriet Beecher Stowe

From June 1851 to April 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and the wife of a prominent biblical scholar, published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in serial form in the journal, National Era. It was published in book form on 20 March 1852 and became the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century. Initially, however,  it sold better in Britain than America.  The country was enjoying a surge of prosperity and the presidential campaign of 1852 showed that neither side wished to raise the issue of slavery.

The 1852 election

Another consequence of the 1850 Compromise was the break-up of the Whig party, with the Southern Whigs abandoning the party for the Democrats.   For the election of 1852 the Democrats chose Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire candidate, in preference to Stephen A. Douglas from Illinois. Pierce committed his party to adhere to the Compromise, and defeated his Whig rival, General Winfield Scott by 254 electoral votes to 42.  But the divisions over slavery were now so deep that his presidency was doomed to failure.

The new politics

Economic developments

In the early nineteenth century, the United States changed rapidly and a distinctive American identity emerged.

As settlers poured westwards, the United States developed a transport infrastructure to cope with the movements of population. In 1806 congress authorized the National Road (also known as the Cumberland Road), America’s first interstate highway. Construction started at Cumberland, Maryland in 1811, and the road reached Vandalia, Illinois, in 1839.  The West was becoming increasingly significant. 

Since 1817 the Erie Canal had been under construction and was opened in 1825. At  363 miles long and with 83 locks it was the longest canal in the world, and it cost $7 million dollars to build. By linking the Great Lakes with New York City via the Hudson River, it connected the Western interior to the Atlantic. 

In 1828 the cornerstone for the Baltimore and Ohio railroad was laid on 4 July 1828.  At the end of 1829 it carried passengers on the first completed 13-mile stretch. By 1850 America had nine thousand miles of track. 

Cornerstone of the B&O, laid July 4, 1828
by Charles Carroll of Carrollton,
now displayed at the B&O Railroad Museum.
Public domain

Agriculture remained central to the American economy: cotton and tobacco in the South, grains and livestock in the North and West. Industry was also growing, as skilled immigrants brought with them their knowledge of British production technologies. In 1822 Boston investors opened the mechanised Lowell cotton mills along the Merrimack River. However the majority of American towns were commercial rather than manufacturing centres, providing goods and services for the surrounding farms. It was only after the Civil War that industrialization seriously took shape. 

The Mexican War and its aftermath

General Winfield Scott enters Mexico City
13 September 1847
Public domain

‘Manifest Destiny’

Andrew Jackson's recognition of the Lone Star Republic exacerbated the already existing tensions over slavery. For the next seven years there was continuous agitation to bring Texas into the Union. Though many American politicians correctly predicted that the annexation of Texas would bring problems,  the tide was flowing against their caution. This was the period of ‘manifest destiny'. To people like the Democratic newspaper editor John O’Sullivan, it was ‘manifest destiny’ that the United States would soon possess not only Texas but Oregon and later California. 

The flag of the Republic of Texas
the 'Lone Star Republic',
officially adopted 1839

The annexation of Texas

Even before O’Sullivan had coined the term, the issue of manifest destiny was a live one in politics. In the run-up to the election of 1844 the former President, Martin van Buren, opposed the annexation of Texas because he wanted to stop the expansion of slavery.  He was backed by a majority in Congress. Henry Clay spoke for many when he asserted that ‘annexation and war with Mexico were identical’. But as a result, Van Buren lost the Democratic nomination to to James K. Polk, the former Governor of Tennessee, who had gained the support of Andrew Jackson. Polk’s win was a victory for manifest destiny.