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.