Abram Hewitt: Memorandum of Conversation with Ulysses S. Grant, December 3, 1876
The Electoral Crisis: Washington, D.C., December 1876
Chicago Tribune: The Court of Arbitration, January 21, 1877
“The public demand peace”: Illinois, January 1877
St. Louis Globe Democrat: The Warning, March 31, 1877
“Let us not delude ourselves”: Missouri, March 1877
The Nation: The Political South Hereafter, April 5, 1877
“Nothing more to do with him”: New York, April 1877
CODA, 1879
John Russell Young: from Around the World With General Grant
Reflecting on Reconstruction: China, Spring 1879
Joseph H. Rainey: From Remarks in Congress on South Carolina Elections, March 3, 1879
“The destruction of a free ballot”: Washington, D.C., March 1879
Chronology
Biographical Notes
Note on the Texts
Notes
Index
Introduction
MOST Americans don’t know very much about Reconstruction, and in many cases what they may think they know is wrong. This shortcoming is understandable. Sometimes passed over in traditional high school or college history courses, the period can also be marginalized as an unseemly interval between the heroic drama of the Civil War and the advent of the tremendous economic, social, and political changes set into motion by the late nineteenth-century triad of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. Popular imagination of the era in the early twentieth century was captured in two famous films based on best-selling novels, Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939), both of which offered vivid portrayals of the persistence and eventual triumph of southern whites over the forces of evil represented by a malevolent alliance of greedy carpetbaggers, treacherous scalawags, and ignorant freedmen. Although some scholars challenged this perspective—most notably, W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction (1935)—only in the 1950s did a wave of revisionist reassessment, inspired in part by the civil rights movement, begin to present different perspectives as historians debated the meaning of Reconstruction and why it turned out as it did. These debates have yet to become part of our popular memory. There is no gripping PBS series on Reconstruction comparable to Ken Burns’s The Civil War, no compelling one-volume narrative history for general readers such as James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, and no vivid popular novel with the enduring appeal of Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels. For many Americans, Reconstruction is not an essential part of our national story, or fundamental to our sense of who we are today. The exception to this marginalization is to be found in the consciousness of black America, where the invocation of “forty acres and a mule” powerfully evokes memories of an era of promise and betrayal.
This volume aims to help redress that imbalance. It brings to life the words and deeds of Americans as they battled each other over what the Civil War did, and did not, achieve, highlighting the struggle of African Americans to make freedom mean more than the absence of slavery, and recording how other Americans resisted that struggle for equality. In the twenty-first century too many Americans think of terrorism as a recent phenomenon brought to our shores by outsiders, erasing the fundamental role that merciless violence played in the preservation of white supremacy. Much is made today of the American promise, and yet during Reconstruction much of that promise went unfulfilled in what historian Eric Foner has termed an unfinished revolution.
A few words about the scope of this volume. Its aim is to collect contemporary writing by participants and observers that records and illuminates our first national attempt to imagine and build a biracial republic. The writings it presents focus on the status of the freed people in the South after the Civil War, on definitions of citizenship and the expansion of suffrage, on the national political struggles that shaped the course of Reconstruction, and on the white supremacist terrorism that resisted the movement toward equality. It is not intended to address every aspect of American public life during the Reconstruction era, and as a result does not encompass foreign policy, tariff legislation and civil service reform, industrial expansion and labor unrest, or westward expansion and the accompanying wars against the Indians. Moreover, while debates over reconstructing the republic began as far back as the secession winter of 1860–61, we have decided to start telling this story in 1865. A range of writings about wartime reconstruction, including the debate over emancipation and Lincoln’s struggles with congressional Republicans over the framing of policy, are available in the four-volume Library of America series The Civil War Told by Those Who Lived It (2011–14). Finally, while a case can be made that Reconstruction did not end in 1877, we have chosen to conclude our volume with the end of significant federal efforts to maintain Republican state governments in the South in the face of violence, intimidation, and the increasing desire of many northerners for an end to civil strife.
By 1865 the war had destroyed slavery, yet no one knew what a post-emancipation America would look like. Among those trying to find a way forward was Abraham Lincoln. His efforts to restore loyal state governments supported by white Unionists in the South had been repeatedly frustrated by the stubborn determination of most white southerners to defend slavery and secession. Over the course of the war he moved from advocating gradual compensated emancipation, followed by the voluntary colonization of at least some of the freed people outside the United States, to emancipation as a war measure and the enlistment of 180,000 black soldiers, to support for the Thirteenth Amendment and, in what turned out to be his last speech, advocacy of limited black suffrage. Yet the sixteenth president never abandoned his desire for the rapid restoration of elected civilian governments in the South, and his vision for what emancipation would ultimately mean remained incomplete up to the day of his death. Many Republicans sought a more thoroughgoing revolution in southern society, envisioning a prolonged military occupation of the region, the confiscation of planter estates, and their redistribution to the very people who had worked them as enslaved labor. Others supported efforts to establish schools for the freed people and to set them on the path to citizenship and the franchise. While Lincoln may have seen emancipation as a means toward the end of preserving the republic, black leaders reversed those priorities and used the war for union to push for emancipation and equal citizenship. During the war African Americans, in ways large and small, helped undermine and then demolish the institution Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens had celebrated as the “corner-stone” of the Confederacy.
With the collapse of Confederate resistance in the spring of 1865, the imperatives that shaped wartime Reconstruction vanished, for there was no longer any slaveholding regime to subdue. The impending ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment made the destruction of slavery a permanent achievement, no longer subject to possible reversal by a Democratic president or a reactionary Supreme Court. Yet much remained to be done; as Lincoln said at a cabinet meeting on April 14, 1865, a scant five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Reconstruction “was the great question now before us, and we must soon begin to act.” Lincoln’s assassination meant that the exercise of executive initiative would be left to Andrew Johnson, an outspoken Tennessee Unionist who, in the words of his presidential private secretary, “at times exhibited a morbid distress and feeling against the negroes.” Johnson’s assumption of the presidency soon narrowed the boundaries of the possible. His pardon and amnesty proclamations in May 1865 put an end to the notion of widespread confiscation of planter lands, while he sought to restore white supremacist state governments under which the freed people would, at best, be second-class citizens, unable to vote in elections dominated by unrepentant secessionists. With the chance for more fundamental change thwarted, congressional Republicans settled for devising means within the framework of restored civil governments to protect black civil rig
hts and curb the influence of former Confederates. They passed the first federal civil rights act, extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and framed the Fourteenth Amendment. Johnson’s repeated vetoes and ill-tempered public outbursts eroded his standing, and in 1867 Congress seized control of Reconstruction policy, restoring military rule in the South and insisting that black men be enfranchised and permitted to participate alongside whites in forming new state governments.
The refusal of most southern whites to accept emancipation and equality before the law as results of the war led to measures that were both revolutionary for their times and ultimately limited in their extent. Framed and proposed to the states by Congress in 1866 and ratified two years later, the Fourteenth Amendment fundamentally transformed the American republic, establishing national citizenship and guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the law to all persons. Yet it was uncertain what the impact of the amendment would be. Although its text gave Congress the power to enforce its provisions through appropriate legislation, it was unclear how enforcement would work in a nation historically averse to centralized power. And to the bitter frustration of the suffragist movement, neither Congress, the courts, nor the public at large would consider the status of women to have been changed by the amendment’s adoption. Southern resistance to ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment helped push Congress to adopt the Reconstruction Acts in 1867, making male black voters in the South part of the political process. The struggle with Johnson over his attempts to interfere with the implementation of the Reconstruction Acts, which eventually led to his impeachment and near-conviction, exacted a toll on the Republicans and forced them to settle for measures that fell short of their intended goals. White supremacist violence escalated through the expansion of the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups. Republicans struggled to institute black suffrage in the North as well as the South, a sign of the limits of white support for political equality and the power of the Democratic Party to obstruct change. Despite widespread violence and intimidation, in 1868 black men participated as voters in large numbers for the first time, with their ballots giving Ulysses S. Grant, the Republican presidential candidate, his margin of victory in the popular vote. (Absent a popular majority, Grant would have secured the presidency through the electoral college in any case.)
In accepting the 1868 Republican presidential nomination, Grant offered a deceptively simple rendering of his personal platform: “Let us have peace.” The phrase could mean whatever one wanted it to mean: an end to violence against the freed people, an end to sectional rancor, an end to prolonged political bickering and conflict, and even an end to Reconstruction, so that the nation could move past the war. In arming black men with the ballot, Republicans could also claim that African Americans in the South were now empowered to defend themselves through the traditional political process, alleviating the need for continued federal intervention to protect them from white violence. The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 removed race as a barrier to voting, although states were still allowed to impose literacy tests, property qualifications, and poll taxes as long as they were applied on an ostensibly nonracial basis. Using the federal amendment process allowed Republicans in the North to enfranchise black men in their own states by a simple majority vote in their legislatures, bypassing the referenda often required to amend state constitutions. As one Pennsylvania Republican congressman put it, “Party expediency and exact justice coincide for once.” Yet the amendment’s passage also marked a turning point for many Republicans, who openly expressed doubt that the federal government could, or should, do anything further to secure the rights of the freed people. And, to the renewed frustration of the suffragist movement, the amendment did nothing to remove disenfranchisement on the basis of sex.
If Americans who voted for Grant thought his slogan “Let us have peace” signaled that he would bring an end to Reconstruction, they would find themselves sorely disappointed during the next eight years. Efforts to suppress black votes and topple Republican-controlled state governments in the South continued, forcing Republicans to pass a series of Enforcement Acts designed to give the federal government the power to protect the freed people from organized violence and electoral fraud. Although a vigorous application of federal military and judicial power broke the back of the Ku Klux Klan, white southerners found other ways to resist Reconstruction, and their use of terrorist tactics became more sophisticated. During the 1870s, in the wake of a devastating economic depression, more and more whites began to believe that nothing more could, or should, be done to protect the rights of southern blacks. Some northerners latched on to the corruption and factionalism of some southern Republicans as justification for washing their hands of the entire Reconstruction endeavor, while others lamented how the necessary means of enforcement, including expanded federal power and military intervention, went against American traditions of local rule and civilian government. A commitment to equality and freedom, never quite complete in the minds and hearts of many white people who had supported the war to preserve the Union, faltered, narrowing the limits of the possible through the erosion of public support for continued intervention. Additional civil rights legislation proved short-lived, although the debate over what became the Civil Rights Act of 1875 allowed the first African American representatives in the halls of Congress an opportunity to demonstrate their eloquence, idealism, and courage as they called upon their fellow Americans to make good on the promise of equality.
In the South the forces of white supremacy waged a skillful campaign to retake control of the region, displaying a commitment that had been lacking in the Confederacy’s quest for independence. Whether Republicans conducted a retreat from Reconstruction or waged a fighting withdrawal, by the time of the nation’s celebration of its centennial in 1876 it was clear that the few Republican state governments that remained in the South were in a precarious position that required federal support to persist, and such support would come to an end no matter who won the presidential contest that year. Once Republicans realized that they could maintain control of the presidency and the Senate without southern voters, they decided that the party’s southern wing was a disastrous political liability. The resolution of the disputed Hayes-Tilden presidential contest through the series of agreements styled the Compromise of 1877 marked the end of an era in Reconstruction policy, while the restoration of home rule to white southerners paved the way for the era of disenfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation, and widespread lynching.
This collection focuses on our country’s first great struggle for black freedom and equality. It is best understood as an introduction to Reconstruction, an effort to outline the perspectives of various participants in the historical drama that unfolded in the dozen years after Appomattox and a point of departure for readers who want to further explore the period. Like all volumes in the Library of America series, it is ultimately a story about Americans and their language—about how our fellow citizens have used the spoken and written word to make sense of their own experiences, to express their hopes and fears, to let posterity know what they believed to be right and wrong, and to tell us what ideals they thought our country should aspire to live up to. It is worth our while to listen to them.
Brooks D. Simpson
PRESIDENTIAL RECONSTRUCTION
1865–1866
As the American Civil War came to an end in the spring of 1865, all Americans, regardless of region or race, anxiously anticipated what would come next. Would former Confederates willingly accept their defeat and thus open the way to reconciliation and reunion? Would northerners welcome their former enemies back, or would they heed calls for the punishment of leading rebels and the confiscation of southern plantations? How would blacks—and whites—define what freedom and citizenship meant in a nation shorn of slavery? What, in short, had four years of fighting really achieved?
Different people viewed Reconstruction in different ways. Was it simply a process to provide for th
e reestablishment of loyal regimes in the former Confederate states as a prelude to the return of an antebellum order based on states’ rights and a limited federal government? Or was it something more—an opportunity for a new birth of freedom that would remake former slaveholding states into more egalitarian societies? Was there any way to devise an approach that would provide both sectional reconciliation between American whites and equality and opportunity for African Americans, including the newly emancipated?
Abraham Lincoln struggled to answer those questions. While he hoped that what wartime reconstruction had achieved would not be undone, he knew that with the end of the war he would have to frame a policy more appropriate to new circumstances. An assassin’s bullet cut short his opportunity to shape events. Taking his place in the White House was Andrew Johnson, a southerner who had maintained his allegiance to the Union during the war. Johnson’s expressions of hatred toward the ruling planter class gave many observers cause to believe that he would pursue a harsher policy toward the defeated South than Lincoln’s. Whether the Tennessean would demonstrate the same sort of commitment toward black freedom remained to be seen.
All eyes turned south to see how southerners, black and white, responded to emancipation. How would former slaves define and experience freedom? Would whites accept blacks as free laborers or would they seek to reimpose slavery in all but name? The decisions by freed people to reunite families, seek schooling, and control their own labor were cited by many whites as evidence that without coercion, blacks would not work. Observers from the North attempted to assess the willingness of former Confederates to accept the verdict of Appomattox. In turn many white southerners took their cues from Johnson, who seemed content with a restoration of the old order while setting aside or blocking African American aspirations. Having at first issued impassioned statements about punishing traitors, the new president soon retreated to requiring minimal concessions from white southerners in order for them to regain their place in the Union. Relieved that Johnson asked so little of them, white southerners squabbled over whether to accept even those requirements. Why ratify the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery when one could simply accept the destruction of slavery as a consequence of military defeat? Why not seek compensation for lost property, including slaves? Was it really necessary to rescind the ordinances of secession adopted in 1860–61? If most southern whites begrudgingly accepted that slavery had become a casualty of the conflict, they were determined to confine blacks to a second-class status through legislation, intimidation, and violence. Most notable were the so-called Black Codes, a series of legislative acts adopted in the former slave states that restricted the legal rights and economic opportunities of African Americans. While their provisions varied, many of the codes prohibited black persons from bearing arms, serving on juries, or testifying against whites, and subjected them to harsher criminal punishments, including whipping. The crime of vagrancy was broadly defined and made punishable by forced labor in an effort to coerce freed people into signing year-long contracts as plantation workers. A sullen acquiescence in defeat accompanied a defiant resistance to black advancement that was aided by a president whose policy of pardon and amnesty cut short the possibility of widespread land confiscation. After all, reasoned Johnson, Reconstruction was nothing more than “restoration” of the prewar republic. His remarks to black veterans in October 1865 betrayed what his private secretary once characterized as “a morbid distress and feeling against the negroes.” Appeals by African Americans for opportunity and protection fell on deaf ears at the White House.
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