Reconstruction, the period that followed the Civil War, is perhaps the most controversial era in American history. Traditionally portrayed as a sordid time when vindictive Radical Republicans fastened black supremacy upon the defeated Confederacy, Reconstruction has come to be viewed more sympathetically, as a laudable if unsuccessful experiment in interracial democracy.
Reconstruction witnessed far-reaching changes in America's political life. At the national level, new laws and constitutional amendments permanently altered the federal system and the nature of American citizenship. In the South, a politically mobilized black community joined with white allies to bring the Republican party to power, and with it a redefinition of the purposes and responsibilities of government.
The national debate over Reconstruction began during the Civil War. On what terms should the defeated Confederacy be reunited with the Union? Who should establish these terms, Congress or the president? What should be the place of blacks in the political and social life of the South? These were the questions on which Reconstruction persistently turned, and they acquired increasing urgency as emancipation became a Union war aim in 1863.
In December of that year, President Abraham Lincoln announced the first comprehensive program for Reconstruction, the Ten Percent Plan. This offered a pardon to all southerners, except Confederate leaders, who took an oath affirming loyalty to the Union and support for emancipation. When 10 percent of a state's voters had taken such an oath, they could establish a new state government. To Lincoln, the plan was more an attempt to weaken the Confederacy than a blueprint for the postwar South. Although it was put into operation in Union-occupied Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia, none of the new governments achieved broad local support or was recognized by Congress. Many Republicans deemed Lincoln's plan too lenient. In 1864, Congress enacted (and Lincoln pocket vetoed) the Wade-Davis bill, which proposed to delay the formation of new southern governments until a majority of voters had taken a loyalty oath. Some Republicans, moreover, were already convinced that equal rights for the former slaves must accompany the South's readmission to the Union. In his last speech, in April 1865, Lincoln himself expressed the view that some southern blacks ought to enjoy the right to vote.
Thus, Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender in April 1865 found the Union without a settled Reconstruction policy. With Congress out of session, it fell to Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, to outline plans for the South's readmission. In May, he issued a series of proclamations that inaugurated the period of Presidential Reconstruction (1865-1867). Johnson offered a pardon to all southern whites except Confederate leaders and wealthy planters (although most of these subsequently received individual pardons), appointed provisional governors, and outlined steps whereby new state governments would be created. Apart from the requirements that they abolish slavery, repudiate secession, and abrogate the Confederate debt—all inescapable corollaries of southern defeat—these governments were granted a free hand in managing their affairs. Johnson offered blacks no role whatever in the politics of Reconstruction. Having long identified himself as a tribune of the South's (white) common people, Johnson assumed that ordinary yeomen would replace in office the planters who had led the South into secession. But when southern elections restored members of the old elite to power, he did not modify his Reconstruction program.
The course adopted by the new southern governments turned much of the North against Presidential Reconstruction. Alarmed by the apparent ascendancy of "rebels," northern Republicans were further outraged by the Black Codes enacted by southern legislatures. These laws required blacks to sign yearly labor contracts, declared unemployed blacks vagrants who could be hired out to white landowners, provided for the apprenticing of black children to white employers without the consent of their former owners, and in other ways sought to limit the freedmen's economic options and reestablish plantation discipline. Blacks strongly resisted the implementation of these measures, and the evident inability of the white South's leaders to accept emancipation fatally undermined northern support for Johnson's policies.
When Congress assembled in December 1865, Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner called for the abrogation of the Johnson governments and the establishment of new ones based on equality before the law and manhood suffrage. But the more numerous moderate Republicans hoped to work with Johnson while modifying his program. Congress refused to seat the congressmen and senators elected from the southern states and in early 1866 passed and sent to Johnson the Freedmen's Bureau and civil rights bills. The first extended the life of an agency Congress had created in 1865 to oversee the transition from slavery to freedom. The second defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens and spelled out rights they were to enjoy equally without regard to race—making contracts, bringing lawsuits, and enjoying "full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property."
As the first statutory definition of the rights of American citizenship, the civil rights bill embodied a profound change in federal-state relations. Traditionally, citizens' rights had been delineated and protected by the states. Less than a decade earlier, Chief Justice Roger A. Taney, in the Dred Scott decision, had announced that a black person could not be a citizen of the United States. Now Congress proposed that the federal government guarantee the principle of equality before the law, regardless of race, against state violation.
A combination of personal stubbornness, fervent belief in states' rights, and deeply held racist convictions led Johnson to reject the bills. His vetoes caused a permanent rupture between the president and Congress. The Civil Rights Act was the first major piece of legislation in American history to become law over a president's veto. Shortly thereafter, Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment, which forbade states from depriving any citizen of the "equal protection of the laws," barred many Confederates from holding state or national office, and threatened to reduce the South's representation in Congress if black men continued to be kept from voting.
Not until 1867, however, was Congress prepared to endorse black suffrage directly. This happened after two developments further strengthened the Radical Republicans. First, northern voters overwhelmingly repudiated Johnson's policies in the fall 1866 congressional elections. Then, the southern states, with the exception of Tennessee, rejected the Fourteenth Amendment. Congress now decided to begin Reconstruction anew. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts and outlined how new governments, based on manhood suffrage, were to be established. Thus began the period of Radical or Congressional Reconstruction, which lasted until the fall of the last southern Republican governments in 1877.
By 1870, all the former Confederate states had been readmitted to the Union, and nearly all were controlled by the Republican party. These groups made up southern Republicanism. Carpetbaggers, or recent arrivals from the North, were former Union soldiers, teachers, Freedmen's Bureau agents, and businessmen, most of whom had come south before 1867, when the possibility of obtaining office was remote. But they leapt at the opportunity to help mold the "backward" South in the image of the North.
The second large group of Republicans—scalawags, or native-born white Republicans—included some Old Whig planters who hoped to lead a "harnessed revolution" in which whites would recognize blacks' civil and political rights but retain control of state government. Most, however, were nonslaveholding small farmers from the southern up-country. Loyal to the Union during the Civil War, they saw the Republican party as a means of keeping "rebels" from regaining power in the South.
In every state, blacks formed the overwhelming majority of southern Republican voters. Composed mainly of those who had been free before the Civil War and slave ministers, artisans, and Civil War veterans, an articulate black political leadership emerged during Reconstruction to press for the elimination of the nation's racial caste system and the economic uplifting of the former slaves. Although blacks did not obtain office in proportion to their numbers in the party, and "black supremacy" never existed, some sixteen served in Congress during Reconstruction, over six hundred in state legislatures, and hundreds more in local offices, from sheriff to justice of the peace, scattered across the South. The presence of sympathetic local officials, black or white, made a real difference in southern life, ensuring that those accused of crimes would be tried before juries of their peers and enforcing fairness in such prosaic aspects of local government as road repair, tax assessment, and poor relief.
In many ways, Reconstruction at the state level profoundly altered traditions of southern government. Serving an expanded citizenry and embracing a new definition of public responsibility, Reconstruction governments established the South's first state-funded public school systems, adopted measures designed to strengthen the bargaining power of plantation laborers, made taxation more equitable, and outlawed racial discrimination in public transportation and accommodations. They also embarked on ambitious programs of economic development, offering lavish aid to railroads and other enterprises in the hope of creating a New South whose economic expansion would benefit black and white alike. But the program of railroad aid did much to undermine support for Reconstruction. Spawning corruption and rising taxes, it alienated increasing numbers of white voters.
The essential reason for the growing opposition to Reconstruction, however, was the fact that southern whites could not accept the idea of former slaves voting and holding office or the egalitarian policies adopted by the new governments. Increasingly, Reconstruction's opponents turned to violence. The Ku Klux Klan launched a campaign of terror that targeted for beatings or assassination local Republican leaders as well as blacks who asserted their rights in dealings with white employers. The Klan decimated the Republican organization in many localities. Increasingly, the new southern governments looked to Washington for survival.
By 1869, the Republican party was firmly in control of all three branches of the federal government. After attempting to remove Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, in apparent violation of the new Tenure of Office Act, Johnson had been impeached by the House of Representatives in 1868. Although the Senate, by a single vote, failed to convict him, his power to obstruct the course of Reconstruction was gone. Republican Ulysses S. Grant was elected president that fall. Soon afterward, Congress approved the Fifteenth Amendment, prohibiting states from restricting the franchise because of race. Then it enacted a series of Enforcement Acts authorizing national action to suppress political violence. In 1871, the administration launched a legal and military offensive that destroyed the Klan. Grant was reelected in 1872 in the most peaceful election of the period.
Nonetheless, Reconstruction soon began to wane. Democrats had never accepted its legitimacy, and during the 1870s, many Republicans retreated from both the racial egalitarianism and the broad definition of federal power spawned by the Civil War. Southern corruption and instability, Reconstruction's critics argued, stemmed from the exclusion of the region's "best men"—the old planters—from power. As the northern Republican party became more conservative, Reconstruction came to symbolize both misgovernment and a misguided attempt to use state power to uplift the lower classes of society. The depression that began in 1873 pushed economic questions to the forefront of politics, eclipsing Reconstruction. And when Democrats, for the first time since the Civil War, won control of the House of Representatives in 1874, it was clear that southern Republicans could expect little further help from Washington. When violence again erupted in the South in the mid-1870s, Grant failed to intervene.
By 1876, only South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana remained under Republican control—the remaining southern states had been "redeemed" by white Democrats. The outcome of the presidential election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden hinged on the disputed returns from these states. After negotiations between southern political leaders and representatives of Hayes, a compromise was reached: Hayes would recognize Democratic control of the remaining southern states, and Democrats would not block the certification of his election by Congress. Hayes was inaugurated, federal troops returned to their barracks, and Reconstruction came to an irrevocable end.
The collapse of Reconstruction deeply affected the future course of American development. Except in a few areas, the southern Republican party all but disappeared, and the South long remained a one-party region under the control of a reactionary ruling elite who used the same violence and fraud that had helped defeat Reconstruction to stifle internal dissent. Despite its expanded authority over citizens' rights, the federal government stood by indifferently as the South effectively nullified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and stripped blacks of the right to vote. Not until the 1960s would the nation again attempt to come to terms with the political agenda of Reconstruction.
Eric Foner
