Evaluating the Successes and Failures of Reconstruction
Bibliography In the aftermath of the Civil War, Reconstruction of the South took place between 1865 and 1877 under the auspices of three American presidents. While Southerners did not embrace the process, which resulted in the germination of various obstacles and problems that ultimately rendered it quite unsuccessful, as slavery reappeared in debt peonage. Moreover, racism escalated due to latent antagonists by Southern Democrats against newly freed African Americans.
When the Civil War was nearing its end in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln began devising a blueprint for the social, economic, physical, and political rehabilitation in the South, which was a region that had endured four years of bitter conflicts and tensions spawned by the Civil War combined with over two centuries of racism. Republicans serving in the federal government felt the need to restore private property, public infrastructure, housing, medical care, and food production despite the fact that the economy and the labor force had been torn asunder. In addition, Republicans sought to fundamentally alter the characteristics and aspects of Southern politics and society. The majority of the programs were geared towards assisting the South, yet Southerners still resented the notion that the South needed to be reconstructed, thereby chafing against the proposed changes forced upon them by the Republicans, the federal government, and northerners. Thus, the struggle to reintegrate and rebuild the government, infrastructure, society, and economy took twelve years, as Reconstruction remained the primary political issue that dominated debates in the government in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Lincoln freed the slaves in the former Confederacy in 1863 but not slavery in the border states. His goal was to free slaves in the confederacy to cut off the labor source in the South in order to devastate the Southern economy. Between 1863-1864, Lincoln devised a plan to reconstruct the Confederate States now under Union control as he wanted the two entities to combine into one. 10% of the population in the Confederate state must claim loyalty to the Union in order to be allowed back into the Union. Congress did not like Lincoln’s proposal because they had just fought an atrocious civil war and wanted it to be a little more difficult to be readmitted into it so easily. Thus, Congress members put forth the Wade-Davis bill, which stated that a majority vote of confidence was necessary in order to be re-admitted into the Union. In 1863, there was already massive descent in executive judicial branch over how to deal with slavery and Confederate states. Unfortunately, in 1865 Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes booth at the theatre and Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency. That same year, Sherman’s special order #15 stated that any place with three heads of household, the former slaves would get 40 acres of land and a mule. The land that would be given was the land in the Confederacy, which the Union claimed as contraband. Congress vetoed this immediately even before the Confederacy collapsed completely. The creation of the Freedman’s Bureau in 1865 was originally intended to help African Americans adjust to freedom in this racist country and to help African Americans find jobs and suitable places to live. It was a very hasty compromise with the intended goal of dealing with four million newly freed slaves in addition to the land that was destroyed in the South during the war as well as the land was laid fallow during the war. The Union as well as the South during the era suffered due to this land lying fallow. The U.S. economy had hitherto depended on exporting textiles manufactured in domestics industries such as cotton. Because the land had laid fallow, these necessary textiles were not being made. After Lincoln is assassinated in April of 1865 the “Reconstruction plan” quickly put into place. President Johnson allowed for the southern states that had seceded to be readmitted into the Union, which was the president’s primary goal. The majority of the southern states did not agree to all of the terms and stipulations mandated for reentry. Confederate states in 1867 pass Black codes and vagrancy laws, which mandated all American citizens to have a job, and they cannot walk around without supervision or vote. President Johnson was busy pardoning generals who participated in the Civil War while the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified and rendered it illegal to have people perform coerced work as forced laborers.
Despite the promises that inhered Southern Reconstruction with the passage of favorable laws and overwhelming congressional support, its failures underscore the grim realities of racism and second-class citizenship that would endure in the United States for over a century. President Johnson returned all land that had been confiscated and parceled out by the Freedman’s Bureau in addition to pardoning the war generals. He tried desperately to repair the nation by ensuring that the southern states that had seceded rejoined the Union. The Civil Rights Act of 1865 enumerated the rights of American citizens, which included the right to sign contracts, the right to sue others, and the right to buy and sell private property. After the Dred Scott decision was passed in 1862, which concluded that African Americans are not citizens, Congress feared that the Supreme Courts would override this act. As a result, the seminal Fourteenth Amendment was proposed by Congress out of fear that the Civil Rights Act of 1865 would be invalidated by the Supreme Court. Confederate officers were not allowed to hold office, and African Americans could not be sold for money. Moreover, African Americans were recognized as citizens even though suffrage was unavailable. President Johnson vehemently opposed it, and he wanted the South to reject it, which sparked white riots were in the South. These riots commenced a year because the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, a white vigilante group that deployed mob tactics and vaunted vigilantism in order to prevent African Americans from exercising their rights as free citizens. Congress retained the right to override President Johnson’s veto because two thirds of Congress belonged to the Republicans, which was Lincoln’s party, which leads to radical reconstruction in the South in 1867.
Radical Reconstruction commenced in 1867 when Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act, which enfranchised African-American men and resulted 700,000 African American men registering to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, which guaranteed the right of citizenship to Africans Americans but not to Native Americans. Congress also ratified new constitutions drawn up in the Southern states. The South was redrawn into five military districts and was subject to martial law as army troops in control there. There were only 15,000 troops stationed in the various military districts throughout the South, but it should be noted that but the majority of the federal troops in the South were fighting the indigenous peoples over their land. In 1867, the Freedman’s Bureau in the unreconstructed South took place, and it was extended into the year 1868. The Bureau retained the authority to pen and enact or veto laws, to collect taxes, to define what crimes are and how to punish individuals in a manner that they see fit, and to conscript and take charge of its own military force. There were 900 bureau officials in the South, and by June 1869, there were over twelve million patients who received ample medical treatment by physicians hired by the Bureai. In spite of the scope of the bureau—they fed and sheltered the needy—its primary function was as a labor bureau that W.E.B. Dubois, a seminal civil rights leader, contended for. Labor bureaus were supposed to act as middlemen, monitor the ability of newly freed slaves as workers free to the employer of their choice and to ensure that fixed wages were not paid on the plantations. As a result, several thousands and even millions of recently freed former slaved were unemployed and had no place to live, which spawned great misery for these former slaves. The U.S. economy during an epoch that still relied on the production of the cash crop and the bureau really needed to ensure stability of the US economy, although it proved unable to fulfill its primary goal of maintaining the economy as well as social order. Ultimately, the Freedman’s Bureau completely changed the shape of American society and established the first state-sponsored public schools created and instituted during the nineteenth century in the South. As a result of educational opportunities, the literacy of newly freed African Americans escalated in the South and in the North, which was necessary so that they could effectively assimilate and successfully transition from slave life to a free American citizen. The Bureau created a network of public schools which today many Americans take for granted, thereby making education a government task.
Although some successes manifested, a litany of failures did as well as African Americans still remained to an extent economically and politically disempowered. The sharecropping system burgeoned in the aftermath of the Civil War in the divided South as a result of the Freedman’s Bureau seminal role as a labor bureau. The bureau emerged as an employment center, a return of African American citizens to farm work for low wages returned, which in reality meant that workers only were able to keep a small portion of their earnings. African Americans had to choose from two disparate options with regards to labor and earning wages to supposed themselves and their families: sharecropping, which required them to rent land and get a part of the product; or taking up menial work for extremely low wages. At the outset of the post-slavery epoch, a wage economy for African-American families called for the entire family was expected to work in the field. There is a shift in the structure of African-American labor, as black families represent the bottom of the labor hierarchy because they were viewed as menial, low-level workers. The whole family was expected to work in both options for blacks because the vagrancy laws and Black Codes had to be adhered to by al members of African-American families. The Fourteenth amendment was supposed to guarantee due process for all individuals, yet such protections in the law was merely nominal. In 1868, Georgia expelled all black members from the government, and Ulysses Grant was elected president. The Fifteenth Amendment was proposed because the Fourteenth amendment was supposed to enforce equality of rights for blacks and whites but it was failing miserably. The goal of this amendment then was to try and handle at least with regards to voting. Once this amendment was ratified, it again incited massive rioting by whites throughout the country. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 attempted to deal with the segregation of blacks in public places; their exclusion from voting as a result of literacy tests because the tests that were virtually impossible to pass as there were unanswerable questions on it; and poll taxes aimed at hindering blacks from voting. African Americans were destitute and could barely afford to eat. Moreover, African Americans were exempt from serving on juries, which enabled racist whites incarcerate all blacks even if no crime committed.
In 1878, Rutherford B. Hayes won the presidential election by one electoral vote. However, there was a scandal because claims of voters fraud emerged in Florida as well as reports of white intimidation of blacks at the voting polls. The Compromise of 1877 accepted Hayes’ presidential election in exchange for the withdrawal of military troops from the South while also making it so the federal government intervened in Southern affairs. As a result, the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments could not be enforced there. In 1890, a de facto system of segregation was pronounced in the South was enforced through the exclusion of blacks from public places, the intimidation of blacks through violence, and the elimination of interracial trials and laws used to incarcerate black males. Black males were sent to plantations where they worked as chain gangs since it was legal to put prisoners to free, coerced labor according to the Thirteenth Amendment. Plantations thus emerged as prisons as black males who worked in chain gangs engaged in the same work as they did during slavery. Because interracial trials were prohibited, black males were given extra long sentences for minor offenses even if there was a lacking of evidence. Moreover, the sharecropping system expanded in the aftermath of Reconstruction. Debt peonage, which is a system of labor on small family farms throughout the south, was similar to serfdom. This system works so that tenant farmers owed more to their creditor than they earned. Thus, blacks could be sent to prison as a result very frequently. If the tenant farmers decide to leave than they would be arrested for vagrancy, thereby rendering blacks stuck in a virtual state of slavery all over again.
It is clear that Reconstruction succeeded in its original goal of melding the nation back together, as the Confederacy was dismantled, and all of the states that had seceded were readmitted back to the Union. The ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment outlaws slavery, and the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment defined citizenship and nominally protected all U.S. citizens under the law. The Fifteenth Amendment effectively extended the vote to all men regardless of race or social class. A litany of federal legislation including the Civil Rights Act and the Freedman’s Bureau helped freed blacks integrate into U.S. society and assist in their participation as equal citizens in the economy, government, and society. Indeed, African-American men were elected senators and governors, thereby granting them some political agency. While new political, economic, and cultural venues opened up for blacks, Reconstruction nonetheless faced great challenges due to white antagonism and resistance. The passage of the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws underscore how racism was grafted into new laws in order to ensure that African Americans remained second-class citizens.
Works cited
"African American Records: Freedmen's Bureau." National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives and Records Administration. Web. 20 Apr. 2015. <http://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/freedmens-bureau/#head>.
"Black History in America-The Reconstruction Era." Black History in America. Web. 20 Apr. 2015. <http://www.myblackhistory.net/reconstruction.htm>.
Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty!: An American History. Seagull Third ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. Print.
Kelley, Robin D. G. To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.
Richardson, Heather Cox. The Death of Reconstruction Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2004. Print.
