The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877

This is Unit Sixteen, part three, and it closes the historical narrative of this course. Part two ended with the Fifteenth Amendment ratified and the two reform movements split. This half is what the Reconstruction governments actually did, what was done to them, and why the country stopped. Two corrections to carry, and they are the reason this unit exists. The first is arithmetic. Reconstruction was called negro misrule for a century, and Black members held a majority in exactly one chamber of one state. The second is about why it ended. The argument that finished Reconstruction was not primarily an argument about race at all. It was an argument about the size of government, made credible by a corruption scandal in a railroad. By the end you will be able to make both corrections. To explain why freed people got no land. To explain why Klan violence worked. And to state what the Compromise of eighteen seventy-seven settled.

Two entries on what Black southerners built once they could vote.

The leagues, and the offices.

USH1 2291 Black Political Achievement

Union Leagues, northern fraternal groups promoting Union loyalty, expanded south and became political clubs and Black community centres, helping build schools and churches and enrolling newly enfranchised voters. In the eighteen seventies fifteen Black members sat in the House of Representatives and two in the Senate, Blanche K. Bruce and Hiram Revels, both from Mississippi.

The first of those senators.

USH1 2292 Hiram Revels

Hiram Revels was born free in North Carolina, rose as an African Methodist Episcopal minister, and became a Mississippi state senator in eighteen sixty-nine, with the legislature electing him the following year to a vacant United States Senate seat. He took the seat in Jefferson Davis's home state. The New York Times reported that a pin might have been heard drop.

Two entries now, and the first is the most contested interpretation in this course.

What the governments were called.

USH1 2293 Negro Misrule and the Counterrevolution

White southerners called Reconstruction government negro misrule, complaining of corruption by freed people and northerners. Some corruption was real. Legislators bought hams and perfumes and voted themselves inflated salaries, though the anchor records that such examples were relatively few and comparable to nineteenth-century national corruption. The claim of Black domination fails on arithmetic. Over six hundred African Americans served as legislators in Reconstruction governments, and Black members held a majority in only one chamber of one state, the lower house of South Carolina's legislature. In every other southern legislature they were a minority, and that six hundred figure and the South Carolina exception come from a witness rather than from the anchor. The anchor states the correction directly: the narrative that the South was unfairly sacrificed primed the country for accepting the fallacy that White southerners frequently experienced violence at unrestrained Black hands, when reality was opposite, and White southerners orchestrated a sometimes violent, generally successful Reconstruction counterrevolution beginning in the eighteen sixties. Teach the corruption honestly, because the anchor does, and because denying it invites you to disbelieve everything else in the unit. The comparative clause carries the argument. The corruption was real, it was small, and it was ordinary by the standards of the same decade's national scandals, which you will meet shortly and which nobody cites to delegitimise the governments that produced them. Then apply the arithmetic. One chamber of one state is not domination, and a story about Black rule told for a century about a period without Black rule is doing some other work.

What those governments did.

USH1 2294 What Those Governments Did

Reconstruction governments eliminated the Black codes, invested in infrastructure and railroad rehabilitation, and established public education systems enrolling White and Black students alike, funding hospitals, orphanages and asylums, and in places supplying firewood and bread to the poor. To pay they levied land and property taxes, striking at southern economic inequality's foundation and compounding White landowners' cash poverty.

Two entries on what freedom turned out to mean, and the second names a decision.

Rebuilding families.

USH1 2295 Rebuilding Families

Slavery had denied legal recognition to Black marriages, deprived enslaved men of ability to protect enslaved women, and allowed children and parents to be sold apart, and thousands took to the roads searching for lost spouses and children. One journalist interviewed a freed person who had travelled over six hundred miles on foot searching for the family taken from him.

The land they were promised.

USH1 2296 The Land That Was Not Given

On the Sea Islands off South Carolina formerly enslaved people expected to own land, after Sherman directed that freed people receive forty-acre plots. In eighteen sixty-five Johnson ordered the land returned to its White owners, and ultimately no land redistribution occurred. Freedom meant wage labour rather than economic independence. Without money or implements, freed people relied on the crop-lien system, in which store owners extended credit at high interest against a portion of the future harvest, and sharecroppers rented land, often on the plantations where they had been enslaved, paying in crops, often as much as half their harvest. The forty acres and the order rescinding them belong in the same entry. The decision that most determined the next century of Black southern poverty was not a failure to act. It was an act, and it was Johnson's order of eighteen sixty-five returning the land. Year-to-year leases then removed any incentive to improve the land, and interest drained the rest.

Two entries on the organisation formed to reverse it, and you have met its first leader.

The Klan.

USH1 2297 The Klan

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in eighteen sixty-six as an oath-bound fraternal order of Confederate veterans in Tennessee, its name likely from kuklos, Greek for circle, and its first leader was former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Unit Fifteen covered Forrest at Fort Pillow. The man who commanded the massacre of surrendered Black soldiers now led the Klan.

Methods and targets.

USH1 2298 Methods and Targets

The Klan punished Black people for attempting to improve their station, burned schools, and murdered, whipped and intimidated freed people and their White supporters, riding masked and armed, firing into homes, some dressed as ghosts of slain Confederate soldiers. They killed a congressman from Arkansas and three state congressmen from South Carolina. The Red Shirts and White League worked alike.

One entry, sworn testimony, and it closes this part of the unit for a reason.

Abram Colby.

USH1 2299 Abram Colby

Abram Colby was fifty-two, formerly enslaved, and elected to Georgia's lower house in eighteen sixty-eight. He testified in Atlanta on October twenty-seventh, eighteen seventy-one, before the congressional committee investigating the Klan. Two days before the attack they had offered him five thousand dollars to turn and go with them, and two thousand five hundred cash if he would let another man go to the legislature in his place. He refused. On the twenty-ninth of October they came to his house, broke his door open, took him out of his bed and took him to the woods and whipped him three hours or more and left him in the woods for dead. They asked whether he would ever vote another damned Radical ticket. He answered that if there was an election tomorrow he would vote the Radical ticket, and they set in and whipped him a thousand licks more. His testimony was given under oath. Colby's account shows the mechanism and not only the cruelty, which is why it closes this unit. Take the sequence in order. First the bribe, which means the Klan preferred his resignation to his death and understood exactly what it wanted. Then the beating, which came only after he refused. Then the part students miss. Colby said he would have come before the court, but he knew it was no use to try to get Ku-Klux condemned by Ku-Klux, and he noted that a member of that week's grand jury was the father of one of the men who whipped him. The violence worked because the courts were staffed by the people committing it.

One entry on what Washington did about it, and note where it moved the trials.

The Enforcement Acts.

USH1 2300 The Enforcement Acts

Congress created a joint select committee in eighteen seventy-one which took testimony from freed people and published a thirteen-volume report the following year, and the Enforcement Acts of eighteen seventy and seventy-one outlawed polling intimidation. The Ku Klux Klan Act moved trials to federal courts rather than pro-Klan juries, let the president impose martial law, and gave Grant power to suspend habeas corpus.

Two entries on why enforcement stopped, and the first is the second correction I promised.

The three national causes.

USH1 2301 The Three National Causes

Three national developments ended Reconstruction, and none of them was about race. From eighteen seventy-three a depression followed the failure of Jay Cooke and Company, which set off a panic and a downturn lasting much of the decade, and Democrats blamed the Republicans. Liberal Republicans, following classical liberalism, questioned the federal government's expansive role and broke away, and some Republicans began arguing for downsizing Reconstruction. And scandal arrived: the Whiskey Ring reached the president's personal secretary, and Credit Mobilier reached Vice President Schuyler Colfax, taking Union Pacific's federal money, buying the railroad's own bonds with it, and reselling them at huge profits. The argument that ended Reconstruction was not primarily an argument about race. It was an argument about the size of government, made credible by corruption in a railroad. Democrats used Credit Mobilier as evidence that smaller government was preferable, and the federal enforcement that had held the Klan in check was part of what got made smaller.

What the Democrats called it.

USH1 2302 Redemption and Colfax

Redeemers spoke of redeeming their states from northern control and restoring the antebellum social order, working through the Democratic Party, and as many as one hundred and fifty freedmen were killed at the Colfax courthouse, many while trying to surrender. Democrats recaptured Texas by eighteen seventy-three, Alabama and Arkansas in seventy-four, and the United States House in the eighteen seventy-four elections.

Two entries to end the era, and the last of them is a bargain.

The last statute.

USH1 2303 The Civil Rights Act of 1875

The Civil Rights Act of eighteen seventy-five required equality in public places and on juries, and was the last legislative attempt of the era, and the Supreme Court struck it down in eighteen eighty-three. The Court held that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments did not prohibit discrimination by private individuals, having already undercut the Fourteenth's letter and spirit.

The election that ended it.

USH1 2304 The Compromise of 1877

Samuel Tilden carried the South and a three hundred thousand vote lead, but disputed returns threw twenty electoral votes into doubt, exactly what Hayes needed, and a special commission of fifteen awarded every disputed vote to Hayes, eight to seven. David Davis resigned and Grant appointed a Republican in his place, tipping it. The bargain withdrew all remaining federal troops.

Look at what you can now do. You can correct the negro misrule claim on the arithmetic: over six hundred African Americans served as legislators, and Black members held a majority in one chamber of one state, the lower house of South Carolina. And you can state the corruption honestly, because the anchor does — real, small, and ordinary by the standards of the same decade's national scandals. You can explain why freed people got no land, and that Johnson's order of eighteen sixty-five returning the Sea Island plots was an act rather than an omission, which is the decision that most determined the next century of Black southern poverty. You can explain why Klan violence worked, from Colby's own testimony: a bribe first, then a beating, and a grand jury holding the father of one of the men who whipped him. You can state the three national causes — a depression, a liberal Republican break over the size of government, and scandal reaching the vice president — and say that none of them was about race. And you can state what eighteen seventy-seven settled: twenty disputed votes awarded to Hayes eight to seven, and every remaining federal soldier withdrawn.