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Reconstruction: With Malice
Toward None and Charity for
All
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Spring 2009
US Grant
Main Ideas:
1. Freedman’s Bureau. In 1869, with its work scarcely
Analysis:
begun, Congress provided for the termination of the
Evaluation:
(Freedmen's) Bureau's activities, and soon after it ceased
to exist. Even a Congress dominated by the radicalmoderate coalition could support an experiment in social
engineering for only a few short years, and it had to be
justified on the grounds of an unprecedented emergency.
Kenneth M. Stampp, New Left Professor of American
History at University of California at Berkeley, The Era of
Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1965), 135.
During its brief existence it issued more than fifteen
million rations and gave medical care to a million people.
Second, it spent more than $5,000,000 for Negro schools,
a pitifully inadequate sum but as much as Congress would
grant. Kenneth M. Stampp, 134.
The Freedman’s Bureau established 3,695 hospitals,
issued more than 21 million rations, and provided free
transportation to more than 30,000 people dislocated by
war. Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross, The Ku Klux
Klan in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987),
12.
Reformers established a large network of schools for
former slaves—4,000 schools by 1870, staffed by 9,000
teachers (half of them black), teaching 200,000 students.
In the 1870s, Reconstruction governments began to build a
comprehensive public school system in the South. By
1876, more than half of all white children and about 40
percent of all black children were attending schools in the
South (although almost all such schools were racially
segregated). Several black "academies," offering more
advanced education, also began operating. Gradually,
these academies grew into an important network of black
colleges and universities. Alan Brinkley, New Left
Professor of History at Columbia University, The
1
Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American
People, Volume One: To 1877 (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1997), 410.
Main Ideas:
2. Education. The 1868 report of the Secretary of War
Analysis:
recorded a total of 2,295 teachers in schools for Negroes
Evaluation:
in the South; but 990 of these teachers were local Negroes,
and some of the remaining 1,305 were Southern whites.
Of a total of 1831 schools, 1,325 were sustained wholly or
in part by the freedmen themselves, who owned 518
buildings—many of them churches—used for school
purposes. In the tabulation of money supplied, the federal
share was just over a million dollars, compared with an
estimated $700,000 provided by Northern church and
secular groups, and $360,000 provided by the freedmen
themselves. William Pierce Randel, Ku Klux Klan: A
Century of Infamy (New York: Chilton Books, 1965), 91.
Since it was no longer illegal to learn to read and write,
African Americans pursued education with much zeal. A
growing number also sought higher education. Between
1860 and 1880 over 1,000 African Americans earned
college degrees. Some went north to college, but most
attended one of the 13 Southern colleges established by
the American Missionary Association or by black and
white churches with the assistance of the Freedmen's
Bureau. Such schools as Howard University and Fisk
University were a permanent legacy of Reconstruction.
James Kirby Martin, University of Houston, Randy
Roberts, Purdue University, Steven Mintz, University of
Houston, Linda O. McMurry, North Carolina State
University, James H. Jones, University of Houston and
Sam W. Haynes, University of Texas at Arlington,
America and Its People: A Mosaic in the Making (New
York: HarperCollins College Publishers, 1995), 405.
The efforts of these institutions and of the public schools
slowly and painfully reduced the black illiteracy rate from
more than 80 percent in 1870 to 45 percent by 1900.
James McPherson, Ordeal by Fire (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1982), 575.
The annual amount, which the Bureau voted to school
purposes, increased from $27,000 in 1865 to nearly
$1,000,000 in 1870, and reached a total in 1865-1870 of
$5,262,511.26. In July 1870, there were 4,239 schools
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under their supervision, with 9,307 teachers and 247,333
pupils. Notwithstanding this, of the 1,700,000 Negro
children of school age in 1870, only about one-tenth were
actually in school. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, Ph.D.
Harvard, African-American Professor of Sociology,
Atlanta University, Black Reconstruction: An Essay
Toward A History Of The Part Which Black Folk Played
In The Attempt To Reconstruct Democracy In America,
1860-1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace And Company,
1938), 648.
3. Black Gains. In some respects, the postwar years were Main Ideas:
Analysis:
a period of remarkable economic progress for African
Evaluation:
Americans in the South. The per capita income of blacks
(when the material benefits of slavery are counted as
income) rose 46 percent between 1857 and 1879, while
the per capita income of whites declined 35 percent.
African Americans were also able to work less than they
had under slavery. Women and children were less likely to
labor in the fields, and adult men tended to work shorter
days. In all, the black labor force worked about one-third
fewer hours during Reconstruction than it had been
compelled to work under slavery--a reduction that brought
the working schedule of blacks roughly into accord with
that of white farm laborers. Alan Brinkley, 411.
The distribution of landownership in the South changed
considerably in the postwar years. Among whites, there
was a striking decline in landownership, from 80 percent
before the war to 67 percent by the end of Reconstruction.
Some whites lost their land because of unpaid debt or
increased taxes; some left the marginal lands they had
owned to move to more fertile areas, where they rented.
Among blacks, during the same period, the proportion
who owned land rose from virtually none to more than 20
percent. Alan Brinkley, 410.
“The average wage of Negro farm laborers in the South
was about 50¢ a day, Thomas Fortune, a young black
editor of the New York Globe, said. He was usually paid
in orders, not money, which he could only uses store
controlled by the planter, ‘a system of fraud.’” Howard
Zinn, New Left Professor of Political Science at Boston
University, A People's History of the United States (New
York: Harper Perennial, 1980), 204.
3
Some African Americans, usually through hard work and
incredible sacrifice, were able to obtain land. The
percentage of blacks who owned property increased from
less than 1 to 20 percent. African Americans seemed to
fare better than poor whites, for whom the percentage of
land ownership dropped from 80 to 67 percent. James
Kirby Martin, 405.
Main Ideas:
4. Sharecropping. To blacks, sharecropping offered an
escape from gang labor and day-to-day white supervision. Analysis:
Evaluation:
For planters, the system provided a way to reduce the cost
and difficulty of labor supervision, share risk with tenants,
and circumvent the chronic shortage of cash and credit.
Most important of all, it established the work force, for
sharecroppers utilized the labor of all members of the
family and had a vested interest in remaining until the crop
had been gathered. Eric Foner, New Left Professor of
American History at Columbia University,
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Resolution (New
York: Harper & Row, 1988), 174.
The 1870s and 1880s saw an acceleration of the process
that had begun in the immediate postwar years: the
imposition of systems of tenantry and debt peonage on
much of the region; the reliance on a few cash crops rather
than on a diversified agricultural system; and increasing
absentee ownership of valuable farmlands. During
Reconstruction, perhaps a third or more of the farmers in
the South were tenants; by 1900 the figure had increased
to 70 percent. Alan Brinkley, 421-2.
In 1865, planters offered freed workers provisions and
housing plus money wages of only $5 or $6 per month or
share wages of one-tenth of the crop. By 1867, the
freedmen had pushed this up to an average of $10 per
month for a full hand (an adult male) or as much as onethird of the crop. James McPherson, 577.
5. Company Stores. Most local stores had no
competition. As a result, they were able to set interest
rates as high as 50 or 60 percent. Farmers had to give the
merchants a lien (or claim) on their crops as collateral for
the loans (thus the term "crop-lien system," generally used
to describe Southern farming in this period). Farmers who
suffered a few bad years in a row, as many did, could
4
Main Ideas:
Analysis:
Evaluation:
become trapped in a cycle of debt from which they could
never escape. Alan Brinkley, 411.
Interest rates for goods purchased on credit rose to
exorbitant levels (often exceeding 50 percent), reflecting
both the South's capital shortage and the fact that many
rural merchants faced no local competition. In many
cases, too, they inflicted outright fraud upon illiterate
tenants. "A man that didn't know how to count would
always lose," an Arkansas freedman later remarked, and in
some rural areas, blacks banded together to find men able
to check merchants' calculations "to keep them from
taking all our labor away from us." Eric Foner, 408.
[In the South,] Most local stores had no competition (and
went to great lengths to ensure that things stayed that
way). As a result, they were able to set interest rates as
high at 50 or 60 percent. Alan Brinkley, 435.
6. Southern Politics. In the fall of 1867, southern states
held elections for delegates to state constitutional
conventions, as required by the Reconstruction Acts.
About 40 percent of the white electorate staved home
because they had been disfranchised or because they had
decided to boycott politics. Republicans won threefourths of the seats. About 15 percent of the Republican
delegates to the conventions were Northerners who had
moved south, 25 percent were African Americans, and 60
percent were white Southerners. James L. Roark,
Professor of History at Emory University, Michael P
Johnson, Johns Hopkins University, Patricia Cline Cohen,
University of California, Santa Barbara, Sarah Stage,
Arizona State University, Alan Lawson, Boston College,
and Susan M. Hartmann, Ohio State University, The
American Promise: A Compact History Third Edition
Volume I: To 1877 (Boston, Massachusetts: St. Martin's,
2007), 413.
(In South Carolina) Government was a nightmare. The
majority of the legislature consisted of negroes, nearly all
of whom had been slaves . . . The orgy of extravagance,
luxury, and corruption in which this "black parliament"
sank itself was perhaps without a parallel in the annals of
legislation. A bar and restaurant dispensed fine food and
drink to members and their friends. Printing in one year
cost $450,000. Pickles, brandied cherries, and fancy toilet
5
Main Ideas:
Analysis:
Evaluation:
soap figured among the legislative expenses. S.E.
Forman, Consensus Historian and textbook writer, Our
Republic: A Brief History of the American People (New
York: Century Co., 1924), 531.
Black Republicans were hardly immune to the lure of
illicit gain. Governor P.B.S. Pinchbeck used his position
on the New Orleans Park Commission to orchestrate the
purchase of land, at an inflated price, of which he was part
owner. He also made a handsome profit speculating in
state bonds. Inside information, he frankly admitted,
allowed his operations to succeed: "I belonged to the
General Assembly, and knew about what it would do, etc.
My investments were made accordingly." Thomas W.
Cardozo appears to have embezzled state funds while
serving as Mississippi's superintendent of education. And
black lawmakers supported aid to corporations in which
they held directorships or stock, and took money for other
votes. The bribing of black legislators helped Texas
railroads overcome Governor Davis' opposition to state
aid. "Our leading men . . ." wrote one disgusted freedman,
"sold themselves for gold." Eric Foner, 388.
In normal times, corruption seemed an unfortunate but
unavoidable aspect of political life, but Southern
Republicans would have benefited enormously from a
reputation for honesty. "We cannot afford," one party
newspaper correctly remarked, "to bear the odium of
profligates in office."81 Most important, corruption
threatened to undermine the integrity of Reconstruction
itself, not simply in the eyes of Southern opponents but in
the court of Northern public opinion. It was true, but
beside the point, that corruption flourished outside the
South, and that charges of malfeasance generally arose
from hostile sources with a vested interest in exaggerating
its scope. Eric Foner, 389.
81. Harris, "Creed of the Carpetbaggers," 216.
7. Excuses for Corruption. The mass of Negroes were
accused of selling votes and influence for small sums and
of thus being easily bought up by big thieves; but even in
this, they were usually bought up by pretended friends and
not bribed against their beliefs or by enemies. W.E.
Burghardt Du Bois, 617.
Overall, however, blacks' share of the take paled before
6
Main Ideas:
Analysis:
Evaluation:
that of governors like Warmoth and Scott, for few
occupied political positions that allowed them access to
plunder. And in the bribery of lawmakers, the going rate
for whites usually exceeded that for blacks.79 Eric Foner,
388.
79. James Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (New York,
1973), 85-86.
During the period of Republican control, moreover,
minority Democratic officials were sometimes as venal as
their Republican counterparts, and Democratic
businessmen sometimes offered the bribes that
Republicans accepted. Allen W. Trelease, White Terror:
The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern
Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), xxix.
The defalcations of the New York City Tweed Ring
probably amounted to a bigger sum than all the southern
thefts combined. John A. Garraty, Progressive Professor
of History at Columbia University, The American Nation:
A History of the United States to 1877 (New York: Harper
& Row, 1966), 443.
Main Ideas:
8. White Losses. The small farmers' economic distress
had a racial dimension. Because few freedmen succeeded Analysis:
Evaluation:
in acquiring land, they rarely paid taxes. In Georgia in
1874, blacks made up 45 percent of the population but
paid only 2 percent of the taxes. From the perspective of a
small white farmer, Republican rule meant that he was
paying more taxes and paying them to aid blacks.
Democrats asked whether it was not time for hard-pressed
yeomen to join the white man's party. James L. Roark,
420-1.
Levies on landed property remained extremely low (one
tenth of 1 percent in Mississippi, for example), shielding
planters and yeomen from the burden of rising government
expenditures. As a result, "the man with his two thousand
acres paid less tax than any one of the scores of hands he
may have had in his employ who owned not a dollar's
worth of property." He also paid less than town craftsmen,
whose earnings were taxed at rates far higher than real
estate. In Mississippi's Warren County, the three largest
landowners each paid less than $200 in taxes, while the
owner of a liven stable paid nearly $700, a butcher over
$200, and a shoemaker $75. In addition, localities added
7
poll taxes of their own, sometimes, in black belt counties,
raising the bulk of their revenue in this manner. Mobile
levied a special tax of $5 on every adult male "and if the
tax is not paid," reported the city's black newspaper, "the
chain-gang is the punishment." With state, county, and
local levies, blacks might find themselves paying $15 in
poll taxes alone.60 Eric Foner, 206.
60. Murdo J. MacLeod, "The Sociological Theory of Taxation and
the Peasant," Peasant Studies Newsletter, July 4, 1975), 2-6.
9. Taxes. Democrats also exploited the severe economic
plight of small white farmers by blaming it on Republican
financial policy. Government spending soared during
reconstruction, and small farmers saw their tax burden
skyrocket. "This is tax time," David Golightly Harris
observed. "We are nearly all on our head about them.
They are so high & so little money to pay with." Farmers
without enough cash to pay their taxes began "selling
every egg and chicken they can get." In 1871, Mississippi
reported that one-seventh of the state's land-3.3 million
acres-had been forfeited for nonpayment of taxes. James
L. Roark, 420.
In Tennessee a radical reported that during the first three
years after the war taxes had increased sevenfold, though
property had declined in value by one third. Throughout
the South the tax burden was four times as great in 1870
as it had been in 1860. Kenneth M. Stampp, 175-6.
Even though taxes on blacks as well as whites helped fill
their coffers, states and municipalities barred blacks from
poor relief, orphanages, parks, schools, and other public
facilities, insisting that the Freedmen's Bureau should
provide whatever services blacks required. Georgia in
1866 appropriated $200,000 to aid children and widows of
Confederate (but not Union) soldiers and other "aged or
infirm white persons." Eric Foner, 207.
Not surprisingly, blacks resented a highly regressive
revenue system from whose proceeds, as a North Carolina
Bureau agent reported, "they state, and with truth, that
they derive no benefit whatever." Eric Foner, 206-7.
Main Ideas:
Analysis:
Evaluation:
10. Jim Crow Laws. Black Codes in all states prohibited Main Ideas:
racial intermarriage, and some forbade freed persons from Analysis:
Evaluation:
owning certain types of property, such as alcoholic
8
beverages and firearms. Most so tightly restricted black
legal rights that they were practically nonexistent. Black
Codes imposed curfews on African Americans, segregated
them, and outlawed their right to congregate in large
groups. Some laws required that African Americans
obtain special licenses for any job except agricultural labor
or domestic service. Some required African Americans to
call the landowner "master" and allowed withholding
wages for minor infractions. Mississippi even prohibited
black ownership or rental of land. James Kirby Martin,
395.
Under Louisiana’s Reconstruction era black codes any
black could be arrested as a vagrant on the complaint of
any white man and, if unable to pay the fine, could be
hired out for a year-usually to the white who brought the
complaint. Wyn Craig Wade, 22.
Florida's code, drawn up by a commission whose report
praised slavery as a "benign" institution deficient only in
its inadequate regulation of black sexual behavior, made
disobedience, impudence, and even "disrespect" to the
employer a crime. Blacks who broke labor contracts could
be whipped, placed in the pillory, and sold for up to one
year's labor, while whites who violated contracts faced
only the threat of civil suits. Eric Foner, 200.
Mississippi and South Carolina enacted the first and most
severe Black Codes toward the end of l865. Mississippi
required all blacks to possess, each January, written
evidence of employment for the coming year. Laborers
leaving their jobs before the contract expired would forfeit
wages already earned, and, as under slavery, be subject to
arrest by any white citizen. A person offering work to a
laborer already under contract risked imprisonment or a
fine of $500. To limit the freedmen's economic
opportunities, they were forbidden to rent land in urban
areas. Vagrancy—a crime whose definition included the
idle, disorderly, and those misspend what they earn--could
be punished by fines or involuntary plantation labor; other
criminal offenses included "insulting" gestures or
language, "malicious mischief," and preaching the Gospel
without a license. In case anything had been overlooked,
the legislature declares: penal codes defining crimes by
slaves and free blacks "in full force unless specifically
altered by law.47 Eric Foner, 199-200.
9
47. Harris, Presidential Reconstruction, 99-100, 112-5, 103-1; 39th
Congress, 2nd Session, Senate Executive Document 6, 192-5.
11. Justification. To the Southerners they (Black Codes) Main Ideas:
were only the necessary protection of the white population Analysis:
Evaluation:
against the deeds of crime and violence to which a large,
wandering, unemployed body of negroes might be
tempted. David Saville Muzzey, Consensus Historian,
Ph.D. Barnard College, Columbia University New York,
An American History (New York: Ginn and Company,
1925), 383.
The "black codes," aroused feeling in that section to an
extent, which was wholly unwarranted . . . in only six
Northern States, was a negro permitted to vote. James
Truslow Adams, Progressive historian, The March of
Democracy: Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1933), 116.
The ignorant negroes were led to believe that the
government was going to support them and that they
would not have to work. They stood about, idly waiting
for their "forty acres and a mule," and many Negroes who
had been faithful, hard-working slaves were becoming
good-for-nothing loafers. For this reason the southern
people felt that there was need of vagrancy laws. James
Albert Woodburn, Ph.D. Consensus Professor of
American History and Politics at Indiana University, and
Thomas Francis Moran, Ph.D. Professor of History and
Economics at Purdue, Elementary American History and
Government (New York: Longmans, Green and Co.,
1919), 389.
In the subconsciousness of Southern thought slavery was
always on the defensive, even at the moment of its most
potent security . . . It was generally asserted by the
defenders of slavery that negroes would not work at all if
they were free, regardless of the fact that 238,000 free
negroes were actually at work in the Southern states in
1850; and some of them had done so well that they had
built up modest fortunes and owned slaves themselves.
William E. Woodward, Consensus Historian, Meet
General Grant (Garden City, New York: Garden City Pub.
Co., 1928), 139.
12. Northern Voting. The Republican platform in the
10
Main Ideas:
Analysis:
1868 Presidential election smugly distinguished between
Evaluation:
Negro voting in the South ("demanded by every
consideration of public safety, of gratitude, and of justice")
and in the North (where the question "properly belongs to
the people"). John A. Garraty, 440.
Other Republicans were embarrassed by the hypocrisy of
forcing black suffrage on the South while only 7 percent
of Northern African Americans could vote. James Kirby
Martin, 398.
The partisan politicians welcomed negro suffrage as a
means of assuring and retaining Republican majorities in
the Southern states. And finally, there were thousands of
men in the North who wished to punish the South for the
defiant attitude of the Johnson governments in passing the
"black codes, in sending Confederate brigadier generals up
to Congress, and in rejecting the Fourteenth Amendment.
David Saville Muzzey, 389.
Main Ideas:
13. Northern Discrimination. Numbering fewer than
Analysis:
quarter million in 1860, blacks comprised less than 2
Evaluation:
percent of the North's population, yet they found
themselves subjected to discrimination in every aspect of
their lives. Barred in most states from the suffrage,
schools, and public accommodations, confined by and
large to menial occupations, living in the poorest,
unhealthiest quarters of cities like New York,
Philadelphia, and Cincinnati, reminded daily of the racial
prejudice that seemed as pervasive in the free states as in
the slave, many Northern blacks had by the 1850s all but
despaired of ever finding a secure and equal place within
American life. Eric Foner, 25-6.
"At the North," in the phrase of the day, where slavery was
abolished state by state over a period of fifty years
beginning in 1790, colored children were nevertheless
barred from the common schools in many places down to
the Civil War.25 Laura Haviland, devoted crusader for
freedom, testified that even us the Northwest Territory,
where slavery had been abolished in 1787, there was not a
school in the whole state of Michigan in 1837 that a
colored child or adult could attend.26 Negroes were taxed
in Ohio in the 1840's to support *public schools," but their
children could not enter them.27 Eleanor Flexner, writer
(1959), and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Professor of History at
11
University of New Hampshire, Century of Struggle: The
Woman's Rights Movement in the United States
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
1959, 1975), 35.
25. There were some 200,000 free Negroes in the "free states," of
whom Allan has written that they were "kept in menial positions,
debarred from the • professions and skilled handicrafts, denied equal
educational facilities in communities, and subjected to legal and
political discrimination. They were • little better than outcasts."
Ordeal of the Union, I, 519.
26. Laura Haviland, A Woman's Life Work (Chicago, 1881), p. 35. See
also Danforth, A Quaker Pioneer: Laura Haviland, Superintendent of
the Underground (New York, 1961).
27. Dorothy Porter, "Organized Activities of Negro Literary Societies,
18 Journal of Negro Education, 5: 555-576 (October 1936). See also
Benjamin Black, Abolitionists (New York, 1969).
Before the war, black men did not enjoy first-class
citizenship in most Northern states. Several states had
"black laws" that barred Negroes from immigration into
the state, prohibited testimony by blacks against whites in
courts, and otherwise discriminated against people with
dark skin. James M. McPherson, “Reconstruction: A
Revolution Manqué,” (1969), Allen F. Davis, Temple
University, Harold D. Woodman, Purdue University,
Conflict And Consensus In Early American History
(Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath And Company,
1976), 416.
14. Separate But Equal. We consider the underlying
fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the
assumption that the enforced separation of the two races
stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If
this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act,
but solely because the colored race chooses to put that
construction upon it. If one race be inferior to the other
socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put
them upon the same plane. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 US
537 (1896), Mark Whitman, Removing a Badge of
Slavery (New York: Markus Wiener Publishing Inc,
1993), 14.
The highest tribunal was just as pliant in ruling on the
segregation laws. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a case
involving a statute that required separate seating
arrangements for the races on railroad cars, the Court
12
Main Ideas:
Analysis:
Evaluation:
held that separate accommodations did not deprive the
Negro of equal rights if the accommodations were equal.
The Court extended the same principle to education in
the case of Cumming v. County Board of Education
(1899). T. Harry Williams, 30.
The object of the amendment was undoubtedly to enforce
the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but
in the nature of things it could not have been intended to
abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce
social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a
commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory
to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring their
separation in places where they are liable to be brought
into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of
either race to the other, and have been generally, if not
universally, recognized as within the competency of the
state legislatures in the exercise of their police power.
The most common instance of this is connected with the
establishment of separate schools for white and colored
children, which have been held to be a valid exercise of
the legislative power even by courts of states where the
political rights of the colored race have been longest and
most earnestly enforced. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), T.
Harry Williams, 30.
Louisiana's law ordered blacks to ride in separate railroad
cars was passed in 1890; separation was required
irrespective of whether the passenger's destination was
out of state or within Louisiana itself. Mark Whitman, 7.
Albion Tourgee, a key figure in the Republican
carpetbagger regime of North Carolina served six years
as a state judge. New Orleans lawyer, James C. Walker.
Tourgee and Walker now moved to attack the statute as a
violation of the equal protection clause. On June 7th,
1892, Homer Adolph Plessy, who was an octoroon (7/8th
Caucasian and one-eighth African blood), boarded the
East Louisiana Railroad bound for Convington,
Louisiana, and seated himself in the white coach. Mark
Whitman, 7.
Majority Opinion of Justice Henry Brown, for the
Supreme Court. (A) conflict with the Fourteenth
Amendment is concerned, the case reduces itself to the
question whether the statute of Louisiana is a reasonable
regulation, and with respect to this there must necessarily
13
be a large discretion on the part of the legislature. In
determining the question of reasonableness it is at liberty
to act with reference to the established usages, customs
and traditions of the people, and with a view to the
promotion of their comfort, and the preservation of the
public peace and good order. Gauged by this standard,
we cannot say that a law which authorizes or even
requires the separation of the two races in public
conveniences is unreasonable, or more obnoxious to the
Fourteenth Amendment than the act of Congress
requiring separate schools for colored children in the
District of Columbia, the constitutionality of which does
not seem to have been questioned, or the corresponding
acts of state legislators.1 Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 US 537
(1896), Mark Whitman, 14.
1 Roberts v. Boston 59 Mass. 198 (1849).
As Harlan predicted, the Plessy decision was quickly
followed by state laws mandating racial segregation in
every aspect of life, from schools to hospitals, waiting
rooms to toilets, drinking fountains to cemeteries. In
some states, taxi drivers were forbidden by law to carry
members of different races at the same time. But more
than simply a form of racial separation, segregation was
part of a complex system of white domination, in which
each component disenfranchisement, unequal economic
status, inferior education reinforced the others. The
system's major premise, as Dunbar Rowland, a
Mississippi historian, explained in 1903, was that no
black person would "be accepted as an equal no matter
how great his advancement." The was not so much to
keep the races apart as to ensure that when they came
into contact each other, whether in politics, labor
relations, car life, whites held the upper hand. Eric
Foner, Forever Free: The Story Of Emancipation And
Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005),
208.
15. Equal Education. “In 1910 the eleven states of the
former Confederacy spent three times more per capita on
white students than on their black counterparts . . . The
results were predictable: black schools were run-down,
overcrowded, and often without heat in the winter;
busses were unavailable to transport black children to
14
Main Ideas:
Analysis:
Evaluation:
school . . . student-teacher rations were far higher than in
white schools.” Donald G. Nieman, Professor of History
at Bowling Green University, Promises to Keep:
African-Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to
the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991),
116-7.
“By the mid-1930s, only nineteen percent of southern
black children between the ages of fourteen and
seventeen attended high school; the comparable figure
for whites was fifty-five percent.” Donald G. Nieman,
117.
In 1935, black teachers “taught classes that were thirty
percent larger and took home paychecks that were forty
percent smaller than those of their white peers.” Donald
G. Nieman, 117.
In 1929, for instance, the state of Alabama spent $36 a
year per white student on schools, and $10 per black
student. In Arkansas, blacks constituted 23% of the
school enrollment, yet received 12% of the funds. In
Florida, Georgia and Louisiana, the ratio was more than
4 to 1 in favor of white education. That figure typified
the South as a whole. In 1930, per capita expenditures
for black education were only 28% of the amount spent
on whites. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 US 483
(1954), Mark Whitman, 14.
16. Laws. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments,
which could have been adopted only under the
conditions of radical reconstruction, make the blunders
of that era, tragic though they were, dwindle into
insignificance. For if it was worth four years of civil
war to save the Union, it was worth a few years of
radical reconstruction to give the American Negro the
ultimate promise of equal civil and political rights.
Kenneth M. Stampp, 215.
US Constitution Article XIII (adopted 1865). Slavery
Abolished. Section 1. Abolition of Slavery. Neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a
punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been
duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or
any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Enforcement. Congress shall have power to
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Main Ideas:
Analysis:
Evaluation:
enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
US Constitution Article XIV (adopted 1863).
Citizenship Defined. Section 1. Definition of
Citizenship. All persons born or naturalized in the
United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are
citizens of the United States and of the State wherein
they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law
which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of
citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive
any person of life, liberty, or property, without due
process of law; nor deny to any person within its
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Section 2. Apportionment of Representatives.
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several
States according to their respective numbers, counting
the whole number of persons in each State, excluding
Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any
election for the choice of electors for President and Vice
President of the United States, Representatives in
Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a State,
or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to
any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twentyone years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in
any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion,
or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall
be reduced in the proportion which the number of such
male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male
citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Section 3. Disability Resulting from Insurrection. No
person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress,
or Elector of President and Vice President, or hold any
office, civil or military, under the United States, or under
any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a
member of Congress, or as an officer of the United
States, or as a member of an, State legislature, or as an
executive or judicial officer of any State to support the
Constitution of the United States shall have engaged in
insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid
or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by
vote of two thirds of each house, remove such disability.
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Section 5. Enforcement. The Congress shall have
power to enforce by appropriate legislation the
provisions of this article.
US Constitution Article XV (adopted 1870). Right of
Suffrage. Section 1. The Suffrage. The right of citizens
of the United States to vote shall not be denied or
abridged by the United States or any State on account of
race, color, or previous, condition of servitude.
Section 2. Enforcement. The Congress shall have
power article by appropriate legislation.
Reconstruction
Thaddeus Stevens
1. Overview.
a. Freedman’s Bureau
b. Black make economic gains
c. Marred by sharecropping and company
stores
d. Fragile political coalition
e. Torn apart
f. White Democratic party quickly returns to
power
g. Pass Jim Crow Laws
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2. Coalition Politics.
Southern Political Coalition
Groups
Percentage
Carpetbaggers
15%
African Americans
25%
Poor White Trash
60%
Splits over the issues of taxes, education, white
supremacy, and Negro inferiority.
Unwilling to compromise: drove white support
away
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