Download Assessing Reconstruction” and “

Assessing Reconstruction
End of Reconstruction
This 6-minute video gives you more background on the
obstacles that Reconstruction faced and the reasons for
its end. Note the explanation of "Redemption."
To view the video, please click here.
Credit: Video for Dallas County Distance Learning class in US History
since 1877. ©2005 Dallas TeleLearning and Dallas County Community
Colleges (DCCCD)
Reconstruction – Failures
African Americans as Citizens
Reconstruction failed to protect the full citizenship
rights of African Americans. When President
Rutherford B. Hayes removed the last federal troops from
the South in 1877, he acquiesced to the return of
Democratic rule in the South and the institutionalization
of an American version of apartheid - the Jim Crow
system.
Economic Development of the South
Reconstruction failed to fulfill its promises not only to
African Americans but also to the South as a region.
Before the Civil War, you recall that "cotton is king" was
a boast of Southerners who thought themselves immune
from the economic downturn in 1857. Cotton remained a
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king after the Civil War although a feudal one whose
serfs were the black and white tenant farmers and
sharecroppers. Reconstruction failed to provide for the
economic development of the South away from its
dependence on a single crop.
Reconstruction – Successes
Union Restored
Reconstruction reassembled the Union and provided
methods whereby the former Confederate states rejoined
the United States.
Slavery Ended
The Thirteenth Amendment guaranteed that "[n]either
slavery nor involuntary servitude" would exist in the
United States.
Black Political Leadership
Reconstruction, for a time, welcomed black men into
political roles. Sixteen blacks served in Congress during
Reconstruction and 600 in state legislatures.In the South
Carolina state legislature they held the majority of seats
in the lower house for a time.
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Black Families and Community
Newly freed African Americans immediately sought to
reunite with family members sold to another owner. By
consolidating their families and establishing their own
churches, African Americans forged the community bonds
that sustained them.
Education
Reconstruction governments established the South's first
state-funded public school systems. You read about the
Freedmen's Bureau which became the principal agency
for overseeing relations between former slaves and
owners. The Bureau established nearly 3000 schools and
contributed to founding black colleges. In 1880 70
percent of blacks were illiterate, but by 1900 that rate
had dropped to 48 percent.
Reconstruction's Legacy
The Legacy of Reconstruction through Historians and a
Movie
Historians and the silent film Birth of a Nation play an important
role in Reconstruction's legacy. Beginning shortly after
Reconstruction ended and extending until the second half of the
twentieth century, historians interpreted Reconstruction in this
way:
The South accepted defeat, was willing to accept freed
slaves, and wanted quick readmission into the Union. The
misguided efforts of Radical Republicans, blinded by their
partisanship and hatred for the rebels, imposed corrupt
governments on the South controlled by licentious
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carpetbaggers, unscrupulous scalawags, and ignorant
freedmen. The South suffered for years before principled
whites banded together and redeemed the South and ended
a dark (pun intended) chapter in southern history.
Central to this interpretation was the belief by the historians that
the newly freed slaves were childlike and thus were unprepared to
exercise the political rights that Northerners thrust upon them. As
you look at the caricatures of African Americans in Birth of a
Nation and in the clip below from the Jim Crow Museum, think
about the long-term effect of those caricatures and their role
in the denial of African Americans' civil rights.
The famous silent film Birth of a Nation (1915) entrenched
this interpretation in the minds of Americans. Based on the
novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan
(1905), the film presented caricatures of Reconstruction state
houses under African-American control and ended with the
triumphant arrival of the KKK to save the South from rapacious
Reconstructionists and Southern women from predatory black
men.
The film stirred controversy for its racism when it was released in
1915, the year when the KKK emerged once again as a
prominent force not only in the South but in the Midwest and West
where it targeted immigrant groups, Catholics, and Jews.
Here are 2 clips from the film.
The first 3-minute clip claims to
represent "[h]istoric incidents from first legislative session under
Reconstruction" and depicts numerous caricatures of black
legislators who pass an intermarriage bill while the "the helpless
white minority" looks on.
Warning: Many of the stereotypes of African Americans, portrayed
by white actors in black face, are highly offensive.
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To view the video, please click here.
The second 6.5-minute clip comes from the end of the film when
the KKK rides to the rescue of a white family under attack by
black men, some shirtless, wearing Union Army kepis (hats).
To view the video, please click here.
What happened in the South in the decades after the
Civil War?
Economy: After the Civil War, many entrepreneurs (or swindlers,
depending on your point of view) referred to the "New South" and
its economic opportunities. The Reconstruction Era failed to see
the economic restoration of the South to antebellum (pre-war)
levels without slavery much less to see the construction of new
infrastructure that would allow the South to prosper in the
increasingly industrialized nation. Recall that in the antebellum
South, most white southerners did not own slaves and were
small farmers. In 1830 64 percent of them owned no slaves. Of
the 36 percent of white southerners who owned slaves, most
owned fewer than 5 and only 2.5% owned 50 or more. Thus our
image of the plantation owner on the veranda overseeing
hundreds of slaves fits very few white southerners. After the
Civil War, the South declined into the nation's poorest
agricultural region. The South's dependence on cotton
increased and the overproduction resulted in declining prices. Not
only black farmers were sharecroppers, poor whites were as
well. By 1880, about one-third of the white farmers and nearly
three-quarters of the black farmers in cotton states were
sharecroppers or tenants. In the "New South," a cottondominated commercial agriculture with landless tenants and
sharecroppers as the main work force replaced the more
diversified economy of the pre-war era.
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This 1.5-minute video explains in more depth the
sharecropping system. In it, NYU Professor of History
David Levering Lewis refers to it as "slavery by another
name."
To view the video, please click here.
Credit: Video for Dallas County Distance Learning class in US History
since 1877. ©2005 Dallas TeleLearning and Dallas County Community
Colleges (DCCCD)
Politics: Before the end of Reconstruction, you read how the Ku
Klux Klan terrorized African Americans in the South especially to
prevent them from voting. On a single bloody Easter Sunday in
Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873 at least 100 and some sources say 280
blacks were killed. When federal troops withdrew from the South,
former Confederates quickly resumed control of state
governments and instituted policies that accomplished what the
KKK had through terrorism. You read about the
disfranchisement of African Americans in the postReconstruction South. Through devices such as literacy tests,
property requirements, poll taxes, and white-only primaries,
Southern states prevented African Americans from voting. For
example, as late as 1896, 130,334 blacks were registered voters
in Louisianan, but by 1904, only 1,342.
Lynching: Though the KKK was less prominent after
Reconstruction ended, violence against blacks continued.
Lynching was not a crime committed exclusively against African
Americans early in the 19th century, by the 1890s and into the
20th century the vast majority of those lynched were African
Americans. Figures vary widely but a conservative estimate for
the number lynched between 1882 and 1951 listed 4,730
lynchings: 3,437 blacks and 1,293 whites.[1]
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Credit: George Meadows, "murderer & rapist," lynched on scene of his last
crime. L. Horgan, Jr. (dates unknown). Photograph, c. 1889. The Progress of a
People, A Special Presentation of the Daniel A. P. Murray Pamphlet Collection,
Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-31911.
Jim Crow: You read about the systematic segregation of facilities
in the South into "Whites Only" and "Colored Only." The Plessy v.
Ferguson case gave judicial approval to "separate but equal," but,
of course, the separate facilities for whites and blacks were not
equal.
In our exploration of the legacy of Reconstruction, view
the video below about the caricatures of African Americans
propagated during Reconstruction to deny black Americans equal
rights and then promoted throughout the 20th century and into the
21st.
In this 9-minute video, Dr. David Pilgrim, curator of the Jim
Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in
Michigan, discusses the Jim Crow legacy:
To view the video, please click here.
A Positive Legacy - Confronting the Past
After reading and viewing all of the above, let's end with the story
of a city, the home to Abraham Lincoln, that confronted the racist
violence in its past and is using that past today as a way to bring
its citizens together. This story of the 1908 race riot in
Springfield, Illinois, and the city's 2008 centennial
commemoration of that event is reported by Douglas Blackmon,
the journalist who wrote Slavery by Another Name.
To view the video, please click here.
[1] Data are from the Tuskegee Institute as noted in Robert A. Gibson,
"The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United
States,1880-1950," Themes in Twentieth Century American Culture,
vol. II (1979), Curriculum Units by Fellows of the Yale-New Haven
Teachers Institute, 1978-2010. Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute,
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2011. Web. 27 April 2011.
©2011 Susan Vetter
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