Download 3. Civil War and Reconstruction UNIT 3. THE CIVIL WAR AND

3. Civil War and Reconstruction
UNIT 3. THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
1846
1848
1849
1850
1852
1854
1856
1857
1858
1859
1860
1861
1862
1863
David Wilmot introduced a proviso banning slavery in the Mexican cession
Free-Soil party was founded
Zachary Taylor (Whig) was elected president, defeating Lewis Cass (Democrat)
and Martin Van Buren (Free-Soil)
California sought admission to the Union as a free state
Congress debated sectional issued and enacted the Compromise of 1850
Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Franklin Pierce (Democrat) was elected president by a large majority over Winfield
Scott (Whig).
Congress passed Kansas-Nebraska Act, repealing the Missouri Compromise
Republican party was founded in several northern states. Anti-Nebraska coalitions
score victories in congressional elections in the North
Preston Brooks assaults Charles Sumner on the Senate floor
James Buchanan (Democrat) won the presidency despite a strong challenge in the
North from John C. Frémont (Republican)
Supreme Court decided the Dred Scott case legalizing slavery in all territories
Congress refused to admit Kansas to the Union under the proslavery Lecompton
constitution
Lincoln and Douglas debate
John Brown raids Harpers Ferry, was captured and executed
Fierce struggle took place over election of a Republican as speaker of the House
Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln for the presidency
Democratic party split into northern and southern factions with separate candidates
and platforms
Lincoln won the presidency over Douglas (northern Democrat), Breckinridge
(southern Democrat), and Bell (Constitutional Unionist).
South Carolina seceded from the Union (December).
Rest of Deep South secedes: Confederacy was founded (January-February)
Fort Sumter was fired on and surrenders to Confederate forces (April)
Upper South seceded (April-May)
South won the first battle of Bull Run (July).
Grant captured Forts Henry and Donelson (February)
Farragut captured New Orleans for the Union (April)
McClellan led an unsuccessful campaign on the peninsula south-east of Richmond
(March-July)
South won the second battle of Bull Run (August)
McClellan stopped Lee at Antietam (September)
Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (September)
Lee defeated a Union army at Fredericksburg (December)
Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation (January)
Lee was victorious at Chancellorsville (May)
North gained major victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg (July)
Grant defeated Confederate forces at Chattanooga (November)
Lincoln set forth his 10 percent Reconstruction plan
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3. Civil War and Reconstruction
1864
1865
1866
1867
1868
1869
1872
1873
1877
Grant and Lee battled in northern Virginia (May-June)
Atlanta falls to Sherman (September)
Lincoln was reelected president, defeating McClellan (November)
Sherman marched through Georgia (November-December)
Wade-Davis Bill passed Congress, is pocket-vetoed by Lincoln
Congress passed Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery (January)
Grant captured Petersburg and Richmond
Lee surrendered at Appomattox (April)
Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth (April)
Remaining Confederate forced surrender (April-May)
Johnson moved to reconstruct the South on his own initiative
Congress refused to seat representatives and senators elected from states reestablished under the presidential plan
Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment
Republicans increase their congressional majority in the fall elections
First Reconstruction Act was passed over Johnson’s veto
Johnson was impeached, avoided conviction by one vote
Grant won the presidential election, defeating Horatio Seymour
Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment, granting blacks the right to vote
Grant was re-elected president, defeating Horace Greeley, candidate of the Liberal
Republicans and Democrats
Financial panic plunged the nation into a depression
“Compromise of 1877” resulted in an end to military intervention in the South and
the fall of the last Radical governments
1. CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR
The causes of the American Civil War can be considered on three planes, which are
interrelated. These are: the economic conflict, the political and constitutional conflict and the
social and moral conflict. Another very important element that we must bear in mind, which is
perhaps the key to understanding those three planes, is sectionalism.
There were differences between the industrial northern states and the rural states of the
South. At the heart of this problem was slavery. Many of the political battles focused on the
expansion of slavery.
1.1. The Economic Conflict
Gradually, from the colonial period onwards, differences between the North and the South
began to consolidate, pushing them further and further apart.
In the 19th century, there was economic disparity between an agrarian South and an
industrializing north. All the colonies were based on agriculture but by the middle of the 19 th
century, the northern states had gradually diversified their economy and, apart from the
agricultural component, there was a very strong industrial component which led to the
development of urban centres becoming increasingly more urbanized and industrialized;
lifestyle, special distribution of population, etc., created completely different cultural, social
and industrial structures compared with the South.
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The northern economy was based on paid labour. Industries were expanding; the export
market was on the up. They were pro-tariffs and in favour of a federal bank in order to
maintain firm control of the currency, etc. However, high tariffs protected northern industries
against foreign competition and dumping, but raised prices for Southern consumers. Currency
and credit control were also important characteristics of the northern capitalist mixed
economy.
New England and the Middle Atlantic states were the main centres of manufacturing,
commerce and finance. Principal products of these areas were textiles, lumber, clothing,
machinery, leather and woollen goods. At the same time, shipping had reached the height of
its prosperity, and American ships distributed wares of all nations.
The southern economy was based on slave labour, which imposed different patterns of
investments. In the South the planter had to think about the price he had paid for the slave
who became his property; or whether was to have the slave working 16 hours per day and
take the maximum profit before the slave died in a short period of time.
The South, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River and beyond, was a relatively compact
political unit featuring an economy centred on plantation agriculture, on staple crop. Tobacco
was important to the economies of Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. In South Carolina,
rice was an abundant crop, and the climate and soil of Louisiana encouraged the cultivation of
sugar. But cotton eventually became the dominant crop and the one with which the South was
identified. By 1850 the American South grew more than 80 percent of the world's cotton.
Slaves were used to cultivate all these crops, though cotton most of all. The South took the
opposite attitude of the North since they were anti tariff, anti bank and had a weak or no
currency control.
The two completely different structures began to be contradictory.
The issue of slavery exacerbated the regional and economic differences between North and
South.
Economic professional mobility was not possible in the South, where there was no social
change. There was a tough hierarchy.
1.2. The Political and Constitutional Conflict
The terms that we can find related to the constitutional or political conflict are, on the one
hand, state rights, the doctrine of nullification and the theory of secession, and on the other,
the federal union and nationalism as opposed to regionalism and sectionalism.
In the Confederation period, the concept of national union was very weak and the really
strong feeling was of state autonomy. In 1787, came the Constitution that guaranteed
individual rights but did not guarantee the states’ rights. Thus, the passage of the Bill of Rights
was very important.
Political tension emerged due to the different ideas of the states.
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In 1803, after the purchase of Louisiana, the federalists first mentioned the word secession.
The wish to limit the power of the South was not new.
In 1814, at the Hartford Convention, the Federalists expressed their discontent with the
Second war for Independence, and, again, there was a great deal of discussion about
secession, when they criticized a measure in the chamber of representatives that favored the
South, whereby a black person was declared to be worth three fives fifths the value of a white
person.
In 1819, there was a worldwide financial crisis that affected the United States very severely.
One of the consequences of the monetary crash was that the price of cotton fell dramatically.
Agrarian prices did not recover and that provoked moments of depression in the South when
Southerners defended the expansion of slavery as an economic need since there had been
an exhaustion of the soil that resulted in a decrease in productivity.
During Monroe’s presidency, Missouri asked to enter the union in 1818, and this led to a long
debate that would last until 1821. Congress agreed on a compromise: Slavery was permitted
in Missouri and the Arkansas territory, and was banned everywhere else west and north of
Missouri.
The institution of slavery had been a divisive issue in the United States for decades before the
territory of Missouri petitioned Congress for admission to the Union as a state in 1818. The
country had grown from 13 states to 22 and had managed to maintain a balance of power
between slave and free states. There were 11 free states and 11 slave states, a situation that
gave each faction equal representation in the Senate and the power to prevent the passage
of legislation. The free states, with much larger populations, controlled the House of
Representatives, by 105 votes to 81.
Although North and South still enjoyed parity in the Senate, with eleven states each, the North
had more representatives in the lower House, where seats were apportioned by population.
As the nation expanded westward, the South feared that “free” states would soon outnumber
“slave” states, which could even, in the long run, put their livelihood in danger if their
plantation-based economy, built on black slaves, were threatened by pressure to abolish
slavery.
A bill to admit Maine as a state was passed in the House of Representatives in January, 1820
and on March 6, 1820, Maine was made a free state and Missouri was authorized to approve
a constitution having no limits on slavery. This compromise enabled the Senate to maintain
the balance between slave and free state representation, twelve of each.
Although the Missouri Compromise helped to keep the Union together for another forty years,
it was only partially successful in dampening the fervour of the sectional conflict. States rights
southerners were enraged since the Compromise acknowledged Congressional authority
over the slavery issue; Northerners, for their part, were largely against the clause saying that
“fugitive” slaves could be “reclaimed” in a free state, and the idea was not to last “forever”.
Finally, the Missouri Compromise was repealed by the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act and
declared unconstitutional in the Dred Scott decision in 1857.
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The Southern states were not aware of the poor bases on which the economic structure of the
cotton kingdom. The Northern states criticised the South and wanted to impose their
superiority as a politically power so they started to attack the South for turning a political and
economic conflict into a moral one. In the Southern states, people talked about the right to
human property. They argued that the moral issues relating to slavery were relative, whereas
in the North the anti -slavery people would say that it was unfair, that slavery corrupted, and
they would talk about human rights. All this gave way to extreme positions.
As far back as 1830, sectional lines had been steadily hardening on the slavery question. In
the North, abolitionist feeling grew more and more powerful, encouraged by a free-soil
movement vigorously opposed to the extension of slavery into the Western regions that were
not yet organized as states. Two decades later, in 1850, Southerners continue thinking that
slavery was an integral part of the basic economy of the region.
Political leaders of the South, the professional classes and most of the clergy now no longer
apologized for slavery but championed it. Southern publicists insisted, for example, that the
relationship between capital and labour was more humane under the slavery system than
under the wage system of the North.
Before 1830, the system of plantation government, with its personal supervision of the slaves
by their masters, was still characteristic. Gradually, however, with the introduction of largescale cotton production in the lower South, the master gradually ceased to exercise close
personal supervision over his slaves, and employed professional overseers.
Southerners mainly sought to continue with the cotton-slavery system. Expansion was
considered a necessity because the wastefulness of cultivating a single crop, cotton, rapidly
exhausted the soil, increasing the need for new fertile lands. Moreover, the South wanted new
territory for additional slave states, to balance the admission of new free states. Antislavery
Northerners saw in the Southern view a conspiracy for proslavery aggrandizement, and in the
1830s, their opposition became strong and combative.
Politically, the 1850s can be characterized as a decade of failure in which the nation's leaders
were unable to resolve, or even contain, the divisive issue of slavery.
In 1854, the old issue of slavery in the territories was renewed and the quarrel became bitter.
The flow of both Southern slave holders and antislavery families into Kansas resulted in
armed conflict, and soon the territory was being called “bleeding Kansas.” Other events
brought the nation still closer to disorder, most notable among them, the Supreme Court’s
notorious decision concerning Dred Scott in 1857.
Dred Scott was a Missouri slave who, some twenty years earlier, had been taken by his
master to live in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery had been forbidden by the
Northwest Ordinance. Returning to Missouri and becoming discontented with his life there,
Scott sued for liberation on the grounds of his residence on free soil. The Supreme Court,
dominated by Southerners, decided that Scott lacked standing in court because he was not a
citizen; that the laws of a free state (Illinois) had no effect on his status because he was the
resident of a slave state (Missouri); and that slave holders had the right to take their “property”
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anywhere in the federal territories, and that Congress could not restrict the expansion of
slavery. Therefore, the Court's decision invalidated the whole set of measures by which
Congress, for a whole generation, had been trying to settle the slavery issue.
The Dred Scott decision caused resentment throughout the North.
Abraham Lincoln had long regarded slavery as an evil. In a speech in Peoria, Illinois, in 1854,
he declared that all national legislation should be framed on the principle that slavery was to
be restricted and eventually abolished. He also contended that the principle of popular
sovereignty was false, for slavery in the western territories was the concern not only of the
local inhabitants, but also of the United States as a whole. This speech made him widely
known throughout the growing West.
Sectional conflict grew more and more. As a result of this, the split between the South and the
North became a war.
1.3. The Social and Moral Conflict
The question of slavery constituted a moral conflict, because the United States was at the
same time a freedom-loving and also a slave-holding society. This was a social and moral
conflict, where racism and the principle of white supremacy and slavery were pitted against
Christianity, democracy and abolitionism.
Slavery, in the light of the 18th century philosophy, was unnatural; it was declared illegal and
against mankind’s natural rights. The anti-slavery movement spoke about injustice and
corruption and argued that the slaves’ rebellion was not only fair but also desirable. For them,
slavery was inherently a system of brutality and coercion in which the split of families through
the sale of individuals was usual. Slavery was seen as a fundamental violation of every
human being's inalienable right to be free.
In 1787, the Federal Constitution established that the black population was to count as
property, that the owners were to be taxed on them, and that the value of a black man
counted as 3/5 of the value of a white man. Moreover, the Constitution also stated that
fugitive slaves must be returned to their owners. This divorce between law and justice would
eventually bring war.
Within the antislavery movement, one can see two currents of thought: on the one hand there
were the gradualists, those who wanted to finish with slavery gradually, and on the other hand
there were the immediatists who wanted to abolish slavery immediately.
1830-1 was the beginning of the domination of the immediatists. The abolitionist movement
that emerged in the early 1830s was combative, uncompromising and insistent upon an
immediate end to slavery.
One phase of the antislavery movement involved helping slaves escape to safe refuges in the
North or over the border into Canada. Known as the “Underground Railroad,” an elaborate
network of secret routes was firmly established in the 1830s in all parts of the North, with its
most successful operation being in the Old Northwest Territory.
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Moreover, there was also a religious conflict, since Quakers and the Methodists were against
slavery whereas fundamentalists or evangelists were in favour of it, saying that slavery was
an evil, but that evil was something designed by God, whose ultimate intention they were not
to question. Quakers were all Immediatists. For them, the abolition of slavery was a moral
necessity; for them, slavery was a sin.
Basically, the defenders of slavery tended to avoid religious arguments, to concentrate on
economic arguments, and talk about moral relativism. Southern pro slavery opinion said that
the Negro was inferior and unfit for freedom and, therefore, they were much happier being
slaves. Other arguments were that slavery was a positive good. Owners accepted the
possibility of protection for unproductive slaves. In addition, they said that slavery created
social harmony since it avoided the social injustice and class battle that characterized the
north. Another argument referred to the poor whites. Slave owners made up only a small
proportion of the population of the South, and the poor whites were socially superior to the
Negro slaves, so if there were no slavery, then there would be no distinction between them
and the southern poor farmers, except racial distinction.
Southern whites defended slavery fervently, asking for respect for the right to have personal
property. They said that there was a moral relativism and they feared the possible institutional
changes.
1.4. The Immediate Causes of the War
In 1850, California, which had recently been acquired from Mexico, was admitted to the Union
as a free state. This admission triggered a great national debate, because California is in the
South West, a territory, which could admit profitable Slavery.
As a result of California’s admittance as a free state, there was great compromise legislation
in which slave owners were offered a series of advantages by way of compensation.
However, this did not placate many southerners and there was a southern convention in
Nashville, Tennessee, in which they stated that the Government had no right to prohibit
slavery and had the obligation to protect them.
In 1854, the Kansas and Nebraska Act, stated that, according to the principle of popular
sovereignty, the people were to decide whether states integrated in the Union either as free or
as slave states. What was important about this Act was the fact that it annulled the Missouri
Compromise because this territory was affected by the Missouri line, so there was no reason
why slavery could not spread. It was foreseen that Nebraska would eventually become a free
state and that Kansas would become a slave state.
Thus, southerners began to defend the principle that not only should the government defend
slavery where it existed, but it should protect it throughout the national territory.
The next very important episode was the ruling of the Supreme Court in 1857 that Dred Scott
was a slave, was the property of his owner and was not free even if he was in a free state.
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2. THE CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865
The American Civil War was a sectional conflict in the United States that lasted from 1861 to
1865 between the Union, the federal government, led by President Abraham Lincoln and the
Confederate States of America, led by President Jefferson Davis.
The Northern states pressured the Southern states to abolish slavery, and there were
rebellions in the south defending their right to own slaves. These uprisings resulted in the
Southern states declaring their desire for Independence from the Union. After Lincoln had
won the elections with the support of the North, eleven Southern states decided to leave the
Union and proclaimed themselves an independent nation, creating the Confederate States of
America. This marked the beginning of the American Civil War, a war that was also called the
first modern war since it employed weapons created by the industrial revolution.
Lincoln’s prime aim was to keep the United States as one country and after that, he wanted to
abolish slavery.
However, he realized that the issue of slavery was popular and that he could get support.
Therefore, on January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which granted
freedom to all slaves in areas still controlled by the Confederacy. That was followed by the
Civil Rights Act, and the conflict deepened.
On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president of the United States. In his
inaugural address, he refused to recognize the secession, considering it "legally void." On
April 12, guns opened fire on the federal troops stationed at Fort Sumter in the Charleston,
South Carolina harbour. A war had begun in which more Americans would die than in any
other conflict before or since.
Both sides entered the war with hopes for a quick victory. On the one hand, the North enjoyed
a decided advantage in terms of material resources. Twenty-three states with a population of
22 million were arrayed against 11 states inhabited by 9 million. The industrial superiority of
the North exceeded even its preponderance in population, providing it with abundant facilities
for manufacturing arms and ammunition, clothing and other supplies. Similarly, the network of
railways in the North enhanced federal military prospects.
The South had geographical advantages since it was fighting a defensive war on its own
territory. The South also had a stronger military tradition, and had experienced military
leaders. The Confederates won some victories at the beginning of the war but in 1863, there
was the decisive battle of Gettysburg, which was a northern victory, although the war
continued for two more years.
For the first years, the South would often win the battle, but not the war.
In contrast to its military failures in the East, Union forces were able to secure battlefield
victories and slow strategic success at sea and in the West. Most of the Navy, at the
beginning of the war, was in Union hands, but it was scattered and weak.
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In the Mississippi Valley, the Union forces won a series of victories. By contrast, in Virginia,
Union troops continued to encounter one defeat after another.
Despite the fact that the battle of Antietam Creek was not decisive in military terms, its
consequences were important. Great Britain and France, both very close to recognizing the
Confederacy, delayed their decision, and the South never received the diplomatic recognition
and economic aid from Europe that it desperately sought.
Antietam Creek also gave Lincoln the opening he needed to issue the preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation. The final Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1,
1863, also authorized the recruitment of blacks into the Union Army. In spite of the political
gains represented by the Emancipation Proclamation, however, the North’s military prospects
in the East remained.
However, none of the Confederate victories was crucial. The Northern victories at Vicksburg
and Gettysburg in July 1863 marked the turning point of the war, although the bloodshed
continued unabated for more than a year and a half. In the West, Union forces gained control
of Tennessee in the fall of 1863. After the Union victory at Gettysburg, which was a decisive
victory, the South never again invaded the North.
On April 9, 1865 the war ended. The southern General Robert E. Lee was forced to give an
unconditional surrender to General Grant at Appomattox Court House and all the other
Confederate forces surrendered. Although scattered fighting continued elsewhere for several
months, the Civil War was over.
Two days after Lee’s surrender, Lincoln delivered his last public address, in which he
unfolded a generous reconstruction policy. However, on April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the
theatre and, as he sat in the presidential box, he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a
Virginia actor embittered by the South’s defeat. Lincoln’s assassination had enormous
repercussions and the clemency and effort toward rehabilitation for which Lincoln pleaded
would be submerged in a punishment of the South. On Lincoln’s death, Vice President
Andrew Johnson became President.
A few months later, the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution was approved, which said
that slavery was illegal. The republicans remained in power and there were a series of
improvements and amendments, but in spite of the amendments, in practice, the Negroes
were crushed.
The war of Secession devastated the South and was, without doubt, the major constitutional
crisis of the United States. The union won and the United States remained a single nation.
The war solved two questions. The first one was that it ended slavery, which was completely
abolished by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. The second question was that it
settled for all time the issue of disunion, ensuring that America was a single indivisible nation.
3. RECONSTRUCTION
Reconstruction initially referred to the political process in which the seceded states were
readmitted to the Union; this aspect was completed in 1877. Lincoln wanted to return to a
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normal situation as soon as possible and he decided to give the South a Presidential pardon,
that is to say, an amnesty, allowing the recovery of their plantations and their style of life, if
they would take an oath of loyalty to the union.
Three Amendments to the Constitution were introduced by which all slaves were
emancipated, and black civil and political rights were addressed. In spite of this, towards
1870, North and South were united against the blacks, and a number of mechanisms were
introduced to impede their ascension, such as the black codes, imposing racial segregation.
The Ku Klux Klan was created in Tennessee in 1865 and violence remained in the post-war
South, so that in 1865 and 1866, Black people held conventions in which they discussed their
problems and appealed for support from the people of the nation for the problems of
marginalisation and discrimination in society that they faced.
Few people invested in reconstructing the South since the West offered a very interesting
option. Because of this, the southern economy was not revitalized, and this had
repercussions on most African-American, who lived in poverty.
After the war, the country was destroyed, especially the plantations of the South.
During the Civil War, one million slaves became free and with the 13 th Amendment and the
Victory of the North, three million more got their liberty. Thus, enormous numbers of people
were emancipated in the sense that they were free from individual masters, but they remained
slaves of a society in which they had no money, propriety or friends.
To deal with one of its major concerns, the condition of former slaves, in March 1865,
Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau to act as guardian for African Americans and
guide them toward self-support. And in December of that year, Congress ratified the 13th
Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery.
Throughout the summer of 1865, Johnson proceeded to carry out Lincoln’s reconstruction
program, with minor modifications. By presidential proclamation, he appointed a governor for
each of the former Confederate states and freely restored political rights to large numbers of
Southern citizens through use of presidential pardons.
In the South, most planters thought that emancipation meant a change of the legal situation of
the blacks, but they tried to keep their slaves as hired help or tenant farmers. They
recognized the right of blacks to own, sell, and inherit propriety, to appeal to court, and to
access some kind of education, but they were not given the right to vote. Blacks were
required to enter into annual labour contracts, with penalties imposed in case of violation of
these contracts, and dependent children were subject to compulsory apprenticeship and
corporal punishments by their masters.
Some groups in the North advocated intervention to protect the rights of blacks in the South.
In the Reconstruction Act of March 1867, Congress, ignoring the governments that had been
established in the Southern states, divided the South into five districts and placed them under
military rule.
In order to give blacks full citizenship, by July 1866, Congress had passed a civil rights bill
and set up a new Freedmen’s Bureau to prevent racial discrimination by Southern
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legislatures. Following this, the Congress passed a 14th Amendment to the United States
Constitution (citizens’ rights). All the Southern state legislatures, with the exception of
Tennessee, refused to ratify the amendment, some voting against it unanimously. There was
another important act, the Civil Rights Act that was enacted by Congress in 1875 to provide
black people with the right to equal treatment in public places and transportation. However,
later, the Supreme Court declared this act unconstitutional.
Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865 to provide assistance to the emancipated
slaves.
The Radical Republicans in Congress were exasperated by President Johnson’s legislation
protecting newly freed blacks and punishing former Confederate leaders by depriving them of
the right to hold office.
Many Southern whites, their political and social dominance threatened, turned to illegal
means to prevent blacks from gaining equality. Violence against blacks became more and
more frequent. In 1870, increasing disorder led to the passage of an Enforcement Act
severely punishing those who attempted to deprive the black freedmen of their civil rights.
Slaves were granted their freedom, but not equality. The North completely failed to address
the economic needs of the freedmen. Blacks were dependent on these Northern whites to
protect them from white Southerners, who, united into organizations such as the Ku Klux
Klan, intimidated blacks and prevented them from exercising their rights. Without economic
resources of their own, many Southern blacks were forced to become tenant farmers on land
owned by their former masters, caught in a cycle of poverty that would continue well into the
20th century.
As time went by, it became more and more obvious that unforgiving laws against former
Confederates were not solving the problems of the South. In May 1872, Congress passed a
general Amnesty Act, restoring full political rights to all but about 500 Confederate
sympathizers. Gradually, Southern states began electing members of the Democratic Party
into office, ousting so-called carpetbagger governments and intimidating blacks from voting or
attempting to hold public office. By 1876, the Republicans remained in power in only three
Southern states. As part of the bargaining that resolved the disputed presidential elections in
favour of Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republicans promised to end Radical Reconstruction,
thereby leaving most of the South in the hands of the Democratic Party. In 1877, Hayes
withdrew the remaining government troops, tacitly abandoning federal responsibility for
enforcing black civil rights.
The South was still a region devastated by war, burdened by debt caused by misgovernment,
and demoralized by a decade of racial warfare. Unfortunately, whereas formerly it had
supported harsh penalties against Southern white leaders, it now tolerated new and
humiliating kinds of discrimination against blacks. The last quarter of the 19th century saw a
profusion of “Jim Crow” laws in Southern states that segregated public schools, forbade or
limited black access to many public facilities, such as parks, restaurants and hotels, and
denied most blacks the right to vote by imposing poll taxes and arbitrary literacy tests.
The failure of Reconstruction meant that the struggle of African Americans for equality and
freedom was deferred until the 20th century.
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The reconstruction was a very hard process and it took many years to change people’s
mentalities and to supply the black population with education, jobs, housing, and civil rights to
become real American citizens.
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