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Lesson 8: The Lost Promise of Reconstruction (1865-1877)
Objectives
By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:
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define Reconstruction and explain the political and economic events of the era
describe how African Americans reunited with family, found housing and land, sought work, and set up
schools
identify key African American politicians and evaluate their successes and failures
identify and explain the Civil War Amendments and the Enforcement Acts
list ways that the lives of African Americans changed politically and economically during Reconstruction
describe how the Freedman's Bureau supported African Americans
explain how Southern lawmakers, the Ku Klux Klan, and other conservative forces disenfranchised
African Americans
summarize the events that led to Reconstruction’s collapse and the Compromise of 1877
Glossary
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Introduction
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In the aftermath of the Civil War, roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were finally freed. Because of the war’s staggering cost in
lives and money, many in the North were intent on reforming Southern society for good. During the period known as Reconstruction (18661877), African Americans in the South worked with the Republican Party to establish and promote their civil rights.
African American men gained the right to vote, black schools were established, and some formerly enslaved people even received their
own land to inhabit and farm. Yet these advances were short lived. To make ends meet, most African Americans in the South were forced
to work the land of wealthy white landowners for little profit. Racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan used threats and violence to strike
fear into African American communities. The Democratic Party and other conservative political forces slowly but fiercely chipped away at
hard-earned political rights.
This lesson traces the swift reversal of fortunes that African Americans experienced after the Civil War. The end of enslavement signaled
the beginning of a new system of economic and political bondage in the South that would last well into the 20th century. This system
reinforced the old social order of the South and preserved the region’s old racial prejudices. For this reason and others, many came to
regard Reconstruction as one of the greatest missed opportunities in American history.
Politics of Reconstruction
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The idealized renderings of Reconstruction, such as this poster from 1880 by W. H. Cowell, differed greatly from the personal experiences of most African
Americans in the South.
Reconstruction was essentially the federal government’s occupation of former Confederate states. Because the North had won the war,
occupied Southern territories were at the political mercy of Congress and the national government. After the war, the United States
government disbanded the rebel governments of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas,
Mississippi, and Texas. Federal troops then occupied these territories.
Reconstruction was a tug-of-war for power between Northern politicians with differing opinions on how to allow Southern states back into
the Union. However, one thing was certain: President Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans in Congress did not want ex-Confederates to
return to political office. They feared that if the ex-Confederates returned to power and financial prosperity, the old Southern
establishment would quickly return African Americans back to harsh plantation work and might even reinstate slavery. The war had been
far too costly for the South to be allowed to go back to its old ways. People wanted Reconstruction to lead to real political change so that
the Civil War would not happen again. Congress required former Confederate states to adopt new constitutions guaranteeing the right to
vote for African Americans before they could be readmitted to the Union and have representatives and senators in Congress. Congress
also disenfranchised many former Confederate military and civil leaders and barred them from holding office or serving their country again.
In the North, the war had sparked economic growth. Demand for supplies for the war effort fueled the creation of big factories, big
industries, and big businesses. New inventions, such as the telegraph, helped create a manufacturing boom in northern cities. The railroad
system increasingly connected the North to the West, making northern businessmen rich from the country’s westward expansion. After
the war, these businessmen and industrial leaders set their sights on developing the defeated South.
The Union Army had ravaged the South during the war, destroying towns and burning fields. The South's farmland, which was the basis of
its economy, was in ruins. As a result, much of the population had become impoverished. Poor white Southerners and freedmen, as
formerly enslaved African Americans were now called, suffered from starvation, disease, homelessness, and unemployment. Plantation
owners opposed the plans of Northern businessmen. They were desperate to regain the prosperity and power they had enjoyed before the
war. Yet the South's economy, and its financial well-being, had revolved around slave labor. Many wondered how the ruined South could
ever recover without a labor force of enslaved people.
During Reconstruction, the economic desires of both Northern businessmen and Southern plantation owners hinged on the African
American population in the South. Northern businessmen viewed them as unthinking supporters of their political agenda. Southern
landowners viewed them simply as cheap labor.
Presidential Reconstruction
Even during the war, the U.S. government realized that some kind of recovery would be needed for the South. President Lincoln was
willing to compromise with white Southerners to help restore political order. Lincoln’s plan allowed southern states to establish new
governments if they met his conditions. He would accept any state government so long as 10% of its voters swore loyalty to the U.S. and
abolished slavery. By 1864, before the end of the war, Louisiana and Arkansas already had set up new governments according to Lincoln's
conditions. These new governments supposedly let African Americans be free, but greatly limited black citizenship rights. For example,
they denied African Americans the right to vote.
In April 1865 Lincoln was assassinated by men angry about the Confederacy’s defeat. Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s vice president from
Tennessee, became president. Johnson quickly relaxed restrictions on former Confederate leaders. He invited Southern legislatures, voted
in by white males, to create new state constitutions that abolished slavery but granted few rights to African Americans. Every former
Confederate state had new governments in place by 1866. Under President Johnson, Confederate landowners reclaimed property seized
during the war and the South returned to its old ways, except without slavery.
To regain control over African Americans, Southern states created Black Codes. Many Black Codes were direct copies of the previous slave
codes with the word slave being replaced with the term freedman. These laws limited the civil rights of formerly enslaved African
Americans. The laws kept them from owning or renting property, voting, and speaking freely in public. Additionally, the laws subjected
African Americans to fines for work absences, for curfew violations, and for making speeches. White employers could whip African
American employees, and ordinary white citizens had the right to arrest African Americans. Vagrancy laws in the Black Codes allowed white
Southerners to keep African Americans in involuntary servitude. Vagrancy laws stated that if African Americans quit their jobs, they could
serve jail time. As a result, African Americans were forced to keep working, regardless of harsh treatment, ill health, or low
wages. Ultimately, the Black Codes represented a return to the South's social order before the Civil War. They reduced African American
workers to the state of slavery in all but the name.
The Freedman's Bureau
In the final months of the Civil War, Congress developed the Freedmen's Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, a new
office in the U.S. War Department. The Freedmen's Bureau, as it was known, helped African Americans and other poor refugees during
Reconstruction. The bureau aided thousands of freed African Americans and refugees who had camped near Union armies during the war.
With Freedmen’s Bureau officials protecting them from white Southerners, African Americans made advances in the early years of Reconstruction.
The Freedmen’s Bureau oversaw the confiscation and redistribution of southern lands that the Union armies had occupied. The bureau
confiscated about 850,000 square miles of property that had belonged to Confederate leaders and officials, then rented or sold the land to
freedmen. However, there were far more freedmen than confiscated plots. The total amount of land the bureau confiscated equaled less
than 1% of all land in the South.
The Freedmen's Bureau also resettled people who had been displaced by the war. An urgent need for laborers occurred in the post-war
years. The agency transported former enslaved African Americans to areas of the South with labor shortages. By 1870, more than 30,000
African Americans had taken advantage of this and migrated for work.
Bureau officials offered other forms of practical help to former enslaved people and white refugees across the South. Between 1865 and
1869, the bureau distributed 21 million rations, or supplies of food, over 75% of which went to African Americans. The bureau also helped
establish black schools, provided medical supplies, and managed a number of hospitals. In 1867, it oversaw 46 medical facilities, treated
450,000 cases of illness, and spent $2 million treating formerly enslaved African Americans.
One of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s other primary concerns was protecting African American workers. The bureau met with white landowners
and black workers and helped negotiate labor contracts. They pressured landowners to draw up and honor fair contracts. The bureau also
encouraged African Americans to seek work to provide for their own financial security and independence. Because of the bureau's
mediation, many African Americans were able to get better contracts.
Additionally, the bureau created freedmen's courts, which tried minor civil and criminal cases where one or both parties were freedmen.
Often, their efforts ensured justice for freedmen at a time when it was hard to get a fair trial in most Southern courts. In many cases,
African Americans who were punished because of Black Code violations turned to the Freedman’s Bureau for legal help.
The Freedmen's Bureau was often viewed with hostility in both the North and the South. To Northerners, the bureau’s programs seemed
too costly after an expensive war.Conservative Southerners were bitterly opposed to the bureau because they knew it worked to uphold
the black vote and spread Republican influence in the South. Southern landowners disliked federal supervision of their labor contracts with
African Americans. Fair pay for African Americans meant their labor would no longer be cheap, and their profits would suffer.
Despite the noble assistance it provided, the Freedmen's Bureau, like many government organizations of the time, was often inefficient
and corrupt. Some officials strongly believed in equality and opportunity for African Americans. Other officials owned plantations
themselves and acted against the interests of African American workers. Such officials often insisted upon labor contracts that favored
white landowners. The head of the bureau, Oliver O. Howard, insisted that African Americans enter into labor contracts whenever possible.
"A man who can work has no right to be supported by government," he said. Even if Howard's advice was meant to encourage African
Americans to join the workforce, freedmen were often forced by labor contracts into working on plantations in conditions similar to the
days of enslavement.
With the complicity of the Freedman's Bureau, the contract labor agreement became the Southern landowners' way of commanding black
labor. One Mississippi landowner described it this way:
This year I says to ‘em, "Boys, I'm going to make a bargain with you. I'll roll out the ploughs and the mules and the feed, and you shall do
the work; we'll make a crop of cotton and you shall have half. I'll provide for ye; give ye quarters, treat ye well, and when ye won't work,
pole ye like I always have." They agreed to it and I put it into the contract that I was to whoop 'em when I pleased.
J. W. Trotter, The African American Experience, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), 295.
African Americans and abolitionists knew that freedom from slavery was just the first step. African Americans needed civil rights and land.
If their only alternative to slavery was backbreaking field work for plantation owners, their political gains would become meaningless.
Southern Terrorism
By killing freedmen, former Confederates hoped to discourage African American communities in the South from exercising their civil rights. This sobering
political cartoon from Harper's Magazine in August 1868 mourns the murder of African Americans and the rise of a new motto: One Vote Less.
Some white Southerners used tactics of terror to control African Americans. Union troops in the South could not prevent Southern lynch
mobs and terrorists from killing thousands of African Americans and white people who worked with the Union. General (and future
Senator) Carl Schurz reported in 1865 that killings were so widespread that the authorities could no longer keep count of them:
The number of murders and assaults perpetrated upon Negroes is very great; we can form only an approximative estimate of what is
going on in those parts of the South which are not closely garrisoned, and from which no regular reports are received, by what occurs
under the very eyes of our military authorities. As to my personal experience, I will only mention that during my two days sojourn at
Atlanta, one Negro was stabbed with fatal effect on the street, and three were poisoned, one of whom died. While I was at
Montgomery, one negro was cut across the throat evidently with intent to kill, and another was shot, but both escaped with their lives.
U.S. Senate, Report on the Condition of the South, 39th Cong., 1st sess., 1865.
Schurz supported his statements with sworn testimony from soldiers and Freedman's Bureau officials posted throughout the South. They
described how the murderers were rarely taken to court and even then were usually let off with little or no punishment.
In Their Own Words
In General Carl Schurz's report, one officer described how white patrols in southwestern Alabama murdered African Americans:
There are regular patrols posted on the rivers, who board some of the boats; after the boats leave they hang, shoot, or drown
the victims they may find on them, and all those found on the roads or coming down the rivers are almost invariably murdered.
The bewildered and terrified freedmen know not what to do—to leave is death; to remain is to suffer the increased burden
imposed upon them by the cruel taskmaster, whose only interest is their labor, wrung from them by every device an inhuman
ingenuity can devise; hence the lash and murder is resorted to [to] intimidate those whom fear of an awful death alone cause to
remain, while patrols, negro dogs and spies, disguised as Yankees, keep constant guard over these unfortunate people.
U.S. Senate, Report on the Condition of the South, 39th Cong., 1st sess., 1865.
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African Americans were not the only ones persecuted by the KKK in the South. In this warning, printed in an Alabama newspaper, the KKK threatens to lynch
carpetbaggers from Ohio.
Several former Confederates formed groups to terrorize African Americans and deny them of their civil rights.These groups included the
Order of the Pale Faces, the White Brotherhood, the Council of Safety, and the Knights of the White Camelia. The Ku Klux Klan, the bestknown terrorist group at the time, was organized in June 1866 in the town of Pulaski, Tennessee. Founded by Nathan Bedford Forrest, a
former Confederate general, this secret society was organized in a terrorist cell structure that stretched across the South. Societies like the
Ku Klux Klan were essentially militia groups allied to the Democratic Party.
Victims of racist violence included thousands of African Americans, both freedmen and members of the Union’s occupation forces.
Northerners living in the South, known as carpetbaggers, were threatened. Terrorists also attacked and threatened Southerners assisting
the federal government, or scalawags, as they were called. Racist groups burned down the houses of African Americans and violently
forced them out of towns. The violence was widespread and severe. As a result, some historians refer to 1865 to 1877 as the "second civil
war."
In addition to organized political terror, individual Southern white men regularly beat and killed African Americans if they violated any part
of the enslaved/enslaver relationship. For example, in November of 1865, a white man shot and killed an African American named Boston
McDaniel on a Texas road because McDaniel failed to tip his hat. Freedmen were threatened, beaten, and killed for trivial events and simple
misunderstandings, such as the following:
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trying to leave a plantation and seeking work elsewhere
speaking to a white person before being spoken to
objecting to African Americans being removed from church services
refusing to submit to a punishment such as whipping
refusing to call a white man their "master"
leaving a plantation without permission
The end of the Civil War left freed African Americans at the mercy of brutal, violent terrorists. Few Southerners would dare to enforce the
law, discourage the terrorists, or help their former enslaved workers.
Congressional Reconstruction
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Republicans who believed President Lincoln had made too many concessions to white Southerners were further enraged by President
Johnson’s acceptance of the Black Codes and former Confederate officials. Northern voters and politicians were shocked by accounts of
racist killings in the South and by the failure of the Southern legal system to bring the murderers to justice. As an added insult, many
politicians who had helped create the Confederacy, and thus the war, were now attempting to retake their former posts in government.
Many Northerners felt that far too many Union men had shed their blood during the war for the South to return to its old ways. This moral
outrage led Congress to take on Reconstruction as its own project by passing laws that President Johnson could not overrule.
Why did Congress try to drive Reconstruction forward? For some congressmen, it was a way to help ensure fairness and equality for African
Americans in the South. Many Republican politicians had been abolitionists and genuinely wanted to see justice for African Americans.
Others, however, supported Reconstruction for political and economic reasons. Many Republicans wanted to make African Americans into
loyal Republican voters to keep their political opponents, the Democrats, from reclaiming power in the South. Other Republicans
represented Northern businesses that hoped to profit from economic opportunities in the South. For all of these reasons, Republican
politicians did not want Southern landowners to return to power and recreate the old social system once again.
Despite President Johnson's objections, Congress passed two important bills in 1866. First, as mentioned earlier, Congress expanded the
Freedmen's Bureau so that it could judge cases about African American rights. These freedmen’s courts allowed African Americans a
chance at getting justice despite hostile Southern law enforcement officers and courts.Next, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866,
giving citizenship to all persons, except for Native Americans, born in the U.S. regardless of their race. President Johnson vetoed both
measures. However, the Republican Party had enough of a majority in Congress to pass both laws, in spite of Johnson's opposition.
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 gave all African Americans U.S. citizenship, but it wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, nearly 100 years later, that African Americans in the
South had the right to share spaces such as public restrooms with white people.
Military Occupation and the Civil War Amendments
Congress resolved that only direct military occupation could provide justice and equality for African Americans in the South. In 1866 Ulysses
S. Grant, the top U.S. Army general, ordered army troops to act as a police force and preserve the law when local authorities failed to act.
Congress set up a military occupation of the South with the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. The Reconstruction Acts put the 11 Confederate
states, except for Tennessee, in the control of five military districts. In each district, a military commander was in charge of protecting
people and property. However, Congress did not provide enough troops or money to do an effective job. In 1865, shortly after the end of
the war, more than 200,000 Union troops were scattered all over the South. By 1867, when the military districts were set up, only about
20,000 troops remained.
Through military occupation, Congress hoped to stop the victimization and murder of African Americans. Congress also set higher
standards for rejoining the Union. To rejoin, Southern states had to follow these rules:
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write new state constitutions
ratify the Fourteenth Amendment (see below)
extend the right to vote to male African Americans
disqualify ex-Confederate officials and officers from holding office
Unlike state or federal laws, which could be easily repealed or altered over time, constitutional amendments would be hard for Democrats
to change even if they later regained political control. With the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, Republicans attempted
to establish the rights of African Americans (and of all citizens) in the United States Constitution. Between 1865 and 1870, all three
amendments were ratified and added to the U.S. Constitution. Collectively, they were known as the Civil War Amendmentsbecause African
American rights were a legacy of the Civil War.
Civil War Amendments
Amendment
Essential Content
Years of
Ratification
Thirteenth
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude is allowed in U.S. territory, except in
cases where an individual was officially convicted of a crime
1865
Fourteenth
All persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are U.S. citizens and no state can
create any law to deny them of their life, liberty, or property
1866-1867
The right of any U.S. citizen to vote cannot be impaired by or denied because
of that person's race, color, or former enslavement
1869-1870
Fifteenth
With their governments now run by progressive Republican politicians, Southern states wrote progressive constitutions. All states
outlawed slavery in accordance with the Thirteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment went one step further by establishing the
rights due to all U.S. citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed the rights of individuals who were U.S. born or had become U.S.
citizens. It also prohibited the taking of anyone’s life, liberty, or property without "due process of law." In theory, this amendment gave full
civil rights to African Americans in both the South and the North.
Beginning in 1869, Congress and a majority of the states also ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed voting rights for African
American men. Specifically, it banned state and local governments from preventing men from voting based on "race, color, or any previous
condition of servitude." Although this right was already included in many Southern state constitutions, a national amendment made it
enforceable by the federal government.
Congress made passage of the Fourteenth Amendment a requirement before former Confederate states could rejoin the Union. Most
states were readmitted in 1868. Because of various complications, four holdout states (Texas, Virginia, Mississippi, and Georgia) also had to
accept the Fifteenth Amendment before they were readmitted. Together, these Civil War Amendments made African American men
virtually equal to white men, under the law.
As early as 1851, African American civil rights activist Sojourner Truth stood up for women’s suffrage at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in her famous
speech, "Ain’t I a Woman?"
Many in the South opposed the Civil War Amendments, and the state legislatures of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and New
Jersey also rejected it. Leaders of the women's movement such as Sojourner Truth also resented the Fifteenth Amendment because it did
not give women the right to vote:
There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored woman; and if colored men get their
rights, and not colored women get theirs, it will be just as bad as it was before.… I want women to have their rights. In the courts
women have no rights, no voice; nobody speaks for them.… There ought to be equal rights more than ever, since colored people have
got their freedom. Men have got their rights, and women has got no rights. That is the trouble. When woman gets her rights man will be
right.
Sojourner Truth, speech at the First Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association New York City, quoted in the New York Evening Post, May 9, 1867.
Most black women, however, supported any form of expanded rights for African Americans. They viewed racism, not sexism, as their most
immediate problem.
Think About It
Do you think that African American women benefited from the Fifteenth Amendment, even though it did not give them the right to
vote? Does the pursuit of women’s rights ever conflict with the pursuit of equal rights made by other groups? How does this conflict
continue today?
African American Education
Perhaps the most significant work done by the Freedmen's Bureau work was in the field of education. By 1870, the Bureau had spent $5
million toward the education of African Americans. In 4,329 schools, it employed 9,300 teachers who served nearly 250,000 students. With
the help of religious and charitable organizations from the North, the bureau set up day and night schools, industrial schools, and Sunday
schools. Eventually, the bureau founded and funded colleges including Atlanta University, Fisk University, St. Augustine's College, the
Hampton Institute, and Howard University. Both black and white staff were hired by these schools to be teachers and professors.
Funded by the Freedmen's Bureau, schoolhouses such as this one in Richmond, Virginia, were run by volunteers from the North.
Black education did not depend solely on the Freedmen's Bureau. Charities, churches, and African Americans themselves also educated
freedmen during Reconstruction. Northern businessmen financed schools through organizations like George Peabody's Education Fund
and the John Slater Fund. The Republican-led governments in the South helped both schools and colleges. In 1870, the South Carolina
legislature funded free elementary school education. This law sent 70,000 African American children to school for the first time. It also sent
50,000 white children to school, the majority of which also attended for the first time.
In addition, the Congregationalist American Missionary Association (AMA) strongly supported the education of freedmen. The AMA, a
Northern-based religious association, encouraged members to go to the South. The superintendant of AMA schools in Savannah, Georgia,
Reverend S. W. Magill, believed that freedmen needed the AMA "to guide, counsel, and instruct them in their new life, protect them from
the abuses of the wicked, and direct their energies so as to make them useful to themselves, their family, and their country." This quote
shows how Magill and others in the AMA had a low opinion of African Americans. Local African American communities often disagreed with
the AMA because it refused to take the communities' own requests, needs, and abilities into account.
In many cases, African Americans used their own money to fund their education. They recruited and paid good teachers for their schools.
As payment, some parents offered teachers regular gifts of produce and meat. Many parents vowed to do whatever they could to send
their children to school. By 1870, free African Americans had spent more than $1 million for their education.
Reuniting With Families
During the Civil War, many African American families had been separated. The first priority for many freedmen after the war was to find lost
family members. The search for lost relatives was difficult. Often, years had passed without contact between relatives. Changes in physical
appearance made loved ones hard to recognize. African American families were spread over large regions of the South, making it difficult
to travel by foot to find loved ones. In one case, a man walked more than 600 miles, from Georgia to North Carolina, in search of his wife
and children.
A family record book printed around 1880 celebrating the end of the Civil War
African Americans used letters, aid from the Freedman’s Bureau, and social networks to track down family. People placed newspaper ads
offering payment for information about lost loved ones. Reunions were joyful and sometimes difficult. Slavery and the ravages of war had
torn many families apart and left emotional and physical scars. In other cases, spouses had remarried and created whole new families.
In Their Own Words
Laura Spicer and her husband found each other after the war but decided not to reunite. Spicer’s husband, believing his wife had died
during the war, had started a new family. He wrote these tearful words to her:
I would come to see you but I know you could not bear it. I want to see you and I don't want to see you. I love you just as well as
I did the last day I saw you; and it will not do for you and I to meet. I am married, and my wife has two children; and if you and I
meet it would make a very dissatisfied family.
J. W. Trotter, The African American Experience (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), 345.
Many African Americans, who had married in broomstick ceremonies while they were enslaved, remarried in an official ceremony to make
their union legal. During early Reconstruction, former enslaved African Americans married in mass wedding ceremonies with more than 50
couples. Legal marriage helped couples keep their children and allowed wives to collect soldiers' pensions after their husbands had died in
the war or occupation.
The Northern press glamorized the first African American votes, as illustrated in this magazine cover titled "The First Vote." In reality, African Americans still
faced harsh conditions in the South and were often violently discouraged from voting.
The Union League and the African American Vote
African Americans used their right to vote to support the Republican Party. The Union League of Americaactively recruited black voters for
the Republican Party. The league was created in the North to rally Union support for the Civil War and spread its activities to the South
during Reconstruction.
The Union League provided political guidance for new African American voters. It welcomed both African American men and women. The
League attracted African Americans to the Republican Party because of its devotion to equal rights and freedom. It was not difficult to
convince African Americans to support Republicans because they were the party of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln.
State Constitutional Conventions
The Reconstruction Act of 1867 forced Southern states to draft new constitutions to rejoin the Union. Districts within each state elected
delegates to conventions to write up new constitutions. A quarter of all delegates sent to state conventions were African American. In
some states African American delegates actually formed a majority of the delegation. African American delegates had diverse backgrounds.
Some had little education while others were intellectuals. Some had previously been enslaved while others had always been free. A
Charleston newspaper, Charleston Daily News, printed the following about black delegates:
Beyond all question, the best men in the convention are the colored members. Considering the influences under which they were called
together, and their imperfect acquaintance with parliamentary law, they have displayed, for the most part, remarkable moderation and
dignity....They have assembled neither to pull wires like some, nor to make money like others; but to legislate for the welfare of the race
to which they belong.
J. Franklin and A. Moss Jr., From Slavery to Freedom, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 265.
These constitutional conventions were of great importance. The new constitutions determined who could vote, how votes would be
counted, who could be taxed, how trials were held, and how people could defend their rights. In several Southern states, constitutions
granted new rights and powers to both African Americans and white citizens who were not part of the Southern upper-class.
African Americans were active in local and national elections, the Union League, and the Republican Party. For the first time, African
Americans were elected to Congress and local legislatures, and black voters were a majority in many districts in the South. In 1870, the
Mississippi legislature appointed African American Hiram Revels to fill the Senate seat once held by Jefferson Davis, who had given it up to
become president of the Confederacy.
African Americans in Office 1870-1876
State
State Legislators
U.S. Congressmen
U.S. Senators
Alabama
69
3
0
Arkansas
8
0
0
Florida
30
1
0
Georgia
41
1
0
Louisiana
87
1 (not seated)
0
Mississippi
112
1
2
North Carolina
30
1
0
South Carolina
190
6
0
1
0
0
Texas
19
0
0
Virginia
56
0
0
TOTAL
633
14
2
Tennessee
This cartoon imagines Jefferson Davis looking in fear and horror at Hiram Revels taking his former seat in the Senate.
A majority of the citizens and eligible voters in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana were African American.In some states, these
majorities elected a larger number of black representatives to government positions. In South Carolina, a majority of representatives in the
state legislature in 1868 and in the state senate in 1874 were African Americans. Out of 156 members in the South Carolina house in 1868, 90
were African American. In other states, such as Mississippi, African Americans in government were far less common. In 1870, only 30 African
Americans out of 107 House members were elected to the Mississippi legislature, and the state senate had five African American senators
out of 33 members. In local politics, African Americans—often hardened Civil War veterans—were frequently elected or appointed as
sheriffs and other officials.
African Americans became popular national politicians, as well. In the final years of Reconstruction, four of South Carolina’s five
congressmen were African American. However, as the table above reveals, African American power did not effectively extend to national
office in most Southern states.
African Americans did not often hold certain leadership positions in state governments either. During the Reconstruction era, P.B.S.
Pinchback, who served as the interim governor of Louisiana for only a month, was the only African American in any state to serve as
governor. Even white Republicans and other opponents of slavery were uncomfortable with voting for African American candidates. As a
result, African American politicians would often support white Republican politicians for leadership positions. For example, in 1868, African
American representatives in the South Carolina legislature outnumbered white representatives 74 to 47 but still elected a white man,
Franklin Moses, as Speaker of the House.
Despite setbacks, the number of elected African Americans highlights the revolutionary nature of Reconstruction. African Americans had
gone from enslavement to shaping state and local governments. For African Americans everywhere, this was a huge step forward.
The Economics of Reconstruction
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The Civil War had ruined the South’s economy. Formerly productive and fertile, southern agriculture had been devastated by five years of
fighting. In this environment, free African American men and women tried hard to make a living. African Americans wanted economic
independence, but this dream could not be achieved without land, the primary source of revenue in the South. As a result, the hopes of
many freedmen centered on land seized from former Confederate enslavers. To many African Americans wanting to maintain any kind of
lasting freedom, this land was crucial.
The Issue of Land
Many people in both the South and the North believed that democracy and progress could not come to the South as long as the majority of
good farmland was held by the white aristocracy. Many enslaved families had worked these pieces of land for generations. African
Americans hoped that the federal government would confiscate white plantations after the war and give them to the freedmen who had
labored in slavery. During the war, some Union generals had awarded seized plantations to enslaved people. At that time, Congress also
wrote two laws confiscating the land of Confederate leaders. Congress later promised this land to freedmen. However, most freedmen did
not receive land. The government under President Johnson even took back the plots that generals had granted to freedmen and returned
them to their former Confederate owners.
In Their Own Words
In the constitutional convention for South Carolina, Francis L. Cardozo, an African American intellectual, spoke eloquently about the
need for land among the South’s working poor.
One of the greatest bulwarks of slavery was the infernal plantation system, one man owning his thousand, another his twenty,
another fifty thousand acres of land. This is the only way by which we will break up that system, and I maintain that our freedom
will be of no effect if we allow it to continue. What is the main cause of the prosperity of the North? It is because every man has
his own farm and is free and independent. Let the lands of the South be similarly divided. I would not say for one moment they
should be confiscated, but if sold to maintain the war, now that slavery is destroyed, let the plantation system go with it. We will
never have true freedom until we abolish the system of agriculture which existed in the Southern States. It is useless to have any
schools while we maintain the stronghold of slavery as the agricultural system of the country.
Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of South Carolina (Charleston, SC: Denny & Perry, 1868), 116.
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The federal government made public land available to African Americans and other poor farmers with the Southern Homestead Act of
1866. Large plots of unwanted public land were put up for sale in Alabama, Arkansas, and Florida. In Louisiana and Mississippi, the federal
government offered nearly 10% of state land for sale. Prices were cheap but still often more than freedmen could afford. Black homesteads
in Florida covered roughly more than 160,000 acres in 1867. In Georgia, African American homesteads covered more than 350,000 acres in
1874. While these numbers sound impressive, in both cases they were both far less than .1% of the land in each state. The Homestead Act
helped many African Americans achieve some economic independence, but this was limited to a small number of people.
Think About It
Why was owning land just as important for African Americans as political rights?
Wage Labor and Sharecropping
African Americans who could not purchase public land under the Homestead Act often took jobs on plantations. Because many freedmen
had emigrated to the North or to cities in the South during and after the war, white plantation owners desperately needed people to work
their land. This labor shortage forced plantation owners to offer higher wages and better living accommodations to African Americans and
poor white farmers.
Sharecropping kept some African Americans working plantations in conditions similar to slavery for almost a century after the Civil War. Here sharecroppers
work a cotton field in Georgia in 1941.
However, the situation for African American farmhands soon deteriorated. Using Black Codes and vagrancy laws, white Southerners forced
African Americans to remain on the same plantations indefinitely. Many landowners took advantage of illiterate African Americans. They
often changed or ignored written contracts. African Americans were largely at the mercy of their white employers. Many contracts
restricted workers' personal life by dictating how they dressed, how they behaved, where they went, and how they voted. Often,
conditions spelled out in the written contracts were not much better than slavery.
Most African Americans in the South found jobs as farmhands working for a set wage or, more commonly, as
sharecroppers. In sharecropping, workers provided labor to plantation owners in exchange for a portion of the crops they harvested.
Landowners provided land, shelter, tools, seeds, and fertilizer for workers and usually got between 50% and 70% of the crops. Farmers who
worked the fields could get anywhere between 10% and 50% of the crops produced. The amount sharecroppers then received depended on
the size of the harvest. If the crops failed, sharecroppers received little of the harvest and sometimes none at all. Sharecropping contracts
often forbid tenants from planting anything except cotton. Therefore, they had to sell their shares of the cotton harvest to get food for
their families. For plantation owners, sharecropping guaranteed labor for at least a year. Because sharecroppers were not paid until after
crops were harvested and sold, they had to stay through the harvest season.
Although Republican governments fought to protect the rights of African American sharecroppers by banning contracts that forced
workers to stay on plantations and by limiting vagrancy laws, plantation owners found ways to exploit workers. Because the owners
controlled the finances, it was easy for them to cheat sharecroppers. Owners often paid off loans for seed, tools, and livestock before they
paid their workers. They also sold the crops before giving sharecroppers their share. White employers would sometimes loan their tenants
small amounts of food and expect to be repaid. African Americans often ended up owing more to their employers at the end of each
month. They had little or no money left after paying for food or basic items.
There were some benefits to sharecropping. People working on plantations for a wage usually worked in gangs under overseers with
whips, just as in the days of slavery. Armed overseers decided when workers could take water breaks or eat. On the other hand, most
sharecroppers worked without direct overseers, which allowed them the freedom to choose when and how to work. If the contracts
allowed it, they also had small family plots where they grew fruits and vegetables for their families. For many African Americans,
sharecropping brought them closer to economic freedom than working in Northern factories for wages could. One African American
farmer stated what many others felt, "If I can't own the land, I'll hire or lease the land, but I won't contract," which meant work for wages.
Nevertheless, since many African American sharecroppers could not survive on their shares of the harvests, they were forced to work for
wages again.
While both sharecropping and wage labor were a step up from slavery, rich landowners still came out on top. At the time, the Freedman’s
Bureau estimated only 10% of African Americans were making enough to support their family. Wages for African Americans were extremely
low and stayed that way for many years. Although the first years after the war were a disaster for farm owners due to droughts and
pestilence, by 1880 the South was producing more cotton than it ever had in the past.
Work in the Industrial North
Some African Americans left rural areas and plantations for opportunities in northern and southern cities. However, white workers and
unions began to see African Americans as competition in the workplace. African American carpenters, blacksmiths, cabinetmakers, and
bricklayers faced strong opposition from white skilled laborers.
Urban employers sometimes hired black workers to break strikes by white labor unions. In 1867, white ship caulkers in Boston held strikes
to secure an eight-hour work day, instead of the 10 or 12 hour days which were common at the time. Rather than give into their demands,
ship owners hired just black ship caulkers from Virginia to replace the strikers. Naturally, this made white employees angry at African
Americans, whom they blamed for stealing their jobs. Already earning lower wages than the white workers they replaced, these
black strikebreakers were often fired as soon as employers struck a deal with white unions.
To ensure better working conditions, African Americans tried to organize. While some local unions admitted African Americans, the vast
majority turned them away. As a result, African Americans established the National Negro Labor Union in December 1869. White unions
and workers staunchly opposed the black union and refused to affiliate with it. African Americans remained outside of the wider national
labor movement throughout Reconstruction and for years beyond.
Practice Questions
Take some time to answer the following questions and to write your answers down in your notebook. Then click the "Check Your
Answer" button to see a suggested answer. Some of these questions may be asked in the submission for this lesson.
Name and describe at least two institutions that offered freed African Americans support after the Civil War.
Check Your Answer
Do you think that African American women were right to support the Fifteenth Amendment, even though it only gave males the right
to vote? If put in the same position as African American women, would you have supported the amendment or not?
Check Your Answer
Why was reconstruction of the South necessary after the Civil War?
Check Your Answer
Why did Congress decide to put the South under military occupation?
Check Your Answer
What was the Southern Homestead Act of 1866? What was its purpose?
Check Your Answer
Action Against the KKK
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An 1874 cartoon depicts the White League and the KKK cooperating to make the lives of African Americans worse than slavery.
The new Republican governments in the South set up under Reconstruction were under constant threat from the KKK and other
groups. The new amendments and state constitutions had secured voting rights for African Americans and for electing African American
representatives to high offices. However, white conservatives were threatened by efforts to educate and establish the rights of African
Americans. Southern terrorist groups, angered by the outcome of the war and the new political reality, killed and intimidated African
Americans to prevent them from voting for Republicans. These groups threatened white Republicans to make them afraid of protecting
the rights of African Americans. The groups also sent death threats to Southern black public officials, pressuring them to resign or face the
consequences.
All of the Republican state governments in the South faced strong resistance from white conservatives and secret societies. Some local
governments tried to outlaw secret societies such as the Klan. In 1868, Tennessee and Alabama began fining anyone caught wearing masks,
molesting people, or destroying property and made it legal to arrest or shoot anyone wearing such masks. Despite the efforts of
Republican governments, the KKK and other groups were rarely troubled. Even under Republican governments, many public officials,
police, and politicians often tolerated or worked with secret societies. It was clear that the federal government would have to step in to
protect African Americans directly.
In the effort to suppress secret societies, Congress passed several laws in 1870 and 1871. These laws, known as theEnforcement Acts,
allowed the president to use military force against white supremacists. In addition, in April 1871, the president was given the power to
suspend the right of habeas corpus when dealing with violent, law-breaking secret societies. This meant that Klansmen and others could be
arrested without being charged with a crime. In the law, activities of secret societies were defined as acts of rebellion against the U.S.
Constitution. The president at the time, Ulysses S. Grant, had been a general in the Civil War, and he actively used the new powers granted
him by the Enforcement Acts to crush the Klan.
The army and federal agents hunted down and arrested hundreds of Klansmen and other members of secret societies. Many were tried
and found guilty of conspiracy. By 1872, federal agents had effectively disbanded the Klan, but other Southern terrorists kept persecuting
and even killing African Americans. The violence became worse when Northern politicians grew weary of providing protection and
assistance to African Americans during the next few years.
The End of Northern Support
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Why did the North stop supporting African Americans in the South? From the beginning, the Republican Congress did not provide enough
money and resources to make Reconstruction successful. Many of the programs created after the Civil War required large amounts of
funding from the federal government, especially because many local authorities in the South did not support them. Shouldered with the
country’s first income tax and other measures to help pay for the war, Northern voters grew tired of providing financial support to
freedmen. Northern Democrats used racism and fear to turn white Northerners against Reconstruction and the Republican Party.
In Their Own Words
Representative George Shanklin, a Democrat from Kentucky, accused Republican congressmen of using Reconstruction for political
power, complained about allowing African Americans as guests in Congress, and demanded the end of Reconstruction, the
Freedmen's Bureau, and the Civil Rights Act:
You have freed four million slaves, who were productive laborers, who were contented and happy and well provided for....You
have imposed upon the people a debt which I will not attempt to estimate, for the purpose of supporting a pet institution called
the Freedman's Bureau. Perhaps you have gained another object. You have through the bureau manufactured the materials that
have filled the galleries of this Hall during the whole session. Crowds of these negroes have hung over us like a black and
threatening cloud, while we were crucifying the Constitution of our fathers and trampling under our feet the rights and liberties
of the people in passing the Freedmen's Bureau bill, the civil rights bill, and the indemnity bill. They have joined in the shouts of
triumph which have gone up when this House has trampled on the rights of the people....Discharge your joint committee on
reconstruction; abolish your Freedmen's Bureau, repeal your civil rights bill, and admit all the delegates from the seceded States
to their seats in Congress.
U.S. House of Representatives, Speech of Hon. George S. Shanklin, of Kentucky, on the Freedmen's Bureau Bill, 39th Cong., 1st sess., 1867, 2501.
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With the Reconstruction Acts, Congress had set up military districts to rule the South. The Union Army had more than a million men
scattered throughout the country during the war, but afterwards most were sent back home to their families and businesses in the North.
In the South, an army of less than 30,000 men was charged with restoring order and governing eight states with a combined population of
12 million people. As white soldiers reached the end of their terms of enlistment, African American troops, who had not been able to join
the army until the second half of the war, took over the task of occupation. Since African Americans were now keeping the peace in the
South, Southerners grew even more resentful of the Republican government. The withdrawal of white soldiers and the end of Northern
support made Reconstruction more difficult.
The Freedmen's Bureau, which received its budget from the War Department, also lost funding. Congress originally intended to pay for the
Freedmen's Bureau by selling the confiscated lands of Confederate officers and officials. Parts of the land would also be offered or sold as
small farms for freedmen and landless white farmers. However, President Johnson had pardoned the Confederates and gave many of these
estates back to their former owners. Congress cut funding for the bureau in 1867 and by the end of 1868, the bureau closed its doors and
operations for good.
Although the Freedmen’s Bureau was far from perfect, it had provided vital economic and legal assistance to freedmen after the war. Its
demise was a devastating blow to African Americans in the South. Freedmen no longer had a source for help with negotiating labor
contracts or in protecting themselves from physical threats. With violence and inequality still common in the South, the bureau had been
dismantled long before its job was done.
In Their Own Words
The African American scholar and historian W. E. B. Du Bois commented on the end of the Freedmen's Bureau:
No sooner was the work thus started, and the general system and local organization in some measure begun, than two grave
difficulties appeared which changed largely the theory and outcome of Bureau work. First, there were the abandoned lands of
the South. It had long been the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chief problems of emancipation
might be settled by establishing the slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters,—a sort of poetic justice, said some. But this
poetry done into solemn prose meant either wholesale confiscation of private property in the South, or vast appropriations.
Now Congress had not appropriated a cent, and no sooner did the proclamations of general amnesty appear than the 800,000
acres of abandoned lands in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau melted quickly away. The second difficulty lay in perfecting the
local organization of the Bureau throughout the wide field of work. Making a new machine and sending out officials of duly
ascertained fitness for a great work of social reform is no child's task; but this task was even harder, for a new central
organization had to be fitted on a heterogeneous and confused but already existing system of relief and control of ex-slaves; and
the agents available for this work must be sought for in an army still busy with war operations,--men in the very nature of the
case ill fitted for delicate social work,--or among the questionable camp followers of an invading host. Thus, after a year's work,
vigorously as it was pushed, the problem looked even more difficult to grasp and solve than at the beginning.
W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Freedmen's Bureau," Atlantic Monthly, no. 87 (1901): 354-365.
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The bureau’s education programs continued until 1870. African American education continued to improve despite segregation and
injustice. Although there were many setbacks, the Freedmen's Bureau delivered aid to freedmen on a large scale when it was desperately
needed.
The Panic of 1873 and the Elections of 1874
In 1873, a financial downturn also severely hurt Reconstruction. The value of crops plummeted. Even more sharecroppers went deep into
debt. Landowners lost their land. Reconstruction governments did not receive enough tax income for schools and other projects. In the
North, the system of labor unions and free labor was threatened because too many unemployed workers were looking for scarce jobs. As a
result, factories and employers could dictate awful terms of employment, while labor unions lost hard-won gains such as the eight-hour
workday. Northern voters, hurting economically, had even less sympathy for supporting freedmen in the South.
The bad economic situation turned many voters against the ruling Republican Party. In the House of Representatives, Congressional
Republicans held 115 seats more than the Democrats going into the 1874 elections. Afterwards, the Republicans lost 96 seats and became
the minority party. In the U.S. Senate, Republicans lost seven seats but retained a majority. The elections of 1874 were the largest reversal
of power in Congress during the 19th century and one of the biggest political changes in American history. Economic upheaval and anger at
Reconstruction had combined to cause a major shift in U.S. politics.
Change in the House of Representatives 1872-1874
1872
Elections
1874
Elections
Democratic Party
88
182
Republican Party
199
103
Independent
5
8
The End of African American Political Power
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As the elections of 1874 demonstrated, Northern people lost the political will to fund and support Reconstruction. The Freedmen's Bureau
and other federal agencies soon ended their support of civil rights for African Americans. Without the protection of federal officials, African
Americans were violently driven from their state offices and from voting booths. The sections below describe how white conservatives
beat down African Americans in individual states.
Virginia, Texas, and Tennessee
In Virginia, Texas, and Tennessee, progressive Republican governments had never firmly taken hold of power. The Reconstruction Acts had
required that the former Confederate states make new constitutions and ratify the Fifteenth Amendment. These states complied with
these rules but continued to exclude African Americans from holding office or voting in many elections through violence, intimidation, and
racist interpretations of the law. The Freedmen's Bureau tried to register African Americans to vote and to protect their rights, but African
Americans were often heavily outnumbered in these states. In states such as Virginia and Texas, the Freedmen's Bureau recorded the
beatings and killings of African Americans but was unable to stop them.
Georgia
In Georgia, African Americans never held more than 20% of the state's general assembly. In 1868, white Republicans joined Democrats and
expelled 28 African American legislators from the general assembly. White politicians claimed that the state constitution prevented African
Americans from ever holding office. Consequently, the U.S. Congress returned Georgia to military control and again refused to admit
representatives and senators from Georgia.
In Their Own Words
In this speech, Henry Turner, one of the African Americans removed from Georgia's General Assembly, expressed disappointment at
Reconstruction.
But for all, what have we got in Georgia? Simply the right to vote and sit in the General Assembly.... Not a colored juror or a
colored police in all the State. Two colored magistrates, one colored clerk of the court, and one or two colored bailiffs make up
the compliment [sic] for Georgia.... We are forced to pay taxes to keep up schools and municipalities, and not a dollar is ever
extended for the benefit of colored children. We are tried and condemned by the courts, with laws enacted thirty years ago. Our
statute books are as proscriptive now as they were in slave times to the exception of whipping and selling...not a single law has
ever been passed by the Georgia Legislature or by any city municipality in the whole State, that was intended, or even
contemplated the bettering of the colored man's situation.
Henry M. Turner, speaking on the eligibility of colored members to seats in the Georgia Legislature, on Sept. 3, 1868, Congressional Record 10.
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In 1870, the U.S. Army removed the ex-Confederates from the general assembly and reinstated the 28 African American members. Georgia
was then readmitted to the Union. In the next election, however, the Democrats won a majority of the seats, and the Republican governor
resigned, fleeing the state under pressure. The vengeance of Southern Democrats fell upon African American elected officials who stayed
behind. African American legislator Abram Colby was pulled out of his home by a mob, and lashed 100 times with a whip. A man on
horseback shot and killed Colby’s colleague Abram Turner in broad daylight, but the local authorities refused to investigate the
crime. Violence and racism against African Americans were common in Georgia for the next century.
Arkansas
In Little Rock, Arkansas, Reconstruction ended with a physical battle between rival Republican candidates for governor in 1874. The
election was so close that it was left to the courts to decide the outcome. Due to the violence that ensued, the election became known as
the Brooks-Baxter War. One candidate, Reverend Joseph Brooks, was supported by a militia of about 600 African American Republicans.
The other candidate, Elisha Baxter, was supported by a militia of white Democrats. Even as the rival militias clashed in armed confrontation,
President Grant refused to intervene. A short battle between the militias ended in a victory for the Democrats and many dead African
Americans.
In Their Own Words
The New York Times reported how African Americans were fighting in the Brooks-Baxter War in Arkansas:
"...it will be remembered that all the black men were in favor of Brooks; many of them supported him with arms, and scores of
them sacrificed their lives in defense of his cause. They fell in what was called a fair fight, however; and although that "fair fight"
often amounted to little better than a cold-blooded massacre, as in the case of the battle of New-Gascony, I will make no
comment on it. The negro leaders went into the "war" knowing what they had to expect, and they were perhaps as much to
blame for the bloodshed referred to as were the wild young white men who fought Baxter's battle. For the violence which
followed the defeat of Brooks, however, the Bourbons [conservatives] are alone responsible. They found the negroes cowed
and trembling--they saw their opportunity and took advantage of it. All over the State prominent negroes were warned to leave
Arkansas and find other homes. If they refused to do so they were quietly taken out of their cabins and "lost" in the woods and
swamps. In plain English, they were either killed outright or left in some wilderness to die."
"What Arkansas Will Do." New York Times, May 9, 1876.
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After the Democrats won, terror fell upon the African American community. Many African American leaders were killed. Many more were
forced to leave the state. White leaders who tried to protect them were also threatened. Later that same year, the former Confederates
dissolved the Reconstruction Constitution and wrote a new one that denied African Americans their civil rights and the right to vote. They
also closed the public schools that the Republicans had opened two years earlier. Arkansas became the first state to halt Reconstruction by
law; it would not be the last.
As this map reveals, conservative politicians quickly took over southern states once they were returned to the Union.
Mississippi
The white minority in Mississippi also used violence to win back power. At a July 4th parade in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1874, a well-armed
group of white people fired into the parade and marched through the streets, hunting and killing African Americans. Warren County, where
Vicksburg was located, had an African American majority and had elected Peter Crosby, an African American Civil War veteran, as sheriff.
Crosby asked the governor for help. The African American lieutenant governor, A.K. Davis, asked President Grant for federal troops.
However, Grant knew that Reconstruction was politically unpopular in both the North and South and refused Davis’s requests. The white
terrorist mob controlled the town for a month, overseeing the August elections and using intimidation to control the vote.
Similar violence happened all over Mississippi. Republican Governor Adelbert Ames could not persuade any white men to serve in a state
militia to fight the terrorists. He doubted that he could trust any white men to protect African American officeholders and civilians. He
recruited and armed African American militias, a move that played right into the hands of white Democrats. They used the threat of a black
militia to get more support among locals. In addition, the state militias had poor weapons in comparison to the white unofficial militias.
Trying to avoid a bloodbath, Ames disbanded the black militia hoping the Democrats would stop the intimidation. Instead, African
Americans were assaulted, killed, and intimidated to prevent them from voting, and Democrats easily won the state. Ames had to resign or
face impeachment. Fearing for his own safety, Ames decided to leave the state.
An illustration of African Americans recovering the dead and wounded after the Colfax Massacre
Louisiana and South Carolina
The Republican governments of Louisiana and South Carolina remained in power longer than in other states. However, eventually
conservatives and white terrorists gained political inroads and increased violence during the elections of 1868, 1870, 1872, and 1874. In the
town of Colfax, Louisiana, white terrorists put the elected African American sheriff and county government under siege in 1873. After
African Americans gathered to defend the local government, a white militia assembled and attacked them. They set fire to the county
courthouse and massacred roughly 100 African Americans, burning some alive and torturing others after they had surrendered. The Colfax
Massacre of April 13, 1873, inspired many similar assaults in Louisiana and across the South. Many more African American leaders and white
Republicans were hunted and killed in the aftermath of the massacre. In 1924, the town of Colfax even set up a monument celebrating the
actions of the white terrorists.
In September 1874, the Battle of Liberty Place erupted between the state government in New Orleans and the White League, a local white
terrorist group that was similar to the KKK. On the city’s streets, 3,500 well-armed White League militiamen attacked government buildings
defended by black militiamen and city police. The terrorists occupied city hall and the statehouse until federal troops arrived and forced
them to retreat. Although the 1874 government takeover was short lived, the same white conservative forces were elected to power in the
1876 elections.
In South Carolina, the racial situation was only slightly better. However, despite terror and political violence, African American politicians
won majorities in both state houses in 1874. A reporter commented on the fate of African Americans in South Carolina: "They have [the
majority of residents], but the other side has the brute force, the money, the land, the intelligence." Eventually, African Americans in South
Carolina also faced the same slow erosion of their political power as African Americans in other parts of the South.
The Death of Reconstruction
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The 1876 presidential election dealt the final blow to Reconstruction. The Democratic nominee was Samuel J. Tilden, and the Republican
nominee was Rutherford B. Hayes. Tilden defeated Hayes by at least 250,000 votes nationwide. However, the election’s outcome
depended on South Carolina and Louisiana's electoral votes, which were disputed because the vote was close. For many weeks, it was
unclear who had actually won the Presidency. However, behind closed doors in Washington, the two parties struck a deal known as
theCompromise of 1877. This compromise stated Republicans would end support for Reconstruction if the Democrats would concede the
election to Hayes. The Democrats quickly accepted, Hayes became president, and the policy of Reconstruction was abandoned in the
South.
Republican and progressive white legislators in the South were soon forced out of power or intimidated into leaving. In each state,
fraudulent and violent means were used to suppress African American voters. Before long, former Confederates and rich plantation
aristocrats were back in the halls of power. After the conservative governments and terrorist militias prevented African Americans from
voting, progressive social programs were the next target. Wealthy plantation owners did not want to pay for public education which would
only interfere with their need for a compliant and poor workforce. In some states, Democrats shut down state schools for several years. In
others, Democrats began charging for public education, which meant that poor families could no longer send their children. Across the
South, the advances of Reconstruction were being destroyed.
The Supreme Court Rolls Back Reconstruction
Two important Supreme Court decisions also prevented the government from helping African Americans. In the 1876 case, United States v.
Reese, the Supreme Court declared that the Fifteenth Amendment allowed states to deny voting rights as long as their laws did not
explicitly mention race as a factor. States could deny the vote for reasons such as illiteracy, poverty, conviction of a crime, or even because
a person's father had never registered to vote. Because of the ruling, many Southern states found creative ways to deny the vote to African
Americans. Though these laws could not deny all African Americans their rights, they would generally be crafted to ensure few were able to
cast a vote.
The other significant case involved the 1873 Colfax Massacre in Louisiana. The government arrested and convicted the white leaders who
led the rebellion, but the murderers appealed their conviction all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1875, the Supreme Court decided
in United States v. Cruikshank that the federal government did not have the authority to protect a citizen's constitutional rights. As a final
insult, the court let men who had killed more than 100 African Americans go free. The case set a troubling precedent for the federal
government to ignore even the public murder of African Americans.
Over the next few decades, the Supreme Court repeatedly undermined the rights of African Americans and sided with conservative forces
like segregationists and plantation owners. Southern Democratic state governments passed laws to weaken African Americans politically
and economically and to strengthen the power of landowners. Stopping just short of returning African Americans to slavery, former
Confederates and their Democratic allies were allowed by Washington to go back to their old ways. Reconstruction ended much as it
began, with African Americans struggling for civil rights in a South determined to keep them subdued.
Lesson Review

Jump
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Reconstruction was a period of hope among many Americans. The rights and opportunities of African
Americans were expanded through the Civil War amendments and greater educational opportunities. After the war, African Americans
reunited with families, tried to become economically independent, and elected African American leaders.
However, many of these changes proved to be little more than mirages on the road to freedom. Dreams of independence through
landownership were realized by only a few freedmen. The federal government did not give African Americans enough support to acquire
and maintain their own land. Instead, most African Americans faced hardship and exploitation as wage laborers or sharecroppers. Without
economic freedom, the lives of African Americans were not much better than they had been during slavery.
Reconstruction had promised a new beginning for African Americans in a united nation that would finally accept them as equals. This
dream died at the hands of white supremacists and indifferent Northern politicians. Scholar W.E.B. Du Bois later wrote the following:
One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile.
African Americans continued to have their rights abused and undermined in the years following Reconstruction. In the coming decades,
race relations became worse than they had been under slavery.
Practice Questions
Take some time to answer the following questions and to write your answers down in your notebook. Then click the "Check Your
Answer" button to see a suggested answer. Some of these questions may be asked in the submission for this lesson.
What were the main objectives of secret societies such as the Ku Klux Klan?
Check Your Answer
What effect, if any, did African American delegates, representatives, and national politicians have on the politics of Reconstruction?
Check Your Answer
Explain why the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Reese allowed authorities to deny the vote to African Americans.
Check Your Answer
What were some of the factors which led to the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South?
Check Your Answer
To Learn More
Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Cimbala, P. and R. Miller. The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations. New York: Fordham University Press, 1999.
Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Russell & Russell, 1935, 1962.
Foner, E. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
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