Module 2: Emancipation and Reconstruction

Welcome to Week 2! In this module, we'll explore the end of the Civil War and the period between 1865-1877, known as Reconstruction.

These three essential questions will guide this module blog post:

1. What were some of the conflicts which arose between freedpeople, federal officials, and white Southerners over the nature of Black freedom after the war?

2. What major legal and political changes occurred because of Reconstruction?

3. How did violence contribute to the end of Reconstruction?

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Part I: Defining Freedom at the End of the Civil War

We’ll start our module with the abolition of slavery in the United States. On January 31, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was approved.

The Amendment abolished slavery throughout the entire Union. It states, “Neither slavery nor involuntarily servitude, except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

During his inaugural address of 1865, President Abraham Lincoln spoke very firmly about slavery and its connection the history of the United States and to the Civil War:

“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray—that this might scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Only five days after the Confederates' surrender, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor. He died the next morning. A train took his body to Illinois on a long and winding journey, where crowds lined the train routes and hundreds of thousands of people passed by his coffin to pay their respects.

Lincoln's Funeral Procession, Pennsylvania Avenue, April 19, 1865

What comes after emancipation?

Although on the surface emancipation seems simple—Black men, women, and children were enslaved, and then they were not—no one quite knew how a post-Civil War United States would look. Were formerly enslaved people going to be citizens? Would they be able to vote? Own property? What would the cultural, political, and social landscape of the United States look like without the institution of slavery? (Nothing like some big heavy questions to start off the semester.)

An important thing to keep in mind is that emancipation had been pressed for and enacted by Black people, before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, before the Thirteenth Amendment was approved.

Before the Civil War’s end, Black men and women who escaped from slavery cultivated and negotiated relationships with white authorities in order to live freely—as American citizens.

St. Louis Commercial District, between 1862-1868

For example, during the Civil War, St. Louis, Missouri, was a Union-occupied city. The military court system provided enslaved men and women with a new vehicle through which to petition for their freedom and combat the institution of slavery. During the Civil War, Black people continued to be subject to arrest by the city police. The military’s interference with the civil court and police system disrupted the enforcement of the slave code.

During the last two years of the Civil War, one of the main concerns of provost marshals in military courts was rooting out Confederate sympathizers. To do so, they turned to the testimony of both free and enslaved African Americans. Enslaved African Americans used the Union military’s need for information about Confederate sympathizers as a strategy to earn a hearing before military officials. Many enslaved women took the opportunity to seek improvements in the legal status of themselves or their kin. [1] Once in front of military officials, women used the hearings as a space to petition for assistance in regaining custody of enslaved or indentured children, and to gain assistance in labor disputes (things like conflicts over wages and abuse from employers).

In Missouri, several African American women used the St. Louis provost marshal’s office to reunite their families after the eradication of slavery. Children were often hired out to different households or geographically separated from their parents to discourage escape attempts. In April 1865, a number of women applied to the St. Louis district provost marshal for assistance in regaining custody of their children who had been stranded in the Missouri countryside.

Under martial law, military officials were given wide authority to interfere in the lives of St. Louis residents. In many cases, enslaved women relied on military power to bring white citizens to justice for assaulting Black residents.

In her book, Gender and the Jubilee, historian Sharon Romeo argues that by testifying against their Confederate masters, enslaved women asserted their loyalty to the United States and their right to inclusion in the nation. Romeo asserts that these women’s actions “established a precedent for the federal government to protect the principle of equality under the law when the states would not.”[2]

Portrait of Two African American Women, c. 1870

What is Freedom?

As the above example from St. Louis demonstrates, one of the most important things that formerly enslaved people did after emancipation was try to put their families back together.

Many formerly enslaved people (known as freedpeople) left plantations to search for family members who had been sold away. They published newspaper ads seeking information about long lost relatives. These ads were common until the turn of the 20th century. They also sought to gain control over their children or other children who had been apprenticed to white masters during the war or as a result of the Black Codes, which I'll address below.

Many people formalized their marriages with wedding ceremonies. Additionally, after the war, we hear of more complaints from planters who argued that Black women weren’t working the same way as they used too—many black women preferred to devote more time to their families than had been possible under slavery.

Freedpeople also put a great emphasis on education. Students of all ages filled schools established by ex-slaves, missionary societies, and by the Freedmen’s Bureau. Booker T. Washington asserted: “It was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn.”

There was also a proliferation of independent black churches and church associations. Many churches were organized into regional, state, and national associations, often by northern and Midwestern free blacks who went to the South after the war to help the freedpeople. Baptists became the fastest growing post-emancipation denomination.

First African Church, Richmond, VA Harper's Weekly 1874

Black churches provided centralized leadership and organization. Many political leaders and officeholders were ministers. Churches also served as community centers and centers for political organizing.

Land was one of the major desires of freed people. Many former slaves insisted that their unpaid labor meant that they had acquired a right to the land.

In one of your required readings for this module, Jourdan Anderson wrote to his former master who had asked him to return and work for him again. This letter illustrates the importance former slaves put on taking control of their labor: “we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars.”

Take a minute to think about and answer the poll below. Elaborate on why you would have chosen your answer in the annotations and/or comments. (If you have difficulty viewing the embedded poll, you can also view it here.)

The Freedmen’s Bureau

Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (commonly referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau) in March 1865. It was designed to provide temporary assistance to former slaves and whites in dealing with the effects of the Civil War. It lasted through the end of 1868.

Bureau agents were supposed to establish schools, provide aid to the poor and aged, settle employment disputes between whites and Blacks and among the freedpeople, and secure for former slaves and white Unionists equal treatment before the courts.

The Freedmen’s Bureau was the first federal agency dedicated to social welfare. It was an experiment in social policy that seems more similar to the social welfare programs of the New Deal of the 1930s or the Great Society of the 1960s, which we will discuss later this semester.

By 1869, nearly 3,000 schools, serving more than 150,000 pupils in the South reported to the Bureau. Bureau agents also ran hospitals established during the war and provided medical care to both Black and white southerners. However, even at its peak, there were fewer than 1000 agents in the entire South. The Bureau faced strong opposition from segments of the Southern white population.

Harper's Weekly, 1868: A Freedmen's Bureau Agent Stands Between Armed Groups of Whites and Freedmen

Land Reform

During the war, General William Sherman issued a special order to set aside land in Georgia and South Carolina as homesteads for freedpeople. However, the plan never took effect, as Sherman did not have the authority to confiscate and redistribute land.

One of the provisions of the law establishing the Bureau gave it the authority to divide abandoned and confiscated land into forty-acre plots for rental and eventual sale to former slaves. (Here’s where you get the phrase “forty acres and a mule” which might be familiar to some of you.)

The Bureau land grants were short-lived, because President Andrew Johnson, who had succeeded Lincoln, ordered that nearly all land in federal hands was to be returned to its former owners.

Freedmen’s Bureau agents were charged with holding meetings with the freedmen throughout the South, telling them that they weren’t going to receive land and that they should go back to work for their former owners as wage laborers.

One response to this came from a committee of freedmen on Edisto Island, South Carolina:

“…we are landless and Homeless, from the Homes we have lived in in the past we can only do one of three things. Step into the public road or the sea or remain on them working as in former time and subject to thire will as then. We can not resist it in any way without being driven out Homeless upon the road. You will see this is not the condition of really freemen.”

No land distribution took place—as a result, the vast majority of rural freedpeople had no property during Reconstruction, and often had no alternative but to work on white-owned plantations, often for their former owners.

Two new systems of labor developed out of the conflict on the plantations:

Sharecropping: This system allowed a Black family to rent a part of the plantation, with the crop divided between worker and owner at the end of the year. Sharecropping guaranteed planters a stable resident labor force, and former slaves preferred it to gang labor because they could work without day-to-day white supervision. However, economic opportunities were limited, especially because the American cotton crop competed with new cotton plantations around the world after the Civil War. As the years went on, sharecropping led to cycles of debt that kept families bound to the land.

Crop-lien system: This system affected mainly white small farmers. To deal with wartime devastation, farmers obtained supplies from merchants. In order to obtain those supplies, they had to take up the growing of cotton and pledge part of the crop as collateral. Many farmers found themselves still in debt after marketing their portion of the crop at the year’s end, due to high interest rates and the dropping price of cotton.

Black and white farmers found themselves caught in sharecropping and crop-lien systems, and struggled with debt and poverty.

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Part II: Radical Reconstruction

We'll start Part II with an Answer Garden question. (You can also access the question here.) After the Civil War, what do you think the federal government's main goal was for the South? What were they most concerned about?

During the years immediately following the Civil War (1865-1877), the federal government played a large role in the administration and government of the former Confederate states. This period is known as “Reconstruction," and is usually discussed in two distinct "eras": Presidential Reconstruction and Radical Reconstruction.

First, the "president" in Presidential Reconstruction: Andrew Johnson.

Portrait of Andrew Johnson c.1870-1880

Andrew Johnson was elected as Lincoln’s vice president in the election of 1864. He was born in North Carolina and had moved to Tennessee, where he became a successful politician, identifying himself as an “honest yeoman” and a foe of large planters. He was a strong defender of the Union, and was the only senator from a seceding state to remain at his post in Washington when the war began.

Johnson held deep-rooted racist views. He did not believe that African Americans had any role to play in Reconstruction. For example, in his third annual message to Congress in 1867, Johnson warned against giving black men the right to vote, arguing that “Negro suffrage was established by act of Congress, and the military officers were commanded to superintend the process of clothing the Negro race with the political privileges torn from white men….It is not proposed merely that they shall govern themselves, but that they shall rule the white race, make and administer State laws, elect Presidents and members of Congress, and shape to a greater or less extent the future destiny of the whole country. Would such a trust and power be safe in such hands?"

After Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson became the 17th president. In 1865, Johnson began the period of Presidential Reconstruction. He pardoned nearly all white southerners who took an oath of allegiance, restoring their political and property rights, except for slave property. He appointed provisional governors and ordered them to call state conventions elected by whites alone, that would establish governments in the South, granting new governments a free hand in managing local affairs.

White voters in the south elected prominent Confederate leaders and members of the old elite to power.

Black Codes

Northern Republicans began to turn against the president as more and more reports of violence directed at formerly enslaved people and northern visitors came out of the South. Much opposition was aroused over the Black Codes, laws passed by the new governments which attempted to regulate the lives of former slaves. (You will read a piece of the Mississippi Black Code for this module.)

Under the Black Codes, Blacks were granted certain rights, such as legalized marriage, ownership of property, and limited access to the courts. But they were denied the right to testify against whites, to serve on juries, to serve in state militias, and to vote. And these codes decreed that those who failed to sign yearly labor contracts could be arrested and hired out to white landowners.

In Mississippi, all freedmen were required to carry papers proving they had means of employment. If they had no proof, they could be arrested and fined. If they could not pay the fine, the sheriff could hire out his prisoner to anyone who was willing to pay the fine.

Essentially, under the newly constituted Southern governments (and the blessing of Andrew Johnson), former Confederates attempted to reinstate the antebellum economic order—based on a system of coerced labor.

"The Veto," April 1866 by Thomas Nast

A group of Republicans known as the “Radical Republicans” disagreed with this. They called for the dissolution of these new governments and establishment of new ones which excluded Confederate rebels from power and guaranteed the right of Black men to vote. The most prominent Radical Republicans were Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. Both were motivated by a desire for racial equality and defending Black rights. However, the majority of Republicans were also motivated by political interests—giving the vote to hundreds of thousands of Black men would good for Republicans.

In 1866, Republicans responded to the Black Codes with the Civil Rights of 1866, the first federal attempt to constitutionally define all American-born residents as citizens and prohibit any curtailment of citizens’ fundamental rights. The bill was vetoed by Johnson, who argued that it would centralize power in the national government and deprive the states of the authority to regulate their own affairs. He also argued that Blacks did not deserve the rights of citizenship. Congress overrode his veto, making the Civil Rights Act the first major law in American history to be passed over a presidential veto.

The Fourteenth Amendment

In conjunction with the Civil Rights Act, Congress developed the Fourteenth Amendment. The House approved the Amendment on June 13, 1866. The Amendment begins:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

The 14th Amendment did not grant Black men the right to vote. However, it did provide that if a state denied the vote to any group of men, that state’s representation in Congress would be reduced. Because slavery had been abolished, now the South had the benefit of all Blacks counting in determining the state’s representation in Congress (not just three-fifths). The Fourteenth Amendment offered the leaders of the white South a choice—allow Black men to vote and keep their state’s full representation in the House, or limit the vote and sacrifice part of their political power.

Johnson was opposed to the 14th Amendment. He urged southern states to refuse to ratify it. This pushed more moderate Republicans towards the Radicals.

We have a clear sense of who a citizen is in the United States today. A citizen is either someone who was born in the United States or within the jurisdiction of the United States, or someone who has naturalized—they applied for US citizenship and were accepted. Both of these definitions of citizenship are specified in the 14th Amendment, in the Citizenship Clause. (The piece of the amendment stated above.) The rest of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment states:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law (Due Process Clause); nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws (Equal Protection Clause).

The 14th Amendment signaled the federal government’s willingness to enforce the Bill of Rights over the authority of the states. It transformed the Constitution into a vehicle through which members of vulnerable populations could stake a claim to freedom and seek protection against misconduct by all levels of government.

In the twentieth-century, many of the Supreme Court’s most important decisions expanding the rights of American citizens were based on the Fourteenth Amendment. For example, Brown v. Board of Education (segregation of public schools was in violation of the Equal Protection Clause); Griswold v. Connecticut (married couples had a Constitutional “right to privacy” in matters of contraception, protected by the Due Process clause); Loving v. Virginia (anti-miscegenation (interracial marriage) laws violated the Equal Protection Clause) and Obergefell v. Hodges (right of same-sex couples to marry is protected by the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses).

What would the United States look like if the 14th Amendment had never been passed? Let me know what you think in the Answer Garden below. (Or submit your answer here.)

In 1867, over Johnson’s veto, Congress adopted the Reconstruction Act, which temporarily divided the South into five military districts and stipulated that before they could rejoin the Union, they had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, write new constitutions enfranchising Black men, and abolish the Black Codes. The Fourteenth Amendment was finally ratified on July 9, 1868.

California did not ratify the 14th Amendment until 1959.

Yes, you read that right. Nineteen. Fifty. Nine.

It was hostility towards Chinese migrants that led politicians in the California legislature to refuse to ratify the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Amendments in the Reconstruction era, because they did not want to extend equal protection and/or suffrage to Chinese people. We’ll discuss the larger context of anti-Chinese sentiment and the 14th Amendment in more detail in Module 3.

In March 1867, Congress adopted a new act which barred the president from removing certain officeholders, including cabinet members, without the consent of the Senate. Johnson disagreed with this act, and in 1868, he removed his Secretary of War, who was an ally of the Radical Republicans. In response, the House of Representatives approved articles of impeachment and presented charges against Johnson to the Senate. Johnson became the first president to be placed on trial for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Although virtually all Republicans thought that Johnson was a failure, some moderate Republicans feared that conviction would damage the constitutional separation of powers between the Congress and the executive branch. In the end, they were one vote short of the two thirds necessary to remove him.

"The Senate as a Court of Impeachment for the Trial of President Andrew Johnson," Harper's Weekly, 1868

A few days after the vote, Republicans nominated Ulysses S. Grant, the Union’s most prominent military hero, as their candidate for president. In the 1868 campaign, Reconstruction was the central issue. Democrats appealed openly to racism, denouncing Reconstruction as unconstitutional and condemning Black suffrage as a violation of America’s political traditions.

The vice presidential candidate for the Democrats, Francis P. Blair, argued that Republicans were placing the South under the rule of “a semi-barbarous race” who longed to “subject the white women to their unbridled lust.”

The Fifteenth Amendment

Grant won the election. Due to Black Southern votes, he won most of the former Confederacy. He won the election by 300,000 votes out of 6 million cast, a margin that Republicans found to be too thin.

Congress adopted the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited the federal and state governments from denying any citizen the right to vote because of race. It was ratified in 1870.

The Fifteenth Amendment did not protect against restrictions of voting which were not explicitly based on race—things like literacy tests, property qualifications, and poll taxes. In addition, it did not extend the vote to women. This produced a bitter split between feminists and Radical Republicans, and within feminist circles.

Women activists saw the rewriting of the Constitution as an opportunity to claim their own emancipation. The Fourteenth Amendment explicitly specified that states would be penalized for depriving men the right to vote and the Fifteenth Amendment did not mention gender. Some white women spoke in overtly racist terms in opposition to allowing “uneducated” Black men to vote before white women.

Reconstruction brought the first moment of mass democratic participation for African Americans. After 1867, when Congress ordered Southern states to eliminate racial discrimination in voting, Black men began to win elections across the South. In a short time, the South was transformed from an all-white, proslavery Democratic stronghold, to a collection of Republican-led states with Blacks in power for the first time in American history. Two thousand African Americans held public office during Reconstruction.

First Black Senator and Representatives, 1872: Sen. Hiram Revels, Rep. Benjamin Turner, Robert DeLarge, Josiah Walls, Jefferson Long, Joseph Rainey, and Robert B. Elliott

Fourteen were elected to the national House of Representatives. Two Black men served in the US Senate, both representing Mississippi. Hiram Revels became the first black senator in American history in 1870, in 1875, a former slave, Blanche Bruce was elected. It wouldn’t be until 1967 that another African American was elected to the US senate, Edward Brooke of Massachusetts.

In total, there have only been 10 African Americans who have ever served in the US Senate.

In Louisiana, P.B.S. Pinchback served as governor for thirty-four days, after the previous governor was suspended during impeachment proceedings. He was the only African American state governor until Virginia elected L. Douglass Wilder in 1989.

Almost 800 Black men served as state legislators around the South, at one time Blacks made up the majority in the South Carolina House of Representatives.

Some Black office holders had been born free or had gained their freedom before the Civil War. Some free African Americans, particularly those in South Carolina and Louisiana were wealthy and well-educated. But the majority of Black office holders were former slaves.

Republican Governments in the South

New groups of whites also gained power in the new southern governments. Many were Union soldiers who decided to remain in the South after the war. Opponents dubbed them “carpetbaggers,” implying that they packed their belongings and came to the South in order to reap the spoils of office in the South.

Other Republicans were whites who had been born in the South, many of whom had been wartime Unionists and cooperated with the Republicans in order to prevent Confederates from returning to power.

Reconstruction-era governments in the South established the region’s first state-sponsored public schools, serving both white and Black children (although generally segregated by race). They passed civil rights legislation, making it illegal for railroads, hotels, and other institutions to discriminate based on race. South Carolina created a Land Commission which settled Black families and some poor whites on their own farms.

However, although they tried to invest in economic growth through railroad construction and tax reductions and incentives to attract northern manufacturers to invest in the region, economic development remained weak in the South.

We can really see the impact of the changes that were made based on the response those changes garnered. Historian James Loewen writes, “…it is vital to understand that Reconstruction was destroyed not because white and black Republicans failed to establish viable governments and an interracial society, but because they were succeeding.” [3]

We'll end Part II with a question. There is no right answer for this one. Thinking about the impact of both the Freedmen's Bureau and the election of Black men to political office, which do you think is the most significant for Black citizenship in the Reconstruction era? (If you have trouble viewing the embedded poll, please enter your response here.)

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Part III: Reign of Terror

(Content note: Violence and Sexual Violence)

The most basic reason for opposition to Reconstruction was that most white southerners could not accept the idea of former slaves voting, holding office, and enjoying equality before the law. They launched a campaign of violence in an effort to end Republican rule.

After the Civil War, violence was mostly local and unorganized. Blacks were assaulted and even murdered for refusing to give way to whites on sidewalks, using “insolent” language, challenging contract settlements, and attempting to buy land. Southern white men were almost never prosecuted for violence against Black victims. These incidents were reported to local federal authorities like the army or the Freedmen’s Bureau, but more often than not, it was unreported and unprosecuted.

By 1867, the violence was more organized and pervasive and motivated by politics. Secret societies sprang up with the aim of preventing Blacks from voting and destroying the organization of the Republican Party by assassinating local leaders and public officials. Groups of nightriders operated under the cover of darkness and wore disguises, harassing and killing Black candidates and office holders and frightening voters away from the polls.

"The Union As It Was," 1874 by Thomas Nast

The most infamous group was the Ku Klux Klan, which was founded in 1866 in Tennessee. By 1868, it had spread to nearly every state in the former Confederacy. The Klan committed some of the most brutal criminal acts in American history. The Klan targeted white Republicans, including wartime Unionists, local officeholders, teachers, and party organizers. But it was African Americans—local political leaders, those who had managed to acquire land, or others who defied the norms of white supremacy in some way who bore the brunt of violence.

Other vigilante paramilitary groups, like the White League, Knights of the White Camellia, and the White Brotherhood formed the web of terror that spread throughout the South during Reconstruction.

Terror at Home

One of Klan's methods was to attack freedpeople at home. This purposeful use of violence attacked the autonomy and safety that freedmen and women had gained with emancipation. Historian Hannah Rosen has written that, “Night riders’ intrusion into African American homes asserted that only whites had access to a secure and autonomous domestic space, a man’s authority over his home and his dependents, and a woman’s protected status when in the company of her family." [4]

When Klanmembers raped Black women, they threatened both the physical and emotional safety of Black women, but also targeted their family structures, as Black men could not protect them.

This fundamental lack of safety and security was magnified by the masks Klan members wore. Masking their faces, clothing, and even horses ensured that Klansmen escaped identification and retribution under the law for their acts. It also created the image of something even more ominous and powerful than the threat posed by individual local residents. Instead of the local grocer, mechanic, plantation owner, or sheriff, it was anonymous ‘KuKlux’ who patrolled the night.

"Visit of the Ku Klux," Harper's Weekly 1972

To justify their violence, the Klan and their supporters circulated rumors about the threats that Black men posed to white women and white families in the South.

In general, freedpeople had few means of preventing night riders from raping Black women in the midst of a Klan attack. The Klan outnumbered them and had more weaponry. In addition, any attempts at fighting back could result in even more violent retaliation towards other freedpeople. However, as historian Hannah Rosen writes, freedpeople did resist the meaning that night riders attributed to their acts by speaking about what had occurred.

Black women went to great lengths and took enormous risks to seek out federal officials and to testify against racist violence. They went to the Freedmen’s Bureau and testified in front of Congress, producing a record of white male brutality. They actively sought out protection from the state, and sought to establish themselves as citizens with the rights to equal protection under the law as well as a voice in the courts. [5]

Colfax Massacre

Another example of this reign of terror occurred in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873. After an election, the two candidates for governor both claimed victory. President Grant told Congress he would recognize the Republican for governor. In anticipation of white violence, African Americans posted a militia and fortified the courthouse against attack.

White Democrats mobilized and overpowered the defenders, murdering hundreds of former slaves, including fifty members of the Black militia unit after they had surrendered.

The historical marker which describes this event reads: “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 Negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.” [6]

Marker to the Colfax Massacre of 1873

In Louisiana in the summer and fall of 1868, white Democrats killed 1,081 people, mostly blacks and white Republicans. In Lafayette County, Klansmen drowned thirty black Mississippians in a single mass murder. Thousands of individual citizens, men and women, white and black, had their homes raided and were whipped, raped, or murdered.

In 1870 and 1871, in response to these terrorist groups, Congress passed three Enforcement Acts, making it criminal to deprive African Americans of their civil rights and deeming violent Klan behavior as an act of rebellion against the US. The acts allowed for the use of US troops to protect freedpeople. President Grant sent federal marshals and troops to arrest hundreds of Klansmen in 1871.

The violence in the South garnered two very different responses. Some white conservatives argued that reports of violence were overblown, or an unavoidable consequence of enfranchising African Americans. For example, in 1871, a resident of Yorkville, South Carolina wrote to the New York Tribune:

“the same principle that prompted the white men at Boston, disguised as Indians, to board, during the darkness of night, a vessel with tea, and throw her cargo into the Bay, clothed some our people in Ku Klux gowns, and sent them out on missions technically illegal. Did the Ku Klux do wrong? You are ready to say they did and we will not argue the point with you…Under the peculiar circumstances what could the people of South Carolina do but resort to Ku Kluxing?”

On the other side of the spectrum, victims of the violence argued that they were being punished for their loyalty to the country. In 1869, Sallie Adkins, wrote to President Grant after her husband, a Georgia state senator was assassinated by the Klan:

“I am no Statesman. I am only a poor woman whose husband has been murdered for his devotion to his country. I may have very foolish ideas of Government, States & Constitutions. But I feel that I have claims upon my country. The Rebels imprisoned my husband. Pardoned Rebels murdered him. There is no law for the punishment of them who do deeds of this sort… I demand that you, President Grant, keep the pledge you made the nation—make it safe for any man to utter boldly and openly his devotion to the United States.”

Reconstruction was simultaneously an era of great opportunity and enormous restriction. In the question below, consider which of the following developments would have the greatest impact on American history in the twentieth century: the Fourteenth Amendment or the emergence of the Klan? (You can also submit your answer and view responses here.)

The North's Retreat

In the early 1870s, Northern support for Reconstruction began to wane. Some Republicans split from the party and formed their own party, the “Liberal Republicans,” arguing that the growth of the federal government needed to be curtailed. Elsewhere in the North, racists made the argument that Reconstruction was failing because the South was controlled by “barbaric” Blacks.

As the country plunged into economic depression in 1873, many Republicans did not want to devote further attention to the South.

By the mid-1870s, Democrats in the South claimed to have “redeemed” the white South from corruption, misgovernment, and northern and black control, taking control of states with substantial white voting majorities, including Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas.

In other places in the South, armed Democrats destroyed ballot boxes, drove former slaves from the polls and ensured a Democratic victory and the end of Reconstruction.

"Everything Points to a Democratic Victory This Fall," 1874

The end of Reconstruction was ensured with the contested Presidential election of 1876. The Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, and the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes both received 50% of the electoral vote. An electoral commission decided to award Hayes the presidency. In exchange, he withdrew federal troops from the South. This compromise allowed southern Democrats to return to power, no longer fearing reprisal from federal troops or northern politicians for violence and intimidation of Black voters.

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Conclusion

1. In addition to reconstituting families and pursuing education, freedpeople also sought ownership of land. The Freedmen’s Bureau did not provide land grants, but did establish schools and hospitals for Southern blacks and whites, despite opposition from some segments of the Southern white population.

2. During Reconstruction, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were added to the Constitution, ensuring the first moment of mass democratic participation for African Americans.

3. White paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the White League embarked on a reign of terror, killing blacks and white Republicans and taking control of the ballot box by force.

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Citations

[1] Sharon Romeo, Gender and the Jubilee: Black Freedom and the Reconstruction of Citizenship in Civil War Missouri (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2016): 81-82.

[2] Romeo, Gender and the Jubilee, 2.

[3] James Loewen, Lies Across America: What Our Historical Sites Get Wrong (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 213.

[4] Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 192.

[5] Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom, 224-225.

[6] Loewen, Lies Across America, 210.