A Short History of Reconstruction [Updated Edition]

by Eric Foner

Originating in wartime exigencies, the activist state came to embody the reforming impulse deeply rooted in postwar politics.

Four interrelated areas reveal the extent and limits of Republican efforts to reshape Southern society: education, race relations, the labor system, and economic development.

Most important, corruption threatened to undermine the integrity of Reconstruction, not simply in the eyes of Southern opponents but in the court of Northern public opinion.

Thus the gospel of prosperity failed in both its aims: It produced neither a stable Republican majority nor a modernizing economy.

The demise of slavery and the rapid spread of market relations in the predominantly white upcountry produced new systems of labor and new class structures among both black and white Southerners.

By the mid-1870s, both the geographical and racial locus of cotton production had been transformed. Nearly forty percent of the crop was raised west of the Mississippi River, mainly by white farmers, and in the older states production increasingly shifted to the upcountry. Black laborers, who cultivated nine-tenths of the South’s cotton crop in 1860, grew only sixty percent in 1876.

By 1880, one-third of the white farmers in the cotton states were tenants renting either for cash or a share of the crop,

Indeed, these grievances proved almost as great a liability for Southern Republicans among white Piedmont voters as the party’s identification with black political equality.

Atlanta, whose rise was stimulated by its selection as state capital and the opening of rail connections to the North, was the quintessential upcountry boom city, serving as a gathering point for cotton grown in Georgia’s Piedmont and a distribution center for Northern goods.

Although some of these business leaders belonged to the old planter class, the economic importance of the new upcountry elite rested more on access to credit and ties with the North than on connections with the prewar aristocracy.

Nearly all urban blacks lived by manual labor, the vast majority as servants, porters, and unskilled day laborers.

The black urban community contained no well-established elite of wealthy bankers and merchants and found most white-collar positions closed to it.

black artisans were mostly confined to trades that required little capital, like carpenter, blacksmith, brickmason, and shoemaker, or to occupations like barber, traditionally avoided by whites.

The essential fact about the black upper class, however, was its tiny size and negligible economic importance.

Black business was small business: grocery stores, restaurants, funeral parlors, and boardinghouses.

the majority of planter families managed to retain control of their land.

The end of the state’s efforts to bolster labor discipline and the coming to power of local officials sympathetic to the freedmen produced during Reconstruction a kind of stalemate on the plantations.

Blacks quickly became a wage-earning labor force, receiving daily or monthly wages considerably exceeding those elsewhere in the South and enjoying, as well, the traditional right to garden plots on which to raise vegetables and keep poultry and livestock.

production did not regain the level of 1861 until the 1890s.

More than in any other region of the South, the lowcountry freedmen succeeded in shaping labor relations in accordance with their own aspirations.

In most of the cotton states, the commissioner of agriculture reported in 1876, only about one black family in twenty had managed to acquire land.

Renting seems to have involved as many as twenty percent of black farmers by the end of Reconstruction.

by the early 1870s, especially in the cotton belt, sharecropping had become the dominant form of black labor.

the end of planters’ coercive authority over the day-to-day lives of their tenants represented a fundamental shift in the balance of power in rural society and afforded blacks a degree of control over their time, labor, and family arrangements inconceivable under slavery.

Only after the depression of the 1870s and the end of Reconstruction combined to limit severely the bargaining power of black laborers would the exploitative implications of sharecropping become fully clear.

Biracial democratic government, a thing unknown in American history, was functioning effectively in much of the South. Men only recently released from bondage cast ballots and sat on juries and, in the Deep South, enjoyed an increasing share of authority at the state level, while the conservative oligarchy that had dominated Southern government from colonial times to 1867 found itself largely excluded from power. Public facilities had been rebuilt and expanded, school systems established, and tax codes modernized.

Reconstruction had nipped in the bud the attempt to substitute a legalized system of labor discipline for the coercion of slavery and had enhanced blacks bargaining power on the plantations.

Democratic leaders now devoted their energies to financial criticisms of Republican rule. In several states they organized Taxpayers’ Conventions, whose platforms denounced Reconstruction government for corruption and extravagance and demanded a reduction in taxes and state expenditures. Complaints about rising taxes became an effective rallying cry for opponents of Reconstruction.

The threat of federal intervention restrained the most extreme proposals, and the diversity of the Democratic coalition ensured that specific policies varied from state to state, but it remained perfectly clear that the party was still devoted to white supremacy and labor control. As

The Klan, even in its heyday, did not possess a well-organized structure or clearly defined regional leadership. But the unity of purpose and common tactics of these local organizations make it possible to generalize about their goals and impact and the challenge they posed to the survival of Reconstruction.

White Union Army veterans in mountainous Blount County, Alabama, organized “the anti-Ku Klux, which ended violence by threatening Klansmen with reprisal unless they stopped whipping Unionists and burning black churches and schools.

The Colfax Massacre was the bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era. Among blacks, it confirmed that in any large confrontation they stood at a fatal disadvantage.

Generally, the national party ignored Southern state organizations and local campaigns, and even when the Presidency was at stake, few experienced speakers ventured south and little money was dispatched by the Republican National Committee.

They forbade state officials to discriminate among voters on the basis of race and authorized the President to appoint election supervisors with the power to bring to federal court cases of election fraud, the bribery or intimidation of voters, and conspiracies to prevent citizens from exercising their constitutional rights. The most sweeping measure, the Ku Klux Klan Act of April 1871, for the first time brought certain crimes committed by individuals under federal law. Conspiracies to deny citizens the right to vote, hold office, serve on juries, and enjoy the equal protection of the laws could now, if states failed to act effectively against them, be prosecuted by federal district attorneys and even lead to military intervention and the suspension of habeas corpus.

As in the South, social change profoundly affected Northern politics and government. The state became a battleground not only for entrepreneurs seeking economic advantage, but also for Radicals, blacks, and women hoping to extend northward government-promoted social and racial reconstruction, for farmers and workers bent on redressing inequities caused by capitalism’s rapid expansion, and for a newly self-conscious intelligentsia determined to redefine the meaning of “reform.

Pennsylvania’s legislature prohibited streetcar segregation in 1867, and New York Republicans six years later enacted a pioneering civil rights law that outlawed discrimination in public accommodations.

In Congress, George W. Julian’s bill to establish an eight-hour day for federal employees brought together an unusual coalition of Northern Democrats, many representing urban working-class constituencies, and Radical Republicans accustomed to using the democratic state for reform purposes.

Yet if all Radicals agreed the state should embrace the principle of civil and political equality, liberals increasingly insisted it should do little else.

The veto marked a milestone in the process by which what Henry L. Dawes called “the slow, conservative sentiment” gained ascendancy in Republican circles and economic respectability replaced equality of rights for black citizens as the essence of the party’s self-image.

Ironically, even as racism waned as an explicit component of the Northern Democratic appeal, it gained a hold on respectable Republican opinion, as a convenient explanation for Reconstruction’s “failure.”

Just as the era of Reconstruction had opened in 1863 with the promise of freedom to blacks, quickly followed by an explosion of class and racial antagonisms in the streets of New York City, the restoration of white supremacy in the South coincided with an even more powerful reminder of the conflicts that divided Northern society.

Only Kentucky’s John Marshall Harlan dissented. The United States, he warned, had entered “an era of constitutional law, when the rights of freedom and American citizenship cannot receive from the nation that efficient protection which heretofore was unhesitatingly accorded to slavery.”

But not until the 1890s did racial segregation become embedded in Southern law.

The Deep South showed no increase at all in its per capita income between 1880 and 1900. As late as 1900, only six percent of the Southern labor force worked in manufacturing.

The freedmen’s political and civil equality proved transitory, but the autonomous black family and a network of religious and social institutions survived the end of Reconstruction. Nor could the seeds of educational progress planted then be entirely uprooted.

Without Reconstruction, it is difficult to imagine the establishment of a framework of legal rights enshrined in the Construction that, while flagrantly violated after 1877, created a vehicle for future federal intervention in Southern affairs.

Perhaps the remarkable thing about Reconstruction was not its failure, but that it was attempted at all and survived as long as it did.

Yet the institutions created or consolidated after the Civil War—the black family, school, and church—provided the base from which the modern civil rights revolution sprang. And for its legal strategy, the movement returned to the laws and amendments of Reconstruction.