A Short History of Reconstruction [Updated Edition]

by Eric Foner

Indeed, one reason the South fell prey to buccaneers like Swepson was that more established entrepreneurs, except for New Yorkers with longstanding Southern connections, avoided the region.

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

Begun by the Civil War and emancipation, the transformation of Southern life was in some ways accelerated, in others redirected, by the years of Republican rule.

Patterns of Economic Change

The burden of history weighed heavily upon the South’s economic transformation, which took place in a war-torn, capital-scarce region that lacked the institutional base for sustained economic growth, faced a slowing world demand for its major export, and was excluded from a significant share of national political power.

In retrospect, it was all but inevitable that the postwar South would descend into a classic pattern of underdevelopment, its rate of economic growth and per capita income lagging far behind the rest of the nation.

The absorption of white farmers into the cotton economy took place at different speeds in different parts of the South. But where railroads penetrated already settled upcountry counties, as in South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, or opened new areas to cultivation in Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana, the shift from subsistence to commercial farming proceeded apace.

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.

Recause of the region’s chronic capital shortage and scarcity of banking institutions, local merchants generally represented the only source of available credit. With land values having plummeted, merchants usually advanced loans only in exchange for a lien on the year’s cotton crop, rather than take a mortgage on real estate, as was conventional in the North. The emergence of the crop lien as the South’s major form of agricultural credit forced indebted farmers to concentrate on cotton, further expanding production and depressing prices. By 1880, one-third of the white farmers in the cotton states were tenants renting either for cash or a share of the crop, and a region self-sufficient before the Civil War was no longer able to feed itself.

The rise of upcountry cotton farming represented only one part of a fundamental reorientation of Southern trading patterns and a wholesale shift in regional economic power. As railroad and telegraph lines worked their way into the interior, merchants in rapidly developing market towns for the first time found it possible to trade directly with the North, bypassing the coastal cities that had traditionally monopolized Southern commerce. 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.

The railroad also transformed smaller towns like Selma and Macon into commercial entrepôts. Meanwhile, older port cities languished. By 1880, Charleston was a minor seaport of little commercial significance. New Orleans found itself unable to compete with St. Louis for access to the expanding cotton trade of East Texas, and Richmond, Savannah, and Mobile, bypassed by the railroad, also stagnated economically.

By the end of Reconstruction an area dominated before the war by self-sufficient yeomen was being transformed into a commercial economy peopled by merchants, tenants, farm laborers, and commercially oriented farmers.

Towns and cities also exerted a growing influence on black life, although migration from the countryside slowed considerably after 1870. In urban centers were concentrated the schools, churches, newspapers, and fraternal societies that produced many of the articulate leaders of Reconstruction politics.

the variety of employment opportunities far outstripped those available in the countryside. But the black urban social structure was, compared with that of whites, truncated and heavily weighted toward the bottom. Nearly all urban blacks lived by manual labor, the vast majority as servants, porters, and unskilled day laborers. They received subsistence wages, faced much higher unemployment rates than whites, and enjoyed virtually no opportunities for the accumulation of property or upward mobility.

Wow. You could find stark parallels with modern, urban Black/ Latino circumstances.

Only a tiny minority achieved professional status during Reconstruction, although the number of lawyers and doctors increased in the 1870s thanks to the new black universities. Artisans, perhaps a quarter of employed blacks in most Southern towns and cities, comprised the largest group above the ranks of the unskilled. But instead of prospering, their economic position steadily worsened. Denied access to credit, threatened by an influx of Northern manufactured goods, and driven from many skilled crafts by white employers and competitors, 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.

Only in life-style and aspirations did this elite constitute a “black bourgeoisie,” for it lacked capital and economic autonomy and did not own the banks, stores, and mills that could provide employment for other blacks. Black business was small business: grocery stores, restaurants, funeral parlors, and boardinghouses. Black proprietors formed no part of the national or regional bourgeoisie,

When black businessmen did acquire wealth, they tended to invest it in real estate rather than in economic enterprises.

The black community, a white North Carolina Republican observed in 1879, was only beginning to divide into “classes or ranks of society.” The distillation of a new system of social stratification to supersede prewar divisions between free and slave, mulatto and black, had only begun during Reconstruction, a fact that helps explain the black community’s remarkable

Yet, as in the cities and white upcountry, a new class structure in the plantation belt slowly replaced the shattered world of master and slave.

The degree of “planter persistence” varied considerably among the South’s crop regions.

Louisiana sugar planters, unable to repair wartime destruction, saw themselves replaced by newcomers; by 1870, Northern investors owned half the estates. In the lowcountry rice kingdom, with its equally large capital requirements, continuing labor turmoil and the opening of new lands to rice cultivation west of the Mississippi discouraged outside investment. Many planters, unable to resume production, were reduced to penury.

Elsewhere, however, the plantation South seemed at first glance to offer a remarkable example of social and economic continuity. No “revolution in land-titles” swept the tobacco and cotton belts; the majority of planter families managed to retain control of their land. Yet despite their uncanny capacity for survival, war, emancipation, and Reconstruction fundamentally altered the planters’ world and their own role in it.

Many who had once seen planting as the only honorable calling now urged their sons to take up careers in business and the professions. Most of all, control of land no longer translated automatically into control of labor, a situation evident since the end of slavery but in many ways exacerbated by the advent of Reconstruction. In

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. “Capital is powerless and labor demoralized,” wrote South Carolina agricultural reformer D. Wyatt Aiken in 1871. Labor was scarce not merely because fewer blacks were willing to work on plantations, but also because those who did were unmanageable. “The power to control [black labor], the Selma Southern

Nowhere was the dialectic of continuity and change more evident than in the sugar districts of Louisiana,

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. Yet the system did not end the conflict over labor discipline. Planters complained of a shortage of workers, especially at harvest time, and of blacks demands for higher pay. Many estates lay idle, and production did not regain the level of 1861 until the 1890s.

An even more complex economic transition took place in the rice kingdom, where planter Ralph I. Middleton described labor relations as “a continuous struggle where the planter is all the time at a great disadvantage.”

Lowcountry rice output never regained its...

In the end, the great plantations fell to pieces, their lands rented or sold to blacks. In their place emerged a pattern of small-scale farming, with black families growing their own food and supplementing their income by marketing farm produce or seeking day labor in Charleston and Savannah.

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

Entirely different was the economic transition in the far larger plantation regions of the tobacco and cotton South.

the planter class by and large retained control of its land and resumed production.

Few blacks managed to fulfill this aspiration by acquiring homesteads of their own, for even those who possessed the necessary resources found most whites adamantly opposed to black landownership. In most of the cotton states,

Like urban businessmen, landowners stood atop the emerging black class structure but had little impact on the economy at large. Compared to whites, they owned smaller farms, less machinery and livestock, and used fertilizer less frequently. Many black farmers, their tiny plots unable to provide a family with subsistence, found it necessary to engage in occasional plantation labor.

Below landowners, although closest to them in independence from white control, stood those who rented for a fixed payment in cash or cotton.

Renting seems to have involved as many as twenty percent of black farmers by the end of Reconstruction. At the bottom of the black social order were wage-earning farm laborers. But by the early 1870s, especially in the cotton bel...

Sharecropping, according to a report of the Department of Agriculture, developed not as “a voluntary association from similarity of interests, but an unwilling concession to the...

D. Wyatt Aiken railed against the inefficiency of sharecropping, but found himself forced to adopt it on his own plantation: “I had to yield, or lose my labor.”

The growing predominance of sharecropping had profound implications for the structure of rural black society.

With the demise of the communal slave quarter, black families, living on isolated tenancies scattered across the length and breadth of the plantation, emerge...

To some extent, sharecropping “solved the plantation labor shortage. Since each family had a vested interest in larger output, black women and children returned in large numbers to field work. In other ways, howev...

Republican laws awarding laborers a first lien on the crop reinforced blacks’ belief that sharecroppers owned their share rather than receiving it as a wage from the planter.

While sharecropping did not fulfill blacks’ desire for full economic autonomy, 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

By 1880 the cotton South counted over 8,000 rural stores. Many landlords established stores on their own plantations, sometimes finding the business of supplying tenants “as lucrative, if not more so, than planting or renting.”

Yet as planters and their children went into merchandising and storekeepers acquired land, the two groups tended to coalesce. Reconstruction witnessed the origin of a new landlord-merchant class that by the end of the century would dominate Southern rural life.

On the other hand, interest rates for goods purchased on credit often exceeded fifty percent, reflecting both the South’s capital shortage and the fact that many rural merchants faced no local competition.

In many cases, too, they inflicted outright fraud on illiterate tenants. As cotton prices declined during the 1870s, many tenants, unable to settle their accounts at year’s end, carried indebtedness over to the new season. To obtain additional credit, they were compelled to produce more and more cotton.

For the region as a whole, the crop lien produced a growing overreliance on cotton and neglect of food, a pattern already clear by the 1870s. “The credit system,” reported a resident of Mississippi, “has been pushed to such an extent that crops have been mortgaged for supplies before they have been planted. The...

Compared with their predecessors, the accomplishments of the new governments were indeed impressive. Biracial democratic government, a thing unknown in American history, was functioning effectively in much of the South.

All in all, declared a white South Carolina lawyer in 1871, “we have gone through one of the most remarkable changes in our relations to each other, that has been known, perhaps, in the history of the world. Most striking of all was the impact on the freedmen. For Reconstruction transformed their lives and aspirations in ways immeasurable by statistics and