A Short History of Reconstruction [Updated Edition]

by Eric Foner

In many ways, of course, the “second revolution” was woefully incomplete. Blacks still suffered from dire poverty, and the old ruling class remained largely intact, implacably hostile to the new order of things. But as long as Reconstruction survived, so too did the possibility of further change.

“Nothing renders society more restless,” Carl Schurz had written in 1865, “than a … revolution but half accomplished.” If Reconstruction’s failures betrayed the Utopian aspirations with which Republican rule began, its successes persuaded those accustomed to controlling the South’s destiny that the entire experiment must be brought to a violent, irrevocable end.

The Challenge of Enforcement

The New Departure and the First Redemption

Southern Democrats confronted their own legitimacy crisis—the need to convince the North that they stood for something other than simply a return to the old regime.

These advocates of a New Departure argued that their party’s return to power depended on putting the issues of Civil War and Reconstruction behind them. So began a period in which Democrats, like Republicans, proclaimed their realism and moderation and promised to ease racial tensions. But

In other states, Democrats accepted Reconstruction “as a finality,” but retained their party identity rather than merge into new organizations or endorse dissident Republicans.

party had abandoned racial issues for economic ones, and openly courted black voters.

In place of racial issues, 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

Complaints about rising taxes became an effective rallying cry for opponents of Reconstruction.

Asked if his tax of four dollars on 100 acres of land seemed excessive, one replied: “It appears so, sir, to what it ...

while accepting the “finality” of Reconstruction and the principle of civil and political equality, the Taxpayers’ Conventions simultaneously exposed the limits of political “convergence.” Most Democrats objected not only to the amount of state expenditures but to such new purposes of public spending as tax-supported schools.

Democratic calls for a return to rule by “intelligent property-holders meant the exclusion of many whites from government, while implicitly denying blacks any role in the South’s public affairs

the New Departure

there was always something grudging about Democrats’ embrace of black civil and political rights.

Publicly, Democratic leaders spoke of a new era in Southern politics; privately, many hoped to undo the “evil” of black suffrage

Despite the ratification in 1870 of the Fifteenth Amendment, prohibiting disenfranchisement because of race, border Democrats developed ingenious methods of limiting black voting power.

Delaware, whose Democratic party insisted that the state was not “morally bound” by any of the postwar constitutional amendments, in 1873 made payment of a poll tax a requirement for voting, effectively disenfranchising the bulk of the black population

Maryland’s constitution of 1867 reoriented representation toward the plantation counties at the expense of Baltimore and the small f...

The most comprehensive effort to undo Reconstruction, however, occurred in Georgia, whose legislature fell into Democratic hands in 1870, followed by the governorship a year later. A poll tax, coupled with new residency and registration requirements, sharply reduced the number of black voters, while a shift from ward to citywide elections eliminated Republicans from Atlanta’s city council.

Clearly, the First Redemption belied the idea that Southern Democrats acquiesced in the democratic and free labor revolutions embodied in Reconstruction. And in pursuit of power, the opponents of Reconstruction launched a campaign of violence that confronted Republican governments with a challenge to their very physical survival. It is a measure of how far change had progressed that the reaction against Reconstruction proved so extreme.

The Ku Klux Klan

Violence had been endemic in large parts of the South since 1865. But the advent of Radical Reconstruc...

By 1870 the Ku Klux Klan and kindred organizations like the Knights of the White Camelia and the White Brotherhood were deeply entre...

In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy.

It aimed to destroy the Republican party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life.

On occasion, violence escalated from the victimization of individuals to wholesale assaults on the Republican party and its leadership.

blacks who managed to acquire an education were often singled out for attack.

Equally important as a goal of violence was the restoration of labor discipline on white-owned farms and plantations.

The most “offensive” blacks of all seemed to be those who achieved a modicum of economic success, for, as a white Mississippi farmer commented, the Klan “do not like to see the negro go ahead.”

Some historians attribute the Klan’s sadistic campaign of terror to the fears and prejudices of poorer whites. The evidence, however, contradicts such an interpretation. Ordinary farmers and laborers comprised the bulk of the membership, and energetic “young bloods” were more likely to conduct midnight raids than middle-aged planters and lawyers, but “respectable citizens” chose the targets and often participated in the brutality.

Personal experience led blacks to blame the South’s “aristocratic classes” for violence, and with good reason, for the Klan’s leadership included planters, merchants, lawyers, and even ministers. When the Knights of the White Camelia initiated Samuel Chester in Arkansas, the pastor of his church administered the oath and the participants included Presbyterian deacons and elders “and every important member of the community.”

the Klan was “not a gang of poor trash, as the leading Democrats would have us believe, but men of property … respectable citizens.

Many “respectable citizens,” of course, had no connection with the violence, and a few spo...

Indeed, the silence of the most prominent white Southerners spoke volumes of what Maj. Lewis Merrill, who investigated the Klan in York County, South Carolina, called “the demoralization of public opinion.” Rather than dissociate themselves from the campaign of terror, prominent Democrats either minimized the Klau’s activities or offered thinly disguised rationalizations for them.

Some denied the organization’s existence altogether, dismissing reports of violence as electoral propaganda from a Republican “slander mill.”

Others characterized the victims as thieves, adulterers, or men of “bad character”...

Even in Republican areas, however, the law was paralyzed. When sheriffs overcame fear of violence and arrested suspects, witnesses proved reluctant to testify and Klansmen perjured themselves to provide one another with alibis. Community support extended far beyond the Klan’s actual membership, embracing the numerous Southern women who sewed costumes and disguises for night riders, and those unconnected with the Klan who still seemed to view violence against blacks as something less than a crime.

Occasionally, organized groups successfully confronted the Klan. White

The scale of violence, however, dwarfed these efforts at extralegal reprisal.

It is indeed true that slavery, which gave rise to numerous forms of black resistance, did not produce a broad tradition of violent retaliation against abuse. But the failure of nerve, if such it was, extended up and down the Republican hierarchy and was not confined to one race.

“We could burn their churches and schoolhouses but we don’t want to break the law or harm anybody,’ wrote one black from a violence-torn part of Georgia. “All we want is to live under the law.

The specter of armed blacks taking the law into their own hands was certain to enrage the white community and produce a further escalation of violence.

His appraisal was borne out in Louisiana in 1873. The election of 1872 produced rival claimants for the governorship, a situation paralleled in localities throughout the state. In Grant Parish, freedmen who feared Democrats would seize the government cordoned off the county seat

under the command of black veterans and militia officers. They held the tiny town for three weeks;

whites armed with rifles and a small cannon overpowered the defenders and an indiscriminate slaughter followed, including the massacre of some fifty blacks who laid down their arms under a white flag of surrender. Two whites also died. The Colfax Massacre was the ...

Yet when it came to enforcing these laws, Republican leaders vacillated. Deep South governors had little confidence in the freedmen’s prospects when confronting well-trained Confederate veterans and feared the arming of a black militia would inaugurate all-out racial warfare.

As Clayton and Davis demonstrated, a government willing to suspend normal legal processes and employ armed force could mount an effective response to the Klan. But as many a modern government has discovered, the suspension of constitutional rights carries its own risks, especially the possibility of transforming perpetrators of violence from criminals into victims in the eyes of citizens who sympathize with their motives, if not their methods.

Most of all, violence raised in its starkest form the question of legitimacy that haunted the Reconstruction state. Indeed, as a former Confederate officer shrewdly observed, it was precisely the Klan’s objective “to defy the reconstructed State Governments, to treat them with contempt, and show that they have no real existence.”

The effective exercise of power, of course, can command respect if not spontaneous loyalty. But only in a few instances had Republican governments found the will to exert this kind of force.