A Short History of Reconstruction [Updated Edition]

by Eric Foner

But the exigencies of war created, as Sen. George S. Boutwell later put it, a “new government,” with a greatly expanded income, bureaucracy, and set of responsibilities.

regular army in 1860 numbered only 16,000 found itself mobilizing, training, equipping, and coordinating the activities of millions of men.

The federal budget, amounting to $63 million in 1860, rose to well ov...

At war’s end the federal government, with 53,000 employees including new Custom House officials, internal revenue agents, clerks, and inspectors,...

“The policy of this country,” declared Sen. John Sherman, “ought to be to make everything national as far as possible; to nationalize our country so that we shall love our country.”

This

As never before, the war mobilized the energies of Northern reformers. Especially among women,

Although men controlled these organizations at the highest levels, the war years inculcated among these women a heightened interest in public events and a sense of independence and accomplishment, while also offering training in organization. Even though the prewar agitation for the suffrage came to a virtual standstill, the war enlarged the ranks of women who resented their legal and political subordination to men and believed themselves entitled to the vote

Thus the Civil War consolidated the national state while identifying that state, via emancipation, with the interests of all humanity and, more prosaically, with a coalition of diverse groups and classes. An emerging industrial bourgeoisie, adherents of the Republican party, men and women of the reform milieu, a Northern black community demanding a new status in American life—all these embraced the changes brought on by the war.

To unite these groups, the Democracy built upon an ideological appeal developed in the 1850s, which identified the Republican party as an agent of economic privilege and political centralization, and a threat to individual liberty and the tradition of limited government. During the war, Democrats perfected economic appeals based on the inequity of protective tariffs, high railroad freight rates, and state and federal aid to private corporations that would provide the staples of agrarian protest in years to come. White supremacy provided the final ideological glue in the Democratic coalition. “Slavery is dead, the Cincinnati Enquirer announced at war’s end, “the negro is not, there is the misfortune.”

We could say that the party platforms have reversed by early 21st C.

All the elements of opposition to the war and its consequences came together for a few terrifying days in July 1863. The New York City draft riot, the largest civil insurrection in American history apart from the South’s rebellion itself, originated in opposition to conscription.

But it reflected as well resentment of the emerging industrial bourgeoisie and the Republican party that appeared as its handmaiden, and violent hostility ...

Thus, two societies, each divided internally, entered the Reconstruction years to confront the myriad consequences of the Civil War. As Sidney Breese, an Illinois jurist and politician, observed, all Americans “must live in the world the War made.”

Rehearsals for Reconstruction

Dilemmas of Wartime Reconstruction

On what terms should the defeated Confederacy be reunited with the Union?

Issued on December 8, 1863, his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction offered full pardon and the restoration of all rights “except as to slaves” to persons who took an oath of future loyalty and pledged to accept the abolition of slavery. A few groups, including high-ranking civil and military officers of the Confederacy, were excluded.

Of course, this will not be enforced fully; Robert E. Lee.

it could adopt temporary measures regarding blacks “consistent … with their present condition as a laboring,

landless, and homeless class.”

See: Gen. George Patton's 'slow' implementation of Allied de-nazification policy.

It would be a mistake to see the Ten Percent Plan as a hard-and-fast policy from which Lincoln was determined never to deviate.

But in strictly military terms, for ten percent of the voters of 1860 to renounce their loyalty to the Confederacy would indeed augment the Union war effort and undermine the Confederacy’s will to fight.

The four slave states and part of a fifth (West Virginia) that had remained within the Union and were unaffected by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Ten Percent Plan were the first to reveal the revolutionary implications of tying Reconstruction to abolition,

The experience of the border states provided graphic insights into the potential and limitations of a Reconstruction that excluded the participation of both Confederates and blacks.

Occupied by federal troops when the war began, Maryland soon experienced the disintegration of slavery from within and the mobilization of free blacks against the institution. It also witnessed the rapid growth of emancipationist sentiment among the white population. The “great army in blue,” remarked antislavery leader Hugh Lennox Bond, brought in its wake “a great army of ideas.” These found a receptive audience among small farmers and the manufacturers and white laborers of Baltimore. “It seems to give great satisfaction to the laboring whites,” one slaveholder noted, “that the non laboring slave owners are losing their slaves, and they too will be reduced to the necessity of going into the fields.”

"Free State of Jones".

Except for a few emancipationists, however, little concern was evinced for the fate of the former slaves. Many delegates denied that support for abolition implied “any sympathy with negro equality.” The school system excluded blacks, and the legislature did nothing to alter a prewar statute that authorized local courts to apprentice free black children, even over the objections of their parents. Within a month of November 1, 1864, the date of emancipation, thousands of former slaves had been bound to white masters, an injustice that galvanized blacks to protest and bedeviled relations between Maryland and federal authorities.

Revisit the plight of graduate students who are not monetarily compensated for work performed for the schools they attend. 'Apprenticeship' could be viewed, in this context, as economic extortion.

Early in 1865, the antislavery party moved to solidify its position by disenfranchising all who had served in the Southern armies or given even verbal support to the Confederacy. No thought was given to expanding the Unionist base by allowing the black fifth of Maryland’s population to vote.

In essence, the three-fifths compromise was strengthened to 100% since emancipation eliminated the limited political value of slaves (60%) w/o granting accompanying political clout to emancipated slaves.

Time would reveal that Johnson’s Radicalism was cut from a different cloth from that of Northerners who wore the same label, but this was not completely evident during the Civil War. Although Tennessee was exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation, by the end of 1863 Johnson had declared for abolition in the state. His conversion, however, was based less on concern for the slave than on hatred of the Confederacy and of the slaveholders he believed had dragged poor whites unwillingly into rebellion. As he remarked to Gen. John M. Palmer: “Damn the Negroes, I am fighting those traitorous aristocrats, their masters.” Yet,

Of all the states where wartime Reconstruction was attempted, only Louisiana lay in the Deep South. Here Lincoln invested the greatest hopes, and here he suffered the greatest disappointments.

As in other states, however, Louisiana’s Unionists were divided. Conservatives, notably sugar planters and wealthy merchants, hoped at first to preserve slavery and then insisted that planters should receive compensation for their slaves and retain their traditional political power. The Free State Association embodied the more radical view

For them, the Civil War offered the opportunity to overthrow a reactionary and aristocratic ruling class.

By January 1864 Lincoln appears to have privately endorsed the enrollment of freeborn blacks as voters in Louisiana. But to Gen. Banks, even limited black suffrage was both personally distasteful and a threat to his efforts to win white support for reconstructing Louisiana under the Ten Percent Plan. Meanwhile, two representatives of the free black community, Arnold Bertonneau, a wealthy wine dealer, and Jean-Baptiste Roudanez, a plantation engineer, arrived in Washington to present a petition for the suffrage.

President wrote Louisiana Gov. Michael Hahn concerning the coming constitutional convention: “I barely suggest for your private consideration, whether some of the colored people not be let in—as for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks…. But this is only a suggestion, not to the public, but to you alone.” Hardly a ringing endorsement of black suffrage, Lincoln’s letter nonetheless illustrated the capacity for both growth and compromise that was the hallmark of his political leadership.

When it came to the role of blacks in free Louisiana, however, the ideas of the “old and worn out past displayed remarkable resiliency. “Prejudice

“prejudice bitter and vulgar.” Radicals were shocked when men who favored abolition demanded the expulsion of all blacks from the state, even though black troops were at that very moment guarding the convention hall. The delegates ignored Lincolns “suggestion” concerning limited black suffrage. The result widened the breach in Unionist ranks, turned the Radicals more sharply against the Banks government, and propelled them, within a few months, down the road to universal manhood suffrage.

Land and Labor During the Civil War

New chapter

Northern investors understood free labor to mean working for wages on plantations; to blacks it meant farming their own land and living largely independent of the marketplace.

evolved in southern Louisiana. Here, as in the Sea Islands, blacks aspired to own the land. But occupied Louisiana also contained a large group of Unionist planters, who expected the army

to enforce plantation discipline.

Despite local variations in policy, most army officials assumed that the emancipated slaves should remain as plantation laborers. Only occasionally did glimmerings of an alternative point of view appear.

But it was not Davis Bend, any more than the South Carolina Sea Islands, that proved to be the true rehearsal for Reconstruction so far as labor relations were concerned.

agriculture based on yearly labor contracts, which would carry over into the postwar policies of the army and the Freedmen’s Bureau. Almost by default, military men had made crucial policy decisions that began to resolve one of the most complex problems to arise from the Civil War. And their labor policies exacerbated a developing split within the Republican party over the course of wartime Reconstruction and the implications of emancipation.

The Politics of Emancipation and the End of the War

In 1864, the major concern even of Radical Republicans was equality before the law, not black suffrage, and the control of new Southern governments by genuine Unionists. On both counts, the new government of Louisiana appeared wanting.

Dissatisfaction with events in Louisiana and concern for the fate of the freedmen came together in July 1864 to produce the Wade-Davis Bill. This proposed to delay the start of Reconstruction until a majority of a state’s white males had pledged to support the federal Constitution. Then, elections would be held for a constitutional convention, with suffrage restricted to those who swore under the Ironclad Oath that they had never aided the Confederacy. The bill also guaranteed blacks equality before the law, although not the suffrage. Fearing the measure would force him to repudiate the Louisiana regime, Lincoln pocket-vetoed it, whereupon its Radical authors, Ohio Sen. Benjamin F. Wade and Maryland Congressman Henry Winter Davis, issued an intemperate “manifesto” accusing the President of exercising “dictatorial usurpation.”

Thus, as the Civil War drew to a close, the nation’s most articulate and politicized black community was thoroughly estranged from the military and civil authorities of free Louisiana. In Washington, their complaints found a sympathetic audience. Contact with this cultured, economically successful group challenged the racist assumptions widespread even in Republican circles and doubtless influenced Lincoln’s evolution toward a more egalitarian approach to Reconstruction.

Despite the Louisiana impasse, the second session of the Thirty-Eighth Congress was indeed a historic occasion. In 1864 the Senate had approved the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery throughout the Union. On January 31, 1865, by a margin of 119 to 56, the Amendment won House approval and was forwarded to the states for ratification. “The one question of the age is settled, declared antislavery Congressman Cornelius Cole. But like so many other achievements of the Civil War, the Amendment closed one issue only to open a host of others. “What is freedom?” James A. Garfield later asked. “Is it the bare privilege of not being chained? … If this is all, then freedom is a bitter mockery, a cruel delusion.” Many Republicans believed the Thirteenth Amendment made blacks part of a national citizenship whose fundamental rights were protected by a beneficent federal government.

Lurking behind these debates was a broader question suggested by the end of slavery: Should the freedmen be viewed as ready to take their place as citizens and participants in the competitive marketplace, or did their uniqne historical experience oblige the federal government to take special action on their behalf? Although they had generally accepted the expansion of national authority during the war, many reformers still espoused laissez-faire ideas. Assistance begets dependence, insisted Sea Island teacher William C. Gannett; the sooner blacks were “thrown upon themselves, the speedier will be their salvation.”

The most persistent Congressional supporter of such a measure was George W. Julian, chairman of the House Committee on Public Lands, who insisted that without land reform, the freedmen would find themselves reduced to “a system of wages slavery … more galling than slavery itself.” The creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau in March 1865 symbolized the widespread belief among Republicans that the federal government must shoulder broad responsibility for the emancipated slaves, including offering them some kind of access to land.

Amid this cavalcade of historic events, Reconstruction emerged as the central problem confronting the nation. but, as James G. Blaine later remarked, Lincoln did not turn to peacetime with a “fixed plan” of Reconstruction. The President had approved the lenient policies of General Banks in Louisiana and the far more prescriptive acts of Andrew Johnson in Tennessee, all in an attempt to quicken Union victory and secure the abolition of slavery, rather than to fashion a blueprint for the postwar South.

The elusive concept of “freedom” differed substantially in the United States from societies accustomed to fixed social classes and historically defined gradations of civil and political rights. Here, emancipation led inexorably to demands for civil equality and the vote. And, on a more pragmatic level, without black suffrage could the old ruling class of the South be prevented from reestablishing its political hegemony? These