A Short History of Reconstruction [Updated Edition]

by Eric Foner

The Meaning of Freedom

From Slavery to Freedom

Among the most resented of slavery’s restrictions was the rule, enforced by patrols, that no black could travel without a pass. With emancipation, it seemed that half the South’s black population took to the roads. Southern towns and cities experienced an especially large influx of freedmen during and immediately after the Civil War.

Reconstruction witnessed the rise of a new, segregated, urban geography.

No aspect of black mobility was more poignant than the effort to reunite families separated during slavery. “In

For blacks, liberating their families from the authority of whites was an indispensable element of freedom. But the family itself was in some ways transformed by emancipation. Although historians no longer view the slave family as matriarchal, it is true that slave men did not function as economic breadwinners and that their masters wielded authority within the household. In a sense, slavery had imposed on black men and women the rough “equality” of powerlessness. With freedom came developments that strengthened patriarchy within the black family and consigned men and women to separate spheres.

Building the Black Community

In the larger cities, the number of black members often justified the organization of wholly black congregations and the construction of separate churches, although these were legally required to have white pastors. In the aftermath of emancipation, the wholesale withdrawal of blacks from biracial congregations redrew the religious map of the South. Two causes combined to produce the independent black church: the refusal of whites to offer blacks an equal place within their congregations and the black quest for self-determination.

By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the vast majority of Southern blacks had withdrawn from churches dominated by whites.

On the eve of the war, 42,000 black Methodists worshipped in biracial South Carolina churches; by the 1870s, only 600 remained.

The church was “the first social institution fully controlled by b...

The church served as an “Ecclesiastical Court House,” promoting moral values, adjudicating family disputes, and disciplining individuals for adultery and other illicit behavior.

“A man in this State cannot do his whole duty as a minister except he looks out for the political interests of his people.” Even those preachers who lacked ambition for political position sometimes found it thrust upon them.

Perhaps the most striking illustration of the freedmen’s quest for self-improvement was their seemingly unquenchable thirst for education. Before the war. every Southern state except Tennessee had prohibited the instruction of slaves, and although many free blacks had

Like the ministry, teaching frequently became a springboard to political office.

least seventy black teachers served in state legislatures during Reconstruction.

The Freedmen’s Bureau found many free blacks reluctant to send their children to school with former slaves.

In the severing of ties that had bound black and white families and churches to one another under slavery, the coming together of blacks in an explosion of institution building, and the political and cultural fusion of former free blacks and former slaves, Reconstruction witnessed the birth of the modern black community.

The Economics of Freedom

Above all, they inspired the quest for land. Owning land, the freedmen believed, would “complete their independence.

Unlike freedmen in other countries, however, American blacks emerged from slavery convinced that the federal government had committed itself to land distribution. Belief in an imminent division of land was most pervasive in the South Carolina and Georgia lowcountry, but the idea was shared in other parts of the South as well, including counties that had never been occupied by federal troops.

A small number did, however, obtain property through other means, squatting on unoccupied land in sparsely populated states like Florida and Texas, buying tiny city plots, or cooperatively purchasing farms and plantations.

Most blacks, however, emerged from slavery unable to purchase land even at the depressed prices of early Reconstruction and confronted by a white community unwilling to advance credit or sell them property. Thus, they entered the world of free labor as wage or share workers on land owned by whites.

Blacks quest for economic independence not only threatened the foundations of the Southern political economy, it put the freedmen at odds with both former owners seeking to restore plantation labor discipline and Northerners committed to reinvigorating staple crop production.

Origins of Black Politics

The delegates’ central preoccupation, however, was equality before the law and the suffrage. In justifying their demand for the vote, the delegates invoked America’s republican traditions, especially the Declaration of Independence—“the broadest, the deepest, the most comprehensive and truthful definition of human freedom that was ever given to the world.”

Violence and Everyday Life

Ambiguities of Free Labor

Even apart from physical devastation, the widespread destruction of work animals, farm buildings, and machinery, and the deterioration of levees and canals, ensured that the revival of agriculture would be slow and painful. So too did the appalling loss of life, a disaster without parallel in the American experience. Thirty-seven thousand blacks, the great majority from the South, perished in the Union Army, as did tens of thousands more in contraband camps, on Confederate Army labor gangs, and in disease-ridden urban shantytowns. Nearly 260,000 men died for the Confederacy—over one-fifth of the South’s adult white male population. The region, moreover, was all but bankrupt, for the collapse of Confederate bonds and currency wiped out the savings of countless individuals and the resources and endowments of colleges, churches, and other institutions.

Despite the grim reality of desolation and poverty, the South’s economic recovery involved more than rebuilding shattered farms and repairing broken bridges. An entire social order had been swept away, and on its ruins a new one had to be constructed. The process by which a new social and economic order replaced the old followed different paths in different parts of the South. But for black and white alike, the war’s end ushered in what South Carolina planter William H. Trescot called “the perpetual trouble that belongs to a time of social change.”

Masters Without Slaves

Plantation slavery never dominated the entire South as it did, for example, most is...

But the plantation belt, containing the region’s most productive land, the bulk of its economic wealth, and the majority of its slave population, gave rise to a ruling class that had shaped regional institutions, from the school and church to the state, in its own interests. A large landed...

Like their counterparts in other societies, American planters believed that the South’s prosperity and their own survival as a class depended, as a Georgia newspaper put it, on “one single condition—the ability of the planter to command labor.” And the conflict between former masters attempting to re-create a disciplined labor force and blacks seeking to infuse meaning into their freedom by carving out autonomy in every aspect of their lives profoundly affected the course of Reconstruction.

“Want of ambition will be the devil of the race, I think,” wrote Kemp P. Battle, a North Carolina planter and political leader, in 1866. “Some of my most sensible men say they have no other desire than to cultivate their own land in grain and raise bacon.” On the face of it, such an aspiration appears ambitious enough, and hardly unusual in the nineteenth-century South. But in a plantation society, a black man seeking to work his way up the agricultural ladder to the status of self-sufficient farmer seemed not an admirable example of industriousness, but a demoralized freedman unwilling to work—work, that is, under white supervision on a plantation.

planters resolved never to rent or sell land to freedmen. In effect, they sought to impose upon blacks their own definition of freedom, one that repudiated the former slaves’ equation of liberty and autonomy. “They have an idea that a hireling is not a freedman,”

Between the planters’ need for a disciplined labor force and the freedmen’s quest for autonomy, conflict was inevitable.

Planters attempted through written contracts to reestablish their authority over every aspect of their laborers’ lives. “Let everything proceed as formerly,” one advised, “the contractual relation being substituted for that of master and slave.”

Many contracts not only specified modes of work and payment, but prohibited blacks from leaving plantations, entertaining visitors, or holding meetings without permission of the employer.

Southern whites were not the only ones to encounter difficulty disciplining the former slaves. During and immediately after the war, a new element joined the South’s planter class: Northerners who purchased land, leased plantations, or formed partnerships with Southern planters.

As time passed, the Northern planters sounded and acted more and more like Southern. Some sought to restore corporal punishment, only to find that the freedmen would not stand for it. Perhaps the problem arose from the fact that, like Southern whites, most of the newcomers did not believe recently emancipated blacks capable of “self-directed labor.” If the freedmen were to become productive free laborers, said the New York Times with unintended irony, “it must be done by giving them new masters.” Blacks, however, wanted to be their own masters. And, against employers both Southern and Northern, they used whatever weapons they could find in the chaotic economic conditions of the postwar South to influence the conditions of their labor.

Blacks did, indeed, enjoy considerable bargaining power because of the “labor shortage” that followed the end of slavery.

“The struggle seems to be who will get the negro at any price,” lamented Texas planter Frank B. Conner. Planters, he concluded, must band together to “establish some maximum figure,” stop “enticing one another’s workers, and agree that anyone “breaking the established custom should be driven from the community.”

If the shortage of labor enhanced blacks’ bargaining power, successive postwar crop failures seriously undermined it.

1865, Southern planters and Northern newcomers plunged into cotton production, only to find that wartime destruction of tools and animals, the use of old seed that failed to produce vigorous crops, and persistent conflicts over labor discipline combined to produce a disappointing harvest.

Many planters suffered devastating losses in these years. In black belt Alabama, Henry Watson, Jr., surveyed the condition of his neighbors at the beginning of 1867. Of fourteen plantations, only one had turned a profit. Large numbers of Northern planters and investors suffered the same fate.

crop failures further embittered relations between planters and their black employees. Those working for a share of the crop discovered that poor harvests reduced their income virtually to nothing; others, laboring for wages, found planters, themselves impoverished, unable to meet their obligations. Thousands of blacks were evicted from the plantations without pay as soon as crops had been harvested. Decades later, freedwoman Ella Wilson would recall how her employer drove her family from a Louisiana plantation: “We didn’t get no half. We didn’t git nothin’…. We hadn’t done nothin’ to him. He just wanted all the crop for hisself and he run us off. That’s all.”

The “Misrepresented Bureau”

Despite the intensity of their conflict, neither former master nor former slave possessed the power to define the South’s new system of labor. A third protagonist, the victorious North, also attem...

To the Freedmen’s Bureau, more than any other institution, fell the task of assisting at the birth of a free labor society. The Bureau’s commissioner was Gen. Oliver Otis Howard, whose close ties to the freedmen’s aid societies had earned him the sobriquet “Christian General. Although temporary, Howard’s agency was an experiment in social policy that, a modern scholar writes, “did not belong to the America of its day.” Its responsibilities can only be described as daunting; they included introducing a workable system of free labor in the South, establishing schools for freedmen, providing aid to the destitute, aged, ill, and insane, adjudicating disputes among blacks and between the races, and attempting to secure for blacks and white Unionists equal justice from the state and local governments established during Presidenti...