11926_18_ch17_p458 11/18/10 12:45 PM Page 458 C h m a 17 p o c t . e Hear the Audio b r a 1 l 7 y a or t ist www.myh Reconstruction 1863–1877 CHAPTER OUTLINE American Communities 459 The Election of 1868 White Resistance and “Redemption” Hale County, Alabama: From Slavery to Woman Suffrage and Reconstruction King Cotton: Sharecroppers,Tenants,and the Southern Environment Freedom in a Black Belt Community The Meaning of Freedom 469 Moving About Reconstructing the North 482 The Politics of Reconstruction 461 African American Families, Churches, The Age of Capital The Defeated South and Schools Liberal Republicans and the Election Abraham Lincoln’s Plan Land and Labor After Slavery of 1872 Andrew Johnson and Presidential The Origins of African American Politics The Depression of 1873 Reconstruction The Electoral Crisis of 1876 Free Labor and the Radical Southern Politics and Society 476 RepublicanVision Southern Republicans Congressional Reconstruction and the Reconstructing the States:A Impeachment Crisis Mixed Record 11926_18_ch17_p459-489 11/18/10 12:45 PM Page 459 Theodor Kaufmann (1814–1896), On to Liberty, 1867. Oil on canvas, 36 ϫ 56 in (91.4 ϫ 142.2 cm). Runaway slaves escaping through the woods. Art Resource/Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hale County, Alabama: From Slavery to Freedom in a Black Belt Community n a bright Saturday morning in May 1867, had recently been O4,000 former slaves streamed into the town of appointed a voter Greensboro, bustling seat of Hale County in west- registrar for the dis- central Alabama.They came to hear speeches from two trict. Orrick swore delegates to a recent freedmen’s convention in Mobile he would never be registered by a black man and shot and to find out about the political status of black peo- Webb dead. Hundreds of armed and angry freedmen ple under the Reconstruction Act just passed by formed a posse to search for Orrick but failed to find Congress.Tensions mounted in the days following this him. Galvanized by Webb’s murder, 500 local freedmen unprecedented gathering, as military authorities began formed a chapter of the Union League, the Republican supervising voter registration for elections to the Party’s organizational arm in the South. The chapter upcoming constitutional convention that would functioned as both a militia company and a forum to agi- rewrite the laws of Alabama. On June 13, John Orrick, tate for political rights. a local white, confronted Alex Webb, a politically Violent political encounters between black people active freedman, on the streets of Greensboro. Webb and white people were common in southern communities 459 11926_18_ch17_p459-489 11/18/10 12:45 PM Page 460 460 CHAPTER 17 Reconstruction 1863–1877 in the wake of the Civil War. Communities throughout be able to buy land.The majority settled for some ver- the South struggled over the meaning of freedom in ways sion of sharecropping, while others managed to rent that reflected their particular circumstances.The 4 million land from owners, becoming tenant farmers. Still, freed people constituted roughly one-third of the total planters throughout Hale County had to change the southern population,but the black–white ratio in individ- old routines of plantation labor. Local African ual communities varied enormously. In some places, the Americans also organized politically.In 1866, Congress Union army had been a strong presence during the war, had passed the Civil Rights Act and sent the hastening the collapse of the slave system and encouraging Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to the experiments in free labor. Other areas had remained rela- states for ratification; both promised full citizenship tively untouched by the fighting. In some areas, small rights to former slaves. Hale County freedmen joined farms prevailed; in others, including Hale County, large the Republican Party and local Union League chap- plantations dominated economic and political life. ters. They used their new political power to press for West-central Alabama had emerged as a fertile cen- better labor contracts, demand greater autonomy for ter of cotton production just two decades before the the black workforce, and agitate for the more radical Civil War.There, African Americans, as throughout the goal of land confiscation and redistribution.“The col- South’s black belt, constituted more than three-quarters ored people are very anxious to get land of their own of the population.With the arrival of federal troops in to live upon independently; and they want money to the spring of 1865,African Americans in Hale County, buy stock to make crops,” reported one black Union like their counterparts elsewhere, began to challenge League organizer. “The only way to get these neces- the traditional organization of plantation labor. saries is to give our votes to the [Republican] party.” One owner, Henry Watson, found that his entire Two Hale County former slaves, Brister Reese and workforce had deserted him at the end of 1865. “I am James K. Green, won election to the Alabama state leg- in the midst of a large and fertile cotton growing coun- islature in 1869. try,”Watson wrote to a partner. “Many plantations are It was not long before these economic and politi- entirely without labor, many plantations have insuffi- cal gains prompted a white counterattack. In the cient labor, and upon none are the laborers doing their spring of 1868, the Ku Klux Klan—a secret organiza- former accustomed work.” Black women refused to tion devoted to terrorizing and intimidating African work in the fields, preferring to stay home with their Americans and their white Republican allies—came children and tend garden plots. Nor would male field to Hale County.Disguised in white sheets, armed with hands do any work, such as caring for hogs, that did not guns and whips, and making nighttime raids on horse- directly increase their share of the cotton crop. back, Klansmen flogged, beat, and murdered freed Above all, freed people wanted more autonomy. people.They intimidated voters and silenced political Overseers and owners grudgingly allowed them to activists. Planters used Klan terror to dissuade former work the land “in families,” letting them choose their slaves from leaving plantations or organizing for own supervisors and find their own provisions. The higher wages. With the passage of the Ku Klux Klan result was a shift from the gang labor characteristic of Act in 1871, the federal government cracked down on the antebellum period, in which large groups of slaves the Klan, breaking its power temporarily in parts of worked under the harsh and constant supervision of the former Confederacy. But no serious effort was white overseers, to the sharecropping system, in which made to stop Klan terror in the west Alabama black African American families worked small plots of land in belt, and planters there succeeded in reestablishing exchange for a small share of the crop.This shift repre- much of their social and political control. sented less of a victory for newly freed African The events in Hale County illustrate the struggles Americans than a defeat for plantation owners, who that beset communities throughout the South during the resented even the limited economic independence it Reconstruction era after the Civil War.The destruction forced them to concede to their black workforce. of slavery and the Confederacy forced African Americans Only a small fraction—perhaps 15 percent—of and white people to renegotiate their old roles. These African American families were fortunate enough to community battles both shaped and were shaped by the 11926_18_ch17_p459-489 11/18/10 12:45 PM Page 461 461 1. What were the competing political 3. What were the most important political plans for reconstructing the defeated and social legacies of Reconstruction in Confederacy? the southern states? 2. How did African Americans negotiate 4. How did economic and political the difficult transition from slavery transformations in the North reflect to freedom? another side of Reconstruction? 1863–1877 victorious and newly expansive federal partially successful. Not until the “Second government in Washington. But the Reconstruction” of the twentieth- new arrangements of both political century civil rights movement would power sharing and the organiza- the descendants of Hale County’s tion of labor had to be worked Greensboro African Americans begin to enjoy out within local communities. In the full fruits of freedom—and even the end, Reconstruction was only then not without challenge. which the federal government took precedence over The Politics of Reconstruction the individual states.The key historical developments of When General Robert E. Lee’s men stacked their guns at the Reconstruction era revolved around precisely how the Appomattox, the bloodiest war in American history ended. newly strengthened national government would define its More than 600,000 soldiers had died during the four years relationship with the defeated Confederate states and the of fighting, 360,000 Union and 260,000 Confederate. 4 million newly freed slaves. Another 275,000 Union and 190,000 Confederate troops had been wounded. Although President Abraham Lincoln insisted early on that the purpose of the war was The Defeated South to preserve the Union, by 1863 it had evolved as well The white South paid an extremely high price for seces- into a struggle for African American liberation. Indeed, sion, war, and defeat. In addition to the battlefield casual- the political, economic, and moral issues posed by slav- ties, the Confederate states sustained deep material and ery were the root cause of the Civil War, and the war psychological wounds. Much of the best agricultural land ultimately destroyed slavery, although not racism, once was laid waste, including the rich fields of northern and for all. Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley, and large sections of The Civil War also settled the constitutional crisis Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina.