Reconstruction What Went Wrong?

M16_UNGE0784_04_SE_C16.qxd 1/25/10 11:39 AM Page 355 16 Reconstruction What Went Wrong? 1863 Lincoln announces his Ten-Percent Plan for reconstruction 1863–65 Arkansas and Louisiana accept Lincoln’s conditions, but Congress does not readmit them to the Union 1864 Lincoln vetoes Congress’s Wade–Davis Reconstruction Bill 1865 Johnson succeeds Lincoln; The Freedmen’s Bureau overrides Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Act; Johnson announces his Reconstruction plan; All-white southern legislatures begin to pass Black Codes; The Thirteenth Amendment 1866 Congress adopts the Fourteenth Amendment, but it is not ratified until 1868; The Ku Klux Klan is formed; Tennessee is readmitted to the Union 1867 Congress passes the first of four Reconstruction Acts; Tenure of Office Act; Johnson suspends Secretary of War Edwin Stanton 1868 Johnson is impeached by the House and acquitted in the Senate; Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana are readmitted to the Union; Ulysses S. Grant elected president 1869 Woman suffrage associations are organized in response to women’s disappointment with the Fourteenth Amendment 1870 Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia are readmitted to the Union 1870, 1871 Congress passes Force Bills 1875 Blacks are guaranteed access to public places by Congress; Mississippi redeemers successfully oust black and white Republican officeholders 1876 Presidential election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden 1877 Compromise of 1877: Hayes is chosen as president, and all remaining federal troops are withdrawn from the South By 1880 The share-crop system of agriculture is well established in the South 355 M16_UNGE0784_04_SE_C16.qxd 1/25/10 11:39 AM Page 356 356 Chapter 16 • Reconstruction n the past almost no one had anything good to say about Reconstruction, the process by which the South was restored to the Union and the nation returned to peacetime pursuits and Irelations. Most contemporaries judged it a failure. To most southern whites it seemed a time when Dixie was subjected to a cruel northern occupation and civilization itself was buried under an avalanche of barbarism. For the “freedmen”—as the former slaves were collectively called— the period started with bright promise but ended in bitter disappointment, with most blacks still on the bottom rung of society. Contemporary northerners, too, generally deplored Reconstruction. They had hoped it would remake the South on the national model of a free, pro- gressive, prosperous society. But it did not, and many were relieved when the last federal troops withdrew in 1877 and the white South once more governed itself. Nor have later Americans generally thought well of Reconstruction. A half century ago most historians accused the Republicans who controlled Reconstruction after the Civil War of being blinded by vindictiveness and botching the job. Scholars of the next generation rejected this view, but believed the chance to modernize and liberalize southern society had been missed because the North had neither the will nor the conviction to take the bold steps needed. More recently some historians have declared that by failing to guarantee the political rights of the freedmen and provide them with land, the North sold out the black people, leaving them little better off than before the Civil War. Obviously, then, from many points of view, Reconstruction has seemed a failure. Were the results as bad as most critics have believed? And if so, what went wrong? THE LEGACY OF WAR A month after Appomattox, Whitelaw Reid, a correspondent for the Republican newspaper the Cincinnati Gazette, went south to see what the war had done to Dixie. Reid was struck by the dev- astation he encountered. Hanover Junction, near Richmond, he reported, “presented little but standing chimneys and the debris of destroyed buildings. Along the [rail]road a pile of smoky brick and mortar seemed a regularly recognized sign of what had once been a depot.” Not a train platform or water tank had been left, he wrote, and efforts to get the road in running order were often the only improvements visible for miles. Elsewhere the picture was the same. Interior South Carolina, despoiled by General Sherman’s army, “looked for many miles like a broad black streak of ruin and desolation.” In the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia between Winchester and Harrisonburg, scarcely a horse, pig, chicken, or cow remained alive. Southern cities, too, were dev- astated. Columbia, capital of South Carolina, was a blackened wasteland with not a store standing in the business district. Atlanta, Richmond, Selma, and other southern towns were also ravaged. All told, over $1 billion of the South’s physical capital had been reduced to ashes or twisted wreckage. Human losses were even more appalling. Of the South’s white male population of 2.5 million in 1860, a quarter of a million (10 percent) had died of battle wounds or war-induced disease. Most of these were young men who represented the region’s most vigorous and creative human resource. Of those who survived, many were physically maimed and many others were worn out emotionally. The South’s economic institutions were also shattered. Its banking structure, based on now-worthless Confederate bonds, had collapsed. Personal savings had been wiped out when Confederate currency lost all its value. Even more crushing, the region’s labor system was in ruins. Slavery as an economic institution was dead, but no one knew what to replace it with. Many blacks remained on the farms and plantations and continued to plant, cultivate, and har- vest. But many others—whether to test their new found freedom, hunt for long-lost relatives, or M16_UNGE0784_04_SE_C16.qxd 1/25/10 11:39 AM Page 357 Chapter 16 • Reconstruction 357 Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, being abandoned by the Jefferson Davis government in the last days of the war. just to take their first holiday—wandered the roads or fled to the towns, abandoning the land on which the South’s economy was based. The war had also left behind damaging resentments. After struggling for independence against the “tyrannical government in Washington” and “northern dominance” for four years, white southerners could not help feeling apprehensive, angry, and disappointed. Now, even more than in 1860, a weak South, they feared, would be oppressed by the North, its arrogance rein- forced by victory. Northerners, for their part, would not easily forget the sacrifices and losses they had suffered in putting down what they considered the illegal and unwarranted rebellion; nor would they easily forgive the “atrocities” committed by the Confederacy. At Andersonville, Georgia, for example, during July 1864, 31,000 Union prisoners had been confined in a sixteen- acre stockade, protected from the weather only by tents and fed on scanty rations. As many as 3,000 prisoners had died in a month, a rate of 100 a day. To the northern public the Confederate prison officials, and especially the camp commandant, Captain Henry Wirz, seemed beasts who must be punished. The American people, then, faced a gigantic task of physical, political, and psychological restoration. By the usual measure, the period of revival, or Reconstruction, lasted for some twelve years, until 1877. It was a time of upheaval and controversy, as well as new beginnings. In its own day the problems associated with Reconstruction dominated the political and intellectual life of the country, and they have fascinated and repelled Americans ever since. ISSUES AND ATTITUDES During the years of Reconstruction all Americans agreed that racial and political readjustments were necessary. But what changes should be made and how to make them deeply divided contemporaries, North and South, black and white, Republican and Democrat. People’s views M16_UNGE0784_04_SE_C16.qxd 1/25/10 11:39 AM Page 358 358 Chapter 16 • Reconstruction tended to cluster around five major positions: Radical Republican, northern conservative, southern conservative, southern Unionist, and southern freedman. Let us examine each of these. Radical Republicans The group we call Radical Republicans, though never very large, was highly influential especially in the “upper North.” Successors to the hard liners who had pushed Lincoln to pursue the war more vigorously and attack slavery more forcefully, they believed that the defeated South must be made to recognize its errors, and forced to acknowledge that now it could no longer decide its own fate. Southerners could avoid northern wrath and show they deserved to be readmitted as citizens of the United States in a number of ways. At the very least, they must reject their former leaders and choose new ones who had not been connected with the Confederacy. They must take oaths of loyalty to the United States. They must reject all attempts to repay the Confederate debt incurred in an unjust cause. Most important of all, they must accept the fact that the former slaves were now free and must be treated as the political equals of whites. Many former slaves, Radicals felt, had worked and fought for the Union, and the nation must now help them through the difficult transition to full freedom. As to how this end could best be accomplished, not all Radicals agreed. A few held that it would be necessary for the freedmen to acquire land so they could support themselves independently. But at the very minimum they must be given the right to vote and, during the early stages of the change, must be protected against privation and exploitation. No doubt they would be grateful for the efforts of their Republican friends in defeating the slave power, destroying slavery, and defending them against those who do not accept the new situation. This gratitude would undoubtedly incline them to vote Republican. But that was all to the good. The Republican party was the great hope of the nation.

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