Reconstruction
The Civil War ended in April 1865 when top
Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to his counterpart on the Union
side, Ulysses S. Grant. Soon after the
end of the war, Congress passed--- and
the states ratified--- the 13th
Amendment to the United States Constitution, ending slavery; the 14th Amendment granting
citizenship rights to people of all ethnicities and regardless of “previous
condition of servitude”; and the 15th
Amendment granting the right to vote to all adult males. Congress also passed two notable pieces of
statue law: the Civil Rights Act of
1866, reinforcing the same essential citizenship rights as given in the 14th
Amendment; and the Civil Rights Act of
1875, which stated that all people should have access to public accommodations and
the right to serve on juries, with penalties for contravention of the law.
The postwar effort on the part of the United
States government to bring African Americans into the full participation of
life in the nation as citizens is known as Reconstruction. The key government agency charged with the
practical task of carrying out Reconstruction was known as the Bureau of
Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, which came to be called the Freedmen’s
Bureaus for short. Between 1865 and
1869, the bureau distributed about 21 packages of rations sufficient to sustain
an adult for one week; fifteen million
of these packages went to African Americans, while six million went to
displaced and hungry whites. Officials
at the bureau, led by General Oliver Otis Howard, committed two million dollars
in improving the health of freedmen, vaccinating them for smallpox,
establishing over 40 hospitals, and treating more than 500,000 cases of
illness. During its years of operation
in the south, the Freedmen’s Bureau established (either directly or in support
of local efforts) 4,239 schools employing 9,302 teachers and serving 247,333
students.
Freedmen’s Bureau officials also established
courts to intervene when local, district, and appellate courts issued decisions
suspected as prejudicial; oversaw fair
labor contracts for those emerging from conditions of unpaid labor; and distributed government-owned land in
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi to those newly freed
from servitude. But these efforts fell
short: The bureau’s court system tried
few cases after 1866, and most former slaves became wage laborers or
sharecroppers rather than landowners.
Officials also proved unable to provide a stable financial institution
capable of properly handling monetary deposits from African Americans: The Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company
mishandled much of the money from deposits totaling $55,000,000 in 1874, the
year that the company went defunct and left many depositors penniless. Authorities eventually refunded 62% of
deposits but never located many small depositors.
In the end, the activities opf the Freedmen’s
Bureau and Freedmen’s Savings Bank symbolized those of the Reconstruction
period in general. They held great
promise, achieved some lasting good, but in the end fell far short of what was
necessary to bring African Americans into the economic, social, and political
life of the United States on an equal basis with the white population.
Although in the end offering just a
tantalizing and evanescent experience with what full citizenship could mean,
the Reconstruction era did extend to African Americans a head-spinning array of
opportunities that must have seemed a dream life away from cotton fields and
the lash of the whip. White powerholders
during the Civil War and Antebellum South were barred from holding office; especially in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi,
and South Carolina, where the African American population was substantial and
replete with tide-turning possibilities in state elections , voters propelled a
number of black politicians into office.
South Carolina voters placed the most African
Americans in public office: At various
times, black officials occupied the positions of lieutenant governor, secretary
of state, treasurer, and speaker of the house.
African American governor P. B. S. Pinchback of Louisiana served several
months as governor after the white governor was dismissed from office.
At the national level, fourteen African
Americans held positions in the House of Representatives. Five southern states had one African American
in the House, as follows: Florida
(Josiah T. Walls, served 1871-1877), Georgia (Jefferson E. Long, 1870-1871),
Louisiana (Charles E. Nash, 1875-1877), Mississippi (John R. Lynch, 1873-1877
and 1882-1883), and North Carolina (John A. Hyman, 1875-1877). Alabama sent three African American
Representatives to the United States Congress:
Jeremiah Haralson (served 1875-1877), James T. Rapier (1873-1875), and
Benjamin S. Turner (1871-1873). But
South Carolina sent by far the most African Americans to the House of
Representatives, with six: Richard H.
Cain (served 1873-1875 and 1877-1879), Robert C. DeLarge ((1871-1873), Robert
B. Elliot (1871-1875), Joseph H. Rainey (1870-1879), Alonso J. Ranier
(1873-1875), and Robert Smalls (1875-1879 and 1881-1889); the service of these South Carolina African
Americans thus spanned the years
1870-1889.
Hiram R. Revels (served for Mississippi,
1870-1871) and Blanche K. Bruce (also served for Mississippi, 1875-1881) were
the first two African Americans to serve in the United States Senate.:
Revels hailed originally from North Carolina,
born into free status in 1822. He
studied at Quaker Seminary in Indiana and Darke County Seminary for Negroes in
Ohio prior to his ordination as minister into the African Methodist Episcopal
(AME) Church in 1845. He served as an
AME minister to congregatios in Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri and as chaplain
in the Union army, to which he had recruited numerous African American
soldiers. After the war, he moved to
Natchez, Mississippi, upon appointment as presiding elder of the city’s AME
congregation, and in 1868 began his political career as an alderman. The frist African American in the Senate,
Revels held the seat that Jefferson Davis had held prior to becoming president
of the Confederacy. He served for just
one year but during that time joined forces that defeated an amendment that
would have accommodated the advocates of segregation in Washington, D. C. In the aftermath of his aborted senatorial
career, Revels served as editor of the Southern
Christian Advocate and then served a long tenure as president of Alcorn
State University.
Bruce (1841-1898) was a born a slave In
Virginia, eventually moving with his master to Missouri and acquiring knowledge of the printing trade. He escaped from his master and fled to
Hannibal, Missouri, where he presented himself as a free man and started a
school for African Americans. In the
aftermath of the Civil War, Bruce attended Oberlin College in Ohio for two
years, then moved to Mississippi.
Settled in that state, Bruce purchased considerable land, using his
status as a wealthy planter as a springboard to an array of political
positions: county superintendent of
schools, levee board, sheriff, and tax collector. He was elected to the United States Senate as
a Republican in 1874, served his full term, and then settled in Washington, D.
C. In the national capital, he saw
service in the presidential administrations of James A. Garfield, Benjamin
Harrison, and Grover Cleveland. In 1893,
Bruce was awarded an honorary LL. D. by
Howard University, and from 1894 until his death in 1898 served on that
institution’s Board of Trustees.
Aside from these national level figures,
African Americans of the Reconstruction era held positions as sheriff, mayor,
prosecuting attorney, justice of the peace, and county superintendent of
education; most served as Republicans,
the progressive party of Lincoln. Most
African American politicians and voters would stay loyal to that party until
the Great Depression and the advent of the Franklin Roosevelt administration.
Notable in the post-Civil War social and
political context of the United States was the phenomenon of prominent,
ambitious, and energetic African Americans to move to the South. These
erstwhile northerners worked with those who
had long lived in the South to overturn laws allowing use of the whip and
branding iron to administer punishment for those accused of crimes. They also ended imprisonment for debt in many
states and in others facilitated the adoption of new constitutions featuring
provisions that abolished property qualifications and tests for voting and
holding office. Each of these
constitutions established a system of free public education for all children in
the state.
Also notable in the spirit of Reconstruction
era action was congressional passage of the Morril Act (1862), which provided
funding of land grants to the governments of states taking the initiative for
opening institutions of higher learning.
A second Morril Act (Land Grant Act, 1890) required governments that
established institutions of higher learning
for their white residents to pay for the founding and maintenance of
technical and agricultural schools for African Americans. The land grant system that emerged during the
Reconstruction era laid a strong foundation for the system of publicly funded
state institutions now found in states throughout the country, especially in
those of the South and the West.
Among those black colleges and universities
founded during Reconstruction wre Knoxville College (1863), Fisk University
(1866), and LeMoyne-Owen College (1870) in Tennessee; Emerson College (1867) and Talladega College
(1867) in Alabama; Morehouse College
(1867) in Georgia; Morgan State College
(1867) in Maryland; Johnson C. Smith
College in North Carolina; Hampton
University in Virginia (1868); Dillard University (1869) in Louisiana; Tougaloo College (1869) in Mississippi; and Howard University (1867) in
Washington, D. C. The latter acquired a reputation as the
Harvard of the black institutions of higher learning, and there was a
connection between the two universities:
A number of African American graduates of Harvard went on to take
leadership and professorial roles at Howard.
Richard Greener (1844-1922) led the way as the
first African American graduate of Harvard University in 1870; upon graduation, Greener taught philosophy at
the University of South Carolina until 1877 but lost that position as
Reconstruction ended. He moved on to
Howard University, where he became dean of the law school in 1879 (the
institution had added the law school in 1872 after establishing a medical
school in 1868). Greener later served as
comptroller of the United States Treasury and in 1898 accepted the post of U.
S. consul in Vladivostok, Russia from this Far East Asian post, Greener was in
a position to help with famine relief in China in the aftermath of the Boxer
Rebellion, and endeavor for which he was decorated by the Chinese
government. Greener spent his years of
retirement, 1906-1922, in Chicago.
Both white and black educators came to the
South in the aftermath of the Civil War to open schools and train
teachers. Black schools occupied a
prominent role in African American society and culture in the late 19th
century. Not only did these institutions
provide access to education; they also
trained farmers, published newspapers, provided instruction in land
acquisition, and prepared people to vote and run for public office.
Despite the promise of the Reconstruction era,
members of the Republican Party began to lose interest in following through on
the key initiatives aimed at bringing African Americans into the civic and
social life of the nation as full participants alongside the white
majority. As that group within the
Republican Party known as the Radical
Reconstructionists grew older and as their energy waned, the Reconstruction
effort languished; although, they were
able to garner a good deal of support from African Americans in national
elections on the strength of habit and residual goodwill, Republicans
increasingly turned toward big business
interests in the North as their key political constituency.
Whites in the South resisted Reconstruction
from the beginning. Hatemongers
formed the Ku Klux Klan in 1866, and others of
ill-will followed with the establishment of
organizations--- such as the Knights of the Golden Circle and
the Midnight Raiders--- that
participated in similar acts of intimidation and violence: They burned churches, homes, and schools of African Americans, and they similarly
harassed and murdered those in the white community who had taken up the cause
of Reconstruction. A mob of
hatemongering whites that gathered in Colfax, Louisiana, in April 1873 murdered
105 African Americans in retaliation for election results that were not to
their liking. In Mississippi, a state
characterized by near-anarchy during 1870-1875, a group known as Higgie’s
Scouts boasted that it had murdered116 African Americans. In one of its many logically tortured and
strange decisions over a period stretching from the 1870s through the early 20th
century, the Supreme Court majority determined that the mob that had gathered
in Colfax constituted a private army over which the federal government had no
authority.
As time went on, many in the southern white
elite who had been shunted aside in the immediate aftermath of Civil War found
ways to reenter government; these
people, and most poor whites, as well, supported the Democratic Party. The Republican Party, meanwhile, continued to
live off its reputation, maintaining among African Americans goodwill created
by the efforts of President Lincoln and those Republicans who launched and
sustained the Reconstruction effort. But
as Republicans increasingly got their key donations and electoral numbers from
big business, the vital initiatives of the Reconstruction era waned.
Then, in 1877, the Republicans cut a deal that
would cause at least another century of suffering for American citizens of
African descent:
The deal, the Compromise of 1877, came about
as a result of the disputed election of 1876.
The contest was between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat
Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden won the popular
vote but needed the electoral votes from the state of Florida in order to claim
victory in the Electoral College. The
popular vote was very close; each party
maintained that it had the majority necessary to claim victory in the Electoral
College.
But before any recount could proceed, or
independent election inspectors brought in, the Republicans and Democrats cut
their infamous deal: In exchange for
Democrats’ conceding the Florida votes and thus the election to them, the
Republicans promised that they would order the withdrawal of all federal troops
from the South. Ever since 1865, federal
troops had been instrumental in combating violent expressions of white
animosity, making sure that constitutional and statutory laws were obeyed,
ensuring that the educational and health initiatives of Reconstruction went
forward, providing protection for African Americans in their election booths
and public offices, and in many ways acting to prevent the white power
structure from
reestablishing business as usual in the
post-Civil War South. Without the
enforcement power represented by the federal troops stationed in the South, the
constitutional and civil rights laws that had held such promise for African
American citizenship would be ineffective.
But the cynical deal resulting in the
Compromise of 1877 was cut, whites returned to near-exclusive power in the
South, and an awful road was cleared for some of the darkest moments in the
history of African America.
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