Contraband
Newly arrived at Fortress Monroe, on May 23, 1861, General Benjamin Butler was confronted by the arrival of three fugitive slaves from the Confederate defensive works project across Hampton Roads. Faced with the looming prospect of being shipped to North Carolina to work on fortifications, Goodheart writes “the three slaves decided to leave the Confederacy and try their luck, just across the water, with the Union.” They were not the first slaves to seek sanctuary in a Union military post. Soon after Lincoln’s inauguration in early March, slaves in separate incidents had presented themselves at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor and Fort Pickens near Pensacola, Florida. Consistent with the Fugitive Slave Act, the slaves in both instances had been rebuffed and turned over to local authorities. In this atmosphere of uncertainty, Benjamin Butler had to decide what action to take. His hand was forced by the arrival of a Confederate officer at Fortress Monroe under flag of truce demanding the slaves return.
Adam Goodheart relates the encounter between Butler and the Virginian, Major John Baytop Cary on the three slaves.
Cary got down to business. “I am informed,” he said, “that three Negroes belonging to Colonel Mallory have escaped within your lines. I am Colonel Mallory’s agent and have charge of his property. What do you mean to do with those Negroes?”
“I intend to hold them,” Butler said.
“Do you mean, then, to set aside your constitutional obligation to return them?”
Even the dour Butler must have found it hard to suppress a smile. This was, of course, a question he had expected. And he had prepared what he thought was a fairly clever answer.
“I mean to take Virginia at her word,” he said. “I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be.”
“But you say we cannot secede,” Cary retorted, “and so you cannot consistently detain the Negroes.”
“But you say you have seceded,” Butler said, “so you cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these Negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.” Officers on the ground like Butler quickly realized the slaves were a significant military asset to the Confederacy, acting not only as laborers, teamsters, and in other support roles for the army, but also by keeping southern agriculture functioning allowing a much larger portion of the white male population to be available for military service than might otherwise have been the case. Hence, as property being used in support of a rebellion against the government, Butler’s “contraband of war” formulation legally justified the seizure of the slaves without immediately undermining their status as property. The Lincoln administration quickly acquiesced to Butler’s policy and Congress gave it the force of law in early August through the Confiscation Act of 1861.
Within a little more than a year, the stream of a few hundred contrabands at Fort Monroe became a river of tens — probably even hundreds — of thousands. They “flocked in vast numbers — an army in themselves — to the camps of the Yankees,” a Union chaplain wrote. “The arrival among us of these hordes was like the oncoming of cities.”
This was such an important situation because it resulted in the creation of a separate organization to handle the refugee crisis. A whole new system had to be developed to address slaves crossing Union lines throughout the war effort in many parts of the country leading to the development of refugee camps.
History of Secession
Many people, especially those wishing to support the South’s right to secede in 1860–61, have said that when 13 American colonies rebelled against Great Britain in 1776, it was an act of secession. Others say the two situations were different and the colonies’ revolt was a revolution. The war resulting from that colonial revolt is known as the American Revolution or the American War for Independence. As to Lincoln’s belief on this issue see below:
First Inaugural Address March 4, 1861
I hold that, in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the union of these States is perpetual....It follows....that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void; and that acts of violence, within any State or States, against the authority of the United States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances. I, therefore, consider that, in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken. We find the proposition that, in legal contemplation, the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And, finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was "to form a more perfect Union."
Message to Congress in Special Session July 4, 1861
The States have their status in the Union, and they have no other legal status. If they break from this, they can only do so against the law and by revolution.
Effect of the Civil War on the South
The losses were so great that the numbers ceased to register. In what Walt Whitman called “the desolated, ruined South . . . nearly the whole generation of young men between seventeen and thirty” had been “destroyed or maimed; the rich impoverished; the plantations covered with weeds; the slaves unloosed and become the masters; and the name of Southerner blackened with every shame.” Emancipation alone had wiped between $ 1.6 and $ 2.7 billion of capital investment off the books. Per capita income in the South collapsed by more than 40 percent, and real estate fell in value, ranging from an 18 percent loss in Tennessee to a whopping 70 percent devaluation in Louisiana. A third of Southern livestock and half of the South’s farm machinery had disappeared, and with them, the agriculture that depended on them, as land under cultivation shrank by 34 percent in South Carolina and 30 percent in Louisiana. Banking capital, much of it invested in Confederate securities, suffered losses of 28 percent, sending interest rates on what remained for borrowing through the few intact roofs. Total direct and indirect costs of the war for the South were probably close to $ 13.6 billion— which does not even begin to convey the sense of demoralization that accompanied the losses. “The whole country is alive with robbers,” shivered one Tennessee woman. “Every night we hear of a new robbery and sometimes murder.” Keep in mind the question, what would it take to resurrect the South economically?
The slave community was the seedbed for the ways African Americans responded to the coming of emancipation and shouldering the responsibilities of freedom during Reconstruction. After the war thousands of freedmen and women seeking to locate family members from whom they had been separated while in slavery would place advertisements in newspapers and solicit aid from the Freedman’s Bureau. Many families divided under slavery because their members belonged to different owners, now lived together. Remember the experience of working under their own direction and of marketing produce they had grown as slaves helped to prepare African Americans for involvement in the market economy during Reconstruction. Many affirmed their newly acquired freedom by physical movement, separating themselves from former owners, if only by a few miles, “If I stay here,” one freedwoman told her ex-owner, “I’ll never know I am free.” Thousands of blacks converged on southern towners and cities. Schools, churches, fraternal societies, offices of the Freedman’s Bureau, and federal army outposts were built in cities. There was a broader theme- a desire for independence from white control, for autonomy as individuals. Some married women established bank accounts in their own names at the Freedman’s Savings Bank.
Remember freedom meant more than establishing autonomous institutions. Recognition of their equal rights as American citizens quickly emerged as the animating impulse of black politics. In a society that had made political participation a core element of freedom, the right to vote inevitably became central to the former slave’s desire autonomy and empowerment. “Slavery,” said Frederick Douglas in 1865, “is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.”
“We simply ask, “declared the South Carolina Colored People’s Convention of 1865 in a petition to Congress, “ that was shall be recognized as men; that there be no obstructions placed in our way, that the same laws that govern white men shall govern black men; that we have the right of trial by jury of our peers;…. That in short, we be dealt with as others are- in equality and justice.”
Freed people remained adamant in the desire to work without the supervision of masters and overseers, to determine their own hours and pace of labor, and to receive wages commensurate with their effort. Genuine economic freedom could be obtained only through ownership of land, for without land, blacks’ labor would continue to be exploited by their former owners. The response, summed up by a Kentucky newspaper: the former slaves was “free, but free only to labor.” What the freedman wanted most, said Martin Delany, the black abolitionist, “is a home-one that he can call his own, and possess in fee simple.”
What was the definition of freedom for slaves?
Many affirmed their newly acquired freedom by physical movement, separating themselves from their former slave owners, if only by a few miles.
Some former slaves jettisoned the surnames of their masters.
A desire for independence from white control, for autonomy as individuals and as newly created communities. They want to work without supervision of masters and overseers. The ownership of land, without land, black’s labor would continue to be exploited by their former owners.
Reunite relatives separated by slavery and to consolidate long-existing family relationships.
Access to education.
The right to vote.
In South Carolina, Louisiana, and other areas occupied earliest by the Union soldiers, federal authorities found themselves presiding over the transition from slavery to freedom.
The world of most rural slaves was bound by their local communities and kin. They became extremely familiar with the local landscape, crops, and population, and gathered with slaves from nearby farms and plantations to celebrate marriages, attend funerals and for Christmas and Fourth of July celebrations.
The slave family was central to the African American community, allowing for the transmission of values, traditions, and survival strategies. When freedom came for slaves, legalizing their marriages and consolidating their families were among their highest priorities.
Slaves developed a distinctive version of Christianity that would play a crucial role in the Reconstruction era and, indeed, down to the present time. Before the Civil War, urban free blacks established their own churches. These institutions, at which many slaves as well as free blacks worshiped, became training grounds for postwar black leadership and schools, in a sense, of self-government. The black churches were the center of community life. These churches housed schools, social events, and political gatherings, adjudicated family disputes. The church also became a breeding ground for black leadership, and many ministers entered politics. At least 240 black ministers, held some public office during Reconstruction.
Central to the meaning of freedom was access to education, so long denied to most African Americans. There was a recognition that learning was a form of empowerment, a desire to read the Bible, a general thrust toward uplift and group advancement. Northern abolitionists had been dispatching teachers as “missionaries” to runaways and contrabands since the first such contrabands had shown up at Fort Monroe in 1861.
The most difficult task confronting many Southerners at the end of the Civil War and beginning of Reconstruction was devising a new system of labor to replace the shattered world of slavery. Planters found it hard to adjust to the end of slavery. Many former slaves believed that their years of unrequited labor gave them a claim to land. “Forty acres and a mule” became their rallying cry. Most rented land or worked for wages on white-owned plantations. Out of the conflicts of the plantations, new systems of labor emerged to take the place of slavery. Sharecropping dominated the cotton and tobacco South, while wage labor was the rule on sugar plantations. As under slavery, most rural blacks worked on land owned by whites. But they now exercised control over their personal lives, could come and go as they pleased, and determined which members of the family worked in the fields. Some urban growth occurred during Reconstruction, both in cities like Richmond and small market centers scattered across the cotton belt. Cities offered more diverse work opportunities for both black and white laborers.
Let’s remember the problem: Were they now supposed to sign contracts and be paid for their labor? Who would guarantee that the contracts would not turn out to be simply a newer version of bondage? Should provision be made by the public purse to educate them? Should they be considered citizens, and entitled to all the “privileges and immunities? Guaranted to citizens by Article 4, section 2, of the Constitution? And what were those “privileges and immunities” anyway? Office holding, jury service, bearing witness in court, voting, election to office? And what would happen on representation in the House of Representatives, a complete change. The so-called three-fifths rule in the Constitution would disappear and going forward every freed slave would be counted as a full person- yet without any right to vote.
The Emancipation-Proclamation is perhaps the most misunderstood important document in American History. The proclamation applied almost exclusively to areas under Confederate control. Thus, it had no bearing on the nearly half a million slaves in the board slave states that had never seceded from the Union, or on more than three hundred thousand slaves in the areas of the Confederacy occupied by Union soldiers and exempted by Lincoln from its coverage- the entire states of Tennessee and parts of Virginia and Louisiana. On January 1, 1863, most slaves resided in places where the proclamation could not be enforced.
A New Birth of Freedom- Reconstruction During the Civil War, The Emancipation Proclamation launched the historical process of Reconstruction.
At the war’s outset, the Lincoln Administration insisted that restoring the Union was its only purpose. But as slaves by the thousands abandoned the plantation and headed for the Union lines, and military victory eluded the North, the president made the destruction of slavery his war aim announced in the Emancipation Proclamation. During the war “rehearsals for Reconstruction “took place in the Union-occupied South. On the South Carolina Sea Island, the former slaves demanded land of their own, while government officials and Northern investors urged them to return to work on the plantations. In addition, a group of young Northern reformers came to the islands to educate the freed people and assist in the transition from slavery to freedom. As the Union army occupied Southern territory, slaves by the thousands abandoned the plantations. The move towards emancipation might alienate the border states or make it more difficult to persuade the Confederate States to rejoin the Union. Just five months after the war had begun, the Union Commander of the Western Department, Major General John C. Frémont, declared martial law in Missouri. The enthusiastic Frémont confiscated property belonging to owners from the Confederacy and announced that the slaves present in Missouri were to be freed. Lincoln intervened, canceling these emancipations and noting that “I think there is great danger that . . . the liberating slaves of traitorous owners, will alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us.” When Major General Frémont objected, he was removed from command. When in May 1862 another Union commander, Major General David Hunter, announced the emancipation of freed slaves in South Carolina and Georgia, Lincoln intervened once again and canceled these emancipations too. It wasn’t until June 1862 that Lincoln finally signed legislation that formally outlawed slavery in all U.S. territories though this was not immediately enforced.
Lincoln still had to be very careful. The phrasing of the proclamation meant that slaves in states which were part of the Confederacy would be deemed to be free only if their states were invaded by the north or if they escaped to the north. However, the status of slaves in states which were part of the Union such as Maryland and Kentucky were unchanged. African American slaves in the southern states saw this proclamation as a promise of freedom if they could escape from the south and enter the northern states. Over the next three years, more than half a million slaves made their way north to freedom. This not only deprived the Confederacy of essential workers, but it also provided a vital source of new troops for the Union. Almost 200,000 African Americans, many former slaves, joined the armies of the north and fought bravely during the remainder of the Civil War.
Lincoln and the 13th Amendment
Lincoln defeated Democratic candidate George McClellan and secured his second presidential bid, Congress continued to debate the passage of the 13th amendment. This time, however, the President positioned himself at the center of the controversy.
Lincoln argued that emancipation would so undermine the morale of the Confederacy that it would weaken their military and bring about a swift end to the war. The President undertook his own campaign for passage of the amendment, and his political allies and cabinet members helped to further the cause, convincing constituents and state legislatures to appeal directly to their congressmen for passage of the amendment. The proposal had passed quickly through the Senate the previous spring, but in the House of Representatives debates created divisive partisan factions, with little certainty as to the fate of the proposal. Finally, after months of conflict, on January 31, 1865, the amendment passed 119-56, a two-vote margin. In December, it was formally adopted.
The ratification of 13th amendment conferred upon Congress the power to enforce the abolition of slavery by appropriate legislation, granting the federal government the constitutional authority to dictate power relationships among individual citizens as it never had before.
As the text reads:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article with appropriate legislation.
Less than a year after ratification, Congress called upon the enforcement power from Section 2 to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866, granting African Americans citizenship and equal protection. Proponents of the law argued that the 13th amendment authorized the federal government to legislate state action; critics maintained that unequal treatment was distinct from slavery such that the 1866 Act was beyond the amendment’s reach. This act represented the first attempt to give concrete meaning to the 13th Amendment. This Act declared all persons born in the United States (except Indians) national citizens and went on to spell out the rights they were to enjoy equally without regard to race. No longer could states enact laws such as the Black Codes (noted below) declaring actions crimes for black persons but not white.
In response to these debates, and as a direct outgrowth of the enforcement clause, Congress went on to pass the 14th and 15th amendments in quick succession, defining citizenship and equal rights and banning voting restrictions based on race.
The 14th amendment would become the Supreme Court’s principal tool in deciding civil rights cases through the 20th century. Still the 13th amendment, while less applicable to subsequent controversies than its counterpart, served to fundamentally reshape the American landscape.
And while its eventual champion may have begun as little more than a symbolic emancipator, Lincoln’s 1865 campaign for ratification served to launch perhaps the greatest legal, economic and social revolution the United States has ever seen.
Response to Lincoln’s Plans
Two congressional factions formed over the subject of Reconstruction. A majority group of moderate Republicans in Congress supported Lincoln’s position that the Confederate states should be reintegrated as quickly as possible. A minority group of Radical Republicans--led by Thaddeus Stevens in the House and Ben Wade and Charles Sumner in the Senate--sharply rejected Lincoln’s plan, claiming it would result in restoration of the southern aristocracy and re-enslavement of blacks. They wanted to effect sweeping changes in the south and grant the freed slave’s full citizenship before the states were restored. The influential group of Radicals also felt that Congress, not the president, should direct Reconstruction. This is what led to the Wade-Davis Bill in July 1864.
The Radical Republicans voiced immediate opposition to Lincoln’s reconstruction plan, objecting to its leniency and lack of protections for freed slaves. Congress refused to accept the rehabilitation of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. In July 1864, Congress passed the Wade-Davis Bill, their own formula for restoring the Union.
A state must have a majority within its borders take the oath of loyalty.
A state must formally abolish slavery.
No Confederate officials could participate in the new governments.
Lincoln did not approve of this plan and exercised his pocket veto. An angry Congress would later pass the Wade-Davis Manifesto (August 1864), which charged Lincoln with usurping the powers of Congress. This statement would have little impact on the public, as the military news from the South improved; Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign restored Lincoln’s popularity and helped assure his reelection.
President Johnson and his Reconstruction Plan
With the Assassination of Lincoln, the Presidency fell upon an old-fashioned southern Jacksonian Democrat of pronounced states’ rights views. Although an honest and honorable man, Andrew Johnson was one of the most unfortunate of Presidents. Arrayed against him were the Radical Republicans in Congress, brilliantly led and ruthless in their tactics. Johnson was no match for them.
Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808, Johnson grew up in poverty. He was apprenticed to a tailor as a boy but ran away. He opened a tailor shop in Greeneville, Tennessee, married Eliza McCardle, and participated in debates at the local academy.
Entering politics, he became an adept stump speaker, championing the common man and vilifying the plantation aristocracy. As a Member of the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 1840’s and ’50’s, he advocated a homestead bill to provide a free farm for the poor man.
During the secession crisis, Johnson remained in the Senate even when Tennessee seceded, which made him a hero in the North and a traitor in the eyes of most Southerners. In 1862 President Lincoln appointed him Military Governor of Tennessee, and Johnson used the state as a laboratory for reconstruction. In 1864 the Republicans, contending that their National Union Party was for all loyal men, nominated Johnson, a Southerner and a Democrat, for Vice President.
Views on Black Population
What were Johnson’s views regarding blacks? He held deeply racist views regarding blacks and proved unable to envision their playing any role in the South’s Reconstruction, except as a dependent laboring class returning to work.
Prior to his assuming office after Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson continued to repeat himself: the eleven states of the Confederacy had never actually been out of the Union because they did not have the right to secede. According to Johnson, since these states hadn’t seceded, they had not relinquished their right to govern themselves as they wished. He insisted that slavery provided far better conditions for black men and women than they would enjoy in Africa and certainly enjoyed better conditions than the Northern wage slave, who had to grind out a pittance in a factory. To Johnson, free blacks were much worse off than southern slaves. By the summer of 1863, Johnson supported immediate, unconditional emancipation. His reasoning was consistent with his hatred of the aristocrat: emancipation would liberate the white man from the tyranny of the plutocrat slaveholders. He did not for a minute believe” that the negro race is equal to the Anglo-Saxon-not at all.” Blacks had no role to play in Johnson’s vision of Reconstruction. In his view Reconstruction boiled down to placing the southern states under the control of loyal whites and bringing them back to their full standing in the Union as quickly as possible. At the end of May 1865 Johnson announced his plans for Reconstruction.
Johnson’s Plan for Reconstruction
Following Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Andrew Johnson became president and inaugurated the period of Presidential Reconstruction (1865–67). Johnson shared the white Southerners’ attitude toward African Americans, considering black men innately inferior and unready for equal civil or political rights. On May 29, 1865, Johnson made his policy clear:
Issued a general proclamation of pardon and amnesty for most Confederates and authorized the provisional governor of North Carolina to proceed with the reorganization of that state. Shortly afterward he issued similar proclamations for the other former Confederate states. In each case a state constitutional convention was to be chosen by the voters who pledged future loyalty to the U.S. Constitution. Johnson offered a pardon to all Southern whites except Confederate leaders and wealthy planters (although most of these subsequently received individual pardons), restoring their political rights and all property except slaves. Petitions for pardons came in by the hundreds and were given the presidential signature by the hundreds. By 1867 Johnson would issue 13,500 pardons.
He also outlined how new state governments would be created. Apart from the requirement that they abolish slavery, repudiate secession, and abrogate the Confederate debt, these governments were granted a free hand in managing their affairs. They responded by enacting the black codes, ( note the Black Code folder ) laws that required African Americans to sign yearly labor contracts and in other ways sought to limit the freedmen’s economic options and reestablish plantation discipline. Note the observation of journalist Sidney Andrews on the black codes: “the whites seem wholly unable to comprehend that freedom for the negro means the same think as freedom for them. They readily enough admit that the Government has made him free but appear to believe that they have the right to exercise the old control.” All told, Johnson’s self-reconstructed states chose for senators and representatives six Confederate cabinet officers and four generals. Back to the Black Codes, it defined as “vagrants” or “paupers” any freedperson who appeared unemployed and allowed local officials to bid them out as laborers for up to a year. The first Black Code was enacted in Mississippi in an ironically titled piece of legislation: An Act to confer Civil Rights on Freedmen. This act required all African American men to present an annual labor contact in January each year. Failure to do so would result in classification as a vagrant and arrest. Workers who reneged on their annual contracts were treated as runaways who could be classed as vagrants. Even whites who associated with or assisted African Americans could find themselves arrested for vagrancy. The Mississippi code was quickly amended to include a clause which noted that “all white persons so assembling themselves with freedmen, free negroes or mulattoes, or usually associating with freedmen, free negroes or mulattoes, on terms of equality, shall be deemed vagrants.” The Black Code enacted in Mississippi became the model for others that followed, and South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana all introduced their own Black Codes in late 1865. In early 1866, Florida, Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, and Arkansas all followed the leads of these states. Thomas W. Conway, the commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Louisiana noted in 1866, “These codes were simply the old black code of the state, with the word ‘slave’ expunged, and ‘Negro’ substituted. The most odious features of slavery were preserved in them.”
Johnson vetoed both the Freedman’s Bureau and the Civil Rights bills. He insisted that Congress pass no Reconstruction legislation until the Southern states were fully represented. Although the Senate failed by a single vote to override the Freedman’s Bureau bill (another measure, enacted in July 1867 extended the bureau’s life to 1870). Congress mustered the two-thirds majority to pass the Civil Rights Act.
Johnson assumed that ordinary white yeoman would replace in office the planters who had led the South in secession. He also ordered nearly all the land in the hands of the army and the Freedman’s Bureau returned to its prewar owners, an action that solidified his support among the South’s power class.
Despite the abolition of slavery, many former Confederates were not willing to accept the social changes. The fears of the mostly conservative planter elite and other prominent white citizens, however, were partly assuaged by Johnson’s assurance that wholesale land redistribution from the planters to the freedmen would not occur. Johnson ordered that land forfeited under the Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862, which were passed by Congress and administered by the Freedmen’s Bureau, would not be redistributed to the freedmen, but instead returned to pardoned owners. African Americans strongly resisted the implementation of these measures, and they seriously undermined Northern support for Johnson’s policies.
Congressional Radical Reconstruction Plan
During the autumn of 1865, the Radical Republicans responded to the implementation of the Black Codes by blocking the readmission of the former rebellious states to Congress. Johnson, however, pushed to allow former Confederate states into the Union, if their state governments adopted the Thirteenth Amendment (which abolished slavery). The amendment was ratified by December 6, 1865, leading Johnson to believe that Reconstruction was over. Congress refused to seat the representatives and senators elected from the southern states, many of whom had been leading officials in the Confederate government and army.
The Radical-controlled Congress, however, rejected Johnson’s moderate presidential Reconstruction, and organized the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, a 15-member panel that devised Reconstruction requirements for the Southern states to be restored to the Union.
Congress continued to pass more radical legislation. The Radical Republican vision for Reconstruction, also called “Radical Reconstruction,” was further bolstered in the 1866 election, when more Republicans took office in Congress. During this era, Congress passed three important Reconstruction amendments. The Civil Rights Bill was passed in 1866, as noted above. No state could deprive any citizen of the right to make contracts. The Congress mustered the two-thirds majority to pass the bill over the President’s veto.
The Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery was ratified in 1865. The Fourteenth Amendment, proposed in 1866 and ratified in 1868, guaranteed U.S. citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and granted them federal civil rights. The Fifteenth Amendment, proposed in late February 1869 and passed in early February 1870, decreed that the right to vote could not be denied because of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” These amendments transformed the Constitution from a document concerned primarily with federal-state relations and rights of property into a vehicle through which members of vulnerable minorities could stake a claim to substantive freedom and seek protection against misconduct by all levels of government.
Congress also passed the Reconstruction Acts (1867-1868), Congress approved the acts in February 1867, and then on March 2 it overrode Johnson’s veto. Their principle task was to create an entirely new electorate in the South that carefully excluded recusant Confederates and their sympathizers among the white population and certified the enfranchisement of the freedman through the creation of vast registries of eligible voters.
The first Reconstruction Act placed 10 Confederate states under military control (dissolving the self-reconstructed governments that Johnson had set up) grouping them into five military districts that would serve as the acting government for the region. One major purpose was to recognize and protect the right of African Americans to vote. Under a system of martial law in the South, the military closely supervised local government, elections, and the administration of justice, and tried to protect office holders and freedmen from violence. Blacks were enrolled as voters and former Confederate leaders were excluded for a limited period. These Reconstruction Acts denied the right to vote for men who had sworn to uphold the Constitution and then rebelled against the federal government. As a result, in some states the black population was a minority, while the number of blacks who were registered to vote nearly matched the number of white registered voters. In addition, Congress required that each state draft a new state constitution—which would have to be approved by Congress—and that each state ratify the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and grant voting rights to black men. One of the acts arrested on the premise that lawful governments did not exist in the South, and that Congress could govern the region until acceptable ones had been established, this is the act that temporarily divided the South into five military districts and led as noted above to the ratification of the 14th Amendment. Union Leagues spread throughout the South in 1867. The organization had originated among middle-class northerners. The local leagues met in schools and churches, planned rallies and parades, and raised funds for mutual aid societies. Local leagues organized cooperative stores, advised freedmen on contract disputes with landowners and sometimes established their own courts to deal with community disagreements.
The Overthrow of Reconstruction 1869-1877
In 1868, the Republicans unanimously chose Ulysses S. Grant to be the Republican presidential candidate. Grant won favor with the Radicals after he allowed Edwin M. Stanton, a Radical, to be reinstated as secretary of war. As early as 1862, during the Civil War, Grant had appointed the Ohio military chaplain, John Eaton, to protect and gradually incorporate refugee slaves in west Tennessee and northern Mississippi into the Union war effort and pay them for their labor. Grant also opposed President Johnson by supporting the Reconstruction Acts passed by the Radicals.
President Grant’s Reconstruction Efforts
Grant was unanimously nominated by all 650 delegates, “with swinging hats and waving handkerchiefs” and a spontaneous chorus of “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” and went on in November, 1869 to win the presidency by 300,000 votes and a 214 to 80 victory in the electoral college. 3 Even before the election, congressional reconstruction was bringing Southern states back into the Union, this time firmly under Republican control. Between June 22 and July 15, Congress readmitted seven of the ten rebel states— Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and North and South Carolina— under new constitutions. South Carolina’s constitution enfranchised any “resident of this State” who was also a “male citizen of the United States, of the age of twenty- one years and upwards . . . without distinction of race, color or former condition,” and forbade the state legislature from passing “any law that will deprive any of the citizens of this State of the right of suffrage, except for treason, murder, robbery or dueling, whereof the persons shall have been duly tried and convicted.” And there was serious discussion of appealing to the federal government for a loan of $ 1 million to be used in buying land for the freedmen. “There is but one way to make a man love his country,” argued Franklin J. Moses, an ex- Confederate who had transformed himself into a Radical Republican, “Give them lands; give them houses.”
Immediately upon inauguration in 1869, Grant bolstered Reconstruction by prodding Congress to readmit Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas into the Union, while ensuring their constitutions protected every citizen’s voting rights. Grant met with prominent black leaders for consultation, and signed a bill into law that guaranteed equal rights to both blacks and whites in Washington, D.C.
By the early 1870’s biracial democratic government, something unknow in American history, was functioning effectively in many parts of the South, and men only recently released from bondage were exercising genuine political power. The most startling aspect of the new state governments was the role played by African Americans. Of the eighty- four Republicans in the lower house of the Georgia legislature, twenty- nine were black. In Arkansas, eight were black, and the average age was thirty- seven; five were biracial, three were ministers, three were farmers, and one was a postmaster. Florida elected fifty- three members to its lower house, thirty- seven of them Republican, and of those Republicans, seventeen were African American. In North Carolina, sixteen African Americans were elected to the state House of Representatives and three to the state Senate. As a group, they impressed a New York Times correspondent as possessing “by long odds the largest share of mental calibre.” By contrast, “there is scarcely a Southern white man” sitting in the state offices “who has character enough to keep him out of the Penitentiary.
During Grant’s two terms, he strengthened Washington’s legal capabilities to directly intervene to protect citizenship rights even if the states ignored the problem. He worked with Congress to create the Department of Justice and Office of Solicitor General, led by Attorney General Amos Akerman and the first Solicitor General Benjamin Bristow. Congress passed three powerful Enforcement Acts in 1870 and 1871. These were criminal codes which protected the Freedmen’s right to vote, hold office, serve on juries, and receive equal protection of laws. Most important, they authorized the federal government to intervene when states did not act. Grant’s new Justice Department prosecuted thousands of Klansmen under the tough new laws. Grant sent federal troops to nine South Carolina counties to suppress Klan violence in 1871.
Grant also used military pressure to ensure that African Americans could maintain their new electoral status, won passage of the Fifteenth Amendment giving African Americans the right to vote, and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which gave people access to public facilities regardless of race. To counter vote fraud in the Democratic stronghold of New York City, Grant sent in tens of thousands of armed, uniformed federal marshals and other election officials to regulate the 1870 and subsequent elections. Democrats across the North then mobilized to defend their base and attacked Grant’s entire set of policies. On October 21, 1876, President Grant deployed troops to protect black and white Republican voters in Petersburg, Virginia.
Election of 1876
In the months following the Election of 1876, but prior to the inauguration in March 1877, Republican and Democratic leaders secretly hammered out a compromise to resolve the election impasse and address other outstanding issues.
Under the terms of this agreement, the Democrats agreed to accept the Republican presidential electors (thus assuring that Rutherford B. Hayes would become the next president), provided the Republicans would agree to the following:
To withdraw federal troops from their remaining positions in the South
To enact federal legislation that would spur industrialization in the South.
To appoint Democrats to patronage positions in the South
To appoint a Democrat to the president’s cabinet.
Why did the Democrats so easily give up the presidency that they had probably legitimately won? In the end it was a matter of practicality. Despite months of inflammatory talk, few responsible people could contemplate going to war. A compromise was mandatory and the one achieved in 1877, if it had been honored, would have given the Democrats what they wanted. There was no guarantee that with Samuel J. Tilden as president the Democrats would have fared as well.
To the four million former slaves in the South, the Compromise of 1877 was the “Great Betrayal." Republican efforts to assure civil rights for the blacks were totally abandoned. The white population of the country was anxious to get on with making money.
Once the parties had agreed to these terms, the Electoral Commission performed its duty. The Hayes’ electors were selected, and Hayes was named president two days before the inauguration.
The policies of Rutherford B. Hayes, America's 19th president, began to heal the nation after the ravages of the Civil War. Hayes had a reputation for being upstanding, moral, and honest, despite the controversial election. Much of Hayes's 1877 inaugural address was devoted to calming down the citizenry. He quickly announced plans for election reform and pledged his earnest desire to heal the rift between North and South. Though he had generally supported Reconstruction, which aimed to secure the rights of black citizens, Hayes came to believe that interventionist policies were breeding more hatred among southerners, preventing the nation from healing itself in the aftermath of war.
Plessy vs Ferguson 1896
The 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson case was extremely important. It was a legal case in which the Supreme Court decided that "separate but equal" facilities satisfied the guarantees of 14th Amendment, thus giving legal sanction to "Jim Crow" segregation laws. The namesakes of the Plessy v. Ferguson case were the plaintiff Homer Adolph Plessy (1862 – 1925) and the defendant Judge John H. Ferguson (1838 - 1915) of the Criminal Court for New Orleans. In 1954, the Supreme Court justices in Brown v. the Board of Education reversed the decision made in the Plessy case by making the decision that legally sanctioned racial segregation was inherently unequal and a violation of the 14th Amendment.
Conclusion- End of Reconstruction
Reconstructed ended when national attention turned away from the integration of former slaves as equal citizens enabling white Democrats to recapture southern politics. Between 1868 and 1877, and accelerating after the Depression of 1873, national interest in Reconstruction dwindled as economic issues moved to the foreground. The biggest threat to Republican power in the South was violence and intimidation by white conservatives, staved off by the presence of federal troops in key southern cities. Reconstruction ended with the contested Presidential election of 1876, which put Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in office in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South.
What do you think of the Reconstruction era? Let us know below.
Now read Richard’s series of articles on trauma and medicine during war, starting with the American Revolution here.
