RECONSTRUCTION

KEY-WORDS:

1- Radical Republicans:

1 - Radical Republicans were members of the Republican Party who had very progressive ideas, radical ideas; they wanted to destroy the aristocratic South of the plantations. They were a minority, but they managed to impose their views between 1867 down to 1877.
2- Rampant immorality is another phrase that is often quoted when dealing with Reconstruction. This was the time of political corruption, crime, when Southerners were supposed to be pushed around and bossed about by Northerners and Blacks alike.
3- Carpet-baggers are also traditionally associated with Reconstruction. They were poor Whites from the North. They had not succeeded in making it in the North, so they went South with all their belongings in travel-bags called carpet-bags, hence their names. They wanted to profit from the unsettled conditions in the South after the Civil War and from the climate of corruption. They were adventurers.
4- Scalawags were Southerners who accepted to co-operate with the Yankees i.e. Northerners. They were considered traitors. 20% of the Whites in the South must have been Scalawags.
5-Share-cropping (more or less "métayage" or "colonage") soon appeared after the war. Planters had no money to pay the black workers on their plantations. The Blacks had no money to buy or rent farms. So planters would supply their black tenants (farmers) with some land, a mule, tools, a cabin and fertilizers. The tenant would keep one third of the crop, the rest to go to the owner. The problem was that very soon black and white tenants alike became indebted and had to pledge (mettre en gage) their growing crops. They felt discouraged and fell into absolute poverty.
6- "40 acres and a mule"was what the freed slaves believed they had been promised. But in fact Congress only tried to give them political rights, without really trying to give them economic security—40 acres and a mule.What developed during that period was the share-cropping system. What the Black had been promised was 40 acres and a mule after the confiscation of land from white planters and during a very short period between Jan. 1865 and June of the same year, when the Confederacy was collapsing, abolitionist, liberal and radical generals of the Union Army could do whatever they wanted to. And what they did was to divide up the plantations, confiscate the land, and give slaves titles to the land. So some slaves in some states (Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana) ) were actually given 4O acres and a mule for a few months. But Henry Johnson, as President after the assassination of Lincoln, fired these generals. From 1867 till 1877 “Radical” Reconstruction was radical only in the political sense. Blacks were given the right to vote. Civil Rights laws were passed. But the old dream of 40 acres and a mule was gone.
7- the plantation
The master and his family lived in their mansion. The slaves lived in barracks; they lived in one concentrated area. In the days of slavery, every morning they would be gathered in slave-gangs by either a slave-driver (sometimes a black man) or an overseer. They would be driven to the fields, they would work there during the day, had lunch in the fields and they would come back at dusk. It was a routinized, regimented kind of existence. (Exactly the same in Reunion)

II- A CHRONOLOGY:

1- THE WAR (The War between the States/The Civil War)

18...
Apart from the matter of slavery, the Civil War arose out of both the economic and political rivalry between an agrarian South and an industrial North and the issue of the right of states to secede from the Union.
1860
Dec. 20 South Carolina secedes.
1861
Mississipi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas follow. They form the Confederate States of America, with Jefferson Davis as president. War begins as Confederates fire on Fort Sumter (April 12) Virginia,Arkansas,Tennessee, and North Carolina secede to complete the 11-state Confederacy.
1862
Ironclads, Union's Monitor and Confederate Virginia (Merrimac) duel at Hampton Roads. (March)
New Orleans fall to Union fleet under Farragut. The city is occupied.
Confederate General Robert E. Lee is victorious at second battle of Bull Run.
Lee attacks Washington (battle of Antietam.)
1863
Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania is stopped at Gettysburg by George Meade in July. Lee loses 20,000 men. It is the greatest battle of the war. Lincoln delivers his “Gettysburg Address.” Victory at Vicksburg. Those two battles mark the war's turning point.
1864
Ulysses S. Grant is named commander-in-chief of Union forces. In the Wilderness campaign, Grant forces Lee's Army of Northern Virginia back toward Richmond. Sherman defeats the Confederate army during Atlanta's campaign and leads a "march to the sea " and finally takes Savannah (Dec.)
1865
Sheridan defeats confederates at Five Forks, Confederates evacuate Richmond. On April 9, Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox.

2-RECONSTRUCTION (1865-1877)

1865
Lincoln fatally shot at Ford's Theater by John Wilkes Booth. Vice President Johnson sworn as president. He was to fight the Radical Republicans.

1865 Amendment XIII: Slavery is abolished and prohibited throughout the States.

1865 Ku Klux Klan created

1865-66 Black Codes before Radical Republican Reconstruction, held the freedmen on the plantations where they had worked as slaves.

1866 - The Civil Rights Act in theory gave the right to vote to Blacks.

1866 Amendment XIV: This amendment creates national citizenship for all males, therefore to Blacks. Along with amendments XIII (abolition of slavery) and XV (the suffrage i.e. the right to vote cannot be denied on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude) it might be looked upon as the peace settlement forced upon the South.

1868 (feb.) - President Johnson narrowly misses impeachment.
14th amendment is ratified.

1869 - Amendment XV grants the franchise (the right to vote) to freedmen .

1869 - Ulysses Grant is President.

1869 The first transcontinental railroad

1872 - Congress gives amnesty to most Confederates.

1877 End of Reconstruction.

III-Why the South lost the war:

The South was dis-unified
Although we have a mystique of Unity, in fact, the South was dis-unified. There was a Civil War within the Civil War. The Confederacy did not equal the South. Confederate history is not southern history. After all, Reconstruction was not totally imposed from outside: many Southerners fought for the Union Army; some didn't fight for any side. 20% of white southerners were Scalawags during Reconstruction, most of them poor people. This dis-union is possibly why the South lost the war.

The South was paradoxically a nation that didn't believe in nationalism.
Southerners had to form a national movement in order to fight the war, but they did not believe in nationalism. At the beginning, it was just a romantic nationalism as it is called now. It may appear as a paradox, but the South was much more unified in 1900 than in 1863. The Southerners had to lose the war to become Southern. The fact that they lost the war gave them something in common. It's the lost cause that keep them together, not the cause, and the memory of the war.

IV -RECONSTRUCTION

A “digest” to understand Reconstruction:

A- First Reconstruction:

President Johnson launched a moderate program by issuing a generous amnesty proclamation to follow Lincoln's policy of “malice towards none, charity for all.” Southern states were required to write new constitutions to re-enter the Union. But they did not give the Negro the vote or real civil rights. On the contrary, they enacted a series of Black Codes designed “to keep the Negro in his place” and away from the polls. Congress responded with the 14th Amendment.

B- In 1866, victory at the polls strengthened the Radical Republicans' position so that Radical Reconstruction (1867-1877) could be launched.

The South was militarily occupied (five military districts). The military commanders were to register "loyal" voters (Negroes and Scalawags) and readmission into the Union was made dependent on ratification of the 14th and 15th amendments.

C- Little by little Southern whites won back "home rule".

They created secret societies to frighten Negroes away from the polls (Ku Klux Klan); they had friends in the North—Democrats who wanted a reunited party, businessmen who wanted to build railroads and get industry going, and ordinary citizens who were tired of disorder in the South.

D- The election of 1876 to the White House was one of the closest in American history.

The Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, seemed to win the vote. In four states returns were in dispute. If these votes went to the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes [heiz] he would be elected. A deal was arranged between Democrats and Republicans: if Hayes was declared President by an electoral commission, he would in return withdraw all the troops from the South. Hayes was elected President.

God’s punishment:

Many Americans at the time saw the Civil War as a punishment sent by God on the nation for having slavery in the South, being tolerated by the North. The assassination of Lincoln was viewed as the ultimate sacrifice of the last soldier who had fought and died to atone for the nation's sin. Now the sin was gone, but the question still remained: how was the South to be reorganized?

Northern attitudes to the South:

The question applied to the planters and the freedmen. It must be said that the attitude of Northerners to the black population in the North was not very progressive to say the least. Blacks were denied voting rights and were seen as intellectually inferior, morally irresponsible, so that they could not share citizenship with the so-called superior white race. As for what the Northerners, the Yankees, thought of the Confederate leaders, we must turn back to the colonial tradition: planters were seen as aristocrats, an alien race, who refused to play the game of capitalism.They held Blacks in slavery so that they did not have to pay them wages for work, which was a menace to the work system in the North. They defied middle-class, nearly puritan morality of the North by sexually abusing and exploiting their female slaves, who gave birth to numerous half-breeds.

The Radical Republicans:

Politically speaking, the interests of the industrialist North were represented by the Radical Republicans. The Radical Republicans represented the rapidly developing industrial capitalists of the North East and Mid West. What they wanted from Washington was a uniform and standardized market place for their products.

The tariff issue:

During the war, favorable legislation that was to boost Northern industry particularly the tariff had been passed. Why not before the War? Because the Southern States whose main source of income was cotton, did not want their customers—the nations of Europe and Great Britain especially—to adopt similar measures. If the U.S. passed severe tariff legislation to protect its products, Great Britain could retaliate by doing the same with American cotton. Now, Northern industrialists had managed to get favorable economic legislation during the Civil War to protect their expanding industry. Yet, it was clear that if Southerners returning to Congress united with Northern Democrats, they could form a majority and abolish the new legislation and the tariff.

The President's position:

What would the President's position be now? Because of his personality and leadership during the war, Lincoln stood out on the political scene. He was believed to have a lenient plan for the Reconstruction of the South which would make it possible for Confederate leaders to keep political power in the South after the war. "With malice toward none, with charity for all."(Second Inaugural Address, 1865)

1865-1867 Presidential Reconstruction

In fact, between June 1865 and late 1867 to a large extent there was no Reconstruction. It was a sort of pause, with a kind of economically radical Reconstruction when land was given to poor Whites as well as poor Blacks. But this rapidly changed after Lincoln's death. Johnson undid all that.This was the time of Presidential Reconstruction which lasted for 2 and a half years, and in a sense, it's no Reconstruction at all.

Radicals seize control and set up a plan:

When Lincoln was assassinated it was easy for the Congressional Radicals to seize control from the new president, Andrew Johnson, who supported the cause of the South and the Democrats.The Radicals also managed to use Lincoln's death: they claimed that the Southern rebels, after making war were now the center of a conspiracy against the North. So that public opinion was ready to accept whatever plan they would put forward. The Radical Republicans' plan to destroy the power of the Confederate leaders and planters was to grant full citizenship to the freed slaves.
Southern whites reorganized their state-governments under the Lincoln-Johnson Plan of Reconstruction.
At the same time, Southern whites were reorganizing their state-governments under the Lincoln-Johnson Plan of Reconstruction.They passed black codes which forced the freedmen to stay on the plantations where they had worked as slaves. (Exactly the same thing happened in Reunion)In the eyes of the Radical Republicans, this still was a form of bondage if not a subtle form of slavery and the only way to put an end to the South's feudal aristocracy was to allow the freed slaves to leave the plantations. If they were free to do so, they could become free workers, able to adapt to the demands of the market- place. In other words, they could move to the industrial cities in the north and work in the industrialists' factories.This reasoning led many Republicans to support the idea of black citizenship.
Northern Democrats shared the Southern political leaders' views.
On the other hand, many Northern Democrats shared the Southern political leaders' views. These views held that the States should have a "white government intended for white men only" or that "unless Negroes submit to the intelligent guidance of the powerful white race, their fate will be that of the Indians, they will be exterminated." President Johnson himself supported these Democrats.
The Northern Republican Party takes political control of the Southern states.
But the majority in Congress was Republican and these Republicans simply refused to accept any Representatives from the South. The Radical Republicans also won victories over Northern Democrats by waving the "bloody shirt": every man that had shot a Union soldier was a Democrat; Lincoln had been assassinated by a Democrat. "Soldiers, every scar you have got on your heroic bodies was given you by a democrat.."
The 14th amendment (1866) At the same time, new state constitutions had to be drafted for the former Confederate states and it was compulsory for the new constitutions to respect the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The 14th amendment created full citizenship for all males. If the Amendment was not accepted, the state was occupied militarily, and could not re-enter the Union.
The Radical Republicans thus had enough power in 1867 to ignore and override President Johnson's vetoes.They first passed a Freedmen's Bureau Act and a Civil Rights Act. Then they voted a Reconstruction Act, which dismantled the Southern state-governments and divided the South into 5 military districts, each under the control of an Army general.
The Army would register (inscrire sur les listes électorales) all black and white voters. Confederate Leaders were disfranchised (se virent retirer le droit de vote).The Republicans nearly managed to impeach President Johnson as well. This domination of the presidency by the legislative branch has hardly ever happened again to such a degree in American History. It was made possible only by the support or the agreement of the Northern labor leaders who identified their interests with those of the industrialists. Similarly, the Officers in the Army chose to support Congress and not the President. The army, through the Freedmen's Bureau and the Union League registered 700,000 blacks to vote. Many white Southerners to show their support to their disfranchised leaders, chose not to register. Only 600,000 whites were eligible to vote. In other words, the Northern Republican Party had taken political control of the Southern states. In 1868, the Republicans helped to elect the war hero, general Ulysses Grant, to the presidency. But a majority of Northerners and Southern whites had voted for the democratic candidate. How was Grant elected then? Thanks to the votes of the Blacks in the Southern states.
To consolidate their new power, the Republicans had the 15 th amendment voted.It reads: the right to vote "shall not be denied on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
It remained that the political scene was dominated by whites,not blacks, especially white Republicans.
The top political leadership in every Southern state was provided by white army-officers, carpet-baggers, and scalawags. No black was governor during the Reconstruction period, blacks were never a majority in any state Senate. Only in South Carolina (65% blacks) did blacks elect a majority in the Lower House. In fact at the time most black politicians were content to follow white leadership, i.e. Radical Republicans and Scalawags. What must be clearly seen here as well, is that both Scalawags and Radical Republicans DID NOT want equality of the races. In fact, they had more respect and sympathy for the disfranchised white leadership of the South than for the black voters.
What those white Southerners expected was the restoration of their full citizenship for those of them who had been disfranchised and the return of their states into the Union on a normal basis, without the occupation by the army nor political control from the North.
At the same time, there was a feeling of fear toward the rising political power of the blacks.There were black majorities in many counties in the South. Blacks could claim the right to share leadership. And in some states like Southern Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana, blacks did tend to claim that right. It was the time when the Republican Party changed its views on the South. Recall that the Republican Party was supported by Northern industrialists.They had wanted the South to be dismantled and ruined because as capitalists they could not accept the plantation system. The industrialists in the North were capitalists working in a system of free enterprise and free labor. If other people like the planters in the South used slavery within the same system, they felt they could no longer compete on the same basis : how can you compete with a man who doesn't have to pay his workers? That must have been one of the most important causes for the Civil War. But now in the 187O's, the reports about the situation in the South sent by Army Officers and carpet-baggers indicated that this judgement passed on the so-called anticapitalist attitude in the South was mistaken. Northern Republicans were told that many Southern Democrats believed that it was better for the South to adopt Yankee forms of capitalism. The best evidence of this trend was that 75% of the top-officers on the Confederate Army had become executives in corporations owned by Northerners investors, such as banks, railroads... In the election of 1876 then, the Republican Party reversed its strategy: it was decided that the Republicans would appeal to the traditional elites of the South. But it was too late.
Southerners wanted one thing: the end of the military occupation; along with other demands like re-establishing the political rights of the ex-Confederate Leaders, and depriving the blacks of 1st class citizenship. The one party who had advanced these views was the Democratic Party of course, and to change political loyalty was impossible now. On the other hand the nation was losing interest in the problems of Reconstruction and between 1869 and 1877, Union troops left the occupied Southern states. It was the end of Radical Reconstruction.
Keeping black away from the polls: the grand-father clause.
Reconstruction itself ends in 1877. But long after the soldiers had left, the South was terrified they might come back. It's only in the 1890's when it was obvious that the Republican Party had lost its idealism and that racism began to prevail all over the States, that Southerners felt free enough to pass laws which disfranchised Blacks.
Before the 1890's, various means were used to control the black vote: stuffing ballot-boxes— a great Southern tradition—, killing a few black people to keep the others in their cabins on election day, tarring and feathering.
But if Reconstruction stopped, in 1877, it doesn't mean that Blacks stopped voting in 1877.The end of black voting is gradual. Blacks are still voting in great numbers in the 188O's and early 1890's. Roughly speaking, in the 188O's between 6O to 8O% of the Blacks voted. In 1920 it's between 1 & 2%.
The classic mode to disfranchise Blacks was the grand-father clause. Many southern states made this provision legal. To become a voter, one had to pass a literacy test. For example you had to interprete the Constitution. Whatever a White man said,he would pass; whatever a Black man, said, he wouldn't be allowed to vote. But you didn't have to take that literacy test if your grand-father or great-grand-father voted before 1866, i.e. the end of the war, when only whites could vote in the South. So the grand-father clause was a sideways mechanism for allowing illiterate Whites to vote and keeping illiterate Blacks away from the polls.
Changes in the views and ideals of the Republican Party.
By the 1870's, the nation lost interest in Reconstruction.Why? It may be accounted for by the shift in emphasis within the Republican Party. Before and just after the war, the Republican Party was all for freedom: freedom of labor, freedom of the market-place, freedom for the Blacks. This attitude led the North to fight the war against the South which was perceived as the land of UNfree labour, i.e. slavery. The South was not playing the Capitalistic game. On the other hand, the political power of the South was so important in Congress before the war, that the North and especially the industrialists felt the South would impose its views, its politics, slavery,upon the whole country and especially over the West. This was the real cause of the war, along with Abraham Lincoln's determination to keep the Union, the Nation together.
Now after the Civil War, the emphasis on freedom, free labor, freedom for the blacks, changed. The former ideal of freedom was replaced by that of control: political, industrial,social control over people and space. The idea now was to keep the South in its place, keep the Blacks in their place, docile. Why? Because to do big business, organize things, you've got to have a well-organized, well-controlled land. So what most Republicans wanted by 1870 was to get the Southern Plantations to produce cotton and to keep Blacks quiet because the real action was in the industrial cities of the North, in building railroads across the continent (the first intercontinental railroad was completed in 1869), at PROMONTORY, UTAH; Central Pacific & Union Pacific; Golden Spike). Those were the reasons why the Republicans didn't really care anymore about their freedom ideology. It was a complete shift, turn-about, from freedom to control, from free labor, being your own boss, to being a good worker, an efficient businessman, a cog in a wheel.

V-INTERPRETING RECONSTRUCTION

A- THE TRADITIONAL VIEW

        This is the view that has dominated American arts and Letters from the 1890's until the 195O's. Anybody in America who is over 55 today was brought-up with this picture of Reconstruction.
       This traditional view is that of Black Reconstruction, an age of black barbarism with the Radical Republicans as the embodiment of evil. It was supposed to be a time of chaos. The Blacks were on top to take vengeance over the whites. Black juries in courts could dispossess white farmers. Many people in the United States still believe these stories and its stereotyped villains. the [mju’lætou] mulatto politician for example who can be used by the unscrupulous Northern white Republicans.
       It's the view that Reconstruction was the continuation of Sherman's march across Georgia. Reconstruction then is crime, corruption, rampant immorality with Southerners being pushed around by Northerners, Blacks, Scalawags.
        In this traditional view of Reconstruction, Blacks are seen as pawns (pions). Blacks could not be really evil, because they were like children, and could not show initiative. It was the carpetbaggers who pulled the strings and manipulated Blacks.
        This view of a Black Reconstruction prevailed in the South as well as in the North for quite a long time.
B- THE NEO-ABOLITIONIST INTERPRETATION:
Every generation of historians has its own evaluation of the past but possibly no chapter of American History has been so thoroughly revised. It's a complete reversal. This new interpretation is based upon 4 principles.
1-The first principle
       says that the real tragedy about Reconstruction is that it failed. Reconstruction used to be seen as a mistake and a failure because, within the American system of rat-race and competition, the best approach to account for historical events was social Darwinism, i.e. the survival of the fittest. In that view, Reconstruction was a big mistake because it was interfering with the natural evolution of history.The Neo-Abolitionists on the contrary believe that the North did not go far enough, the North lost its nerve, it did not have the guts to go through. After all, the idea of Reconstruction was a most noble idea in American History.
2- The 2nd principle
        holds that the idealism [ai’di.lizm] that goes with the civil War, with the North freeing the slaves and Abraham Lincoln fighting for a noble cause, did NOT disappear at the end of the war with Reconstruction. Reconstruction is not corruption, infamy, crime, immorality. In fact, the Civil War and Reconstruction just form one period of American History.
3- The third principle says that the Union was remarkably generous to the South.
       This is most shocking for old Southerners. In fact, the union was too generous, too gutless. The Union should have been harsher on the South. It's the idea that the North won the war but lost the peace. It couldn't change society.
4- The 4th principle holds that Reconstruction failed largely because of its economic conservatism.
        The freedmen were promised 4O acres and a mule, which they were never given. They were eventually given political rights, social freedom, but they were never given the economic tools to really be independent. They eventually ended up on the same plantations as they were before the war!