June 29, 1865---Reconciliation, Restoration, and Reconstruction

JUNE 29, 1865:          

Reconstruction begins in Arkansas.

Reconstruction of the South was the first great social program of the United States. Had Abraham Lincoln been alive, it might have been a successful precursor to the Marshall Plan of post-World War II Europe, acting to, as Lincoln so eloquently stated in the Second Inaugural, “to bind up the nation’s wounds . . . with malice toward none and charity for all.”

As it transpired, Reconstruction amounted virtually to a second Civil War. There were actually three Reconstructions, two Presidential and one Congressional:

Abraham Lincoln’s wartime Reconstruction (sometimes called The Reconciliation) began in 1862 with the effective return of Tennessee and New Orleans to Union control, and remained in place until Lincoln’s death in April of 1865.

Lincoln’s Reconciliation was in almost all ways an ad hoc policy, utterly subject to vagaries of the ongoing war. It was best defined by the Emancipation of the slaves and by Lincoln’s dictum on the ex-Confederates, “Let ‘em up easy,” but Lincoln simply didn’t live long enough to create a truly workable template for Reconstruction. During the Civil War he pressed for the readmission of rebellious States if just ten percent of the prewar voting population agreed to Emancipation and applied for readmission to the Union; thus, during the war Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee all had Union governments (though the majority of citizens, except in Tennessee, remained Confederate). Virginia too had a Unionist State government that met in Alexandria but had no effective authority.

Lincoln’s greatest error as President was his failure to develop a workable plan for integration of the freed slaves into the American body politic. He was roundly criticized for virtually any suggestions he made, either by the Democrats who thought he was too liberal and was kowtowing to the black man, or by the Radical Republicans who thought he was too conservative and was toadying to the rebellious South. It was truly a Solomonic dilemma, though, and the President was evolving towards a workable solution when he died; his suggestion that black veterans receive the franchise was the proximate event that drove John Wilkes Booth to kill him.

Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction (sometimes called Restoration) was a schizoid policy that sought to punish wealthy Confederates even while returning all political power in the rebellious States to the White middle and lower classes. Although Johnson hated slavery as a hallmark of Southern elitism and set out to destroy it root and branch, he personally despised black people and left them at the mercies of lower class Whites.

Most lower-class Whites had suffered tremendous dislocation as a result of the Civil War, most were without any property and money or work, and most resented the newly-freed blacks as competitors for scarce resources. Believing them to be barely human anyway, most Southern Whites vented their rage at fate against their former black underclass.

Restoration was marked by the utter contraction to naught of any newly-won black civil rights and by unmitigated violence against blacks. The first Black Codes were instituted and sharecropping became a way of life.  Johnson did nothing to protect the former slaves except to ensure that they were not returned to slavery (although sharecropping was in all effects a form of peonage).

Restoration was also marked by the return to power of the prewar Southern elites. Johnson simply grated mass pardons to the elected officials, most of whom had not been eligible for his earlier Amnesty.

Restoration lasted from April 1865 to December 1865. President Johnson hurriedly declared Reconstruction to be at its successful end on December 3, 1865, just before Congress reconvened.

Congressional Reconstruction (sometimes called Radical Reconstruction) began on December 4, 1865, when an enraged Northern-controlled Congress swept all evidences of Restoration away. A glance at the “Restored” South caused many Congressmen, even Democrats, to ask, “What did we fight the Civil War for?” They chose to give the war a moral meaning, even if they had to ram it down unwilling Southern throats. The South was to remain in Reconstruction until 1877.

 

Declaring the Restored States to be under military occupation, Congress voided the Southern elections, curtailed the rights of former Rebels, and vastly expanded the rights of the Freedmen, granting them the vote and appointing blacks to public office. Constitutional Civil Rights  Amendments were passed (XIV and XV) granting U.S. Citizenship to all and suffrage to all males, black and white. Federal troops were dispatched South to ensure that the rights of Freedmen were respected.

In some Southern States (like Mississippi) blacks outnumbered whites by a large margin, and so whites found themselves under the authority of black-dominated State legislatures.

Without de jure authority, whites began to strike back. Although there was no centralized Confederacy anymore, local militias began making war against U.S. forces, and underground groups like the White Liners and the Ku Klux Klan began an ongoing terror campaign against “carpetbaggers”, “scalwags” and “uppity niggers” that had to be put down by force.

Although Radical Reconstruction saw the first great expansion of African- Americans’ Civil Rights in this nation’s history, it was an expansion maintained solely by force. When Reconstruction ended, social conditions in the South regressed to those existing under Johnson’s Restoration, and remained that way until another Southern-born President Johnson pressed for new Civil Rights and Voting legislation in 1964 and 1965, fully 100 years after the end of the Civil War.