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.
