He had no timidity, no scruples about keeping to constitutional lines of policy, no regard or thought for the sensibilities of the minority, — being rough-hewn and without embarrassing sensibilities himself, — an ideal radical for the service of the moment.
Careful men, trained in the older ways of statesmanship and accustomed to reading the Constitution into all that they did, tried to form some consistent theory of constitutional right with regard to the way in which Congress ought to deal with this new and unprecedented situation. Both Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Johnson had acted in part upon these assumptions. They had objected only that the governments actually in existence at the close of the war had been chosen by persons who were in fact insurgents, and that their officers had served to organize rebellion.
Let those citizens of the South who had made submission, and who had been pardoned under the Presidents proclamation, reconstitute their governments, repudiating their old leaders, and the only taint upon their statehood would be removed: the Executive would recognize them as again normally constituted members of the Union.
Not many members of Congress, however, accepted this view. The Republican party, it was true, had entered upon the war emphatically disavowing either wish or purpose to interfere with the constitutional rights of the states; declaring its sole object to be the preservation of the Union, — the denial of a single particular right which it could not but view as revolutionary.
But war had brought many things in its train. The heat and struggle of those four tremendous years had burned and scarred the body of affairs with many an ineffaceable fact, which could not now be overlooked. Legally or illegally, as states or as bodies of individuals merely, the southern people had been at war with the Union; the slaves had been freed by force of arms; their freedom had now been incorporated in the supreme law of the land, and must be made good to them; there was manifest danger that too liberal a theory of restoration would bring about an impossible tangle of principles, an intolerable contradiction between fact and fact.
Sumner held that, by resisting the authority of the Union, of which they were members, the southern states had simply committed suicide, destroying their own institutions along with their allegiance to the federal government. They ceased to be states, he said, when they ceased to fulfill the duties imposed upon them by the fundamental law of the land.
Others declined any such doctrine. They adhered, with an instinct almost of affection, to the idea of a veritable federal Union; rejected Mr. Theories made Mr. Stevens very impatient. It made little difference with him whether the southern states had forfeited their rights by suicide, or temporary disorganization, or individual rebellion.
As a matter of fact, every department of the federal government, the courts included, had declared the citizens of those states public enemies; the Constitution itself had been for four years practically laid aside, so far as they were concerned, as a document of peace; they had been overwhelmed by force, and were now held in subjection under military rule, like conquered provinces. It was just as well, he thought, to act upon the facts, and let theories alone. It was enough that all Congressmen were agreed—at any rate, all who were allowed a voice in the matter—that it was properly the part of Congress, and not of the Executive, to bring order out of the chaos: to see that federal supremacy and federal law were made good in the South; the legal changes brought about by the war forced upon its acceptance; and the negroes secured in the enjoyment of the equality and even the privileges of citizens, in accordance with the federal guarantee that there should be a republican form of government in every state, — a government founded upon the consent of a majority of its adult subjects.
The essential point was that Congress, the lawmaking power, should be in control. The President had been too easy to satisfy, too prompt, and too lenient. The year passed, with all things at sixes and sevens. So far as the President was concerned, most of the southern states were already reconstructed, and had resumed their places in the Union.
Their assent had made the Thirteenth Amendment a part of the Constitution. By it had made up its mind what to do to bring the business to a conclusion. Congress had still further tested and made proof of the temper of the South. In June it had adopted a Fourteenth Amendment, which secured to the blacks the status of citizens, both of the United States and of the several states of their residence, authorized a reduction in the representation in Congress of states which refused them the suffrage, excluded the more prominent servants of the Confederacy from federal office until Congress should pardon them, and invalidated all debts or obligations incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States and this amendment had been submitted to the vote of the states which Congress had refused to recognize as well as to the vote of those represented in the houses.
Tennessee had promptly adopted it, and had been as promptly admitted to representation. But the other southern states, as promptly as they could, had begun, one by one, to reject it. Their action confirmed the houses in their attitude toward Reconstruction.
Congressional views and purposes were cleared the while with regard to the President, also. He had not been firm; he had been stubborn and bitter. He would yield nothing; vetoed the measures upon which Congress was most steadfastly minded to insist; alienated his very friends by attacking Congress in public with gross insult and abuse; and lost credit with everybody. It came to a direct issue, the President against Congress: they went to the country with their quarrel in the congressional elections, which fell opportunely in the autumn of , and the President lost utterly.
Until then some had hesitated to override his vetoes, but after that no one hesitated. In March, , two acts, passed over the Presidents vetoes, instituted the new process of reconstruction, followed and completed by another act in July of the same year.
The southern states, with the exception, of course, of Tennessee, were grouped in five military districts, each of which was put under the command of a general of the United States. These commanders were made practically absolute rulers, until the task of reconstruction should be ended. It was declared by the Reconstruction Acts that no other legal state governments existed in the ten states concerned.
It was made the business of the district commanders to erect such governments as Congress prescribed. When Congress had approved the constitutions thus framed and accepted, and when the legislatures constituted under them had adopted the Fourteenth Amendment, the states thus reorganized were to be readmitted to representation in Congress, and in all respects fully reinstated as members of the Union; but not before.
Such was the process which was rigorously and consistently carried through during the memorable years ; and upon the states which proved most difficult and recalcitrant Congress did not hesitate from time to time to impose new conditions of recognition and reinstatement before an end was made. By the close of July, , the reconstruction and reinstatement of Arkansas, the two Carolinas, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana had been completed. Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas were obliged to wait until the opening of , because their voters would not adopt the constitutions offered them by their reconstructing conventions; and Georgia was held off a few months longer, because she persisted in attempting to exclude negroes from the right to hold office.
They could deal with the provisional civil governments as they pleased, — could remove officials, annul laws, regulate administration, at will. Some were dictatorial and petty; some were temperate and guarded in their use of authority, with a creditable instinct of statesmanship; almost all were straightforward and executive, as might have been expected of soldiers. Whatever their mistakes or weaknesses of temper or of judgment, what followed the reconstruction they effected was in almost every instance much worse than what had had to be endured under military rule.
The first practical result of reconstruction under the acts of was the disfranchisement, for several weary years, of the better whites, and the consequent giving over of the southern governments into the hands of the negroes. And yet not into their hands, after all. Negro majorities for a little while filled the southern legislatures; but they won no power or profit for themselves, beyond a pittance here and there for a bribe.
Their leaders, strangers and adventurers, got the lucrative offices, the handling of the state moneys raised by loan, and of the taxes spent no one knew how. Here and there an able and upright man cleansed administration, checked corruption, served them as a real friend and an honest leader; but not for long.
The negroes were exalted; the states were misgoverned and looted in their name; and a few men, not of their number, not really of their interest, went away with the gains. They were left to carry the discredit and reap the consequences of ruin, when at last the whites who were real citizens got control again.
But that dark chapter of history is no part of our present story. We are here concerned, rather, with the far-reaching constitutional and political influences and results of Reconstruction. That it was a revolutionary process is written upon its face throughout; but how deep did the revolution go? What permanent marks has it left upon the great structure of government, federal, republican; a partnership of equal states, and yet a solidly coherent national power, which the fathers erected?
First of all, it is clear to every one who looks straight upon the facts, every veil of theory withdrawn, and the naked body of affairs uncovered to meet the direct question of the eye, that civil war discovered the foundations of our government to be in fact unwritten; set deep in a sentiment which constitutions can neither originate nor limit.
The law of the Constitution reigned until war came. Then the stage was cleared, and the forces of a mighty sentiment, hitherto unorganized, deployed upon it. A thing had happened for which the Constitution had made no provision. In the Constitution were written the rules by which the associated states should live in concert and union, with no word added touching days of discord or disruption; nothing about the use of force to keep or to break the authority ordained in its quiet sentences, written, it would seem, for lawyers, not for soldiers.
When the war came, therefore, and questions were broached to which it gave no answer, the ultimate foundation of the structure was laid bare: physical force, sustained by the stern loves and rooted predilections of masses of men, the strong ingrained prejudices which are the fibre of every system of government. What gave the war its passion, its hot energy as of a tragedy from end to end, was that in it sentiment met sentiment, conviction conviction.
It was the sentiment, not of all, but of the efficient majority, the conviction of the major part, that won. A minority, eager and absolute in another conviction, devoted to the utmost pitch of self-sacrifice to an opposite and incompatible ideal, was crushed and over-whelmed.
It was that which gave an epic breadth and majesty to the awful clash between bodies of men in all things else of one strain and breeding; it was that which brought the bitterness of death upon the side which lost, and the dangerous intoxication of an absolute triumph upon the side which won.
But it unmistakably uncovered the foundations of force upon which the Union rested. It did more. The sentiment of union and nationality, never before aroused to full consciousness or knowledge of its own thought and aspirations, was henceforth a new thing, aggressive and aware of a sort of conquest. It had seen its legions and felt its might in the field. It saw the very Constitution, for whose maintenance and defense it had acquired the discipline of arms, itself subordinated for a time to the practical emergencies of war, in order that the triumph might be the more unimpeded and complete; and it naturally deemed nationality henceforth a thing above law.
As much as possible, — so far as could be without serious embarrassment, — the forms of the fundamental law had indeed been respected and observed; but wherever the law clogged or did not suffice, it had been laid aside and ignored.
It was so much the easier, therefore, to heed its restrictions lightly, when the war was over, and it became necessary to force the southern states to accept the new model.
The real revolution was not so much in the form as in the spirit of affairs. The spirit and temper and method of a federal Union had given place, now that all the spaces of the air had been swept and changed by the merciless winds of war, to a spirit which was consciously national and of a new age. It was this spirit which brushed theories and technicalities aside, and impressed its touch of revolution on the law itself. And not only upon the law, but also upon the processes of lawmaking, and upon the relative positions of the President and Congress in the general constitutional scheme of the government, seeming to change its very administrative structure.
While the war lasted the President had been master; the war ended, and Mr. Lincoln gone, Congress pushed its way to the front, and began to transmute fact into law, law into fact. In some matters it treated all the states alike. But that was, after all, a mere equality of form.
The amendments were aimed, of course, at the states which had had slaves and had attempted secession, and did not materially affect any others. The votes which incorporated them in the Constitution were voluntary on the part of the states whose institutions they did not affect, involuntary on the part of the states whose institutions they revolutionized.
These states were then under military rule. The issues that fueled and the ideological communities that sustained this heightened partisan environment in the region were remarkably consistent across the period from to The party admittedly was sui generis in important regards, but the fiscal issues it addressed, the political coalitions it forged, and the social and racial challenges it confronted were extensions of the politics of postbellum readjustment.
The Democrats in Virginia did not finally drive the last of the major Readjuster politicos from office until Greg Downs describes a half-century period during which hard-pressed southerners fashioned a form of patron-client politics that recast dependency into the foundation of regional politics.
Peter Coclanis makes a compelling case that deep structural transformations, especially global commodity markets and finance, were underway in the mid-nineteenth-century American economy that were largely independent of the Civil War and the fate of plantation slavery.
Scholars have long recognized that transition from slave to free labor was jarring and contested, but there was a common assumption that by the s sharecropping had emerged as a practical solution to matching labor, land, and capital in the region. Recent scholarship suggests that a wide variety of complex labor relations prevailed for decades after the end of the Civil War and that the southern economy continued to be roiled by change and innovation.
Similarly, it took decades for the reconstructed southern legal system to provide sufficient legal guarantees to elicit sustained capital investments from outside the region. The political tumult in the region directly contributed to a perception of the South as a region filled with risk and uncertainty. Finally, southern society remained deeply fragmented after Conventional periodization of Reconstruction can mask the extent and persistence of this ongoing transformation in the southern polity and social relations.
The essential and enduring role of women in civic activism, commemoration, household management, and the regional labor market is now clear. At best only a superficial semblance of peace and order returned there during the late s and s. And it will enable scholars to more completely re present the experiences of southerners after the Civil War.
To take one poignant example, the impact of the postwar impoverishment of the region bore down on southerners for the remainder of their lives. A recent study of the biostatistics of cadets at The Citadel reveals that the cadets during the late nineteenth century were smaller in stature and weight than their antebellum predecessors. The bodies of the postwar cadets were living testaments to the legacy of war and reconstruction.
Sydnor Award from the Southern Historical Association. Stanley L. Thank you for this very deep article about the South reconstruction after the Civil War! Grant in took aim at the Klan and others who attempted to interfere with Black suffrage and other political rights, white supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South after the early s as support for Reconstruction waned.
Racism was still a potent force in both South and North, and Republicans became more conservative and less egalitarian as the decade continued.
In —after an economic depression plunged much of the South into poverty—the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War. When Democrats waged a campaign of violence to take control of Mississippi in , Grant refused to send federal troops, marking the end of federal support for Reconstruction-era state governments in the South.
In the contested presidential election that year, Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes reached a compromise with Democrats in Congress: In exchange for certification of his election, he acknowledged Democratic control of the entire South.
A century later, the legacy of Reconstruction would be revived during the civil rights movement of the s, as African Americans fought for the political, economic and social equality that had long been denied them. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. One of the most important aspects of Reconstruction was the active participation of African Americans including thousands of formerly enslaved people in the political, economic and social life of the South. The era was to a great extent defined by their quest for autonomy and Between and , the U. A white slaveholding south that had built its economy and culture on The 15th Amendment, which sought to protect the voting rights of African American men after the Civil War, was adopted into the U.
Constitution in Despite the amendment, by the late s discriminatory practices were used to prevent Black citizens from exercising their In September , a dispute over a column published in an Opelousas, Louisiana partisan newspaper provoked one of the bloodiest incidents of racial violence in the Reconstruction era. The attackers' goal: to reverse dramatic political gains made by Black citizens after the When slavery ended in the United States, freedom still eluded African Americans who were contending with the repressive set of laws known as the black codes.
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