Reconstructing the Nation, 1865-1877

Reconstruction began not in 1865, but in the midst of the Civil War itself. Early in the war, the Union Army quickly captured and occupied several areas in the deep South, including the Sea Islands off of the South Carolina coast and much of southern Louisiana and the key port city of New Orleans. Slavery rapidly disintegrated in these areas under Union Army control. Yet the occupation by the Union Army seemed to fuel rather than calm sectional and racial tensions. Union troops in New Orleans, for example, under the command of General Benjamin Butler, served as a constant irritant to local white people; and Confederate women as well as men repeatedly harassed the soldiers. At the same time, the presence of federal troops in the city raised the expectations of African Americans, who assumed that Union forces would not only free and protect them but also assure their rights as citizens. The federal troops met neither the worst fears of the Confederates nor the best hopes of the Africans Americans.

As in other southern cities, Black people in New Orleans faced segregation in nearly all public accommodations—theatres, restaurants, inns, streetcars, railroads, schools, and churches. African Americans, for instance, were forced to ride only in those streetcars marked with a black star. They were abused and harassed for demanding to be treated as equals, or simply for failing to defer to white people by giving way on sidewalks, doffing their hats, and lowering their eyes. Because New Orleans had a large population of African Americans   who had been free and achieved some measure of economic autonomy even before the Civil War, freedpeople in that city were quick to challenge such vestiges of slavery. In 1865, for instance, the local Black newspaper, the New Orleans Tribune, published calls for direct action against segregated streetcars: “Let every colored citizen of New Orleans, on and after the fifteenth of August, enter into any car . . . and if ordered out—take a seat, and if afterwards ejected, sue the company.” When open seating on the streetcars was finally achieved in 1867, the newspaper turned its attention to public schools and other segregated institutions.

Such challenges to southern racial norms occurred in many cities after the defeat of the Confederacy. African Americans often assumed that the presence of Union troops and federal officials would assure their protection as they asserted their humanity and sought equal rights under the law. Yet even as northern newspapers derided the “rebel rabble,” outraged by Confederates’ continued defiance, many white Union soldiers and officials stationed in the South were ambivalent about, or outright opposed to, Black people’s pursuit of racial equality. In Memphis and New Orleans, local authorities stood by or actively participated as white mobs slaughtered Black people in cases of mass racist violence.

Developments in New Orleans, Memphis, and other southern cities reflected both the promise and limits of Reconstruction. Following a brutal civil war, no actions by individuals, groups, or the government could restore the nation to daily life as Americans remembered it. African Americans avidly sought change, hoping to gain the economic opportunities, political rights, and personal autonomy denied them under slavery. Most white southerners hoped, instead, for a return to traditional ways. Although recognizing that slavery was gone, they nonetheless imagined a South in which white people regained economic, political, and social power and Black Americans remained subordinate in status and limited to manual labor. Among northern white populations, many supported expanding rights for Black people in the immediate aftermath of war, in part to ensure the resurrection of the southern economy. Certainly the Republican Party hoped to benefit at the polls from the surge of African Americans into electoral politics. Indeed, some Republican leaders viewed the punishment of Confederate leaders and the enhancement of Black rights as going hand in hand. Still, their commitment to racial advancement generally fell well short of full equality.

Why did historical accounts of Reconstruction change dramatically over the course of the twentieth century?

When the Civil War ended with the Confederacy’s defeat and the abolition of slavery, the future seemed frighteningly uncertain to most Americans. Yet African Americans newly emancipated from slavery could savor the taste of freedom on plantations and in towns and cities across the South. Most viewed land and political participation as the two most important foundations for freedom, but they also sought to reunite families, legalize marriages, establish churches, gain an education, and earn a decent wage.

The meaning of freedom could be as specific and personal as the decision to take a new name, or the ability to dress as one pleased. Or it could take the form of refusing to be deferential to one’s former owner. A Charleston, South Carolina, planter complained: “It is impossible to describe the condition of the city—It is so unlike anything we could imagine—Negroes shoving white persons off the walk—Negro women drest in the most outre style, all with veils and parasols, for which they have an especial fancy.” In Richmond, Virginia, freedpeople held meetings without securing white permission. They also walked in Capitol Square, an area previously restricted to white-only, refusing to give up the sidewalks when white people approached. In countless ways, large and small, freedpeople demonstrated that the end of slavery meant the end of petty control by whites.

Freedom also meant the ability to reunite families. Thousands of formerly enslaved people set out on searches for loved ones who had been sold away or displaced during the war’s upheavals. A northern correspondent reported meeting a middle-aged formerly enslaved man—“plodding along, staff in hand, and apparently very footsore and tired”—who had walked six hundred miles in search of his wife and children. As one government official noted, for many freedpeople “the work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited.” Emancipation also made it possible for thousands of couples to formalize long-standing relationships. People who had been unable to marry before the war because of separation or their enslavers’ objections, as well as those who had been allowed to “marry” only informally, sought out northern missionaries and Union officers to officially register and solemnize their unions. And many children who had lost their parents during the war were now legally adopted by relatives or friends.

The postwar years also saw a tremendous upsurge in African American demands for education. Over ninety percent of Black adults in the South were illiterate in 1860, and idealism and pragmatism now fueled their desire to secure an education. Some wanted to read “the word of God” on their own. Others wanted to read and do sums to protect themselves in a world of wage labor and signed contracts. In Savannah, a large number of Black residents, led by a group of ministers, formed the Savannah Education Association in December 1864. Within three months, the association had raised nearly ,000 and had hired fifteen Black teachers, who began their work with six hundred pupils. Freedpeople built and maintained schools and hired Black teachers all across the South in 1865 and 1866. Drawing on their own scarce resources, and with help from northern missionary groups and the federal government, African Americans converted some places that symbolized the oppression of slavery—such as the old slave markets in New Orleans and Savannah—into schoolhouses.

Freedpeople also quickly established churches independent of white control. Religion had been a fundamental institution before the war, but most enslaved Black people had been forced to worship in biracial churches headed by white preachers. Freedpeople now challenged white domination of biracial congregations and even replaced white preachers with Black ones, as did the African American members of the Front Street Methodist Church in Wilmington, North Carolina, early in 1865. When such efforts failed, as they frequently did, many Black congregants pooled meager resources to construct new church buildings as permanent symbols of their desire to practice their religion as they chose. The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church was the most famous of these independent churches. But Baptist churches attracted the largest number of freedpeople after the war, mainly because this denomination’s decentralized, democratic structure allowed for popular ministers, enthusiastic worship services, and local control of church affairs. “The Ebony preacher who promises perfect independence from White control and directions carries the colored heart at once,” observed an officer of the American Missionary Association. The independent Black church rapidly became the moral and cultural center of African American life.

But maintaining Black freedom demanded continual struggle, especially in rural areas still dominated by white people. On Henry Watson’s plantation in Alabama, for example, workers had chosen to remain on the plantation after emancipation, but they quit work in June 1865. Watson responded in January 1866 by proposing a harsh labor contract that set up strict work rules and limited mobility. But the freedpeople rejected this contract in a “most defiant manner.” In disgust, Watson rented the plantation to his overseer, who leased individual plots to freed families.

That was not the only way Watson’s workers demonstrated their interpretation of freedom. “The women,” Watson complained in 1865, “say that they never mean to do any more outdoor work, that white men support their wives, and they mean that their husbands shall support them.” All over the South, Black women both embraced public efforts to gain a political voice and sought to move out of field labor and domestic service to concentrate on their own familial duties. Those employed in white households also tried to remove themselves from the dangers of sexual abuse that came with such employment. To Black women these were crucial efforts to erase remnants of their past enslavement, but Watson saw them only as reflections of a desire to be “idle.”

Other white people, long accustomed to African American subservience, were enraged by the new assertiveness among Black individuals and resorted to violence to punish it. When in the course of a dispute an Arkansas freedwoman told her former white mistress, “I am as free as you, madam,” the white woman struck her. Later that day, learning that a “negro had sauced his wife,” the planter horsewhipped the Black woman. A North Carolina planter shot an employee, his formerly enslaved worker, after a quarrel over food. He later justified the murder by noting that the freedman’s “language and manner became insolent.” Such incidents were symptoms of the deep conflict generated between Black and white Southerners by the lack of agreement on the meaning of emancipation, particularly in relation to political and economic freedoms.

J. W. Toer and his company of traveling players who performed for audiences of formerly enslaved African Americans, presents the many ways African Americans sought freedom in the face of growing repression and violence. View 30-minute video in full or in sections.

To ensure that emancipation meant lasting change, Black southerners needed the power invested in the ballot and the independence that came with property ownership. Though in certain ways, this vision of political and economic independence echoed the republican ideals embraced by many white Americans, freedpeople imagined their advancement in collective as well as individual terms. Consequently, preachers, along with schoolteachers and ex-soldiers, emerged as community leaders, and churches often housed political meetings.

Religion and politics mixed easily in the first years after the war. In Richmond, Virginia, for example, African American men, women, and children met at the four-thousand-seat African Baptist Church to discuss proposals to be presented to the 1867 state constitutional convention. With decisions made by standing votes or voice votes, women had their opinions counted alongside men. In Raleigh, North Carolina, a Freedmen’s Convention was held at the AME church in 1865. Participants elected a Black preacher from the North as their chairman and petitioned the white legislators to assist in the “education for our children,” “protection for our family relations,” and “the re-union of families which have long been broken up by war or by the operations of slavery.”

African Americans held dozens of such conventions, meetings, and rallies across the South in 1865 and 1866. They raised demands for full civil equality and called for universal manhood suffrage, which, in the words of one delegate, was “an essential and inseparable element of self-government.” In some communities, African Americans organized militia companies and “justice committees” as a way of both embracing their responsibilities and claiming their rights as American citizens. The statewide freedmen’s conventions and the community-wide attempts to craft a collective agenda were the first steps that freedpeople took toward the independent political activity that characterized the era of Reconstruction.

Freedpeople were equally committed to obtaining land. They realized that without ownership of property, they would remain in a fundamentally subservient position to their economically powerful former enslavers. “Every colored man will be a slave, and feel himself a slave,” a Black soldier argued, “until he can raise his own bale of cotton and put his own mark upon it and say this is mine.” Freedpeople argued that they were entitled to land in return for their years of unpaid labor. “Our wives, our children, our husbands, have been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land,” argued freedman Baley Wyat in a speech in Yorktown, Virginia, protesting the eviction of Black Americans from land they had been assigned by the Union Army during the war. “And then didn’t we clear the land, and raise the crops of corn, of cotton, of tobacco, of rice, of sugar, of everything? And then didn’t them large cities in the North grow up on the cotton and the sugar and the rice that we made? . . . I say they has grown rich, and my people is poor.”

Many Black southerners firmly believed that the federal government would help them achieve economic self-sufficiency. Just before the end of the war, the Republican-dominated Congress established the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was created to assist freedpeople by issuing supplies, providing medical aid, establishing schools, dividing confiscated plantation lands, and supervising labor contracts. General Oliver O. Howard headed the bureau, and many of its nine hundred agents and officials were army officers. Committed to ideals of self-sufficiency, they did much to aid Black people with education and medical care. African Americans throughout the South turned to the bureau to protest brutality, harsh working conditions, and the hostility and inattention of local courts and police. Although such requests often went unanswered, most bureau agents were at least committed to guiding the South toward northern patterns of free labor relations, what one Tennessee agent called “the noblest principle on earth.”

But there were limits on how far the Bureau would go in supporting the economic interests of Black people against white planters. In fact, in many areas of the South, the Freedman’s Bureau adopted extremely coercive labor policies. In the spring of 1865, for example, the Bureau issued stringent orders that restricted Black laborers' freedom of movement and required them to sign one-year labor contracts with large landowners. If freedmen refused to sign, the Bureau withheld relief rations. “Freedom means work,” declared General Howard in 1865, and his policies ensured that African Americans would continue to work the lands of their former enslavers.

Despite the bureau’s limitations, many Black southerners continued to believe that the federal government would confiscate the enslavers’ land and distribute it among the freedpeople. “This was no slight error, no trifling idea,” reported an observer in Mississippi, “but a fixed and earnest conviction as strong as any belief a man can ever have.” General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Field Order #15, which distributed confiscated plantation lands to African Americans during the final months of the war, only reinforced this heartfelt conviction.

It was unclear whether President Lincoln would endorse Sherman’s order. Lincoln’s assassination before he decided how to proceed left the matter up to vice-president Andrew Johnson. After Johnson, a southerner and a senator from Tennessee before the Civil War, was elevated to the presidency, he rescinded Sherman’s field order. In doing so, he gave encouragement to recalcitrant planters and a bitter defeat to freedpeople.

Planters and freedpeople alike understood that Black land ownership would destroy the white population's basic control over labor and lead to the total collapse of the plantation economy. “The negroes will become possessed of a small freehold, will raise their corn, squashes, pigs, and chickens, and will work no more in the cotton, rice, and sugar fields,” concluded one Alabama newspaper. If even a few independent Black farmers succeeded, concluded one Mississippi planter, “all the others will be dissatisfied with their wages no matter how good they may be and thus our whole labor system is bound to be upset.”

For a century and a half, the South’s labor system had been based on the regimentation of slavery, and maintaining a similar system of labor regimentation became the planters’ most important objective. One northern observer concluded correctly that planters “have no sort of conception of free labor. They do not comprehend any law for controlling laborers, save the law of force.” Planters looked to their state governments to secure this “law of force.” Consequently, the struggle over the meaning and extent of freedom for African Americans shifted back to the arena of politics.

Reconstruction was a process that unfolded in two intertwined arenas: in battles between Black and white people across the South and in struggles among political leaders in Washington, D.C.  Decisions made in the nation’s capital expanded or constrained the rights that African Americans could claim and the level of protection they could expect in asserting them. Yet the demands of Black southerners also influenced debates in Washington. As poor white Southerners and freedpeople organized in support of the Republican Party immediately following the war, the radical members of that party gained important leverage to reject President Johnson’s plans for reconstruction. He hoped to return white southerners to power with few protections for newly-freed Black people. For a brief time, however, progressive forces in the South converged with radical Republicans in the North to map out a radical vision of reconstruction that promised significant gains for African Americans in the South and the nation.

Though Johnson was a Southerner, he had long viewed enslavers as “an odious and dangerous aristocracy.” A tailor by trade and entirely self-taught, Johnson resented the power that slaveholders held in his region, identifying personally and politically with the region’s white yeoman farmers. When his state seceded from the Union, he remained in his Senate seat, the only senator from a seceding state to do so. This act led Lincoln to choose him as vice-president in 1864. But Johnson’s hostility to the planters did not make him a supporter of African Americans, who he thought had participated with their enslavers in the oppression of yeoman farmers. One senator believed that he was “as decided a hater of the negro . . . as the rebels from whom he had separated.”

In May 1865, with Congress in recess, Johnson calculated that he could win broad political support in the South by offering total amnesty to all white Southerners who would swear basic loyalty to the Union. On May 10, Jefferson Davis, who had gone into hiding as the Confederacy collapsed, was captured in Irwinsville, Georgia and imprisoned. He and other members of the southern social and political elite were excluded from Johnson’s automatic amnesty. Still, Confederate leaders could petition the president for a pardon on a case-by-case basis, and many did. Even Jefferson Davis served only two years in prison, and then lived out his life in relative obscurity until his death in 1889. 

Johnson also demanded that for full readmission to the Union, southern states hold constitutional conventions to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery; repudiate Confederate debts; and nullify the ordinances of secession. Once they had complied, the states were free to organize elections and reestablish governments. In the interim, Johnson appointed governors for the southern states, often conservatives hostile to the gains that African Americans had secured since 1863.

The readmission process proceeded rapidly, and nearly all the southern states held elections in the fall of 1865. Meanwhile, planters and Confederate officials flooded Johnson’s desk with requests for pardons, most of which were granted. Although pleased to wield power over the South’s former aristocrats, Johnson also believed that only planters possessed the experience, prestige, and power to “control” the volatile Black population, and that they were therefore the best hope for the South’s future.

Although in Johnson’s view Reconstruction was now complete, the outcome of the 1865 elections shocked many northerners. Ex-Confederates were elected to office in large numbers. Representatives chosen to fill vacated southern seats in Congress, for example, included the vice-president of the Confederacy, four Confederate generals, five Confederate colonels, six Confederate cabinet officers, and fifty-eight Confederate congressmen. More moderate elements—mainly former Whigs, Unionists, and “reluctant” secessionists—dominated the newly elected state governments in the South, but these men (all white) shared with the ex-Confederates a determination to rebuild the South’s plantation society.

Immediately after the elections in 1865, the new state governments began to pass legislation that became known as the Black Codes. The Codes attempted to ensure planters an immobile and dependent Black labor supply through a series of rigid labor-control laws. Most states embraced the same basic provisions: a freedman found without “lawful employment” could be arrested, jailed, and fined. If he could not pay the fine, he could be hired out to an employer, who would pay the fine and deduct it from the worker’s wages. In practice, this meant that any freedman who refused to work at a prevailing wage could be arrested as a vagrant. Other provisions prevented African Americans from entering any employment except domestic work or agricultural labor; allowed Black children to be apprenticed to white employers for indefinite periods of time without parental consent; and set severe penalties even for petty theft. The overall effect of the Black Codes was to set the status of newly freed African Americans as landless agricultural laborers, with no bargaining power and restricted mobility.

The Black Codes were never effectively enforced, largely because of a labor shortage throughout the South and because of opposition from African American workers and Freedmen’s Bureau agents. Their passage did have one important result, however. Many members of Congress and their constituents became enraged that such laws could be passed in the first place.

In 1865, the Republicans held a three-to-one majority over Democrats in Congress. Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts led a group of Republican congressmen called Radicals, whose political roots lay in the prewar antislavery movement. They sought a vast increase in federal power to obtain new rights for the freedpeople and to revolutionize social conditions in the South.

The Radical Republicans attracted only a minority of party members. The far greater number of “moderate” Republicans initially hoped for a rapid reunification of the nation and a return to good business relations between North and South. But, like the Radicals, they were profoundly disturbed by the return of many ex-Confederate leaders to positions of influence and the return of freedpeople to near-enslaved status by the terms of the Black Codes. Consequently, when Congress finally reconvened in December 1865, Radicals and moderates joined in refusing to seat the newly elected southern representatives, an act that initiated a confrontation with President Johnson and transformed the meaning of Reconstruction.

At the end of 1865, the Radicals established a joint committee of Congress to investigate the situation in the South. In the next few months, army officers, white southern Unionists, Freedmen’s Bureau officials, newspaper reporters, and a handful of freedpeople testified to growing anti-Union sentiment, violence, and systematic oppression of the freedpeople. Joseph Stiles, a white Virginian loyal to the Union, complained, “It seems to me that the rapid promotion of rebels, the old politicians, to places of trust and honor, has had a great tendency to render treason popular instead of odious.” Richard Hill, one of the few Black witnesses, informed the joint committee that if the recently elected southern representatives were allowed to sit in Congress, “the condition of the freedmen would be very little better than that of slaves.”

Such evidence convinced many congressmen that the rights of the freedpeople had to be guaranteed. The Republicans in Congress passed a bill that extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and expanded its powers. In addition, they passed a Civil Rights Bill that defined “all persons born in the United States (except Native peoples) as national citizens,” granted freedpeople “full and equal benefit of all laws,” and gave federal courts the power to defend their rights against interference from state governments. In this sweeping act, Congress nullified the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision (which had denied citizenship to African Americans), undermined the Black Codes, and expanded the powers of the federal courts. Both bills marked a dramatic break from the deeply rooted American tradition of states’ rights.

An outraged President Johnson vetoed both bills as unconstitutional infringements of states’ rights, arguing that the “distinction of race and color” had been “made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.” For many Republicans, these vetoes were the last straw. “Those who formerly defended [the president] are now readiest in his condemnation,” said one moderate Republican. On April 6, 1866, Congress overrode Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill, the first time in U.S. history that a major piece of legislation was passed over the president’s objection. Three months later, Congress also overrode Johnson’s veto of the bill to extend the Freedmen’s Bureau. And Congressional Republicans were prepared to go even further, preparing a constitutional amendment to guarantee civil rights to Black southerners.

The Radicals in Congress sought an even more sweeping approach. Stevens and Sumner envisioned not just civil rights for African Americans but a total transformation of southern society. Sumner wanted to make sure that Black people in the South, who were now citizens, would not be denied the right to vote for lack of property, for he believed that this was the only way to give the Republican Party political power in that region. Stevens argued that if the vote was to have any meaning, it needed to be backed up with economic power. Echoing the demands of freedpeople, he called for confiscating the land of planters and distributing it among the formerly enslaved African Americans. “The whole fabric of southern society must be changed,” he proclaimed, “and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost.”

The best that the Radicals could achieve, however, was the Fourteenth Amendment, which passed both houses of Congress in June 1866. It granted full citizenship to African Americans and prohibited states from denying them “equal protection of the laws.” This alone was a sweeping transformation of the constitutional balance of power. Until now, states had been seen as the guardians of the rights of their citizens against the power of the federal government. Now the roles were reversed.

Still, states were not required to grant Black men suffrage. If they chose not to do so, however, their representation in Congress would be reduced in direct proportion. Most Republicans were not yet prepared to take the step of guaranteeing voting rights to Black men, and the Radicals were forced to go along.

One group of political activists took a different position. As the members of Congress worked to pass the Fourteenth Amendment, women’s rights activists called on them to place women and men—Black and white—on an equal footing. Congress refused to pressure states to grant voting rights to women and instead, for the first time, inserted the word male into the Constitution. Although the movement for women’s rights had long been intertwined with the abolitionist movement, women’s rights’ leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony broke with the abolitionists and began searching for other allies in their drive for the vote. This would soon lead to a series of internal conflicts among suffragists and complicate their relationships with advocates of both racial equality and labor advancement.

The concerns of women suffrage advocates were overshadowed, however, by the president’s appeal to southern legislatures to reject the Fourteenth Amendment. Encouraged by the president’s position, all but one southern state (ironically, Johnson’s home state of Tennessee) refused to ratify it. The congressional elections in the fall of 1866 thus became a referendum on the Fourteenth Amendment and Johnson’s approach to Reconstruction. The Union had won the war, but it now appeared to be losing the peace.

In the months leading up to the 1866 congressional campaign, anti-Black violence increased throughout the South. In Memphis, where a race riot erupted in May, the Union Army commander refused to intervene because, he claimed, “he had a large amount of public property to guard; that a considerable part of the troops he had were unreliable; that they hated Negroes too.” Although he initially had many African American troops under his command, he demobilized most Black soldiers stationed near the city in the months preceding the riot. A local white newspaper had then applauded the Union officer: “He knows the wants of the country, and sees the Negro can do the country more good in the cotton fields than in the [Army] camp.” In July 1866, Black laborers paraded in New Orleans to press their demands for equal suffrage to a convention writing a new state constitution. Hostile white mobs dispersed the marchers, and African American convention delegates as well as spectators and marchers were beaten and shot in the ensuing melee. A Congressional investigation later that year concluded that what began as a “riot,” ended as a “massacre,” in part because of the inaction of law enforcement agencies, army officers, and other government authorities.  The Memphis riot took the lives of forty-six African Americans; the one in New Orleans left 166 wounded and thirty-four Black people dead along with three of their white supporters.

The riots revealed what one northern newspaper called “the demoniac spirit of the southern whites toward the freedmen.” This naked brutality led to a stunning victory for the Republicans in the November elections. They held their three-to-one majority in Congress and retained power in every northern state as well as in West Virginia, Missouri, and Tennessee. And among Republicans, the Radicals were the biggest winners.

The Republican mandate in 1866 encouraged the Radicals to present an even more sweeping agenda. They failed to achieve their most radical aim—the redistribution of land—but they did finally convince moderates to join them in embracing Black voting rights. The Reconstruction Act of March 1867—the centerpiece of what became known as “Radical” Reconstruction—passed over President Johnson’s veto. The Act divided the former Confederate states into five military districts. In each state there would be constitutional conventions in which Black people would participate, backed up by protection from federal troops. These conventions were mandated to draft new constitutions, which had to include provisions for African American suffrage. Newly elected state legislatures were also required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment as a condition for their readmission to the Union.

The guarantee of Black voting rights seemed to many Americans to represent the final stage of a sweeping political revolution. In February 1867, a journalist writing in The Nation magazine summed up how the Civil War had revolutionized northern politics:

Six years ago, the North would have rejoiced to accept any mild restrictions upon the spread of slavery as a final settlement. Four years ago, it would have accepted peace upon the basis of gradual emancipation. Two years ago, it would have been content with emancipation and equal civil rights for the colored people without extension of the suffrage. One year ago, a slight extension of the suffrage would have satisfied it

Now Congress had overridden a presidential veto to enshrine African American suffrage in federal law.

The onset of Radical Reconstruction inaugurated a massive and unprecedented movement of freedpeople into the political arena. They staged strikes, rallies, and protests in cities all over the South during 1867—including Charleston, Savannah, Richmond, Mobile, and New Orleans, and small towns like Meridian, Mississippi, and Tuskegee, Alabama. The first organized expression of freedpeople’s political activity was the dramatic growth of the Union (or Loyal) League. The League had started as a national organization that encouraged the Union cause during the war. With passage of the Reconstruction Act, the Union League dispatched white and Black organizers all over the South to found local chapters. They functioned as political clubs, providing a civics education for new members and encouraging support for the Republican Party and its candidates.

These local chapters soon broadened the league’s mission to include more aggressive economic and political activities. They helped build schools and churches, organized militia companies to defend communities from white violence, and called strikes and boycotts for better wages and fairer labor contracts. A number of local chapters were even organized on an interracial basis. One such racially mixed league in North Carolina debated questions such as disfranchisement, debtor relief, and public education, which members expected to be raised in the forthcoming state constitutional convention.

In the fall of 1867, Southerners, Black and white, began electing delegates to these constitutional conventions. The participation of freedpeople was truly astonishing: women joined in local meetings to select candidates, between 70 and 90 percent of eligible Black men voted in every state in the South, and a total of 265 African Americans were elected as delegates. These conventions were of tremendous symbolic and practical importance. For the first time in U.S. history, Black and white people met together to prepare constitutions under which they would be governed. The constitutions they produced were among the most progressive in the nation. They established public schools for both races, created social welfare agencies, reformed the criminal law, and drew up codes that more equitably distributed the burden of taxation. Most important of all, the constitutions guaranteed Black civil and political rights, completing what one Texas newspaper called “the equal-rights revolution.”

The intensity of Black political participation demonstrated in these elections represented a dramatic turning point in southern politics. After 1867 the southern Republican Party won elections and dominated all of the new state governments. African Americans were prominent in many of these governments. Although they represented an actual majority only in South Carolina’s legislature, Black people held a total of six hundred legislative seats in southern states. Between 1868 and 1876, southern states elected fourteen Black representatives to the U.S. Congress, two Black U.S. senators, and six Black lieutenant governors. In addition, thousands of African Americans served local southern communities as supervisors, voter registrars, aldermen, mayors, magistrates, sheriffs and deputies, postal clerks, members of local school boards, and justices of the peace.

Unlike its northern counterpart, the southern Republican Party was, in the words of one Black Republican leader, "emphatically the poor man's party>'Ultimately the party came to include poor white as well as poor Black Southerners, but in 1867, nearly 80 percent of southern Republican voters were Black. Because of the Republican Party’s central role in emancipation and enfranchisement, freedpeople demonstrated a near fanatical loyalty to it, placing the party with the church and the school as a central community institution. George Houston, an Alabama Union League organizer and Sumter County voter registrar, proudly asserted: “I am a Republican, and I will die one.” The intensity of Houston’s commitment echoed across the South.

Moreover, although only African American men were granted the franchise, their wives and daughters considered voting to be a family affair. Some freedwomen continued to wield ballots in community meetings; and throughout the South, they influenced electoral politics by lobbying male voters, demanding that men use their new-found electoral rights, and accompanying voters to the polls on election day. Within African American communities, then, the ballot was seen as a collective, rather than an individual possession, and the Republican Party as an organization to which women as well as men declared their loyalty.

Most Black people elected to state and federal offices were educated, and many were free-born. At the local level, however, Black political leaders often emerged from the ranks of the freedmen. James Alston was a shoemaker and musician born into slavery in Macon County Alabama; he headed the Union League chapter Tuskegee, became the county registrar of voters, and later represented Macon County in the state legislature. Such small-town artisans possessed the skill and independence to represent the growing African American population in southern towns and villages as well as their rural constituents. Moreover, their work experience, which involved a good deal of contact with white people, helped them link the Black community with potential white allies.

How was the promise of full citizenship for African Americans both fulfilled and denied during the Reconstruction period?

White allies were essential. Only in South Carolina and Mississippi were Black people in the majority. To survive in the South, the Republican Party would need to develop a coalition that included some white support. Most visible among the white Republicans were those labeled “carpetbaggers.” Carpet-covered valises were used as luggage in the mid-nineteenth century, and white Southerners used the term carpetbaggers to refer to white Northerners who traveled south to gain money and power. Yet some so-called carpetbaggers were Black and anything but greedy. This was true of Martin Delany, who had risen to the rank of major in the Union Army and then served in the Freedmen’s Bureau before settling down in Charleston. Many white carpetbaggers were similarly sincere in their commitment to Black rights and Republican government.

Even more important to Republican successes in the South were the “scalawags”—white Southerners who supported the Republican Party and were thus viewed as traitors by many former Confederates. Some were wealthy planters who nevertheless believed that the South’s future must be built on industrialization, urbanization, and the construction of a wage-labor system. They sought governmental support for railroads, industry, and the establishment of a stable banking and currency system. But far more of the southern white Republicans were poor yeoman farmers from the mountain regions who had long resented the large planters’ monopoly on land, labor, and political power. The southern mountain region had been a stronghold of Unionist sentiment during the war, providing a vital link to postwar Republicanism.

Economic changes added a new ingredient to yeoman support for the Republicans. Before the war, many small southern farmers had lived largely outside the market economy, producing most of their own food and necessities of life. But after the war, many of them were drawn into cotton planting, just in time to be hit hard by catastrophic crop failures in 1866 and 1867. The passage of new state constitutions containing provisions for homesteading and debtor relief led these struggling white farmers to become Union League and Republican supporters.

Most of the Republican Party’s southern adherents, then, were poor people, Black and white, with a strong hostility to the planter aristocracy. In Georgia, the Republicans called on “poor men” to vote for the party of “relief, homesteads, and schools”; their nominee for governor proclaimed himself the “workingman’s candidate.” The “bottom rail” among both races voted overwhelmingly in 1867 and 1868 to reconstruct state governments and design laws to benefit all citizens.

During their period in power—from two years in Tennessee to eight in South Carolina—these Republican governments constructed the beginnings of a welfare state for their citizens. They created a public school system where none had existed before. These schools remained segregated by race and were better in the cities than in the countryside, but there was real progress nonetheless. By 1876, about half of all southern children—white and Black—were enrolled in school. And not only children went to school: a northern correspondent reported in 1873 that in Vicksburg, Mississippi, “female negro servants make it a condition before accepting a situation, that they should have permission to attend the night-schools.”

Although school integration made little progress, several Radical governments did pass laws banning racial discrimination in other public accommodations, notably streetcars, restaurants, and hotels. Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida made it illegal for railroads, hotels, and theaters to deny “full and equal rights” to any citizen. After 1869, South Carolina, with a Black majority in the Republican-controlled legislature, required equal treatment in all public accommodations and in any business chartered or licensed by municipal, state, or federal authority. Much of this legislation proved unenforceable, but it showed that Republicans were committed to ending legal segregation.

Laws helping both Black and white landless agricultural laborers were another achievement of Radical rule. Radical Republicans repealed the notorious Black Codes and passed lien laws that gave farmworkers (both Black and white) a first claim on crops if their employers went bankrupt. South Carolina went further, creating a state Land Commission with the power to buy land and resell it to landless laborers on long-term credit. By 1876, despite this commission’s initial mismanagement, fourteen thousand African American families (about one-seventh of the state’s Black population) had acquired homesteads, as had a handful of white families. Other states chose to increase the property-tax rate paid by large landowners, shifting some of the burden of new programs from poorer to wealthier residents.

Having local officials who sympathized with the plight of landless farmers proved especially beneficial to the rural poor. Locally elected magistrates and justices of the peace, many of them Black, negotiated contract disputes between planters and laborers—and usually decided in favor of the laborers. The poor thus gained a significant bargaining edge in their economic relations with employers. This became particularly clear in the late 1860s, when the economy improved and Black agricultural workers could command higher wages. With the repeal of the Black Codes by progressive state legislatures, “the power to control [Black labor] is gone,” lamented one white southern newspaper.

Their new bargaining power enabled freedpeople to negotiate compromises with planters on how the land would be worked and who would reap its bounty. Rather than working in gangs for wages, individual Black families now worked small plots independently, renting land from the planter for cash or, more commonly, for a fixed share of the year’s crop. By 1870, “sharecropping” had become the dominant form of Black agricultural labor, especially in the vast cotton lands. The system was a far cry from the freedpeople’s objective of owning their own land, and, later in the century, it became connected to a credit system that drastically reduced the workers’ economic freedom. But in the short run, sharecropping did free Black workers from the highly regimented gang-labor system, allowing them a good deal of control and autonomy over their work, their time, and their family arrangements.

These very real economic and legal gains would be short-lived, however. Members and potential supporters of the southern Republican Party were constantly dissatisfied. Because the party was a fragile coalition of wealthy ex-Whigs, northern politicians, rural freedpeople, free urban Black people, and poor white yeomen, it could not take any position without alienating at least part of its constituency. Its leaders, moreover, generally favored economic expansion. The promotion of transportation and industry, combined with large increases in state spending on schools and social programs, led to tremendous increases in taxes. This tax burden fell increasingly not only on the wealthy planters but also on poor white people who owned little property. Revelations of political corruption among southern Republicans seeking to gain from the state’s involvement in capitalist enterprise also contributed to the growing disaffection of white voters. And perhaps most importantly at this critical moment, the corruption provided Northerners with a rationale for losing interest in southern affairs. In 1869, Tennessee and Virginia became the first states to return to Democratic control, in a process that conservative whites called “redemption.”

How did popular art visualize Reconstruction’s promise of equality?

Two distinct forces converged to end Reconstruction. First, passage of the Reconstruction Act in 1867 had severely undercut the political power of the planter class, so they were now willing to turn to violence, economic intimidation, and fraud to regain political control of the South. Second, both northern public opinion and the northern Republican Party began to move sharply away from the original goals of Radical Reconstruction. Ordinary Northerners’ commitment to the political and civil rights of African Americans had dwindled, as indicated by Republican defeats in a number of northern states in 1867. Many Northerners were worn out by the long military and political battles and considered their obligation over when the most overt signs of southern resistance were removed. When a financial panic swept the nation in 1873, economic woes reinforced this sense of political exhaustion and caused many white northerners to refocus their attention on concerns closer to home. 

Economic issues loomed large even during Radical Reconstruction. Indeed, the first official sign of retreat from Reconstruction occurred on the economic front when Congress refused to confiscate planters’ lands and distribute them among the freedpeople. Throughout 1867, Radicals Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens had proposed a number of confiscation schemes. Echoing Thomas Jefferson, Stevens proclaimed, “Small independent landholders are the support and guardians of republican liberty.” But northern businessmen and moderate Republicans effectively blocked land redistribution efforts for two reasons. First, many firmly believed that government had no business redistributing property. Second, and perhaps more important, they feared the economic consequences of ending plantation production of raw cotton, which remained the nation’s single largest export and an important source of foreign revenue.

Other indications of waning enthusiasm for Reconstruction were apparent in the nation’s capital. In 1868, Radical Republicans persuaded the House of Representatives to impeach the president for his efforts to subvert the Reconstruction program. In the subsequent trial before the U.S. Senate, however, moderate Republicans cast the deciding votes, narrowly acquitting Johnson. His successor, Ulysses S. Grant, elected in 1868, was a popular Union Army general. Grant’s ascendancy to the presidency coincided with the emergence of a new group of moderate leaders in the Republican Party following the death of Thaddeus Stevens in 1868. These men, known as the “Stalwarts,” had none of the idealism of the Radical Republicans. Their sole objective was to maintain the power of the Republican Party. By 1870, the Stalwarts had stripped Stevens’s Radical Republican ally, Charles Sumner, of power.

By 1872, the end of Grant’s first term of office, it was starkly obvious that national Republican leaders were willing to abandon Black southerners in order to cultivate northern business support—support that depended on a revitalized southern economy. Northern politicians were prepared to retreat from social and political experimentation and leave the South’s economic revitalization in the hands of the former enslavers. Now Black Republican voters were the only remaining obstacle to the return of conservative white rule.

Initially, large planters tried to use their economic power to limit freedpeople’s political activities. In Alabama, for example, one landlord required two Black laborers to sign the following contract before he would hire them: “That said Laborers shall not attach themselves, belong to, or in any way perform any of the obligations required of what is known as the ‘Loyal League Society,’ or attend elections or political meetings without the consent of the employer.” Without land, African Americans depended on planters for employment, but even so, this economic pressure was not very successful. Another planter complained bitterly that the Civil War and the Radical program had totally destroyed “the natural influence of capital on labor, of employer on employee.” The result was that “negroes who will trust their white employers in all their personal affairs . . . are entirely beyond advice on all political issues.”

When economic pressure proved inadequate, planters turned to more violent methods of intimidation. Their most important and effective weapon was the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was, in essence, the paramilitary arm of the southern Democratic Party. Founded by Confederate veterans in Tennessee in 1866, the Klan grew rapidly after the advent of Radical Reconstruction. Although many of its rank-and-file members were poor men, its leaders were mainly prominent planters and their sons. As a white minister who traveled through Alabama reported in 1867:

They had lost their property, and worst of all, their slaves were made their equals and perhaps their superiors, to rule over them. They said there was an organization, already very extensive, that would rid them of this terrible calamity . . . the organization of the Ku Klux Klan . . . seemed to answer precisely the design expressed by these men.

By 1868 the Klan had a wide following across the South. The Klan terrorized individuals and freedpeople’s organizations. Nightriders targeted Black Civil War veterans and freedmen who had left their employers or complained about low wages. Freedpeople who had succeeded in breaking out of the plantation system and were renting or buying land on their own were in particular danger because they defied white supremacist assumptions of racial superiority and were often physically isolated. According to one Georgia freedman, “whenever a colored man acquires property and becomes in a measure independent, they take it from him.”

Hooded Klansmen broke up meetings, shot and lynched Union League leaders, and drove Black voters away from the polls all across the South. The targets of Klan violence were rarely chosen at random. James Alston, an early Union League organizer and by 1870 a Republican member of the Alabama legislature, reported that he was shot by the Klan because of his political activities. Alston had been one of five African American Radicals from his area who had gone to Washington for President Grant’s inauguration in 1869. When asked about the fate of the other four, he replied “I am the only man that is living. Everyone [else] is killed that went there to the inauguration of Grant.” Such targeted violence profoundly affected postwar politics. Even though African Americans fought back valiantly, the Klan succeeded in destroying Republican organizations and demoralizing entire communities of freedpeople.

Despite the Republicans’ general movement away from further intervention in the South, moderate Republicans were not yet ready to stand by and allow their party in the South to be terrorized and destroyed by violence. Congress finally acted in 1869 when members approved the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1870). This time, however, federal officials—already in retreat from Radical Reconstruction—enacted only a lukewarm compromise. The amendment declared that the right of U.S. citizens to vote could not “be denied or abridged” by any state “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” This careful wording left open the possibility of using numerous “nonracial” means, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, to restrict Black voting. Moreover, the amendment said nothing about the right to hold elective office.

In March 1871, a series of grisly events in Meridian, Mississippi, shocked the nation and galvanized Congress to act more forcefully. Three African American leaders who were organizing freedpeople to resist Klan nightriders had been arrested by the Meridian authorities. Charged with delivering “incendiary speeches,” they were put on trial. In the midst of the first day’s proceedings, shots rang out in the courtroom—probably fired by a white spectator—killing two of the defendants and the Republican judge. In the rioting that followed, thirty African Americans were brutally murdered.

A joint congressional committee appointed to hear testimony in Washington and across the South (including in Meridian) listened while witnesses estimated that the Klan had killed or beaten thousands of freedpeople and their white allies in the previous four years. They heard the wives and daughters of Black Republican leaders testify to being whipped and raped, often on more than one occasion and by more than one assailant.

Aghast at tales of such violence, and fearing the demise of the Republican Party in the South, Congress passed a series of enforcement acts imposing harsh penalties on those who used organized terrorism for political purposes. In April 1871 the Ku Klux Klan Act became law. For the first time, certain individual crimes against citizens’ rights were punishable under federal law. Later in the year, President Grant declared martial law in parts of South Carolina, and, although having earlier removed federal troops from many parts of the South, he dispatched U.S. Army units to the area. Hundreds of Klansmen were indicted and tried by the U.S. attorney general in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Mississippi. The federal government had broken the Klan’s back, at least temporarily. The election of 1872, which saw Grant reelected, was the most peaceful in the Reconstruction period.

But other groups rapidly arose to replace the KKK. The Democrats gambled that neither Congress nor the president would act decisively to prevent further political violence and fraud. The gamble paid off. After the 1872 election, Republicans in the North continued their steady retreat from the defense of African American rights.

The national economy was expanding rapidly, and the Republican Party now became closely attuned to the interests of business. Concerned with investment possibilities in the South, businessmen and their political allies became increasingly weary of Reconstruction. A reunion between affluent white people North and South was finally within reach. For African Americans and for poor white people, however, this newfound national unity among economic and political leaders meant that even the minimal protections afforded by federal troops and federal laws in the late 1860s and early 1870s were gradually withdrawn. Though small contingents of U.S. troops would remain in the South until 1877, Northerners and the federal government were clearly in retreat from their earlier support for Radical Reconstruction.

The large planters now engaged in their final battle to “redeem” the South, struggling largely against freedpeople who had declining resources and few allies. Planters initially justified their actions with overt appeals to racism. As one planter put it, “God intended the niggers to be slaves.” But the racism of their rhetoric cloaked another motivation: planters wanted a government-enforced system that would help them reassert control over agricultural workers. As one leading southern Democrat declared, “We must get control of our own labor.” In many areas of the South, the effort to regain control of Black people's lives and labors met substantial resistance from African Americans, sometimes in coalition with poor white people, throughout the late nineteenth century. Still, planters and their new industrial allies gradually achieved their main economic and political goals. As they did so, the South became a much more dangerous place for African Americans.

Beginning in 1873, those who still advocated the reconstruction of race and class relations confronted the longest period of uninterrupted economic contraction in U.S. history—fully sixty-five months, or over five years. The entire nation suffered as businesses failed, banks collapsed, and massive unemployment became widespread. (See Chapter 13) During the Panic of 1873, poor white people, new immigrants, and freedpeople alike saw their dreams of land ownership wither in the shadow cast by rapidly growing cities, wage labor, and long workdays. At the same time, many of the freedoms gained by Black southerners in the late 1860s and early 1870s slipped away.

Southern landowners and employers, under the protection of the newly empowered Democratic Party, curtailed the potential for mass mobilization of poor white people and Black people in rural areas or their unionization in urban ones. New criminal codes in Georgia and elsewhere declared insurrection and incitement to insurrection to be capital offenses. Most southern legislatures increased penalties for theft, broadened the definition of arson, made it illegal to ride a horse or mule without the owner’s permission, and restricted traditional access to land for the purpose of gathering wood, hunting, and fishing.

These codes were part of a larger pattern of discrimination that Democrats also directed against Black Republicans and their white allies. In 1875, the Democrats’ “Mississippi Plan” became a model for “redemption” in what was left of the reconstructed South: South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. The first step in this plan was to use economic pressure, social ostracism, and threats of physical violence to force the remaining white Republicans back into the Democratic Party. Democrats simply made it “too damned hot for [us] to stay out,” explained one white Republican who gave in to the pressure. The second step was to use a combination of economic and physical coercion to prevent African Americans from voting. One Democratic newspaper pledged to “carry the election peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must.” Landlords informed African American sharecroppers that they could expect no further work if they voted Republican. Democrats also organized rifle clubs and physically attacked Republican picnics and rallies. Such violence proved to be the Democrats’ most effective tool.

Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the scene of the worst political violence since the 1871 Klan murders in Meridian, Mississippi. In December 1874, responding to the continuing harassment of Republicans, Vicksburg’s African American sheriff called on local Black people to help maintain the peace. But they were outnumbered and outgunned. White terrorists attacked a group of armed Black deputies, killing thirty-five of them. With Black voters intimidated, the Democrats won the county elections that same month, and the violence continued. It was directed primarily at local Republican leaders such as Richard Gray in Noxubee County. According to a fellow Black Republican, Gray was “shot down walking on the pavements . . . because he was nominated for treasurer, and furthermore, because he made a speech and said he never did expect to vote a Democrat ticket, and also advised the colored citizens to do the same.”

In response to this reign of terror and to the appeals of African Americans, Mississippi governor Adelbert Ames organized a state militia. Black men all around the state volunteered to serve in it, but Ames hesitated to arm them, perhaps fearing that this step would only result in greater violence. Although Ames requested President Grant’s administration to send in federal troops, his request was denied. On election day, Republican supporters were thoroughly intimidated. Many stayed away from the polls, and the Democratic Party carried the state by thirty thousand votes. Mississippi had been “redeemed.”

The presidential election of 1876 brought down the final curtain on the long drama of political Reconstruction. The Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio, as their candidate. He was a moderate Republican with a respectable Civil War record and a reputation for honesty. The Democrats, focusing on the corruption scandals that had rocked the Grant administration, chose New York’s reform governor Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden had helped to break the grip of the notorious Tweed Ring in New York City. Although initial returns gave Tilden the election—including victories in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Indiana, and most of the former Confederacy—disputes about the votes from three southern states still in Republican hands (Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida) threw his victory into question. 

In February 1877, specially appointed electoral commission composed of ten congressmen and five Supreme Court justices—eight Republicans and seven Democrats—ruled eight to seven that the disputed votes in the three states belonged to Hayes. But there was no guarantee that the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives would accept this decision, and many felt the nation faced another civil war. Leading Republicans now moved to the fore, working out an understanding with southern Democrats in Congress to assure Hayes’s inauguration. In exchange for Democratic support, the Republicans promised to give southern Democrats a fair share of federal appointments and to remove the remaining federal troops from the South. They also agreed to provide federal assistance for southern railroad development, as a boon to industrialization and the creation of truly national markets. 

Hayes was inaugurated in March 1877, and in April he pulled out the few remaining federal troops from the capitals of Louisiana and South Carolina, allowing Democrats to return to power. Neither the southern Republican Party nor the freedpeople who were its most ardent supporters could rely any longer on federal protection against violence and intimidation.

 As one southern state after another was “redeemed,” those African Americans who could, left the South behind. Beginning in the mid-1870s, colonization schemes, which proposed migration to Africa or to midwestern states such as Kansas, became popular among freedpeople. Henry Adams, a Union Army veteran from Louisiana and a colonization organizer, claimed to have signed up sixty thousand Black people from all parts of the South. “This is a horrible part of the country,” he wrote. “It is impossible for us to live with these slaveholders of the South and enjoy the right as they enjoy it.” Although not many made the journey to Africa, tens of thousands of Black southerners did migrate to Kansas, taking their name from the Bible’s Book of Exodus. Few of these Exodusters succeeded in establishing themselves on Kansas farmland, however, and most had to settle for menial jobs in the state’s towns.

Life was indeed repressive in the South after Reconstruction ended, but the fact that thousands of freedpeople were able to emigrate at all indicates that they had at least succeeded in preventing the reinstitution of slavery. Moreover, many of the gains secured during the Civil War and Reconstruction could not be erased by redemption. African Americans came out of this era having won control over their family and religious lives; having secured, however briefly, national legal guarantees of equal rights, including suffrage; and, perhaps most important, having created a legacy of successful collective action that their heirs would draw upon in future struggles for civil rights. Nonetheless, by 1877 the free-labor society that Black Americans and their Radical Republican allies had tried to hard to create during Reconstruction had become but a distant ideal.

Growing numbers of African Americans entered the industrial labor force. Unfortunately, they joined the industrial age at the moment of its worst crisis of the century, which drastically limited African Americans’ opportunities to secure employment, especially in skilled jobs, much less to join labor unions. Yet even after the Panic of 1873 subsided, the reconciliation of political and business leaders from the North and South assured that few African Americans would benefit from the revitalization of commercial agriculture and industry. At the same time, the failure of the South and the nation to recognize the contributions that African Americans had made and could make economically, socially, culturally, and politically assured that the nation as a whole would suffer from the deeply-ingrained racism that thrived in the still unreconstructed United States.