American Civil War And Reconstruction
Chiquita Palafox
The Reconstruction era was a period in United States history following the American Civil War, dominated by the legal, social, and political challenges of abolishing slavery and reintegrating the eleven former Confederate States of America into the United States. During this period, three amendments were added to the United States Constitution to grant equal civil rights to the newly freed slaves. Despite this, former Confederate states often used poll taxes, literacy tests, and terrorism to discourage or prevent voting and intimidate and control people of color.[2]
Starting with the outbreak of war, the Union was confronted with how to administer captured territories and handle the steady stream of slaves escaping to Union lines. In many cases, the United States Army played a vital role in establishing a free labor economy in the South, protecting freedmen's legal rights, and creating educational and religious institutions. Despite reluctance to interfere with the institution of slavery, Congress passed the Confiscation Acts to seize Confederates' slaves, providing the legal basis for President Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Congress later established a Freedmen's Bureau to provide much-needed food and shelter to the newly freed slaves.
Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, just as fighting was drawing to a close. He was replaced by President Andrew Johnson. Johnson vetoed numerous radical bills, pardoned thousands of Confederate leaders, and allowed Southern states to pass draconian Black Codes that greatly restricted the rights of freedmen. This outraged many Northerners and stoked fears that the Southern elite would regain its political power. Radical Republican candidates swept the 1866 midterm elections and achieved large majorities in both houses of Congress.
The radical Republicans then took the initiative by passing the Reconstruction Acts in 1867 over Johnson's vetoes, setting out the terms by which they could be readmitted to the Union. Constitutional conventions held throughout the South gave Black men the right to vote. New state governments were established by a coalition of freedmen, supportive white Southerners, and Northern transplants. They were opposed by "Redeemers," who sought to reestablish white supremacy and Democratic Party control in Southern government and society. Violent groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and Red Shirts, engaged in paramilitary insurgency and terrorism to disrupt the Reconstruction governments and terrorize Republicans.[3] Congressional anger at President Johnson's repeated attempts to veto radical legislation led to his impeachment, although he was not removed from office.
Under Johnson's successor, President Ulysses S. Grant, radicals passed additional legislation to enforce civil rights, such as the Ku Klux Klan Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. However, continued resistance from Southern Whites and the cost of Reconstruction rapidly lost support in the North during the Grant administration. The 1876 presidential election was marked by widespread Black voter suppression in the South, and the result was close and contested. An Electoral Commission resulted in the Compromise of 1877, which awarded the election to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes on the understanding that Federal troops would be withdrawn from the South, effectively bringing Reconstruction to an end. Post-Civil War efforts to enforce federal civil rights protections in the South ended in 1890 with the failure of the Lodge Bill.
Historians continue to debate the legacy of Reconstruction. Criticism focuses on the early failure to prevent violence and problems of corruption, starvation, and disease. Union policy is criticized as too brutal toward freed slaves and too lenient toward former slaveholders.[4] However, Reconstruction is credited with restoring the federal Union, limiting reprisals against the South, and establishing a legal framework for racial equality via the constitutional rights to national birthright citizenship, due process, equal protection of the laws, and male suffrage regardless of race.[5]
The Reconstruction era is typically dated from the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 until the withdrawal of the final federal troops stationed in the South in 1877.[6][7] However, historians have proposed different start and end dates for the Reconstruction era, and the exact period of Reconstruction may vary depending on the state or subject.[citation needed]
In the twentieth century, most scholars of the Reconstruction era began their review in 1865, with the end of formal hostilities between the North and South. However, in his landmark monograph Reconstruction, historian Eric Foner proposed 1863, starting with the Emancipation Proclamation, Port Royal Experiment, and the earnest debate of Reconstruction policies during the Civil War.[8][9] Many historians[who?] now follow this 1863 periodization.[7]
The Reconstruction Era National Historical Park proposed 1861 as a starting date, interpreting Reconstruction as beginning "as soon as the Union captured territory in the Confederacy" at Fort Monroe in Virginia and in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. According to historians Downs and Masur, "Reconstruction began when the first US soldiers arrived in slaveholding territory, and enslaved people escaped from plantations and farms, some of them fleeing into free states, and others trying to find safety with US forces." Soon afterwards, early discourse and experimentation began in earnest regarding Reconstruction policies. The Reconstruction policies provided opportunities to enslaved Gullah populations in the Sea Islands who became free overnight on November 7, 1861, after the Battle of Port Royal when all the white residents and slaveholders fled the area after the arrival of the Union. After the Battle of Port Royal, reconstruction policies were implemented under the Port Royal Experiment which were education, landownership, and labor reform. This transition to a free society was called "Rehearsal for Reconstruction."[10][11][12][13]
The conventional end of Reconstruction is 1877, when the federal government withdrew the last troops stationed in the South as part of the Compromise of 1877.[7] However, some scholars[who?] offer later dates, such as 1890, when Republicans failed to pass the Lodge Bill to secure voting rights in the South.[13]
In the American Civil War, the state governments of eleven southern states, all of which permitted the practice of slavery, seceded from the United States following the election of President Abraham Lincoln and formed the Confederate States of America. Though Lincoln initially declared secession "legally void" and declined to negotiate with Confederate delegates to Washington, following the Confederate assault on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, Lincoln declared "an extraordinary occasion" existed in the South and raised an army to quell "combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings." Over the next four years, 237 named battles were fought between the Union and Confederate armies, resulting in the dissolution of the Confederate States in 1865. During the war, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that "all persons held as slaves" within the Confederate territory "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."[citation needed]
The Civil War had immense social implications for the United States. Emancipation had altered the legal status of 3.5 million persons, threatened the end of the plantation economy of the South, and provoked questions regarding the legal and social inequality of the races in the United States. The end of the war was accompanied by a large migration of newly freed people to the cities,[14] where they were relegated to the lowest paying jobs, such as unskilled and service labor. Men worked as rail workers, rolling and lumber mills workers, and hotel workers. Black women were largely confined to domestic work employed as cooks, maids, and child nurses, or in hotels and laundries. The large population of slave artisans during the prewar period did not translate into a large number of free artisans during Reconstruction.[15] The dislocations had a severe negative impact on the Black population, with a large amount of sickness and death.[16]
During the war, Lincoln experimented with land reform by giving land to African-Americans in South Carolina. Having lost their enormous investment in slaves, plantation owners had minimal capital to pay freedmen workers to bring in crops. As a result, a system of sharecropping was developed, in which landowners broke up large plantations and rented small lots to the freedmen and their families. Thus, the main structure of the Southern economy changed from an elite minority of landed gentry slaveholders into a tenant farming agriculture system.[17]
The enormous cost of the Confederate war effort took a high toll on the region's economic infrastructure. The direct costs in human capital, government expenditures, and physical destruction totaled $3.3 billion. By early 1865, the Confederate dollar had nearly zero value, and the Southern banking system was in collapse by the war's end. Where scarce Union dollars could not be obtained, residents resorted to a barter system.[17]
From its origins, questions existed as to the legal significance of the Civil War, whether secession had actually occurred, and what measures, if any, were necessary to restore the governments of the Confederate States. For example, throughout the conflict, the United States government recognized the legitimacy of a unionist government in Virginia led by Francis Harrison Pierpont out of Wheeling. (This recognition was rendered moot when the Pierpont government separated the northwestern counties of the state and sought admission as West Virginia.) As additional territory came under Union control, reconstructed governments were established in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Debates over legal reconstruction focused on whether secession was legally valid, the implications of secession for the nature of the seceded states, and the legitimate method of their readmission to the Union.[citation needed]
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