Chapter Overview

Shortly after the war, Benjamin Montgomery, an extraordinary ex-slave, purchased the plantation of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Through energy and hard work, Montgomery became a leading planter in the postwar South during the period of Reconstruction, when the South was in the process of resuming its place in the Union. Montgomery's hopes and aspirations symbolized both the possibilities for significant change in the South and the ultimate challenge of Reconstruction. Would the newly freed slaves gain economic opportunity -- and the political power needed to secure it? More broadly, how would victorious North and vanquished South readjust their economic and political relations?

Presidential Reconstruction

Even during the war, Lincoln formulated plans for the restoration of the Union once the fighting was over. Lincoln favored a generous peace, since he was eager to bring states back into the Union and wanted to build up a Republican party in the South by attracting former Whigs. Radical Republicans in Congress, concerned about protecting the rights of former slaves and convinced that Congress should control re-admission, found Lincoln's plan too lenient. Lincoln vetoed a Radical plan in 1864, but by war's end he seemed to be moving in the direction of the Radicals.

Lincoln's assassination elevated Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat from Tennessee, to the presidency. Johnson moved in the summer of 1865 to implement a program less stringent even than Lincoln's original plan. Under Johnson's guidelines, all the former states of the Confederacy established new state governments in 1865. Yet southern whites refused to give blacks any political rights, instead passing a series of black codes, laws designed to keep blacks an uneducated, propertyless, agricultural laboring class. In addition, white southerners defiantly elected prominent former Confederates to office.

Congressional Radicals strongly disagreed with Johnson over securing the place of African-Americans in American society. Congress repudiated Johnson's program in December 1865, refusing to seat representatives from the former Confederate states. Moderate Republicans, who favored protecting black rights if not remaking southern society (as the Radical minority wanted), were driven by presidential vetoes into an alliance with the Radicals. Together they extended the life of the Freedmen's Bureau over Johnson's veto in order to provide assistance to former slaves and passed the Fourteenth Amendment. This amendment made blacks citizens, and extended basic civil rights to all citizens, indirectly opening the possibility for black male suffrage. Tennessee ratified the amendment, and was promptly readmitted to the Union. The remaining ten states of the old Confederacy refused and remained under military rule. Johnson took his case against Congress to the northern people in the fall elections of 1866. To his dismay, Republicans won a sweeping victory; with two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress, they could now override any presidential veto.

Congressional Reconstruction

Given a popular mandate, Republicans in Congress proceeded to enact their own program of Reconstruction, requiring the unreconstructed states to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and adopt black suffrage. States that delayed the process were forced to do so. Congress refused, however, to redistribute land to freed slaves, believing that giving blacks the ballot was sufficient.

Johnson tried to obstruct the Congressional program by interpreting laws as narrowly as possible. When the president attempted to remove Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Radical, in defiance of the new Tenure of Office Act, the House finally impeached Johnson. He was acquitted in the Senate by one vote. Those who voted for acquittal were uneasy about using the impeachment process to resolve a political dispute between the two branches of government.

Reconstruction in the South

Under Congress' program, radical governments, representing new Republican coalitions, assumed power in the South. None was controlled by black southerners, though blacks did serve. Ranging widely in ability, black officeholders generally came from the top rungs of African-American society.

In most southern states, black voters did not form a majority. Republicans needed white support as well. Native white southerners who joined the party were branded scalawags; they were often Unionists from the hill counties or former Whigs attracted by the party's economic nationalism. Northerners who came South after the war and held public office were derisively referred to as carpetbaggers. Contrary to their image, they were not all poor and self-interested. Less swayed by racial feelings than were southern-born white Republicans, they disproportionately held the highest offices in the Republican regimes.

The new southern state constitutions adopted some important reforms, most notably the establishment of public schools, and granted black suffrage. But they were cautious on the issue of social equality and did not forbid segregation.

The southern Republican governments confronted the problem of rebuilding the war-ravaged South. They sought to encourage industrialization and expand the railroad network. Taxes went up with expenditures, and these governments came under heavy attack for corruption. Corruption certainly existed -- indeed, it was a nationwide problem -- but opponents exaggerated its extent for partisan purposes. In truth, the major objection of opponents to these governments was that they shared power with blacks.

Black Aspirations

Initially, black southerners thought of freedom largely as a contrast to slavery: the freedom to move about to work where they wished, to be free from physical punishment and the breakup of families. In freedom, blacks moved to strengthen their families, pursue education, and establish their own churches. They negotiated new working conditions with white landlords, refusing to live in the old slave quarters or work in gangs under the supervision of an overseer. Eventually the system of sharecropping evolved as the way to organize black agricultural labor -- a higher status arrangement but harshly exploitative. The Freedmen's Bureau supervised the contracts between white landlords and black workers, and special Freedmen's Courts adjudicated disputes. The Bureau's record in protecting blacks varied considerably, but in general it had only limited success, due largely to the fact that Congress let it expire.

Planters responded to emancipation by seeking physical and psychological separation from former slaves. They discarded the old paternalist ideal in favor of segregation. Less prosperous than before the war, they developed a new way of life based on segregation and sharecropping.

The Abandonment of Reconstruction

In 1868 the Republicans successfully nominated Ulysses S. Grant for president. Grant would come to symbolize a waning of the zeal to enforce and maintain Reconstruction. Republicans tried to make Reconstruction more secure by passing the Fifteenth Amendment, which forbade a state from denying the right to vote on grounds of race, though women's suffrage advocates regretted that discrimination based on gender was not included.

Grant lacked the skill or moral commitment to make Reconstruction succeed. Scandals rocked his administration, creating widespread popular disenchantment and fostering the Liberal Republican revolt in 1872. As charges of corruption swelled and disorder continued unabated in the South, northern public opinion, which never had much faith in the abilities of former slaves, became increasingly disillusioned with Reconstruction. In addition, the beginning of a severe depression in 1874 directed public attention closer to home and gave Democrats control of the House for the first time since 1861.

With the northern commitment weakening, white southerners stepped up their assault on the radical governments in the South. They used social ostracism, economic pressure, and racist appeals to undermine Republican support. Their most effective weapon, however, was terror and violence directed against Republican leaders and black voters. The constant violence in the South during elections further weakened the northern commitment to Reconstruction.

In the end, this combination of southern white terror and northern white weariness -- and a political deal -- combined to end Reconstruction. The 1876 presidential election failed to produce a clear winner. A special electoral commission by a straight party vote declared Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the winner. To secure their victory, in private negotiations Republicans had agreed to restore home rule in the South in exchange for Hayes' election. This deal became known as the Compromise of 1877. Once in office, Hayes dutifully withdrew support for the remaining radical governments in the South and they collapsed. Every southern state had been "redeemed" by 1877; Reconstruction was at an end. The antebellum reform impulse had eroded, and a new materialism turned attention from protecting black rights. Republicans split over tactics: Blacks themselves lacked education and experience. By both weakening northern resolve and stimulating southern white resistance, racism played a major role in the failure of Reconstruction. One isolated symbol of this failure came in 1878, when Benjamin Montgomery lost his land -- to Jefferson Davis.