Episode 21: Reconstruction
Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course
U.S. History and huzzah! The Civil War is
over!
The slaves are free! Huzzah! That one hit
me in the head? It’s very dangerous, Crash
Course.
So when you say, “Don’t aim at a person,”
that includes myself?
The roller coaster only goes up from here,
my friends. Huzzah!
Mr. Green, Mr. Green, what about the epic
failure of Reconstruction?
Oh, right. Stupid Reconstruction always ruining
everything
intro
So after the Civil War ended, the United States
had to reintegrate both a formerly slave population
and a formerly rebellious population back
into the country, which is a challenge that
we might’ve met, except Abraham Lincoln
was assassinated and we were left with Andrew
“I am the Third Worst President Ever”
Johnson.
I’m sorry, Abe, but you don’t get to be
in the show anymore.
So, Lincoln’s whole post-war idea was to
facilitate reunion and reconciliation, and
Andrew Johnson’s guiding Reconstruction
principle was that the South never had a right
to secede in the first place.
Also, because he was himself a Southerner,
he resented all the elites in the South who
had snubbed him, AND he was also a racist
who didn’t think that blacks should have
any role in Reconstruction. TRIFECTA!
So between 1865 and 1867, the so-called period
of Presidential Reconstruction, Johnson appointed
provisional governors and ordered them to
call state conventions to establish new all-white
governments.
And in their 100% whiteness and oppression
of former slaves, those new governments looked
suspiciously like the old confederate governments
they had replaced.
And what was changing for the former slaves?
Well, in some ways, a lot. Like, Fiske and
Howard universities were established, as well
as many primary and secondary schools, thanks
in part to The Freedman’s Bureau, which
only lasted until 1870, but had the power
to divide up confiscated and abandoned confederate
land for former slaves.
And this was very important because to most
slaves, land ownership was the key to freedom,
and many felt like they’d been promised
land by the Union Army. Like, General Sherman’s
Field Order 15, promised to distribute land
in 40 acre plots to former slaves.
But that didn’t happen, either through the
Freedman’s Bureau or anywhere else. Instead,
President Johnson ordered all land returned
to its former owners. So the South remained
largely agricultural with the same people
owning the same land, and in the end, we ended
up with sharecropping. Let’s go to the Thought
Bubble.
The system of sharecropping replaced slavery
in many places throughout the South. Landowners
would provide housing to the sharecroppers--no,
Thought Bubble, not quite that nice. There
ya go--also tools and seed, and then the sharecroppers
received, get this, a share of their crop--usually
between a third and a half, with the price
for that harvest often set by the landowner.
Freed blacks got to control their work, and
plantation owners got a steady workforce that
couldn’t easily leave, because they had
little opportunity to save money and make
the big capital investments in, like, land
or tools. By the late 1860s, poor white farmers
were sharecropping as well--in fact, by the
Great Depression, most sharecroppers were
white. And while sharecropping certainly wasn’t
slavery, it did result in a quasi-serfdom
that tied workers to land they didn’t own--more
or less the opposite of Jefferson’s ideal
of the small, independent farmer.
So, the Republicans in Congress weren’t
happy that this reconstructed south looked
so much like the pre-Civil War south, so they
took the lead in reconstruction after 1867.
Radical Republicans felt the war had been
fought for equal rights and wanted to see
the powers of the national government expanded.
Few were as radical as Thaddeus “Tommy Lee
Jones” Stephens who wanted to take away
land from the Southern planters and give it
to the former slaves, but rank-and-file Republicans
were radical enough to pass the Civil Rights
Bill, which defined persons born in the United
States as citizens and established nationwide
equality before the law regardless of race.
Andrew Johnson immediately vetoed the law,
claiming that trying to protect the rights
of African Americans amounted to discrimination
against white people, which so infuriated
Republicans that Congress did something it
had never done before in all of American history.
They overrode the Presidential veto with a
2/3rds majority and the Civil Rights Act became
law.
So then Congress really had its dander up
and decided to amend the Constitution with
the 14th amendment, which defines citizenship,
guarantees equal protection, and extends the
rights in the Bill of Rights to all the states
(sort of). The amendment had almost no Democratic
support, but it also didn’t need any, because
there were almost no Democrats in Congress
on account of how Congress had refused to
seat the representatives from the “new”
all-white governments that Johnson supported.
And that’s how we got the 14th amendment,
arguably the most important in the whole Constitution.
Thanks, Thought Bubble. Oh, straight to the
mystery document today? Alright. The rules
here are simple.
I guess the author of the Mystery Document
and try not to get shocked. Alright let’s
see what we’ve got today.
Sec. 1. Be it ordained by the police jury
of the parish of St. Landry, That no negro
shall be allowed to pass within the limits
of said parish without special permit in writing
from his employer.
Sec. 4. . . . Every negro is required to be
in the regular service of some white person,
or former owner, who shall be held responsible
for the conduct of said negro..
Sec. 6. . . . No negro shall be permitted
to preach, exhort, or otherwise declaim to
congregations of colored people, without a
special permission in writing from the president
of the police jury. . . .
Gee, Stan, I wonder if the President of the
Police Jury was white. I actually know this
one. It is a Black Code, which was basically
legal codes where they just replaced the word
“slave” with the word “negro.”
And this code shows just how unwilling white
governments were to ensure the rights of new,
free citizens.
I would celebrate not getting shocked, but
now I am depressed.
So, okay, in 1867, again over Johnson’s
veto, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act,
which divided the south into 5 military districts
and required each state to create a new government,
one that included participation of black men.
Those new governments had to ratify the 14th
amendment if they wanted to get back into
the union. Radical Reconstruction had begun.
So, in 1868, Andrew Johnson was about as electable
in the U.S. as Jefferson Davis, and sure enough
he didn’t win. Instead, the 1868 election
was won by Republican and former Union general
Ulysses S. Grant.
But Grant’s margin of victory was small
enough that Republicans were like, “Man,
we would sure win more elections if black
people could vote.” Which is something you
hear Republicans say all the time these days.
So Congressional Republicans pushed the 15th
Amendment, which prohibited states from denying
men the right to vote based on race, but not
based on gender or literacy or whether your
grandfather could vote.
So states ended up with a lot of leeway when
it came to denying the franchise to African
Americans, which of course they did.
So here we have the federal government dictating
who can vote, and who is and isn’t a citizen
of a state, and establishing equality under
the law--even local laws. And this is a really
big deal in American history, because the
national government became, rather than a
threat to individual liberty, “the custodian
of freedom,” as Radical Republican Charles
Sumner put it.
So but with this legal protection, former
slaves began to exercise their rights. They
participated in the political process by direct
action, such as staging sit-ins to integrate
street-cars, by voting in elections, and by
holding office.
Most African Americans were Republicans at
the time, and because they could vote and
were a large part of the population, the Republican
party came to dominate politics in the South,
just like today, except totally different.
Now, Southern mythology about the age of radical
Reconstruction is exemplified by Gone with
the Wind, which of course tells the story
of northern Republican dominance and corruption
by southern Republicans.
Fortune seeking northern carpetbaggers, seen
here, as well as southern turncoat scalawags
dominated politics and all of the African
American elected leaders were either corrupt
or puppets or both.
Yeah, well, like the rest of Gone with the
Wind, that’s a bit of an oversimplification.
There were about 2,000 African Americans who
held office during Reconstruction, and the
vast majority of them were not corrupt.
Consider for example the not-corrupt and amazingly-named
Pinckney B.S. Pinchback, who from 1872 to
1873 served very briefly in Louisiana as America’s
first black governor. And went on to be a
senator and a member of the House of Representatives.
By the way, America’s second African American
governor, Douglas Wilder of Virginia was elected
in 1989.
Having African American officeholders was
a huge step forward in term of ensuring the
rights of African Americans because it meant
that there would be black juries and less
discrimination in state and local governments
when it came to providing basic services.
But in the end, Republican governments failed
in the South. There were important achievements,
especially a school system that, while segregated,
did attempt to educate both black and white
children.
And even more importantly, they created a
functioning government where both white and
African American citizens could participate.
According to one white South Carolina lawyer,
“We have gone through one of the most remarkable
changes in our relations to each other that
has been known, perhaps, in the history of
the world.”
That’s a little hyperbolic, but we are America
after all.
(libertage)
It’s true that corruption was widespread,
but it was in the North, too. I mean, we’re
talking about governments.
And that’s not why Reconstruction really
ended: It ended because 1. things like schools
and road repair cost money, which meant taxes,
which made Republican governments very unpopular
because Americans hate taxes,
and 2. White southerners could not accept
African Americans exercising basic civil rights,
holding office or voting.
And for many, the best way to return things
to the way they were before reconstruction
was through violence.
Especially after 1867, much of the violence
directed toward African Americans in the South
was politically motivated. The Ku Klux Klan
was founded in 1866 and it quickly became
a terrorist organization, targeting Republicans,
both black and white, beating and murdering
men and women in order to intimidate them
and keep them from voting.
The worst act of violence was probably the
massacre at Colfax, Louisiana where hundreds
of former slaves were murdered.
And between intimidation and emerging discriminatory
voting laws, fewer black men voted, which
allowed white Democrats to take control of
state governments in the south, and returned
white Democratic congressional delegations
to Washington.
These white southern politicians called themselves
“Redeemers” because they claimed to have
redeemed the south from northern republican
corruption and black rule.
Now, it’s likely that the South would have
fallen back into Democratic hands eventually,
but the process was aided by Northern Republicans
losing interest in Reconstruction.
In 1873, the U.S. fell into yet another not-quite-Great
economic depression and northerners lost the
stomach to fight for the rights of black people
in the south, which in addition to being hard
was expensive.
So by 1876 the supporters of reconstruction
were in full retreat and the Democrats were
resurgent, especially in the south. And this
set up one of the most contentious elections
in American history.
The Democrats nominated New York Governor
(and NYU Law School graduate) Samuel Tilden.
The Republicans chose Ohio governor (and Kenyon
College alumnus) Rutherford B. Hayes.
One man who’d gone to Crash Course writer
Raoul Meyer’s law school. And another who’d
gone to my college, Kenyon.
Now, if the election had been based on facial
hair, as elections should be, there would’ve
been no controversy, but sadly we have an
electoral college here in the United States,
and in 1876 there were disputed electoral
votes in South Carolina, Louisiana, and, of
course, Florida.
Now you might remember that in these situations,
there is a constitutional provision that says
Congress should decide the winner, but Congress,
shockingly, proved unable to accomplish something.
So they appointed a 15 man Electoral Commission--a
Super-Committee, if you will. And there were
8 Republicans on that committee and 7 Democrats,
so you will never guess who won. Kenyon College’s
own Rutherford B. Hayes.
Go Lords and Ladies! And yes, that is our
mascot. Shut up.
Anyway in order to get the Presidency and
win the support of the supercommittee, Hayes’
people agreed to cede control of the South
to the Democrats and to stop meddling in Southern
affairs and also to build a transcontinental
railroad through Texas.
This is called the Bargain of 1877 because
historians are so good at naming things and
it basically killed Reconstruction.
Without any more federal troops in Southern
states and with control of Southern legislatures
firmly in the hands of white democrats the
states were free to go back to restricting
the freedom of black people, which they did.
Legislatures passed Jim Crow laws that limited
African American’s access to public accommodations
and legal protections.
States passed laws that took away black people’s
right to vote and social and economic mobility
among African Americans in the south declined
precipitously.
However, for a brief moment, the United States
was more democratic than it had ever been
before. And an entire segment of the population
that had no impact on politics before was
now allowed to participate.
And for the freedmen who lived through it,
that was a monumental change, and it would
echo down to the Civil Rights movement in
the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes called the
second reconstruction.
But we’re gonna end this episode on a downer,
as we are wont to do here at Crash Course
US History because I want to point out a lesser-known
legacy of Reconstruction.
The Reconstruction amendments and laws that
were passed granted former slaves political
freedom and rights, especially the vote, and
that was critical.
But to give them what they really wanted and
needed, plots of land that would make them
economically independent, would have required
confiscation, and that violation of property
rights was too much for all but the most radical
Republicans.
And that question of what it really means
to be “free” in a system of free market
capitalism has proven very complicated indeed.
I’ll see you next week.
Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan
Muller. Our script supervisor is Meredith
Danko. The associate producer is Danica Johnson.
The show is written by my high school history
teacher, Raoul Meyer, and myself. And our
graphics team is Thought Café.
Every week there’s a new caption for the
libertage. You can suggest those in comments
where you can also ask questions about today’s
video that will be answered by our team of
historians. Thank you for watching Crash Course.
Don’t forget to subscribe. And as we say
in my hometown, don’t forget to be awesome.
reconstruction -
This page was last edited on 23 January 2021, at 08:58