Origin of the States, Supplemental 7: Reconstruction

Here is one last supplemental to my "Origin of the States" narrative, the fourth supplemental in a Civil War sequence and the seventh overall. We'll call it part 35.6 of 50 in a sporadic series

 

Editor's Note: I don't always identify the picture I use in this series, but this is a house displaying a Confederate battle flag in Franklin Grove, Illinois. Which didn't secede. The "Lost Cause" narrative is pervasive, even now. I had been hoping to have a relevant picture from South Carolina to use by now, but we didn't take that trip.

 

Hey! The Civil War's over! We came through Hell and survived! So we must have solved the problems of institutional racism and the destabilizing nature of "states' rights" philosophy, right? Right?

 

Oh.

 

Abraham Lincoln beat ex-General George "Cement Foot" McClellan in the presidential election of 1864 and won a second term as the 16th President of the United States. At his inauguration four months later -- barely a month before Bob Lee sat down at Appomattox with U.S. Grant -- Lincoln stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and gave a speech about forgiveness. Yes, the war was ending, Lincoln said, and the Union would endure, but this wasn't a time for some Northern victory dance filled with triumphant celebration. The nation had been torn apart and punished for the evils of slavery, and there was no glory here to celebrate. It was time for North and South to come together and reconcile their differences. The last line of this speech is perhaps the most enduring. "With malice toward none," Lincoln said, "with charity for all ... let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

 

Some historians suggest Lincoln's conciliatory tone was meant to foreshadow the gentle path he planned to take toward the reunification of the country, a process that came to be known as "Reconstruction." Lincoln had two big tasks to accomplish with Reconstruction. One, he needed to figure out how to bring the rebellious states back into the national fold, and two, he had to figure out how to integrate four million suddenly freed slaves into the larger society. There was plenty of debate over what this Reconstruction would look like. The victorious Union leaders started looking for pounds of flesh while the beaten Confederates worked to spin defeat into whatever kind of half-victory they could muster. Many in the North thought they should exact harsh retribution against the South, and some wanted Confederate leaders hanged as traitors. Some questioned whether the privileges of true statehood should be returned to the secessionist states at all. But Lincoln had seen enough of anger, and he meant to have the nation bind together in peace.

 

How or whether he would have managed that, we'll never know. A mere six days after Lee surrendered to Grant, a disgruntled actor with Southern sympathies crept into a theatre balcony and shot Lincoln in the back of the head, ending the planned reconciliation of Lincoln's imagination. Lincoln had held the nation together, but other people would have to figure out what that meant. Ultimately, it all turned into a big mess, and a lot of things we'd fought a war to settle were never really worked out at all. We're still working a lot of it out today.

 

President Johnson

 

One of the weird things about the Civil War is that when it ended, a man from the losing side became President.

 

During Lincoln's first term, the vice president had been a man from Maine named Hannibal Hamlin. But though Hamlin spent his vice presidency working hard to help push Lincoln's legislative agenda through Congress, he and Lincoln had never been all that close. Hamlin was one of those guys who wanted to take a hard line that forced the Southern states to accept the reality of freed slaves as true citizens, but he was a little too extreme for Lincoln's agenda of gentle reconciliation. So Lincoln -- who I'll remind you was a Republican -- decided to replace Hamlin with Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat. Which, yeah, is kind of absurd.

 

Andrew Johnson had been a U.S. senator from Tennessee when the war kicked off, and he was the only one of the 22 Southern senators who didn't quit as soon as his home state seceded. He'd loudly voiced his opposition to secession in the days leading up to the war, and after Nashville fell to Union forces in 1862, he served as Tennessee's Union-appointed military governor. The way Lincoln saw it, having a guy like Andrew Johnson as his vice president would be a big step toward showing that "malice toward none" was more than just a sound bite.

 

The obvious risk with that scheme was that somebody might shoot Lincoln in the back of the head, leaving a Southern Democrat who had until just recently owned a bunch of slaves to handle Reconstruction.

 

That's the thing about Johnson. Sure, he'd been opposed to secession, and he worked hard trying to keep Tennessee in the Union, but he was a BIG fan of slavery and an even bigger fan of states' rights. He was the classic Southern racist, and he saw little reason for some minor disagreement like the Civil Freakin' War to motivate Southerners to change their ways. I mean, yeah, Southerners couldn't keep slaves any more (probably), but that didn't mean they had to treat black people like they were human or something.

 

Basically, Johnson's plan for Reconstruction was to have the former Confederate states welcomed back into the fold like nothing had ever happened, and he kicked things off by telling all the rebel states to go ahead and elect whatever state legislators and governors and U.S. congressmen and senators they wanted. Predictably, the Southern states were big fans of this approach, and they all elected a bunch of the same old people who'd held these offices before the war, some of whom had been actively shooting at Union soldiers only a few months earlier.

 

These new-old legislatures immediately started coming up with all sorts of ways to effectively keep slavery going while calling it something else. States across the South spent 1865 and 1866 inventing "Black Codes," which differed from state to state -- states' rights, you know -- but all had the goal of keeping freed slaves subservient to white society. Black people couldn't buy, sell, or own property in most Southern states, and their movement was heavily restricted. The Southern states focused heavily on laws against "vagrancy" among freed slaves, which the law defined as simply not having a job recognized by white folk. Black people who didn't work enough could be arrested. Those convicted of vagrancy -- which was pretty much everybody arrested -- would then be sentenced to forced labor and doled out by counties or municipalities to private landowners still dependent on free labor to work as unpaid field hands. Which is a nicer way of saying, "slave."

 

The Northern reaction to this was also predictable, and Northerners in congress railed against President Johnson's so-called plan. "I mean, come on, people," they said. "We just fought a big ass war over this." They set about passing bills to force a harder line on the South, things like the Civil Rights Act of 1865 and the Second Freedmen's Bureau Bill, which allowed a wartime agency designed to integrate freed slaves into society to continue operating after the war's end. But Andrew Johnson vetoed all these bills, and Southern whites grew more angry and more bold. White folks rioted against freed blacks in places like Memphis and New Orleans. The first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan appeared and started burning their first crosses and holding their first lynchings. (I guess the President figured there were good people on both sides.)

 

Radical Republicans

 

Things flipped in late 1866, when the November midterm elections filled Congress with an unbreakable majority of Radical Republicans. These were people more in line with Hamlin than Lincoln, people who had always believed the South would only accept the Civil War's outcome when forced. Andrew Johnson's attempt at easy Reconstruction had only proven the point, so now it was time for Reconstruction to turn radical.

 

The most immediate consequence of the election of 1866 was that the Radical Republicans had a large enough numerical majority to negate any Presidential veto, so they just overturned all the vetoes Johnson had issued the previous year. They refused to seat any elected representative from the South who had fought for the Confederate army, and they demanded that former Confederate states pass laws to guarantee the civil rights and safety of freed slaves as a condition of readmittance to the Union. They passed the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution granting freed slaves all the rights of full citizenship and prohibiting states from denying the right to vote based on race, then forced the Confederate states to ratify the amendments. They passed the four Reconstruction Acts, which set down a whole slew of requirements for the Southern states to follow before they were readmitted, and divided the South into five administrative districts controlled by military occupation forces until the process was complete. This left 40,000 troops scattered across the Southern states to quell riots and protect black people from the Klan. And when Andrew Johnson tried to weaken this military occupation by firing the Secretary of War, the Radical Republican congress impeached him. Johnson came within one senate vote of being the first and (still) only President to get fired by Congress.

 

The South could only stew in impotent rage as the Radical Republican roll continued through the election of 1868, which brought none other than former Union General U.S. Grant, killer of the Confederate cause, to the Presidency. And that wasn't even the worst of what democracy was bringing to the former Confederates in those days. The South's heavy dependenc on slavery had left many Southern congressional districts with large black majorities, and black men who'd once been slaves started getting elected to national office. Mississippi even elected a black man to the United States senate in 1870, and then another in 1875.

 

Reconstructed

 

Grant started out strong in the view of the Radical Republicans, creating the Justice Department to root out and prosecute Klan members and enforcing harsh military law on states (like South Carolina, of course) that refused to enfranchise blacks. But while the racism of Southern whites seemed to know no bounds, the altruistic urge of Northern whites to push for something resembling equality would only sustain itself for so long before the subtler racism hiding underneath turned it all to apathy. It didn't help that U.S. Grant turned out to be a far better general than a president, and his second term devolved into the kind of scandal-plagued, corruption-coated turmoil that puts people at the bottom of "Top 18 Presidents" lists. Reconstruction in the Grant era turned into a battle of attrition, as Southerners sustained themselves on hatred, determined to outlast Northern attention spans.

 

The end of Reconstruction came suddenly, thanks to another presidential election.

 

The election of 1876 pitted a New York Democrat named Samuel Tilden against a Republican from Ohio named Rutherford B. Hayes. Tilden had a long history of opposing slavery, but he also kind of bought into the states' rights rhetoric and had also opposed using force against the South to prevent secession. With the end of the war now a decade past, Tilden felt it was time for the federal government to put Reconstruction to bed and focus on other issues. Southern whites loved that idea, so they swarmed to Tilden's side and tried violence and intimidation and whatever shenanigans they could come up with to keep black people from voting. The final result of their efforts was that four states had their electoral votes disqualified. This left Tilden with a clear advantage in both the popular and electoral vote, but without an electoral vote majority. And when that happens, the Constitution says the Congress gets to decide the election. But Congress was split; Republicans controlled the senate, while Democrats controlled the House of Representatives. Somebody somewhere was going to have to work out a deal.

 

The deal became the Compromise of 1877. Democrats wanted Reconstruction to end. Republicans wanted Rutherford Hayes to be President. So the Democrats agreed to give the race to Hayes as long as Hayes and the Republicans gave up on Reconstruction. The Republicans were bored with Reconstruction by this time. The deal was a no-brainer.

 

What Did It All Mean?

 

With the official era of Reconstruction finally over in 1877, the final scars of the Civil War could finally be healed. But that sort of thing never heals completely. Government can move on and dance into the Gilded Age if it wants, but there's still going to be bitter white folks in the South seething over Yankee aggression fueled by an out-of-control federal government, and those folks will pass that bitterness down to their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren four generations removed. And there will still be poor black folks trying desperately to overcome the emotional and economic trauma of 10 generations of enslavement and the racism that persists once enslavement ends, unable to do much but bear the oppression those angry white folks impose on them.

 

It should be one of the most obvious observations in the world that the Civil War didn't end racism, though I've known plenty of Southerners in my day who like to pretend otherwise. The end of Reconstruction allowed the rise of a different kind of racism, institutionalized this time by Southern states once more determined to assert their rights. The Radical Republicans had forced the states to abandon their Black Codes, but that didn't mean they couldn't just come up with different versions of the same codes called something else. Like maybe Jim Crow. Because when it comes to race, some states always want to assert their rights. The Constitution wouldn't let them permit slavery and it wouldn't let them deny anybody the right to vote based on race. But they could certainly make it damned hard for black people to exercise that right. They could certainly keep black people isolated, separate and not at all equal. The fight for racial equality, which should have been won in 1865, would have to be fought continuously for the next hundred and fifty years. It's still being fought today.

 

But this is a series about states. So what about all these states and their rights? What happened there?

 

Well, that fight continues on today, too. The pendulum of power continues to swing between the nation and state. Wars and Depressions have occassionally pushed things Washington's way; free market economics in quieter times have pushed it back toward the states. Sometimes that push may strengthen some (but never all) of the states, but like the impotent Confederacy, it leaves the nation weaker and unable to respond in times of crisis. That may mean people go hungry. It may mean people suffer disease they didn't need to suffer. It may mean that states are forced to fight against each other for resources they need to meet the threat.

 

But I risk getting current here. This is a history series.

 

So next time I come back to this series, we'll go back to history. There's still fifteen more states to explore, and one of them doesn't even wait for the Civil War to finish before popping onto the scene ... though the war didn't have much to do with it. That one was all about money. And money more than anything is going to be the driver of the origins of all these states from now on.

Done