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Losing the Peace and the Failures of Reconstruction Reconstruction can be viewed as a failure. It failed to bring about real change in the South. A cash crop economy built on the labor of African Americans persisted. Racial attitudes and white superiority persisted. Strict limitations to the rights and liberties of African Americans persisted. Resentment among southerners towards the Union and northerners persisted. A major reason for this failure was that both political parties expended more energy in securing their power than bringing about reconciliation and any true measure of racial peace.
The Republican Party had several weapons to use when fighting to maintain their hold on power in the south. The Democrats, they argued, were the ones who started the war. Republicans had the benefit of several agencies, both public and private, who worked among the freedmen in the south and made sure they knew which party gave them their freedom and right to vote. One such organization was the Union League. It had been formed in the North before the war’s end to foster support for the war. After the war the League moved into the south, accepting blacks as members. By 1867 there were chapters all over the south, South Carolina itself had 88 of them. African Americans were attracted by the acceptance of the organization, its secrecy and ritual, night meetings, and devotion to equality and freedom. The Union League and other organizations like it were extremely effective in ensuring the Republican Party of the black vote.
Southern whites reacted with violence to their loss of power. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 ended white rule and ushered in Republican rule built on the votes of the freedmen. In response, whites did everything they could to limit the political power and ambitions of both freedmen and those whites who supported them or Radical Reconstruction. This sentiment gave rise to organizations like the “regulators” and Ku Klux Klan who sought to “keep blacks in their place”. By far the most terrifying of these groups was the KKK. The decreasing Union military presence could do little against the KKK because they disguised themselves and had support of the native white population. Fear, violence, arson, and business isolation were all weapons effectively used by the KKK and similar agencies.
The federal government reacted to the rise of the Klan by passing a series of laws that expanded federal authority in dealing with such agencies. The “Klan Acts”, passed in 1870 and 1871, made it a federal offense to infringe in any way on the rights of a US citizen to vote. Such cases could be tried in federal court if prosecutors doubted the objectivity of a local southern court. They also gave the president the power to use the federal military to protect civil rights and the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus.
Several factors combined to bring Reconstruction to a close. Many southerners began returning to their normal lives at the end of the war. Gradually, ex-Confederate leaders regained their rights. Johnson’s wholesale pardons facilitated this. In 1871 Congress repealed the “iron-clad oath” that was used to disqualify many ex-Confederates. This was followed in 1872 with passage of a general amnesty that restored citizenship to all but 600 ex-Confederates. With their restored rights ex-Confederates helped tear down the Republican reconstruction governments and replace them with Democrat regimes led by “redeemers”. These were people who claimed they were redeeming the south from black rule and Republican domination.
Intimidation also played a role in the “redemption” of southern state governments. Activities by the Klan and their ilk reduced African American participation in politics. In some cases African Americans sought to defend their rights with force but most realized to do so would bring about their destruction…the South would barely tolerate free blacks with citizenship, it certainly would not tolerate free blacks used force to defend their rights against whites.
Another factor was political corruption. Republican state administrations ran the governments into debt and were exposed in several corrupt dealings. The debt came from expanded social programs like education systems. Democrats had been just as corrupt as their opponents were but since they were the home team and weren’t in power they could play the good guy and point out all of the wrong doings of the Republicans. When these factors combined with declining interest on the part of Republican leaders (who were more interested in developing American industry) the process and success of Reconstruction was doomed.
The Presidential election of 1876 provided the final send off of Reconstruction. Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes was 20 electoral votes short of winning. His Democrat opponent was only 1 vote short. How can this be? There were 20 votes in dispute (between Florida, Louisiana, and Oregon). A Congressional committee was established to investigate the disputed returns. There were supposed to be three Democrats, three Republicans, and one independent on the committee. The independent turned out to be more Republican than anything else and each vote taken by the committee was 4-3 in favor of the Republicans. The results would have to be accepted by Congress before becoming official. A deal was brokered between the parties whereby Hayes was awarded all 20 disputed votes. In return, the final federal troops would be withdrawn from the South and federal grants would be made available to the South for internal development. With this Compromise of 1877, Reconstruction came to an official end and Hayes was left to deal with his questionable legitimacy, often being referred to as “Rutherfraud” B. Hayes.
With the removal of federal troops and Republican control, Democrats and their southern constituents worked to expand limitations of African American rights. Violence and intimidation continued to be an effective tool. Other methods of limiting political participation included setting up polling places long distances from black communities. Roads were blocked and ferries conveniently out of order on Election Day so African Americans could not make it to polling places. Ballot stuffing became a common practice to negate the votes of those African Americans who managed to make it to the polling station. In some cases candidates catered to African Americans to win their votes through barbecues and other similar events.
State governments took action to establish legal roadblocks to black political participation as well. Poll taxes and literacy requirements were established. Petty larceny an other crimes blacks tended to be convicted of more often were added to lists of disqualifying conditions. It was soon realized that such instruments not only kept African Americans from voting, they also kept poor whites from exercising their rights as well. A remedy for this was hit upon with Grandfather Clauses. Such clauses required a person to pay the tax, pass the literacy requirement, or prove their grandfather or father had voted in a previous election before they could cast a vote. Many poor whites could prove their ancestors had voted but virtually no blacks could do so.
By the 1880s African Americans regained some political power as their votes would be sought as allies. The increasing suffering of farmers prompted formation of farmer’s organizations like the Grange and the Farmer’s Alliance. The Farmer’s Alliance realized that blacks suffered the same as them and a separate Black Farmers Alliance was organized to act parallel to the white organization. Together, it was believed, they would have enough political power to force passage of legislation beneficial to their plight. By 1891 there were over a million members of the Black Farmer’s Alliance across the South.
Democrats responded to the rise of the Farmer’s Alliance and eventually the Populist Party, which grew out of the Alliance, with alarm. They began forcing African Americans to vote for them…repeatedly in some cases. For the most part blacks continued to support the Populists and in some areas blacks, Populists, and the remnants of the southern Republican Party banded together and gained control of states offices. Eventually the Populist party would be absorbed by the Democrats and disappear, leaving African Americans with no political allies again.
Another instrument the southern states used to “keep blacks in their place” were Jim Crow laws. These laws began to appear in the 1870s and instituted segregation in the south. Blacks and whites were separated in trains, hotels, bathrooms, restaurants, everywhere. In 1890 Louisiana passed a law requiring blacks and whites to sit in separate cars on the railroads. Two years later Homer Plessy refused to sit in a black car. He was arrested and brought before Judge John Ferguson who upheld the law. Plessy appealed, charging that separate but equal violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and in 1896 the Supreme Court heard it. The court ruled 7-1 that separate but equal facilities for the races did not violate any provisions of the Constitution. In the lone dissenting opinion, Justice John Marshall Harlan, of Kentucky and a former slave owner wrote that the constitution recognized no superior race or ruling class. “Our Constitution is color-blind.... In respect of civil rights all citizens are equal before the law."
Because they were so concerned with securing their own power, rather than putting the nation back together and bringing about racial peace, the Republicans and Democrats let the chance slip away. Racial tensions, segregation, white supremacy, all of these would survive until the 1950s-60s. What could possibly have been done in the late 1800s was forced to wait another 60 to 80 years. |