essay on reconstruction of the south

Documents and Debates: Reconstructing the South

South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union when a convention in Charleston approved an Ordinance of Secession in December of 1860. Few Americans, during that tumultuous secession winter, foresaw a lengthy civil war. Few Americans predicted the war would bring horrific casualty rates, the devastation of the South, or the emancipation of four million African-American enslaved persons. As bitter as the armed struggle was, the political battle to reunite the Union was only beginning when the war staggered to a close in the spring of 1865. In hindsight, the political debate confronting the nation at the war’s conclusion seems equaled only by the logistical challenge of winning it. 

Two main problems faced the nation at the end of the Civil War: how to rebuild the political connections between North and South, and how to protect the rights of the freedmen. Answering the first question depended on how one understood the South’s status. Had  the seceding southern states left the Union? Should they be treated as a conquered nation, or had they remained in the Union with the constitutional right to reclaim their place in it? To ask the question another way: were the defeated confederates traitors to the nation? What proofs of loyalty did they need to offer before regaining their rights as citizens? 

The second problem was closely related to the first. What assistance should the federal government render the freedmen and women justly demanding the full rights of citizenship, including suffrage? Would the former Confederates respect the rights of those formerly enslaved?

We recently introduced a newly organized resource on the Teaching American History website, designed to engage students in the debates of  earlier generations. Teaching American History developed its two-volume Documents and Debates collection to help teachers present the issues at stake in some of the most crucial moments in American history. Each chapter in the collection presents a variety of viewpoints on one political or social question, along with an introduction giving context, study questions, and helpful notes. We are now adding  a new tool : audio recordings of each chapter’s primary sources. 

Two weeks ago we highlighted  Chapter One: Early Contact from  Documents and Debates, Volume 1: 1493 – 1865.  Today we are highlighting the first chapter of Volume 2: Reconstructing the South . Below is a list of documents in this chapter.  

• President Abraham Lincoln to Nathaniel Banks, August 5, 1863
• President Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865
• Representative Thaddeus Stevens, “Reconstruction,” September 6, 1865
• Frederick Douglass, “Reconstruction,” December 1866
• Jubilee Singers, “Many Thousand Gone,” 1872
• Senator Benjamin R. Tillman, Speech in the Senate, March 23, 1900

These documents in Reconstructing the South present the stark challenge of Reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln’s letter to Nathaniel Banks and his Second Inaugural Address convey the generous restoration of the Union he envisioned. Captured most poignantly in the Second Inaugural’s famous line “With malice toward none: with charity for all,” Lincoln’s plan was  more lenient than that of his fellow Republican, Thaddeus Stevens. Stevens believed creating a “true republic” in the South required that “The whole fabric of Southern Society … be changed.” Stevens called for punishing rebel leaders, confederate soldiers, and large plantation owners. 

An even sharper contrast separates the speeches of Frederick Douglass and Benjamin Tillman. Douglass calls for “negro suffrage” as the freedman’s best defense against white southerners’ deeply ingrained attitudes about  “manners, morals, and religion…” – creating “conditions, not out of which slavery will again grow, but under which it is impossible for the Federal government to wholly destroy it.” After the collapse of Reconstruction closed the small window of equality opened during the era, men like Benjamin Tillman unapologetically insisted on white supremacy. “We took the government away in 1876,” declared Tillman. “We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern the white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.” 

For Lincoln, Stevens, and Douglass, Reconstruction promised a chance to rebuild the nation with citizens of all races having “learned to venerate the Declaration of Independence.” Yet perhaps all three, to differing extents, underestimated the difficulty re-educating the South in this way. Careful readers of the primary sources in Reconstructing the South may wonder if the promise of Reconstruction ever stood a chance of succeeding. 

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Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation and Freedom

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Reconstruction, 1865-1877

Donald Brown, Harvard University, G6, English PhD Candidate

No period in American history has had more wide-reaching implications than Reconstruction. However, white supremacist mythologies about those contentious years from 1865-1877 reigned supreme both inside and outside the academy until the 1960s. Columbia University’s now-infamous Dunning School (1900-1930) epitomizes the dominant narrative regarding Reconstruction for over half of the twentieth century. From their point of view, Reconstruction was a tragic period of American history in which vengeful White Northern radicals took over the South. In order to punish the White Southerners they had just defeated in the Civil War, these Radical Republicans gave ignorant freedmen the right to vote. This resulted in at least 2,000 elected Black officeholders, including two United States senators and 21 representatives. In order to discredit the sweeping changes taking place across the American South, conservative historians argued this period was full of corruption and disorder and proved that Black Americans were not fit to leadership or citizenship.

Thanks to the work of a number of Black and leftist historians—most notably John Roy Lynch, W.E.B. Du Bois, Willie Lee Rose, and Eric Foner—that negative depiction of Reconstruction is being overturned. As Du Bois famously wrote in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), this was a time in which “the slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; and then moved back again toward slavery.” During that short time in the sun, underfunded biracial state governments taxed big planters to pay for education, healthcare, and roads that benefited everyone. There is still much more to be unpacked from this rich period of American history, and Houghton Library contains a wealth of material to further buttress new narratives of that era.

Reconstructing Reconstruction

While some academics, like those of the Dunning School, interpreted Reconstruction as doomed to failure, in the years immediately following the Civil War there were many Americans, Black and White, who saw the radical reforms as being sabotaged from the outset. Writer and civil rights activist Albion W. Tourgée published his best selling novel Bricks Without Straw in 1880. Unlike most White authors at the time, Tourgée centered Black characters in his novel, showing how the recently emancipated were faced with violence and political oppression in spite of their attempts to be equal citizens.

In this period, two of the most iconic amendments were implemented. The Fourteenth Amendment ratified several crucial civil rights clauses. The natural born citizenship clause overturned the 1857 supreme court case, Dred Scott v. Sandford , which stated that descendants of African slaves could not be citizens of the United States. The equal protection clause ensured formerly enslaved persons crucial legal rights and validated the equality provisions contained in the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Even though many of these clauses were cleverly disregarded by numerous states once Reconstruction ended, particularly in the Deep South, the equal protection clause was the basis of the NAACP’s victory in the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed another important civil right: the right to vote. No longer could any state discriminate on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. At Houghton, we have proof of the exhilarating response Black Americans had to the momentous progress they worked so hard to bring about: Nashvillians organized a Fifteenth Amendment Celebration on May 4, 1870. And once again, during the classical period of the Civil Rights Movement, leaders appealed to this amendment to make their case for what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Reign of Kings Alpha and Abadon

Lorenzo D. Blackson's fantastical allegory novel, The Rise and Progress of the Kingdoms of Light & Darkness ; Reign of Kings Alpha and Abadon (1867), is one of the most ambitious creative efforts of Black authors during Reconstruction. A Protestant religious allegory in the lineage of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress , Blackson's novel follows his vision of a holy war between good and evil, showing slavery and racial oppression on the side of evil King Abadon and Protestant abolitionists and freemen on the side of good King Alpha. The combination of fantasy holy war, religious pedagogy, and Reconstruction era optimism provide a unique insight to one contemporary Black perspective on the time.

It is important to emphasize that these radical policy initiatives were set by Black Americans themselves. It was, in fact, from formerly enslaved persons, not those who formerly enslaved them, that the most robust notions of freedom were imagined and enacted. With the help of the nation’s first civil rights president, Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877), and Radical Republicans, such as Benjamin Franklin Wade and Thaddeus Stevens, substantial strides in racial advancement were made in those short twelve years. Houghton Library is home to a wide array of examples of said advancement, such as a letter written in 1855 by Frederick Douglass to Charles Sumner, the nation’s leading abolitionist. In it, he argues that Black Americans, not White abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, founded the antislavery movement. That being said, Douglass was appreciative of allies, such as President Grant, of whom he said: “in him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.” Houghton Library also houses an extraordinary letter dated December 1, 1876 from Sojourner Truth , famous abolitionist and women’s rights activist, who could neither read nor write. She had someone help steady her hand so she could provide a signed letter to a fan, and promised to also send her supporter an autobiography, Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Bondswoman of Olden Time, Emancipated by the New York Legislature in the Early Part of the Present Century: with a History of Her Labors and Correspondence.

In this hopeful time, Black Americans, primarily located in the South, were determined to use their demographic power to demand their right to a portion of the wealth and property their labor had created. In states like South Carolina and Mississippi, which were majority Black at the time, and Louisiana , Alabama, and Georgia , with Black Americans consisting of nearly half of the population, the United States elected its first Black U.S. congressmen. Now that Black Southern men had the power to vote, they eagerly elected Black men to represent their best interests. Jefferson Franklin Long (U.S. congressman from Georgia), Joseph Hayne Rainey (U.S. congressman from South Carolina), and Hiram Rhodes Revels (Mississippi U.S. Senator) all took office in the 41st Congress (1869-1871). These elected officials were memorialized in a lithograph by popular firm Currier and Ives. Other federal agencies, such as the Freedmen’s Bureau , also assisted Black Americans build businesses, churches, and schools; own land and cultivate crops; and more generally establish cultural and economic autonomy. As Frederick Douglass wrote in 1870, “at last, at last the black man has a future.”

Black Americans quickly took full advantage of their newfound freedom in a myriad of ways. Alfred Islay Walden’s story is a particularly remarkable example of this. Born a slave in Randolph County, North Carolina, he only gained freedom after Emancipation. He traveled by foot to Washington, D.C. and made a living selling poems and giving lectures across the Northeast. He also attended school at Howard University on scholarship, graduating in 1876, and used that formal education to establish a mission school and become one of the first Black graduates of New Brunswick Theological Seminary. Walden’s Miscellaneous Poems, Which The Author Desires to Dedicate to The Cause of Education and Humanity (1872) celebrates the “Impeachment of President Johnson,” one of the most racist presidents in American history; “The Election of Mayor Bowen,” a Radical Republican mayor of Washington, D.C. (Sayles Jenks Bowen); and Walden’s own religious convictions, such as in “Jesus my Friend;” among other topics.

Black newspapers quickly emerged during Reconstruction as well, such as the Colored Representative , a Black newspaper based in Lexington, KY in the 1870s. As editor George B. Thomas wrote in an “Extra,” dated May 25, 1871 : “We want all the arts and fashions of the North, East and Western states, for the benefit of the colored people. They cannot know what is going on, unless they read our paper.... Now, we want everything that is a benefit to our colored people. Speeches, debates, and sermons will be published.”

Reconstruction proves that Black people, when not impeded by structural barriers, are enthusiastic civic participants. Houghton houses rich archival material on Black Americans advocating for civil rights in Vicksburg, Mississippi , Little Rock, Arkansas , and Atlanta, Georgia , among other states, in the forms of state Colored Conventions and powerful political speeches . For anyone interested in the long history of the Civil Rights Movement, these holdings are a treasure trove waiting to be mined. Though the moment in the sun was brief, the heat exuded during Reconstruction left a deep impact on progressive Americans and will continue to provide an exemplary political model for generations to come.

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Reconstruction

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 24, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed people into the United States. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive “ Black Codes ” to control the labor and behavior of former enslaved people and other African Americans. 

Outrage in the North over these codes eroded support for the approach known as Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical wing of the Republican Party. During Radical Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, newly enfranchised Black people gained a voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces—including the Ku Klux Klan —would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South.

Emancipation and Reconstruction

At the outset of the Civil War , to the dismay of the more radical abolitionists in the North, President Abraham Lincoln did not make abolition of slavery a goal of the Union war effort. To do so, he feared, would drive the border slave states still loyal to the Union into the Confederacy and anger more conservative northerners. By the summer of 1862, however, enslaved people, themselves had pushed the issue, heading by the thousands to the Union lines as Lincoln’s troops marched through the South. 

Their actions debunked one of the strongest myths underlying Southern devotion to the “peculiar institution”—that many enslaved people were truly content in bondage—and convinced Lincoln that emancipation had become a political and military necessity. In response to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation , which freed more than 3 million enslaved people in the Confederate states by January 1, 1863, Black people enlisted in the Union Army in large numbers, reaching some 180,000 by war’s end.

Did you know? During Reconstruction, the Republican Party in the South represented a coalition of Black people (who made up the overwhelming majority of Republican voters in the region) along with "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags," as white Republicans from the North and South, respectively, were known.

Emancipation changed the stakes of the Civil War, ensuring that a Union victory would mean large-scale social revolution in the South. It was still very unclear, however, what form this revolution would take. Over the next several years, Lincoln considered ideas about how to welcome the devastated South back into the Union, but as the war drew to a close in early 1865, he still had no clear plan. 

In a speech delivered on April 11, while referring to plans for Reconstruction in Louisiana, Lincoln proposed that some Black people–including free Black people and those who had enlisted in the military –deserved the right to vote. He was assassinated three days later, however, and it would fall to his successor to put plans for Reconstruction in place.

Andrew Johnson and Presidential Reconstruction

At the end of May 1865, President Andrew Johnson announced his plans for Reconstruction, which reflected both his staunch Unionism and his firm belief in states’ rights. In Johnson’s view, the southern states had never given up their right to govern themselves, and the federal government had no right to determine voting requirements or other questions at the state level. 

Under Johnson’s Presidential Reconstruction, all land that had been confiscated by the Union Army and distributed to the formerly enslaved people by the army or the Freedmen’s Bureau (established by Congress in 1865) reverted to its prewar owners. Apart from being required to uphold the abolition of slavery (in compliance with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution ), swear loyalty to the Union and pay off war debt, southern state governments were given free rein to rebuild themselves.

As a result of Johnson’s leniency, many southern states in 1865 and 1866 successfully enacted a series of laws known as the “ black codes ,” which were designed to restrict freed Black peoples’ activity and ensure their availability as a labor force. These repressive codes enraged many in the North, including numerous members of Congress, which refused to seat congressmen and senators elected from the southern states. 

In early 1866, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau and Civil Rights Bills and sent them to Johnson for his signature. The first bill extended the life of the bureau, originally established as a temporary organization charged with assisting refugees and formerly enslaved people, while the second defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens who were to enjoy equality before the law. After Johnson vetoed the bills—causing a permanent rupture in his relationship with Congress that would culminate in his impeachment in 1868—the Civil Rights Act became the first major bill to become law over presidential veto.

Radical Reconstruction

After northern voters rejected Johnson’s policies in the congressional elections in late 1866, Radical Republicans in Congress took firm hold of Reconstruction in the South. The following March, again over Johnson’s veto, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which temporarily divided the South into five military districts and outlined how governments based on universal (male) suffrage were to be organized. The law also required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment , which broadened the definition of citizenship, granting “equal protection” of the Constitution to formerly enslaved people, before they could rejoin the Union. In February 1869, Congress approved the 15th Amendment (adopted in 1870), which guaranteed that a citizen’s right to vote would not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

By 1870, all of the former Confederate states had been admitted to the Union, and the state constitutions during the years of Radical Reconstruction were the most progressive in the region’s history. The participation of African Americans in southern public life after 1867 would be by far the most radical development of Reconstruction, which was essentially a large-scale experiment in interracial democracy unlike that of any other society following the abolition of slavery. 

Southern Black people won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress during this period. Among the other achievements of Reconstruction were the South’s first state-funded public school systems, more equitable taxation legislation, laws against racial discrimination in public transport and accommodations and ambitious economic development programs (including aid to railroads and other enterprises).

Reconstruction Comes to an End

After 1867, an increasing number of southern whites turned to violence in response to the revolutionary changes of Radical Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations targeted local Republican leaders, white and Black, and other African Americans who challenged white authority. Though federal legislation passed during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1871 took aim at the Klan and others who attempted to interfere with Black suffrage and other political rights, white supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South after the early 1870s as support for Reconstruction waned. 

Racism was still a potent force in both South and North, and Republicans became more conservative and less egalitarian as the decade continued. In 1874—after an economic depression plunged much of the South into poverty—the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War.

When Democrats waged a campaign of violence to take control of Mississippi in 1875, Grant refused to send federal troops, marking the end of federal support for Reconstruction-era state governments in the South. By 1876, only Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina were still in Republican hands. In the contested presidential election that year, Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes reached a compromise with Democrats in Congress: In exchange for certification of his election, he acknowledged Democratic control of the entire South. 

The Compromise of 1876 marked the end of Reconstruction as a distinct period, but the struggle to deal with the revolution ushered in by slavery’s eradication would continue in the South and elsewhere long after that date. 

A century later, the legacy of Reconstruction would be revived during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as African Americans fought for the political, economic and social equality that had long been denied them.

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Reconstruction in the South

Fitzhugh brundage.

The study of the Reconstruction era in the South may appear free of the vexing problems of definition and chronology that beset many historical topics. On its face, Reconstruction was the discrete historical process of reintegrating the former Confederacy into the American nation. This process began as soon as the Union captured territory in the Confederacy (circa late 1861) and concluded with the compromise after the disputed election of 1876, which marked the restoration of home rule by southern whites. This chronology was conventional before Woodrow Wilson employed it in his History of the American People (1902); and even during the 1960s and 1970s, an especially fertile period for scholarship on Reconstruction, historians betrayed few reservations about either this definition or chronology of Reconstruction.

Like many keywords, with a nod to Raymond Williams, “Reconstruction” is a word (and concept) with a complicated history and layer upon layer of latent meanings. Some Democrats and white southerners, admittedly, preferred the term “Restoration,” which conveyed a comforting image of an ordered and gentle process of sectional reincorporation. Many other contemporaries used “Reconstruction” to describe the process of reunification, but they seldom used it as a label for the epoch in which they lived. Thus, unlike many labels that subsequently were attached to historical periods—the antebellum era, for instance—Reconstruction was not an anachronism imposed by succeeding generations. However,  the word now is routinely applied not only to the postbellum process of national restoration but also to the entire 1862–77 period.

This usage was consonant with the conventions of the teaching of American history, which until recently broke the nation’s narrative up into tidy, bite-sized units. The nineteenth century was conveniently segmented into a series of roughly two-decade-long eras: the Early Republic, Jacksonian America, antebellum America, Civil War and Reconstruction, Gilded Age. Given the emphasis on political history and the prevalence of temporally discrete (rather than thematic) college history courses, these divisions were both reasonable and convenient. This periodization now is receding in the rear view of history, or so it seems, if present-day undergraduate course titles and academic job listings are valid indicators. Job ads now more commonly solicit applications from nineteenth-century specialists than, say, historians of the Jacksonian or Gilded Age United States.

As scholars shift their interests to the longue durée of the nineteenth century, Reconstruction necessarily loses much of its utility as a descriptor for the subjects and questions that scholars are interested in. For one, the temporal boundaries of “Reconstruction” almost certainly will be much more permeable in the future than they were during the twentieth century. The issues associated with the penetration of Union forces into the Confederacy, beginning in the fall of 1861, will remain central to any treatment of the destruction of slavery, restoration of federal authority, and the economic reintegration of the South. But the “rehearsal for Reconstruction,” with due respect for Willie Lee Rose’s enduring classic work, antedated the events in, for instance, the Sea Islands of South Carolina in late 1861 or eastern North Carolina in 1862. [1] Although admittedly marked by contradictions, experimentation, and confusion, the programs adopted and policies applied as early as November 1861 mark the early implementation of the reconstruction of the South.

The conceptual rehearsals for reconstruction antedated the Civil War itself. Even so-called moderate plans for southern reconstruction, such as that of President Lincoln, were audacious visions of social engineering. They presumed profound, far-reaching, and enduring transformations in southern institutions, culture, and behavior on a scale that borders on utopian. From whence did visionaries of a remade South derive their ideas of societal transformation and their optimism about the capacity of the South to be remade? What historical analogies did they draw between their vision for the South and previous or contemporary events? Which societal transformations did they deem feasible? Which transformations infeasible?

We can cobble together a partial answer to these questions from existing scholarship, including important works by Eric Foner, Susan-Mary Grant, James Oakes, and Heather Cox Richardson . [2] But we await a comprehensive history of the ideas of social transformation that circulated in the mid-nineteenth-century United States and informed ideas about reforming the South. Such a history will reveal the various combinations of religious millennialism, “free labor” capitalism, sentimental moralism, political ideology, historical analogies, and old fashioned American hubris that informed plans for a new South.

The task at hand is not just locating the intellectual resources that provided the conceptual architecture for visions of a remade South but also tracing the evolution of those ideas across time. For example, the efforts of Illinois Republicans to “reconstruct” “Egypt” in southern Illinois during the late 1850s was a test of the capacity of expanding public education, market penetration (made possible by railroads), and political mobilization to reform a regional culture that was deeply pro-southern, anti-black, and Democratic. The attempted re-creation of Egypt was a dry run of methods that the Republicans envisioned applying to the South when their party gained the White House. Their plans, however, failed to transform the inhabitants of the region or to pry them away from the Democratic Party. Given the failure of the prewar and wartime efforts to reconstruct Egypt, we might wonder how Republicans were so sanguine that the purportedly inherent virtues of their program would appeal to white southerners. [3]

While the “reconstruction” of antebellum southern Illinois provides some insights into how Republicans imagined the reconstruction of the Slave South before the war dramatically altered the possibilities for intervention in southern affairs, the response to national and international events after the Civil War underscores the breadth of influences that contributed to the recalibration of possibilities of reconstruction. Growing fervor among American workers for the eight-hour workday and the tumult of the Paris Commune, for example, provoked anxiety among some northern champions of “reconstruction,” such as E. L. Godkin of the Nation , that private property and individual liberty were increasingly threatened by the poor demanding cooperative economic action and redistribution of wealth. For skeptics of government activism, the folly of Reconstruction was an American counterpart to the Paris Commune—a dangerous threat to the foundations of civilization itself. Property rights, the natural ordering of society on the basis of innate talent and abilities, and the respect for order had all been subverted in the cause of naïve social and racial uplift. In response, these erstwhile reformers began their “retreat from Reconstruction” well before President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration began its own retreat. [4]

If there are ample grounds to expand the discussion of “reconstruction” to the antebellum era, there are even more compelling reasons to reconsider the conventional temporal conclusion of Reconstruction. First, it exaggerates the significance of the election of 1876 and the so-called Compromise of 1877. C. Vann Woodward offered the most enduring argument about the importance of the informal agreement between Democrats and Republicans that traded Democratic acquiescence to the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in return for the removal of the federal troops from the South, support for a southern transcontinental railroad, and investment in the South. [5] But the purported compromise arguably only signaled the inevitable end of federal “occupation” of the few remaining areas in the South where troops were garrisoned. The deep processes of political, economic, and social transformation under way in the South proceeded apace after 1877. It is not clear that the “compromise” marked the moment when the Republican Party abandoned the freedpeople in the South to their fate at the hands of white southerners. A more compelling case for the abandonment of southern blacks by the party of Lincoln can be made for 1890 when Republicans failed to secure passage of the Federal Elections Bill (aka Lodge Force Bill), which would have established strict(er) standards for federal elections, thereby expanding and protecting black voting in the South. In the wake of the defeat of the Lodge Bill, white Democrats in Mississippi and elsewhere expanded their legal and constitutional machinations to deprive blacks of the vote. The “reconstruction” of the southern electorate, consequently, remained at issue for more than a decade after the purported end of Reconstruction in 1877. [6]

Second, the “reconstruction” of political partisanship in the South was by no means complete in 1877. Between 1865 and the end of the century politics in the South was marked by striking political pluralism. Not only did the Republican Party remain electorally viable in many states, but also insurgent parties, ranging from the Greenback and Readjuster Parties to the People’s Party (aka Populists), won followers in the region. The issues that fueled and the ideological communities that sustained this heightened partisan environment in the region were remarkably consistent across the period from 1865 to 1900. The Readjuster Party in Virginia, for example, was a biracial political vehicle founded after 1877 that rallied white and black voters who sought to revise (“readjust”) Virginia’s inherited and onerous debt. The party admittedly was sui generis in important regards, but the fiscal issues it addressed, the political coalitions it forged, and the social and racial challenges it confronted were extensions of the politics of postbellum readjustment. The Democrats in Virginia did not finally drive the last of the major Readjuster politicos from office until 1889. [7] Moreover, two important recent studies of the postbellum era have stressed the continuity in southern public life from the Civil War era into the early decades of the twentieth century. Greg Downs describes a half-century period during which hard-pressed southerners fashioned a form of patron-client politics that recast dependency into the foundation of regional politics. [8] Steve Hahn has traced the formation of black political networks and consciousness during slavery and its subsequent influence through the late nineteenth century and to the 1920s. [9]

Third, the economic “reconstruction” of southern society in the wake of the Civil War and abolition of slavery does not mesh with the conventional periodization of Reconstruction. Peter Coclanis makes a compelling case that deep structural transformations, especially global commodity markets and finance, were underway in the mid-nineteenth-century American economy that were largely independent of the Civil War and the fate of plantation slavery. [10] The expansion of American capitalism and changes in international commodity demand contributed to the extraordinary economic uncertainty that prevailed in the region across the late nineteenth century. Scholars have long recognized that transition from slave to free labor was jarring and contested, but there was a common assumption that by the 1870s sharecropping had emerged as a practical solution to matching labor, land, and capital in the region. Recent scholarship suggests that a wide variety of complex labor relations prevailed for decades after the end of the Civil War and that the southern economy continued to be roiled by change and innovation. Similarly, it took decades for the reconstructed southern legal system to provide sufficient legal guarantees to elicit sustained capital investments from outside the region. The political tumult in the region directly contributed to a perception of the South as a region filled with risk and uncertainty. [11]

Finally, southern society remained deeply fragmented after 1876. As important scholarship during the past quarter century has demonstrated, the “reconstruction” of gender roles and politics was by no means completed in 1876, let alone 1890. Conventional periodization of Reconstruction can mask the extent and persistence of this ongoing transformation in the southern polity and social relations. The essential and enduring role of women in civic activism, commemoration, household management, and the regional labor market is now clear. [12] It is also telling that the forms of violence that were endemic in the region—personal, political, and extralegal violence—persisted at high levels for decades after the end of Reconstruction. At best only a superficial semblance of peace and order returned there during the late 1870s and 1880s. [13] A final illustration of important trends that persisted uninterrupted across the Reconstruction era and late nineteenth century is the seeming inexorable movement of white and black southerners to new agricultural frontiers in the region and from the countryside to mill towns and cities.

Embracing a more capacious and flexible periodization of reconstruction is not intended to dismiss long-emphasized themes or “turning points” in the scholarship, such as the Emancipation Proclamation, Presidential Reconstruction, Radical Reconstruction, the so-called Reconstruction constitutional amendments, or the retreat from Reconstruction. To the contrary, these events will remain central to the interpretation of the longue durée of reconstruction. But attention to the longue durée allows us to better recognize the asynchronous pattern and speed of change in the region. And it will enable scholars to more completely (re)present the experiences of southerners after the Civil War. To take one poignant example, the impact of the postwar impoverishment of the region bore down on southerners for the remainder of their lives. A recent study of the biostatistics of cadets at The Citadel reveals that the cadets during the late nineteenth century were smaller in stature and weight than their antebellum predecessors. The bodies of the postwar cadets were living testaments to the legacy of war and reconstruction. [14]

FITZHUGH BRUNDAGE is William B. Umstead Distinguished Professor of history and department chair at the University of North Carolina. He is the author or editor of numerous articles and books, including, most recently, Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890-1930 (UNC Press, 2011). His book, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Harvard University Press, 2005), won the 2006 Charles S. Sydnor Award from the Southern Historical Association.

[1] Willie Lee Rose,  Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (New York: Vintage, 1964). [2] Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: Norton, 2013); Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). [3] Eric Michael Burke, “Egyptian Darkness: Antebellum Reconstruction and Southern Illinois in the Republican Imagination, 1854–1861” (MA thesis, University of North Carolina, 2016); also Richard H. Abbott, The Republican Party and the South, 1855–1877: The First Southern Strategy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); and Grant, North over South. [4] Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.) [5] C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction; The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (New York: Little, Brown, 1951). [6] Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Vanessa Holloway, In Search of Federal Enforcement: The Moral Authority of the Fifteenth Amendment and the Integrity of the Black Ballot, 1870–1965 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2015). [7] Jane Elizabeth Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.). [8] Gregory P. Downs, Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). [9] Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003). [10] Peter Coclanis, “The American Civil War and Its Aftermath,” in Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 4 of 4, A.D. 1804–A.D. 2016 , eds. Stanley L. Engerman, David Eltis, and David Richardson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). [11]  Downs, “The Mexicanization of American Politics: The United States’ Transnational Path from Civil War to Stabilization,” American Historical Review 117, no. 2 (2012): 387–409. [12] Elsa Barkley Brown, “Uncle Ned’s Children: Negotiating Community and Freedom in Postemancipation Richmond, Virginia” (PhD diss., Kent State University, 1994); Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Joan Marie Johnson, Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region, and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890–1930 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); Caroline E. Janney, Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); LeeAnn Whites, Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). [13] Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012); and George C Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990). [14] Peter A. Coclanis and John Komlos, “The Stature of Citadel Cadets, 1880–1940: An Anthropometric View of the New South,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 98, no. 2 (1997): 153–76.

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Thank you for this very deep article about the South reconstruction after the Civil War ! Very interesting !

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Examining Reconstruction Fall 2019

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Citizenship in the Reconstruction South

By susanna lee.

Slaveholders created a system of race, gender, and class inequality in the pre-Civil War South. They justified slavery by arguing that enslaved people could not take care of themselves and needed masters to look after them. White southern proslavery advocates compared slavery to marriage: masters supported their slaves, just as men supported their wives. Most white men excluded black men, black women, and white women from public affairs. Even non-elite white men—like non-slaveholders and other poor and middle-class southerners—found themselves in lesser positions. Elite slaveholding white men considered themselves best able to lead, and they dominated political offices. To differing extents, black men, black women, white women, and non-elite white men in the pre-Civil War South were subordinate members of the nation. The upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction brought opportunities to transform citizenship in the United States, determining who belonged to the nation, and what rights and privileges that membership conferred.

Black southerners, once considered least capable of acting as good citizens before the Civil War, transformed the idea and practice of citizenship during Reconstruction. Before the Civil War, most white people thought that black people, because of their supposed racial inferiority or because of the degradation of slavery, could not govern themselves as free people, let alone others as voters or officeholders. During the Civil War, black people proved the opposite, offering their support for the Union cause by the thousands. Black men made one of the greatest sacrifices for their nation—fighting and dying on the battlefield—even before that nation officially recognized them as citizens.

Under Presidential Reconstruction, former slaveholders tried to reassert their control over their former slaves in many ways: by terrorizing and assaulting them, forcing them into involuntary labor, restricting their freedom of movement, and limiting their economic independence. Black southerners refused to accept the freedom-in-name-only offered by their former masters and mistresses. They petitioned, protested, and fought for the dignities, rights, and privileges of citizenship in the nation. At a freedmen’s convention in Virginia in August 1865, leaders of the African American community criticized Presidential Reconstruction:

We, the undersigned members of a Convention of colored citizens of the State of Virginia, would respectfully represent that, although we have been held as slaves, and denied all recognition as a constituent of your nationality for almost the entire period of the duration of your Government, and that by your permission we have been denied either home or country, and deprived of the dearest rights of human nature: yet when you and our immediate oppressors met in deadly conflict upon the field of battle—the one to destroy and the other to save your Government and nationality, we , with scarce an exception, in our inmost souls espoused your cause, and watched, and prayed, and waited, and labored for your success. . . .   When the contest waxed long, and the result hung doubtfully, you appealed to us for help, and how well we answered is written in the rosters of the two hundred thousand colored troops now enrolled in your service; and as to our undying devotion to your cause, let the uniform acclamation of escaped prisoners, “whenever we saw a black face we felt sure of a friend,” answer. Well, the war is over, the rebellion is “put down,” and we are declared free! Four fifths of our enemies are paroled or amnestied, and the other fifth are being pardoned, and the President has, in his efforts at the reconstruction of the civil government of the States, late in rebellion, left us entirely at the mercy of these subjugated but unconverted rebels, in everything save the privilege of bringing us, our wives and little ones, to the auction block. . . . We know these men—know them well —and we assure you that, with the majority of them, loyalty is only “lip deep,” and that their professions of loyalty are used as a cover to the cherished design of getting restored to their former relations with the Federal Government, and then, by all sorts of “unfriendly legislation,” to render the freedom you have given us more intolerable than the slavery they intended for us. [3]

Black southerners had served their nation during the Civil War, and they called on the federal government to protect them during Reconstruction.

Black people’s efforts to fight the re-imposition of white supremacy by former slaveholders and to publicize attacks on black and white Unionists prompted congressional Republicans to take steps to protect freedoms in the South during a period called Congressional Reconstruction. They provided for a new process, one very different from Presidential Reconstruction, in which black and white men who had been loyal to the Union during the Civil War formed new state governments in the South. Congressional Republicans considered stripping former Confederates of their citizenship, but settled for prohibiting them from participating in forming the new state governments. During Congressional Reconstruction, the United States officially granted citizenship and rights to black people. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1866 and ratified in 1868, established birthright citizenship and prohibited states from abridging the privileges and immunities of citizenship. The Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1869 and ratified in 1870, prohibited states from denying citizens the right to vote on account of race, but not sex. The establishment of birthright citizenship—that people born in the United States, regardless of race, possessed the rights and privileges of citizenship—corrected what many Republicans saw as the unjust decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), that black people could not claim citizenship and that they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The Reconstruction Amendments and other Reconstruction measures were powerful and unprecedented efforts by the federal government to define and protect citizens, especially those newly freed from slavery.

During Congressional Reconstruction, black southerners allied with white southerners, especially those who had previously held little political or economic power. Through the Republican Party, black and white southerners acted as citizens in an unprecedented interracial alliance that brought democratic reforms to the South, especially greater rights and protections to everyday folk, those whose humble standing or racial status had previously marked them for discrimination. New state constitutions drafted during Congressional Reconstruction established state-funded systems of public education and other government institutions for common people, abolished property-holding qualifications for office-holding and jury service, prohibited imprisonment for debt, and exempted homesteads and other personal property from seizure by creditors.

White women outside the South, drawing on Congressional Reconstruction’s egalitarian promise, called for the expansion of women’s rights as citizens, especially their political and economic rights. White women in the South did not form a comparable women’s rights movement. Regardless, efforts to enfranchise women in the Reconstruction Amendments failed. In addition, none of the new state constitutions written under Congressional Reconstruction provided for female suffrage. Constitutional conventions in Texas, North Carolina, and Arkansas considered but ultimately rejected women’s suffrage. [4] Women’s rights activists did succeed in securing some economic rights. Most wives had no legal identity separate from their husbands, which prevented them from owning property or controlling their own wages. State legislators passed laws after the Civil War that allowed married women to hold their own property. However, southern legislators passed these married women’s property acts primarily as a way to shield the husbands’ property from creditors, not as a women’s rights reform. [5] The failure of women’s suffrage and the conservative nature of married women’s property acts in the South suggest the larger opposition of many white southerners to the transformations of Congressional Reconstruction.

Many former Confederates, especially former slaveholders, organized themselves into the Conservative or Democratic Party and opposed Congressional Reconstruction, often violently. They embraced terrorism in the form of groups like the Ku Klux Klan who intimidated and murdered black and white Republicans. Federal officials withdrew support for Congressional Reconstruction, distracted by other concerns. The end of Congressional Reconstruction limited the ways that many black and white southerners could act out their citizenship in the South. However, the Reconstruction Amendments—incorporated into the Constitution in part through black activism in the South—remained. New generations of black and white southerners would draw on Congressional Reconstruction for inspiration and the Reconstruction Amendments for constitutional authority in their struggles to claim full citizenship in the nation.

[1] Dan T. Carter, When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865−1867 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 29−30.

[2] Andrew Johnson, Annual message to Congress, December 1867, quoted in Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863−1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 179−181.

[3] “An Address, To the Loyal Citizens and Congress of the United States of America,” printed in Liberty, and Equality before the Law. Proceedings of the Convention of the Colored People of VA., Held in the City of Alexandria, Aug. 2, 3, 4, 5, 1865 (Alexandria, VA: Cowing & Gillis, 1865), p. 21; “The Late Convention of Colored Men,” New York Times , August 13, 1865.

[4] Elna C. Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 6–7.

[5] Suzanne Lebsock, “Radical Reconstruction and the Property Rights of Southern Women,” Journal of Southern History 43, no. 2 (May 1977): 195–216.

Susanna Lee teaches the history of the American Civil War and Reconstruction at North Carolina State University. She earned her BA in history at the University of California, San Diego, and her MA and PhD in history from the University of Virginia. Her book, Claiming the Union (Cambridge University Press, 2014), focuses on southern citizenship after the Civil War. She is currently working on a book about the US–Dakota War.

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Understanding Reconstruction - A Historiography

As the United States entered the 20th century, Reconstruction slowly receded into popular memory. Historians began to debate its results. William Dunning and John W. Burgess led the first group to offer a coherent and structured argument. Along with their students at Columbia University, Dunning, Burgess, and their retinue created a historical school of thought known as the Dunning School. This interpretation of Reconstruction placed it firmly in the category of historical blunder.

Why did the Dunning School blame Radical Republicans and Freedmen for Reconstruction's failure?

According to the Dunning School, the defeated South accepted its fate and wished to rejoin the national culture. Thus, white Southerners sincerely hoped to offer the emancipated freedmen rights and protection along with equal opportunity. However, the bullying efforts of the Radical Republicans in Congress (inspired by their inherent disgust for the South) forced black suffrage, corruption, and economic dependence on the South. Carpetbaggers, scalawags, and uneducated freedmen plunged the South into depression and confusion until the white South banded together to reclaim southern culture and heritage.

While the Radical Republicans were the apparent villains, Dunning and his followers ascribed blame to President Johnson as well, saddling him with responsibility for Reconstruction’s failure. Freedmen were portrayed as animalistic or easily manipulated, therefore, lacking the kind of agency they indeed exhibited. While certainly influenced by the day's racial bias, the Dunning School at least formulated a coherent argument (although an incredibly inaccurate and distasteful one) that refused to fragment. This model of unity did prove somewhat valuable to historians following Dunning, even if their historical research opposed the Dunning School’s argument, “For all their faults, it is ironic that the best Dunning studies did, at least, attempt to synthesize the social, political, and economic aspects of the period.” In contrast, the Progressive historians that followed the Dunning School disagreed with some of its interpretations. President Johnson was not to blame, but rather, the Northern Radical Republicans were at fault. They cynically used freedmen's civil rights as a means to force capitalism and economic dependence on the South.

Why was W.E.B. Du Bois's reassessment of Reconstruction so important?

However, one work stands out from this period as a harbinger of what was to come. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote Black Reconstruction in America in 1935. Du Bois chastised historians for ignoring the central figures of Reconstruction, the freedmen. Moreover, Du Bois pointedly remarked on the prevailing racial bias of the historical inquiry up to that moment, “One fact and one alone explains the attitude of most recent writers toward Reconstruction; they cannot conceive of Negroes as men.” Du Bois’s indictment served as a precursor for the explosion of revisionist history of the 1960s, which would latch onto the argument of Du Bois and refocus the debate concerning Reconstruction to include the central figures of the freedmen.

The revisionists of the 1960s viewed Reconstruction's heroes to be the Southern freedmen and the Radical Republicans. Instead of going too far, Reconstruction failed to be radical enough. According to revisionists, Reconstruction was tragic not because it went too far and handcuffed white southerners; it was tragic because it was unable to securely secure the rights of freedmen and failed to restructure Southern society through land reform and similar measures. Following on the heels of the Revisionist School were the Post-Revisionists who viewed Reconstruction as overly conservative. This conservatism failed to achieve any lasting influence; thus, once Reconstruction ended, the South returned to its old social and economic structures.

What is the Modern Interpretation of Reconstruction?

So, where has that left historians today? How do more recent historians interpret Reconstruction? Several leading historians (James McPherson, Eric Foner, Emory Thomas) have labeled either the Civil War or Reconstruction as a second American revolution. Eric Foner’s work Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution openly claims Reconstruction to be a break from traditional systems (social, political, economic) prevailing in the South.

In contrast, Emory Thomas’s The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience argues the South first underwent a “conservative revolution” in breaking away from the Union since it broke from the North not to redefine itself but to maintain the status quo of the South. Ironically, according to Thomas, this first “external” revolution was subsumed by a more radical “internal” revolution during the Civil War as the South attempted to urbanize, industrialize and modernize to compete with the North. Thus, whether consciously or not, the Confederacy's leaders looked to recreate the South in a way that mirrored the North in several ways. However, this brief example illustrates the differences among historians and the current scholarship on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Perhaps, the best place to start might be with conditions between the North and South before the outbreak of war in 1861.

James McPherson provides a convincing account of the growing differences between the North and South on the eve of the war. McPherson, author of Battle Cry for Freedom (considered in some circles as the preeminent account of the Civil War), is frequently acknowledged as a leading if not the leading historian in Civil War studies today. In an essay for Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction entitled, “The Differences between the Antebellum North and South,” McPherson argues that the South had not changed, but the North had. According to McPherson, the Southern states had remained loyal to the Jeffersonian interpretation of republicanism. Instead of investing in manufacturing and industry, they reinvested in agrarian pursuits. Southern culture emphasized traditional values, patronage, and ties of kinship.

Moreover, low Southern literacy rates and its labor-intensive economy were not unique. Thus, the “folk culture” of the South valued tradition and stability. Education was available to only the upper classes, who often sent children to elite schools. Simultaneously, political dissent was not popular since the political system rested on the foundation of patronage. In contrast, the North modernized through industrialization. Manufacturing and industry overtook the agrarian pursuits of Northern farmers. Education, unlike in the South, occupied a high position in society. Many Northerners saw education as a means of social mobility. More importantly, the North reinterpreted its ideas concerning republicanism. Accordingly, Northerners increasingly claimed to identify with egalitarian, free-market capitalism, which could only be maintained through a strong central government.

Northern republicanism was opposed to the Southern belief in republicanism emphasizing limited government and property rights, not to mention Southern anti-manufacturing sensibilities. Additionally, the more capital intensive economy of the North relied on wage labor and immigration. Two economic and social variables absent from the South. The rise of wage labor placed wager earners in the North in opposition to the system of slavery in the South, and the rising population of the North (from immigration) increased tensions between the two regions. Along with these differences, the West of America was growing rapidly in the image of the North. Resulting from the influence and growth of railroads, trade relations were no longer centered on the North/South relationship but East to West.

Emory Thomas’s work, The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience , supports much of McPherson’s argument. Like McPherson, Thomas acknowledges the South’s political structure resting on the ideology of states’ rights, agrarianism, and slavery. Politically, the south valued stability over reform. Thus, dissent was not a valuable political commodity.

Moreover, the political system held a foundation based on the patronage of the planter class. According to Thomas, the South’s initial break from the Union was inspired by the hope that the South might preserve its traditions and institutions. Led by radical “fire-eaters,” Southern politicians incited animosity between the North and South, “They made a ‘conservative revolution’ to preserve the antebellum status quo, but they made a revolution just the same. The ‘fire-eaters’ employed classic revolutionary tactics in their agitation for secession. And the Confederates were no fewer rebels than their grandfathers had been in 1776”.

However, this initial ‘conservative revolution’ inspired by radicals was overtaken by the moderates of the political south who recognized the need for change. If the Confederacy were to survive economically, politically, and socially, they would mount their internal revolution. Peter Kolchin’s work American Slavery 1619-1877 upholds much of McPherson’s and Thomas’ arguments concerning the South’s increasingly entrenched society. Kolchin’s work attempts to synthesize the prevailing studies of the day concerning slavery in America. Divided into three sections (colonial America and the American Revolution, antebellum South, and Civil War and Reconstruction)

Kolchin weaves historians' arguments past and present into a coherent work that examines several aspects of slavery. Concerning politics and reform, Kolchin notes, “The ‘perfectionist spirit’ that undergirded so much of the Northern reform effort in antebellum years, the drive continues to improve both social organization and the very human character itself, was largely absent in the South."

Moreover, politically, Kolchin remarks on the non-democratic nature of the South, “antebellum Southern sociopolitical thought harbored profoundly anti-democratic currents … More common than outright attacks on democracy were denunciations of fanatical reformism and appealed to conservatism, order, and tradition.” Also, the access to education among Southerners was limited at best, “Advocates of public education, for example, made little headway in their drive to persuade Southern state legislatures to emulate their northern counterparts and establish statewide public schooling … it was only after the Civil War that public education became widely available in the South.”

How did the Civil War Change the South's Social Structure?

In general, Thomas points out three areas of change political, economic, and social. The economic reform was extreme. As the Civil War commenced, the south had neither a large industrial complex nor many large urban areas (New Orleans stands as the lone exception). Jefferson Davis and others saw the need for increased industry and urbanization, “A nation of farmers knew the frustration of going hungry, but Southern industry made great strides. And Southern cities swelled in size and importance. Cotton, once king, became a pawn in the Confederate South. The emphasis on manufacturing and urbanization came too little, too late. But compared to the antebellum South, the Confederate South underwent nothing short of an economic revolution.”

Charles Dew’s work, Bond of Iron supports this viewpoint. Dew’s work documents both slave and master's experience at an industrial metalworking forge in Virginia known as Buffalo Forge. Repeatedly, throughout the work, the southern industry is portrayed as anemic at best. When the Civil War unfolds, Buffalo Forge becomes a few industrial sources of iron within the South. To obtain maximum profit, William Weaver, the forges’ owner, used this scarcity to increase the iron prices. Ironically though, Dew’s work points out the difficulties in industrializing through slave labor. Slavery failed to encourage innovation. Rather stability was seen as the optimum end.

Thus, once Weaver had assembled some 70 slaves, he no longer looked to improve industrial efficiency or examine technological advancements. “After he acquired and trained a group of skilled slave artisans in the 1820s and 1830s and had his ironworks functioning successfully, Weaver displayed little interest in trying to improve the technology of ironmaking at Buffalo Forge … The emphasis was on stability, not innovation. Slavery, in short, seems to have exerted a profoundly conservative influence on the manufacturing process at Buffalo Forge, and one suspects that similar circumstances prevailed at industrial establishments throughout the slave South.” Thus, Dew’s assertion would render the Confederacy’s attempt to industrialize increasingly tricky since the Southern labor system was not conducive to optimum industrial efficiency. Additionally, the Confederacy’s attempt to industrialize, urbanize, and in general, command the Southern economy contrasts sharply with its belief in states’ rights federal authority. Through such management of the economy, the Confederate leaders were contradicting themselves, yet the war called for such measures.

According to Thomas, such reorganization did not limit itself to the economic field. Southern women were no longer confined to the home, “Southern women climbed down from their pedestals and became refugees, went to work in factories, or assumed the responsibility for managing farms.” This hardly seems to be a radical premise since this cycle repeats itself nationally during both World Wars of the 20th century.

Besides, class consciousness began to form in the minds of the “proletariat” “Under the strain of wartime some “un Southern” rents appeared in the fabric of Southern society. The very process of renting what had been harmonious—mass meetings, riots, resistance to Confederate law and order—was the most visible manifestation of the social unsettlement within the Confederate South. Whether caused by heightened class awareness, disaffection with the “cause,” or frustration with physical privation, domestic tumults bore witness to the social ferment which replaced antebellum stability.” Of course, Thomas is careful to couch this class consciousness with limits, “This is not to imply that the Confederate south seethed with labor unrest; it is rather to say that working men in the Confederacy asserted themselves to a degree unknown in the antebellum period.”

Regarding social mobility, the South was forced to embrace meritocracy, at least in the area of military matters. No doubt, at the war’s beginning, the planter class dominated the military. However, as Thomas points out, “Before the war entered its second year, martial merit had challenged planter pedigree in the Confederate command structure. And combat provided ample opportunity for Southerners of all backgrounds to earn, confirm, or forfeit their spurs.” Again, Thomas limits his language, noting that martial merit “challenged” the aristocratic system rather than replacing it. The planter class still held a powerful position, “Still, the Confederate army was at the same time an agency of both democracy and aristocracy. Members of the planter class often won the elections to company commands.” Thus, the reader is left wondering what is meant by revolution since Thomas seems to be saying that the South revolutionizes during the war but then retreats from its revolution once the war comes to its conclusion.

Therefore, would this not serve more aptly as an example of wartime necessities undertaken for war but not intended for permanence? One might respond that such cases begin the process of change since historically, once people are granted rights or freedoms, it proves to be quite difficult to reclaim such rights, mobility, or freedoms. However, one last point concerning social mobility must be made. Considering the conditions of trade for the South during the war, new ways of the trade needed to be located. Such avenues to wealth did provide many southerners previously excluded from the planter class to ascend the ladder of social mobility once new avenues or means to profit were established, “Those who were able to take advantage of new opportunities in trade and industry became wealthy and powerful men … Not only did exemplary men rise from commonplace to prominence in the Confederate period; statistical evidence tends to confirm that the Confederate leadership as a whole came from non-planters.”

However, Thomas’s argument that the Civil War’s demands changed the nature of slavery in the South fails to convince. Thomas argues that increased responsibilities and rights given to slaves because of the War’s demands on the white population proved that the Confederacy was even willing to sacrifice slavery for independence, “White Southerners depended upon black Southerners to do more than till the fields and tend the campfires … As the war wore on the trend toward black labor became more pronounced. Every black man employed meant one more available white soldier .” While the nature of slavery was altered, it did so temporarily. The physical lack of people in rural and even urban areas was granted slaves increased autonomy. The war also demanded laborers, so the Confederacy was forced to pay slaves or hire them as workers (in case of labor shortage or some cases, strikes). Still, this did not change their legal status as property. Once the war ended, providing the South won, slavery would have gone back to its previous form. Thomas remarks on the effects of Reconstruction on his ‘southern revolution.’

However, while Thomas’s overall argument has strength, it has a weakness in that all the change he describes as revolutionary occurred strictly as a result of the Civil War. The United States’ experiences in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War illustrate the rubber band-like quality of wartime societal shifts. Shifts occur, but once the war ends, the shape returns with some alterations which might lead to true change but nothing revolutionary or sudden.

Similarly, Thomas argues that the suspension of civil liberties in the South was a radical departure from Southern culture. Suspension of civil liberties is a common wartime tactic (WWI, WWII). Lincoln did the same in the North. Thomas cannot use this as truly viable evidence of revolutionary change.

Was Reconstruction a Revolution?

Eric Foner regards Reconstruction as a truly revolutionary period. Foner’s work, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 focuses on four main themes concerning the evolution of the Reconstruction Period. Reconstruction aimed to provide a coherent synthesis combining recent scholarship and Foner’s conclusions to produce a comprehensive contemporary interpretation of the Reconstruction period.

However, within the work, several other central themes emerge. The “remodeling” of the South serves as a central theme in the work as Foner attempts to trace the efforts to restructure the South, “The second purpose of this study is to trace how southern society as a whole was remodeled, and to do so without neglecting the local variations in different parts of the South.” The emergence of new complex race and class relations throughout the South provides Foner another historical pillar to investigate. With the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments and the changing nature of the South, racial and class attitudes set upon a difficult task of redefining race and race relations, a process that continues today. The influx of class and its twisted relationship to race into this volatile social mixture complicates Foner’s investigation, “The evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations, and the complex interconnection of race and class in the postwar South, form a third [pillar] of this book.”

However, further complicating this portion of Foner’s argument is the non-linear nature of race relations in the South. Rather as Foner illustrates throughout the book, race relations were subject to local variables that greatly influenced interactions. Moreover, advances did not proceed linearly. Instead, through complex social, political, and economic interactions between races, race relations gradually evolved at times progressing, while in other moments, regressing. African American freedmen fought for their freedoms and liberties even when white resistance turned violent and exclusionary. Its this constant push and pull effect that produces the racial structure of the postwar South.

Foner’s final two themes rest on a more national portrait of the postwar United States. The United States government emerged more with increased authority over the states. Thus, Foner attempts to explain the new role of the federal government and its increasing interest in its citizens' rights. Therefore, the activist nature of the Populists and Progressives finds its birthplace in the activist nature of the postwar United States government and, to some extent, Reconstruction itself.

The Reconstruction's final theme revolves around the influence of the North’s political and economic structure on the South. Foner’s spends less time on this theme than the others. However, as he notes, it does not lack importance, “finally, this study examines how changes in the North’s economy and class structure affected Reconstruction. Many of the processes and issues central to Southern Reconstruction – the consolidation of a new class structure, changes in the position of blacks, conflicts over access to the region’s economic resources were also present, in different forms, in the North … Reconstruction cannot be fully understood without attention to its distinctively Northern and national dimensions.”

Foner’s work's major strength lies in its attempt to sketch for the reader a process that Foner argues begins in 1863 with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. In reality, Lincoln’s command held minimal legitimacy since it did not free slaves in the border states. Thus, Lincoln’s lack of authority over the South left his abolition of slavery a mere symbol in the Southern states. Despite this fact, Foner argues that “emancipation meant more than the end of a labor system, more even than the uncompensated liquidation of the nation’s largest concentration of private property … The demise of slavery inevitably threw open the most basic questions of the polity, economy, and society. Begun to preserve the Union, the war now portended a far-reaching transformation in Southern life and a redefinition of the place of blacks in American society and of the very meaning of freedom in the American republic.”

Thus, the Emancipation Proclamation catalyzed the eventual Civil Rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. Peter Kolchin interprets the effect of the Proclamation similarly, “the Emancipation Proclamation did not -immediately end slavery: the proclamation applied only to rebel territory – where the federal government could not enforce the law – and left untouched slaves held in loyal states. Nevertheless, the decree had enormous symbolic significance, transforming a conservative war to restore the Union into a revolutionary war to reconstruct it.” In a manner, Foner uses the Emancipation Proclamation to unite two possibly “revolutionary” periods into one: the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Since the Emancipation Proclamation occurs as a result of the Civil War, it serves as the bridge from the revolutionary experience of the Civil War to the revolutionary consequences of Reconstruction. In this way, the Civil War and Reconstruction can be viewed as similar to the French Revolution stages. Each with its own unique experience and results, yet both contributing to an overall movement or revolution. For freedmen, Reconstruction’s beginnings were auspicious. African American political grassroots activism exploded with increased political autonomy. In an essay for Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction entitled “Black Reconstruction Leaders at the Grass Roots,” Foner reiterates much of his arguments concerning racial re-division relationships and the interaction between races. According to Foner, blacks joined associations like the Union League, attended conventions, participated in rallies, each of which contributed to the freedmen’s political knowledge and awareness. Among African Americans, this political mobilization was unprecedented and without rival. Most freed blacks looked to the federal government to protect and acknowledge equal rights since southern localities provided little protection or adopted hostile stances toward freedmen and freedwomen.

Reconstruction argues similarly, “But in 1867, politics emerged as the principal focus of black aspirations. The meteoric rise of the Union League reflected and channeled this political mobilization. By the end of 1867, it seemed, virtually every black voter in the South had enrolled in the Union League. The league’s main function, however, was political education” However, this political awareness did not mean that all Southerners appreciated it, nor did it necessarily lead to a better understanding between white and black Southerners, “Now as freedmen poured into the league, ‘the negro question’ disrupted some upcountry branches, leading many white members to withdraw altogether or retreat into segregated branches.” Such political activism redrew racial relationships and reorganized institutions. For example, the Union League’s acceptance of freedmen resulted in white flight or segregation among other branches, despite the small white farmer and the freedmen's obvious class similarities. Still, the political activism by freedmen and freedwomen signifies a great change in Southern society.

During Reconstruction, the most visible change in the South revolved both around race relations and labor. In Reconstruction, Foner argues that African Americans cared about more than just receiving just wages for their labor. Instead, freedmen wanted autonomy and land, “For blacks, the abolition of slavery meant not an escape from all labor, but an end to unrequited toil … To white predictions that they would not work, blacks responded that if any class could be characterized as ‘lazy,’ it was the planters … Yet, freedom meant more than simply receiving wages. Freedmen wished to take control of the conditions under which they labored, free themselves from the subordination of white authority, and carve out the greatest measure of economic autonomy” Foner’s argument finds support from several scholars. Jacqueline Jones's work Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow reiterates Foner’s claims. Although focusing on freedwomen's labor, Jones's work notes the differences in the meaning of freedom for black women compared to its meaning for African American men. According to Jones, black women found themselves obligated to familial concerns.

Thus they retreated from wage labor. However, despite the differing focus, Jones notes the desire for autonomy among African Americans. Freedmen wished to avoid the chain gang-like labor conditions of slavery. Therefore labor was reorganized by black laborers into “non-bureaucratic, self-regulatory, self-selecting peer groups.” Such demands by freedmen eventually would lead to the system of sharecropping. Unlike whites, black husbands and fathers viewed familial issues as another political issue of the day, such as land reform. Whites failed to share this vision and saw the “ethos of mutuality” as a threat to free labor and self-determination.

Harold D. Woodman also notes similar manifestations. However, it must be noted; Woodman refuses to use the term “revolutionary” for the Civil War and Reconstruction period. According to Woodman, historians must assess the quality of this change, not the amount. Woodman notes the need for reform in the former slave society. However, the reform needed was never produced. Bourgeoisie free labor was the basis of the new southern economy since the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War had destroyed the previous one. New roles for both slave and the planter arose, along with the need for new lines of authority.

As Foner attests, these new relations and lines of authority could only be created through constant give and take (strikes, work slowdown). Planters became businessmen and merchants, creating a new class of “capitalistic landlords.” Laborers developed new roles; wage labor became shared wages, which evolved into tenancy and then sharecropping. Woodman notes the change and its effects, which he argues were new business elites preventing opportunity, thus retarding the economy. In comparison, freedmen sharecropping failed to offer economic responsibility or entrepreneurship.

Perhaps the most ironic aspect of Reconstruction lay in white hopes for freedmen. Jones notes such in her work Soldiers of Light and Love , as many black communities chose African American teachers over white missionaries. Freedman wanted independence, privacy. Whites wanted freedmen to become like wage laborers in the North, adopting middle-class values. Freedmen focused more on land and the right to own their labor, to produce for themselves. In this way, sharecropping can be viewed as a compromise fought for by African Americans. While it failed to provide them with the economic independence they desired, it did grant them land and some autonomy. Thus, while this was a great change from the slave system, it failed to change African Americans' lives for the better significantly, nor did it advance the southern economy. Woodman refuses to acknowledge this as revolutionary, “Instead of chronicling quantity we must rather assess quality: the problem is not how much change but what kind of change.”

Why was Reconstruction was a Failure?

So, how successful was Reconstruction? Foner argues that Reconstruction proved revolutionary for a period but ultimately failed. “Here, however, we enter the realm of the purely speculative. What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed and that for blacks, its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments that did endure. For the nation as a whole, the collapse of Reconstruction was a tragedy that deeply affected the course of its future development.” Thomas views the final results of Reconstruction similarly but through a slightly different historical lens. According to Thomas, Reconstruction undid the revolutionary advances of the Confederacy, “Ironically, the internal revolution went to completion at the very time that the external revolution collapsed … The program of the radical Republicans may have failed to restructure Southern society. It may, in the end, have “sold out” the freedmen in the South. Reconstruction did succeed in frustrating the positive elements of the revolutionary Southern experience.”

Both historians view Reconstruction as a failure in two respects: the inability to guarantee freedmen their rights and the retardation of the Southern economy. However, while the political violence in the South (KKK) along with the legislation of black codes and Jim Crow laws severely curtailed the rights of freedmen, lasting constitutional adjustments did lay the groundwork for future battles. The Reconstruction amendments did allow for African Americans to claim freedoms that were rightfully theirs with the gradual successes of the Civil Rights movement. The failure of Reconstruction resulted from several factors besides the two already mentioned. Foner points to the North’s new fascination with industrialization and labor conflict. The economics of which would shift the country’s attention away from the Reconstruction experience.

For all its failures, even Foner acknowledges the importance of Reconstruction in establishing the possibility for a more just America, “the institutions created or consolidated after the Civil War – the black family, school, and church – provided the base from which the modern civil rights revolution sprang. And for its legal strategy, the movement returned to the laws and amendments of Reconstruction.” Like Foner, Kolchin points out similar features of Post-Reconstruction America, “Even as blacks became the objects of intensified racial oppression, they struggled to remake their lives as free men and women and succeeded to a remarkable degree in their efforts to secure greater independence for themselves … In assessing these developments, the question of perspective remains critical: the South of 1910 was hardly the South they would have chosen … but it was far removed from the South of 1860.”

Thus, Reconstruction allowed African Americans to more fully express agency while still oppressed. It gave blacks the chance to counter such oppression more freely. Networks, communities, and relationships were all redefined and recreated. Again, just as Foner maintained, Kolchin remarks, “And in the years after World War II, again with the help of white allies, they spearheaded a “second Reconstruction” – grounded on the legal foundation provided by the first — to create an interracial society that would finally overcome the persistent legacy of slavery.”

Subsequent counterrevolutions have consumed many revolutions throughout history. The French Revolution ended with France in much the same state as when it began the revolution with the monarchy's reinstatement. However, France was forever changed. Retrenchment occurred, yet reform had started. Similarly, Reconstruction failed to achieve its original aim, yet, it altered the South and North forever. However, one cannot separate Reconstruction from the Civil War. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation connected the two events and united them in their revolutionary purpose.

Both Thomas and Foner are correct when they view both events as revolutionary. The legislation passed during Reconstruction stands as the tangible result that allowed for the Civil Rights movement's legalistic protests. Thus, the Civil War allowed for the passage of such legislation, with Reconstruction providing the historical moment to ratify such measures. While Harold Woodman correctly asserts that the quality of change should be the measuring stick by which Reconstruction is judged, his denial of its gradual influence misses the point. When the FDR sent Works Progress Administration agents into the “black belt” during the Great Depression, former slaves (in interviews) repeatedly recalled both the disappointments of Reconstruction but also its accomplishments. Reconstruction and the Civil War provided the light at the end of the tunnel for African Americans. While the tunnel has been long, difficult, and arduous, and the light has still to be reached, its intensity has grown so that America and its people are no longer in total darkness.

This article was originally published on Videri.org and is republished here with their permission.

Updated December 8, 2020

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The South during reconstruction, 1865-1877

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The southern gap

In the american south, an oligarchy of planters enriched itself through slavery. pervasive underdevelopment is their legacy.

by Keri Leigh Merritt   + BIO

In 1938, near the end of the Great Depression, the US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt commissioned a ‘Report on the Economic Conditions of the South’, examining the ‘economic unbalance in the nation’ due to the region’s dire poverty. In a speech following the report , Roosevelt deemed the South ‘the nation’s No 1 economic problem’, declaring that its vast levels of inequality had led to persistent underdevelopment.

Although controversial, Roosevelt’s comments were historically accurate. The president’s well-read and highly educated young southern advisors had convinced him that the South’s political problems were partially a result of ‘economic colonialism’ – namely, that the South was used as an extractive economy for the rest of the nation, leaving the region both impoverished and underdeveloped. Plantation slavery had made the planters rich, but it left the South poor.

Unlike the industrialising North and, eventually, the developing and urbanising West, the high stratification and concentrated wealth of the 19th-century South laid the foundations for its 20th-century problems. The region’s richest white people profited wildly from various forms of unfree labour, from slavery and penal servitude to child indenture and debt peonage; they also invested very little in roads, schools, utilities and other forms of infrastructure and development. The combination of great wealth and extreme maldistribution has left people in the South impoverished, underpaid, underserved and undereducated, with the shortest lifespans in all of the United States. Southerners, both Black and white, are less educated and less healthy than other Americans. They are more violent and more likely to die young.

N ow, 86 years after Roosevelt’s report, the South has returned to historically high levels of economic inequality, lagging behind the rest of the US by every measurable standard. The plight of the South is a direct result of its long history of brutal labour exploitation and its elites’ refusal to invest in their communities. They have kept the South in dire poverty, stifled creativity and innovation, and have all but prevented workers from attaining any kind of real power.

With the rapid industrialisation spurred by the Second World War, the South made great economic strides, but never quite caught up with the prosperity of the rest of the US. While the South’s gross domestic product has remained around 90 per cent of the US rate for dozens of years, deindustrialisation of the 1990s devastated rural areas. Since then, hospitals and medical clinics have closed in record numbers, and deaths of despair (those from alcohol, drugs or suicide) have skyrocketed, as has substance abuse. Southerners in general are isolated and lonely, and wealth and power are heavily concentrated: there are a few thousand incredibly wealthy families – almost all of them the direct descendants of the Confederacy’s wealthiest slaveholders – a smaller-than-average middle class, and masses of poor people, working class or not. The South, with few worker protections, prevents its working classes from earning a living wage. It’s virtually impossible to exist on the meagre income of a single, low-wage, 40-hour-a-week job, especially since the US has no social healthcare benefits.

The American South is typically defined as the states of the former Confederacy, stretching north to the Mason-Dixon line separating Maryland from Pennsylvania, and west to Texas and Oklahoma. Today, one-fifth of the South’s counties are marred with the ‘persistent poverty’ designation , meaning they have had poverty rates above 20 per cent for more than 30 years. Four-fifths of all persistently poor counties in the nation are in the states of the former Confederacy. The data is clear that most Southern states continue to be impoverished and politically backwards. Whether measured in terms of development, health or happiness, the region is bad at everything good, and good at everything bad.

The South was portrayed as anti-capitalist: enslavers had to be dragged into modernity against their wills

The recent popularity in liberal circles of the New History of Capitalism (NHC) to explain the region’s exceptionalism has slowed in recent years. The NHC emerged in the 2000s and 2010s, as one historian wrote , by claiming ‘slavery as integral, rather than oppositional, to capitalism.’ It seems likely that during the post-Cold War triumph of capitalism, a subset of historians began trying to tie much of the past to the term – with the most extreme instance being the insistence that slavery was the key to American capitalism. While the NHC scholars rarely define terms like ‘capitalism’, the problems with their theories are more than academic. Unfortunately, presenting enslavers as cunning, profit-driven businessmen not only obscures important features about the past, it also downplays immense regional differences in economic development.

Thinking back over the NHC trends, it is important to note how other scholars, both past and present, have presented the problems of the region, and discuss issues that may have been obscured by a heavy emphasis on business and ‘slavery’s capitalism’. As the economic historian Gavin Wright has pointed out , the NHC’s central claim, echoed in The New York Times ’ Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘1619 Project’ – that slavery was essential for American economic growth – ignored decades of accepted historiographical work on capitalism and slavery. It also contradicted nearly everything economists have argued regarding slavery’s impact on the South’s (under)development.

Beginning in the 1960s, many historians classified the South, from the days of slavery until the Second World War, as distinctively precapitalist in significant ways. They saw the region as having a type of ‘merchant’ or ‘agrarian’ capitalism, and never considered the states of the Old Confederacy as shrewdly ‘capitalist’ (the term itself without any modifiers). Primarily due to the absence of a free labour society, but also because of the lack of infrastructure and development within the region – a place with few cities, little industrialisation, and few social services – the South was often portrayed as distinctly anti-capitalist: enslavers had to be dragged into modernity against their wills.

After the Second World War industrialisation boom ushered the South into a more fully capitalist society, it essentially became a colonial economy to the North, as it courted investment and corporations from the capital-rich Northeastern US. Existing in a dependency-type of relationship, it was never really the South – or southern labour, no matter how unfree or brutalised – driving the US economy.

Finally, contrary to the position that American slavery represents the key or essence of capitalism, the most recent scholarship regarding economic analysis of slavery argues that the institution was not economically efficient. All these points highlight the need for studies on growth, and more importantly, on underdevelopment. Slavery made the planters very rich, but it made the South very poor. In the 19th century, capitalism, even industrial capitalism, did not bring the South to the developmental standards of the rest of the nation. The question remains: why is that so?

I f we turn from looking at planters to studying labour, we see that elite capture of the state is bad for democracy and worse for development. It also helps us distinguish between growth and development, highlighting the unevenness of both in different areas of the US. The US is a large country and awareness of the difference between growth and development can help us see that perhaps it makes more sense to compare the American South with places in the Global South rather than the American North or West.

To begin with, southern militias proved an effective imperial military tool during the brutal process of Indian Removal, which lasted into the 20th century. The white colonialist push westward robbed Native Americans of the greatest wealth the region has: land. That land eventually became the richest white people’s main source of power, owned by the few and guarded like a religion. Elite white southerners were obsessed with intermarriage and have kept their fortunes intact for generations. While they hoarded riches and resources for themselves, they neglected to invest in the communities in which they lived. With few improvements in technology and development, the South’s dependence on slavery enriched enslavers and their descendants, but it left the rest of the region, both people and resources, deeply and cyclically impoverished.

Americans think of the US as having been at a crossroads in 1860, between slavery and freedom, but that impasse was more than just political and ideological: it was also economic. While the North had made fantastic gains over the previous decades by investing in its people, from education to infrastructure, the South lagged far behind. The wealthy enslavers refused to invest in the poor and middling-class whites surrounding them, finding no compelling reason to put money into communities they would move away from as soon as the western spread of slavery beckoned. In terms of development, whether infrastructure, education, healthcare or wealth distribution, the South remained woefully underdeveloped in comparison with the rest of the country.

The Deep South instead functioned more like an oligarchy or aristocracy

With one-third of the nation’s population in 1860, the South was responsible for only 10 per cent of US manufacturing output, and possessed only 10 per cent of the nation’s manufacturing labour force and 11 per cent of its manufacturing capital. Its transportation system, best described as like a ‘conveyor-belt’, transported goods effectively but did little for people. The northern and even western US had been investing in building schools and providing free public education, but the cotton South left its people to fend for themselves: education was reserved for the rich. The North built hospitals, asylums and places for the invalid and indigent; the South built jails and prisons.

Far from a democratic region, the Deep South instead functioned more like an oligarchy or aristocracy. As W E B Du Bois wrote in 1935: ‘Even among the 2 million slaveholders, an oligarchy of 8,000 really ruled the South.’ The wealthiest slaveholders wielded immense and pervasive power as lawmakers, law-enforcers, judges and even jury members. They dominated the region’s politics and devised multiple ways to disenfranchise their poorer fellow countrymen. The oligarchic structure of the 19th-century South meant that the men who controlled government also controlled everything else in society, from rental properties and bank loans to arrest warrants and vigilante violence.

In fact, the enormous cost of the South’s implementation of its various forms of unfree labour still haven’t been adequately calculated. The ubiquitous, police-state-like criminal justice system, complete with slave patrols and night riders, the overseers and slave-drivers and catchers and other middlemen who had to be hired to keep people working – none of that has truly been accounted for yet. Recently, the economists Richard Hornbeck and Trevon Logan challenged decades of accepted scholarship concerning the cost-effectiveness of slavery, arguing that slavery was inefficient when ‘including costs incurred by enslaved people themselves’. Under this view, emancipation produced major economic gains.

The first years of Reconstruction brought immense changes to the South: a free labour economy threatened to change the entire social order as Black politicians courted poor white voters for a cross-racial, class-based coalition. For the first time, the region experienced democratic elections, open to all men, Black and white. The new state legislators established a system of public education. They began funding public works and infrastructure. They started developing the region.

Despite these transformations, former slaveholding families remained rich – and powerful – because they held a near-monopoly of the only real capital left in the war-torn South: land. The leaders of the Confederate insurrection were never held accountable for treason, and the same few wealthy white families who ruled the slave South remained entrenched in power even after the war. Their enduring place at the top of Southern society helped give rise to the ‘continuity thesis’, in which some scholars argue that, despite the Civil War and Reconstruction, little changed in the US South. In many rural areas, even today, their heirs still lord over their little locales. The South’s ruling elite eventually regained complete control of the region, disenfranchising the masses, terrorising the leaders and the intellectuals and the brave, and undergirding this shadow world of unfreedoms with the ever-present threat of violence.

T he Southern elite may have, eventually, emerged from Reconstruction back on top of the South, but the region no longer dominated US politics. The US South remained overwhelmingly agricultural well into the 20th century and long after the rest of the country had become more urban. From the vital perspective of social and labour relations, the South’s transition to capitalism must be considered as late by US standards. In the 1940s and ’50s, historians began arguing that the type of capitalism in the South throughout the early 20th century was merchant capitalism (also known as mercantile, or agrarian capitalism), not industrial capitalism. Merchant capitalism is considered the earliest phase in the transition to capitalism; it is more about moving goods to market, and is characterised by the lack of industrialisation, wage labour and commercial finance. A modified version of the merchant capitalism model would be championed several decades later by Eugene Genovese whose southern ‘in but not of’ capitalism theory, replete with semi-feudalistic social relations, appeared in the 1960s and generated great interest and debate, and eventually, in the early 2000s, came under sustained attack by some US historians who emerged following the end of the Cold War.

These scholars, who eventually came to be grouped under the designation ‘the New History of Capitalism’, never truly engaged with the consequences of the fact that the slave South, in a strict sense, cannot be considered capitalist because the enslaved are unfree, forced labourers who cannot sell their labour power. Even if we sidestep the slavery-as-labour issue, vital to Marxist assessments of capitalist society, we must acknowledge that impoverished southern whites also had little to no control over their respective labour power. The power of enslaved labour consistently reduced the demand for workers, lowered their wages, and rendered their bargaining power weak to worthless. Labourers in the South, regardless of race, worked within a world ruled by degrees of freedom. Never a stark dichotomy, freedom emerged from a give-and-take process of political contestation and negotiation with the planter aristocracy. Slavery was simply one form – albeit the harshest – of a range of unfreedom, lasting well into the 20th century.

But these merchant capitalist labour market features were not simply rooted in the racism of southern white culture. Instead, elite white southerners ensured a calculated and well-codified social order, complete with exploitative labour practices, debt peonage, and continuing forms of unfree labour made possible by the burgeoning criminal justice system. To maintain power and thus control of the region, at times the elite chose to forgo higher profits in the short term so that they could keep their labour force under tighter control in the long term. This was certainly the case with industrialisation during slavery, when enslavers could have turned a much higher profit by industrialising but chose not to; they did not want to disturb the fragile hierarchy.

South Carolina – the birthplace of the Confederacy – has the lowest union membership, at 2 per cent

Compared with the rest of the US, with only a brief interruption during early Reconstruction, the South’s lack of labour power, infrastructure and internal development extended well into the 20th century. Between the violence the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists, and the lack of opportunities for poor and working-class southerners, by the mid-1870s former slaveholders and their descendants were back in complete control of the South. Due to the absence of land reform, reparations and the failure to punish Confederate leaders or confiscate Confederate property, the labour lords of the antebellum period merely became the landlords of the postbellum period. Their primary source of wealth changed, but they remained in power, controlling everything in the South and reverting to their old ways of undertaxing, underfunding and underdeveloping.

Given these facts, before the popularity of ‘the New History of Capitalism’ 20 years ago, many historians viewed the transition from slavery to capitalism as a long process because, even after emancipation, unfree labour continued to dominate a significant portion of the labour market. Some argued that forms of unfree labour persisted in the South as late as the 1920s and ’30s, and others claimed they lasted until the Second World War. Even when technically free, African American workers generally lacked the labour power necessary to be deemed a proletariat, able to effectively negotiate on a labour market. Due to predatory sharecropping contracts and debt peonage, an extremely punitive criminal justice system, and the added layer of domestic terrorism from white supremacists, the poorest people in the South, both Black and white, still worked in a society in which labour was not entirely free, that is, able to be brought to a labour market.

The South’s shadowland of unfree labour rested entirely on an undemocratic government, also meant to control labour. In the 1880s and ’90s, when Farmers’ Alliances and Populism began mounting a serious political challenge to planter domination, every southern state passed laws limiting the vote. While primarily aimed at disenfranchising Black people, the laws also disenfranchised poor white people, further concentrating each state’s political power in the hands of white elites in plantation districts. It was an effective strategy: in 1880 there were 160,000 union members in the US, and fewer than 6 per cent of them lived in the South. Today, while a record low of just 10 per cent of Americans are union members, the South’s numbers are roughly half of that, with states like South Carolina – the birthplace of the Confederacy – having the lowest union membership in the nation, just over a measly 2 per cent.

During the last third of the 19th century, the value of output rose and capital investment in the US increased tenfold. Meanwhile, most of the Deep South (outside of a few large cities like Atlanta and New Orleans) remained ‘capital starved’ and ‘technologically laggard’, as the region’s elite continued to baulk at infrastructure or other kinds of developmental investment. To secure funding, the states of the former Confederacy needed to court investment from outside the region – first the North and West, later Europe and Asia. Originally, southern politicians chased northern capital by offering them generous tax breaks and other financial incentives. Without a strong tax base or an effective bureaucracy, the region suffered further because most profits were routed out of the South back to northern owners and investors. Taken together, these things meant that, well into the 20th century, the South remained overwhelmingly rural, without a strong system of infrastructure and no good plan for development. In 1900, the country was 40 per cent urban versus the South’s 18 per cent, and 25 per cent of the US labour force was involved in manufacturing versus the South’s 10 per cent. Something had to drastically change.

F ollowing the Great Depression, which hit the rural, already-impoverished South harder than it did the rest of the nation, the New Deal influx of money, federal programmes, jobs and infrastructure helped bring the region fully into the 20th century. Perhaps most importantly, in the 1930s Roosevelt’s New Deal finally broke up the power stranglehold by the big land (plantation) owners. The South was finally able to evolve from an agricultural labour market that had pre-capitalist characteristics, shifting to a much larger industrial workforce during the Second World War. Some $4 billion in federal spending poured into the region, funding military facilities and forever ending the isolated labour market. Since 1940, the South has outperformed the rest of the US in income, job and construction growth, finally reaching about 90 per cent of national per-capita income norms. It has also remained critically behind in multiple important infrastructural and development measurements, from education and transit to poverty levels and healthcare.

Without question, the Second World War changed the South for the better. War industry jobs pulled workers from rural areas, forcing southern farms to finally mechanise. This mechanisation meant the destruction of sharecropping and tenant farming, as well as debt peonage. Workers in the South would finally be paid in wages – in cold, hard cash. And that fact was incredibly freeing.

Outside of extractive industries, the type of industry that came to dominate the South was reliant on intensive, low-wage labour, a striking difference with the rest of the US. ‘A low-wage region in a high-wage country,’ the South industrialised in a way that preserved and reinforced the class and racial status quo, even when corporations were owned by men from outside the region. Instead of being an agent of radical change, southern industrialisation preserved the region’s legacies of low taxes for the wealthy, heavy-handed labour control, and little in the way of governmental oversight or regulation.

Development is, quite simply, an essential part of restorative justice

Even as the South experienced a period of relative prosperity from the Second World War to the 1990s, with development at its peak, it never quite caught up to the rest of the nation. While there were myriad reasons for this remaining gap, historians have attempted to explain them with a type of regional dependency theory. Referring to the old Confederacy as a ‘colonial economy’, they argued that northern-owned corporations controlled southern money and power, extracting resources and exploiting cheap labour, siphoning both profits and tax dollars away from the impoverished region – all while maintaining racist practices. Adding insult to injury was that the southern economy became the domain of men from outside the South, men with no stake in the local communities their decisions ultimately affected (indeed, often devastated).

Whether or not the South was truly a colonial economy, framing it as such highlighted that the region remained impoverished, infrastructurally stunted, and underdeveloped. Even the golden era of the sunbelt South came to a bitter end by the close of the 20th century. Rural developmental problems began as far back as the 1980s, as local banks began shuttering and hospitals closed. Things worsened in the 1990s, as the economic growth the South enjoyed for decades came crashing to a halt when federal trade deals eviscerated manufacturing. The racial tolerance and progress made possible by labour unions and working-class solidarity began to erode; deindustrialisation profoundly changed the region. Never having invested much in public services, state governments continued to slash budgets through the 2000s. This not only stalled new development, it also let much of the states’ infrastructure, education and healthcare plans fall deeply into trouble, perhaps disrepair.

To address the continuing developmental gap in the poorest areas of the US, the country’s staggering levels of inequality must be addressed. Using policy to redistribute property, the South – and the nation – may finally be brought up to the standards of the rest of the developed world. From universal healthcare and a thriving public education sector to functional public transportation and reliable infrastructure, development is, quite simply, an essential part of restorative justice. With deeply progressive taxation coupled with democratic reforms, the right to organise and collectively bargain may be preserved; the right to retire fully funded; the historically racist criminal justice system switched to a Nordic model. Even the poorest rural Americans could lead lives with dignity due to governmental programmes such as a universal basic income (which would immediately lift more than 43 million people out of poverty) and a federal jobs guarantee – a concept derivative of the best aspects of the New Deal.

Today, more than a lifetime after Roosevelt’s declaration of the South as the ‘the nation’s No 1 economic problem’, nothing has changed. The South remains poor, underdeveloped, and lags behind the rest of the country by every measurable standard. It is a moral blight on the nation’s conscience, and far past time to truly lift the region out of poverty, and into the 21st century.

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Reconstruction of the South

This post-war print depicts an allegorical vision of change that could accompany Reconstruction. At the left, Union soldiers are shown beating swords and weapons into farming implements. On the right, a general holds a pickaxe and stands next to a cannon that has been converted into a mill. American-British philanthropist George Peabody, stands at the center of the print, in front of an American flag held aloft by an eagle. He holds open a book that reads, “2,000,000 for Education,” referring to the Peabody Education Fund, which he established to raise the standard of education in the South for those of all races. Beneath him are gathered a group of young white children. One girl looks at a group of four freed slaves, holding a poster that says, “Come Uncle / Learn to Be a Citizen.” In the background, a crowd of 300,000 mechanics, farmers, and laborers carry tools that they will use to facilitate the “Reconstruction of the Union.” On the right, a sailor prepares to sink a barrel labeled, “Extremes,” into the sea. This idealized vision of Reconstruction is one led by the North, which will feature educational and economic development throughout the country, but will be absent of any radicalism. While women's charities had long funded children's orphanages and schooling, George Peabody is considered the "Father of Modern Philanthropy" and his generosity inspired other wealthy individuals to gifting and developing lasting charitable trusts for social causes, particularly in the field of education.

The artist of this print was Augustus Tholey, a German immigrant born in Alsace-Loraine. He moved to Philadelphia in 1848, where he worked as a painter, pastel artist, engraver, and lithographer. It was published by John Smith, who was active in Philadelphia between 1860 and 1870. Besides publishing prints by Tholey and Anton Hohenstein, Smith was also an accomplished gilder, painter, and looking glass and frame manufacturer.

Date Made: 1867

Depicted: Peabody, George Maker: Tholey Smith, John

Location: Currently not on view

Place Made: United States: Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Subject: Education Chronology: 1850-1859 Patriotism and Patriotic Symbols Children Railroads Uniforms, Military Reform Movements Depicted: Eagles Flags Referenced: Civil War Subject: Philanthropy

See more items in: Home and Community Life: Domestic Life , Clothing & Accessories , American Civil War Prints , Art , Domestic Furnishings

Exhibition:

Exhibition Location:

Credit Line: Harry T. Peters "America on Stone" Lithography Collection

Data Source: National Museum of American History

Id Number: DL.60.2576 Catalog Number: 60.2576 Accession Number: 228146

Object Name: Lithograph Object Type: Lithograph

Physical Description: paper (overall material) ink (overall material) Measurements: image: 18 1/4 in x 25 7/8 in; 46.355 cm x 65.7225 cm

Metadata Usage: CC0

Guid: http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ng49ca746b5-1707-704b-e053-15f76fa0b4fa

Record Id: nmah_324886

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Civil War — Why the Reconstruction of the South was Unsyccessful

Why The Reconstruction of The South Was Unsyccessful

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Published: Mar 1, 2019

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A 14-year-old girl was taken to a local hospital by the Oak Creek Fire Department with critical injuries, but her condition remains stable, authorities said.

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South Korean Parliamentary Election Projected to Hand Defeat to Leader

The vote on Wednesday was a big test for President Yoon Suk Yeol, who has forged closer ties with the United States and Japan but whose domestic agenda has stalled.

By Choe Sang-Hun

Reporting from Seoul

In the two years since he was elected, President Yoon Suk Yeol has made his mark in foreign policy, forging deeper ties with the United States and Japan. But his business-friendly domestic agenda has been stalled by his own missteps and an opposition-controlled Parliament.

Now, Mr. Yoon is facing the threat of being a lame duck for the remainder of his single, five-year term.

In a parliamentary election held on Wednesday, voters were projected to have handed Mr. Yoon and his party a crushing defeat, giving the opposition one of its biggest electoral victories in recent decades. Polls closed at 6 p.m. and official results were expected on Thursday morning.

Dozens of parties were vying for the 300 seats in the National Assembly, South Korea’s single-chamber legislature. However, the contest was largely between Mr. Yoon’s conservative People Power Party and the main opposition camp, the liberal Democratic Party.

This was the first general election since Mr. Yoon won the presidency in 2022, beating Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party by a razor-thin margin. While the results will decide the makeup of the Assembly for the next four years, they also serve as a verdict on the two rival leaders .

Exit polls conducted Wednesday by South Korea’s three major TV stations predicted that Mr. Yoon’s People Power Party and an affiliate would win no more than 105 of the 300 seats in the Assembly. Mr. Lee’s Democratic Party and a partner were projected to garner as many 197. A separate exit poll by the cable channel JTBC predicted a similar outcome.

For the past two weeks, candidates have greeted voters at subway stations, woven through their districts on trucks mounted with loudspeakers, and even knelt and bowed before voters, as is customary in the country. All that canvassing stopped as voters began filing into balloting stations across the country at 6 a.m. on Wednesday, which was declared a national holiday for the election.

The outcome of the contest is unlikely to have any immediate impact on Mr. Yoon’s efforts to expand security cooperation with Washington and Tokyo to deter North Korea, as foreign policy is concentrated in the hands of the president.

But Mr. Yoon’s long-stalled domestic agenda — corporate tax cuts and other business-friendly measures as well as his efforts to drastically increase the number of doctors — looks increasingly imperiled.

In contrast, Mr. Lee is likely to get a big push from the election if the exit poll projections are accurate. He hopes to run for president again in 2027.

The rivalry between the two leaders has become symptomatic of the deep political polarization in South Korea.

Mr. Lee’s party billed the election as an opportunity for South Koreans to punish Mr. Yoon over everything from rising consumer prices to allegations of corruption and abuse of power involving his family and the government.

“We must serve a warning that if the worker is not faithful enough, he can be driven out of his job,” ​Mr. Lee said this week​,​ a comment that South Korean news media said hinted at the possibility of impeaching Mr. Yoon if the opposition wins enough seats.

Under Mr. Yoon, Mr. Lee and his wife have been scrutinized by prosecutors and now face various criminal charges. The opposition for its part has passed bills that mandate investigations into allegations of corruption involving Mr. Yoon’s family and former prosecutors and judges. The president has vetoed those bills.

Each side, analysts said, focused on demonizing the other instead of offering policy proposals. Mr. Yoon’s party called Mr. Lee and his party “criminals.” The opposition warned that South Korea under Mr. Yoon was turning into a “dictatorship,” accusing him of using prosecutors and state regulators to suppress unfriendly journalists and politicians; at times, Mr. Yoon’s bodyguards have even gagged and carried away citizens who shouted criticism at him.

“I have never seen an election like this: No campaign promise or policy has become an election issue, except for the forces from the opposite poles clashing to win at all costs,” said Heo Jinjae, an analyst at Gallup Korea.

For one voter, in Seoul, the capital, the choice was between bad and worse.

“Instead of it being a battle of good policy, the election is about picking the least worst candidate,” said the voter, Hong Yoongi, 28, who lives in the city of Seongnam, just outside Seoul. “It’s a shame.”

Kim Eun-joo, a resident in her early 40s, voiced a similar notion but said she cast her vote as a warning against Mr. Yoon’s government.

“I don’t trust any party,” she said. “But I know that the economy has worsened and politics have become more disruptive under President Yoon.”

Nearly a third of the country’s 44 million eligible voters had already cast their ballots in early voting on Friday and Saturday. Experts said that the election would be decided largely by two overlapping blocs of swing voters. The first was people in their 20s and 30s. The second was the roughly 20 percent of eligible voters who hold the middle ground between progressives​ and conservatives. Many voters in their 40s and 50s are progressives, while people in their 60s and older tend to vote conservative.

The two main rival parties competed for swing voters by playing up their enemies’ gaffes and past remarks.

Mr. Yoon committed one such gaffe when he visited a grocery store last month and made a comment that left South Koreans wondering whether he knew how much green onions, a staple, cost amid inflation. Since then, opposition candidates have brandished green onions at campaign rallies as a symbol of Mr. Yoon’s supposed disconnect from everyday life.

Pre-election surveys showed that a majority of voters in their 20s and 30s and those who called themselves moderates disapproved of Mr. Yoon’s performance.

“If anything, this election serves as a report card on Yoon Suk Yeol’s two years in office,” said Jaung Hoon, a political science professor at Chung-Ang University in Seoul.

Jin Yu Young contributed reporting.

Choe Sang-Hun is the lead reporter for The Times in Seoul, covering South and North Korea. More about Choe Sang-Hun