Robert Dawidoff, Professor of History at Claremont Graduate University, observes in his latest book, Making History Matter (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); p. 138:

“The Old South was where it was different . . .in a way that suits America to fantasize.  It is our Valhalla and the scene of some of our deepest, most soothing, and enraging cultural dramas, . . .”

This mythology was created as a justification for the hegemonic culture’s abusive control of the most subordinate of its society; African-Americans.  Nevertheless, its racist legacy was not isolated to the South; it was shared by the nation’s cultural system as a whole, and (unfortunately) its effects are still fresh and persistent in American society today.

The roots of the reinsertion of white dominance in the southern states in the creation of the “New South” began immediately after the close of the Civil War, as a solution to the split between the sections was met with plans to expedite the reunification of the South at any cost.

At the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at the Appomattox courthouse on April 9, 1865, a twofold problem faced the victorious United States that was at the same time, in the grips of a constitutional crisis:

1) How could the 11 Confederate states be reunited with the United States union and what should be their status?  Should they (as the Radical Republicans desired) be forever subordinate to their northern victors as punishment for their crimes?

2) How could the economically, morally, and socially broken South be rehabilitated?

1) The status of the 11 former Confederate states remained unclear; legal issues as to whether or not it was constitutional for the South to secede were unresolved.  Northern politicians contended that the “rebellious” South never legally left the Union and needed to be punished for their treason; but to do so implied an acceptance of the southern argument that secession was a constitutional recourse.

2) The defeated South on the other hand, wanted to be reunited with the Union as quickly and as easily as possible, and thus were forced to accept northern views and rules.  Such views exacerbated difficulties during the post-war transition.

3) Likewise, northerners wanted the South to be responsible for their heavy financial debts incurred during the war (nearly $3 billion).  Northern industrialists and financiers were thus determined to keep the South and its detested agrarian cultural emphasis subservient to the North, as a means to secure easy credit, money laws, tariffs, and other mechanisms helpful for business expansion but traditionally held in suspicion by southerners.

4) Northern humanitarians, led by the Radical Republicans (who were an “uneasy grouping of some of the former Whigs, Know-Nothings, Unionist Democrats, and anti-slavery idealists”) saw the defeat of the South as a means to force the section to accept racial equality.

Distrust between southerners and northerners alike was a real hindrance to reconciliation.  Many southerners, having lost their “war for independence,” fled their homelands for Mexico, Brazil, the Caribbean, Canada, England, and elsewhere.  Radical Republicans positioned themselves to dominate the government, and its leaders suggested that their party should receive the reward of perpetual dominance in government and politics in the United States in order not to allow “secession-minded” Democrats to ever again come to power.

All reconstruction bills before the Congress thus were carefully argued and measured for their ability to strengthen the Republican Party and further weaken the Democratic Party that was already “in a shambles.”  Radical Republicans asserted that the southern Democrats were nothing but a bunch of murderers, traitors and rebels.  As far as the northern Democrats were concerned, the Radical Republicans depicted them as “weak-willed” and disloyal, and hostile to progress and economic growth.  Such notions reflected the overall northern industrialist sense of social superiority and cultural self-importance.  Nevertheless, it became important for the Republicans to show the nation that Reconstruction was a bipartisan effort.

Such policy disagreements resulted in a split in the Republican Party.  In opposition to the Radical Republicans were the Moderate Republicans (who held majority popular support); included in their ranks were Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) and his Vice President Andrew Johnson (1808–75) and former Jacksonian-Democrat and slaveholder from Tennessee,  who favored a mild policy toward southern reconstruction.

Radical Republicans included Charles Sumner (1811–1874), Benjamin Franklin Wade (1800–1878),  and Thaddeus Stevens (1792–1868).

There were five political camps that emerged, each asserting its perspectives with regard to Reconstruction:

Radical Republican objectives:
1) The war should be “justified” by forcing the reshaping of southern society into an image of the North.

2) Punish the Confederate leaders politically (rather than physically or economically); this idea would strengthen the Radical Republican Party hold on the government.

3) Continue the controversial pre-war governmental policies that benefited northern industrialists, such as high tariffs, railroad subsidies, and national banking.

4) Mandate the franchise and economic opportunities for black freedmen.

Moderate northern Democrat and Republican objectives:
1) Establish peace and sectional reconciliation as quickly as possible.

2) Grant amnesty and leniency, allowing for the immediate readmission of the former Confederate states into the Union.

3) Continue capitalist institutions and free enterprise and labor, and land ownership.

4) Encourage local control of government and cultural self-determination, as free as possible from the control of the national government.

5) Provide limited support for black suffrage.

Old Southern Planter Elites and Ex-Confederate objectives:
1) Guarantee protection from the possibility of a black uprising against them; limit the freedom of ex-slaves.

2) Achieve full pardons/ amnesty for participation in the “southern rebellion;” restore confiscated lands to their former southern owners.

3) Reestablish the old traditional plantation economy based in export crop production, using a cheap labor force made up of black freedmen (Mississippi Governor William S. Sharkey was especially adamant regarding this position, denouncing northern suggestions to employ Irish and other European immigrant laborers).

4) Restore traditional southern white conservative political leaders to all offices of government in the South.

5) Reestablish the old paternalistic tradition of racial place and order.

New South (pro-Union) ex-Whigs, businessmen and Yeoman (independent land-holding) farmer objectives:
1) Immediately restore the peace within the Union, and reconcile the differences between the North and the South.

2) Recognize the viability and economic importance of southern Yeoman farmers.

3) Instill greater economic and agricultural diversity; establish railroads and industry in the South.

4) Remove the Old Planter aristocracy from power in the southern states, replacing them with new leaders from diverse economic backgrounds and interests.

5) Limit black suffrage and civil rights.

Black Freedmen objectives:
1) Secure protection from abusive whites and anti-black terrorists.

2) Secure economic independence through independent land ownership – “40 acres and a mule.”

3) Secure educational opportunities to promote black family and cultural cohesiveness.

4) Civil rights; achieve equality under the law (with whites).

5) Franchise – equal opportunities for political participation.

Despite such obstacles, southerners remained resolute in their dedication to the “Lost Cause” of the independent South, and the preservation of their cultural self-importance.  In the mid-twentieth century, the southern writer Wilbur Cash in his classic exposé of the regions’ culture, Mind of the South, clarified, “If this [Civil] war had smashed the Southern world, it had left the essential Southern mind and will . . . entirely unshaken.”
 

Emancipation and the changed status of former slaves; reactions:

Though hopeful, the four million freed slaves typically remained cautious about their future.  Emancipation had been announced many times over the course of the war and its early aftermath, but it often took time for it to be realized; moreover, increasing terrorist campaigns against blacks belied notions of liberation from slavery.  As one South Carolina freedman stated; he had celebrated emancipation “about twelve times,” yet his circumstances had not substantially changed.

Former slaves reacted in different ways to their newfound freedom and independence.  Many moved away from both cruel and benevolent masters and mistresses, usually in search of work or lost family members.  The former owners of such slaves often lamented their loss, in the same manner as having lost a family member (and denying the tragedy of slavery and its effects of their paternalistic system on African-American culture in general).

Other former slaves stayed on with their former owners, perhaps seeking familiarity during a time of great social changes.

Many former slaves sought their education, while most pursued marriage (both were outlawed before the end of the Civil War).  In some parts of the South (the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Davis Bend, Mississippi for examples), former slaves desired to farm their own land; many believed in a supposed promise of “40 acres and a mule,” as part of a new social experiment.

White southerners, on the other hand, usually resented black land ownership; the plantation aristocracy expected former slaves to continue on as laborers.  Whites, resentful of northerners for having “stolen” their slave property from them, expected to have their confiscated lands fully restored to them.

With emancipation, most southerners held deep fears that the loss of the supposed “racial balance” and “racial peace” as they believed to have existed under slavery would lead to crimes committed against them.  Foremost of such feared crimes was the rape of white women and violent acts of revenge against former slave masters (this assumption on the part of former slave masters is certainly ironic in light of the fact that most often, slave owners themselves committed such acts against their slaves).  The presence of armed black soldiers in the South aggravated such fears, but violent acts against by whites by African-American soldiers were extremely rare.  Neverthelass, many white extremists publicly railed against what they called the “Africanization” of the South and the “destruction of the purity of the white race.”

The Old Plantation Aristocracy in the South saw that their traditional world was turned upside down, and thus tried to set it right again by reestablishing the old plantation order and racial relationships/ hierarchy.

Northern governmental leaders required the southern states to reinstate earlier (modified w/o slavery) constitutions as a qualification for readmission into the Union.  The hegemonic southern white planter society desired a gradual rather than an abrupt transition allowing blacks their civil rights.

Moreover, in order to maintain its control on society, the southern hegemony needed blacks as its labor force, disliking the idea of immigrant labor (that was used in the North).

In order to accomplish this goal in the face of northern radical Reconstructionists, southern state legislatures passed a series of restrictive racial laws known as the “black codes” within a year after the end of the war.

Although new rights were guaranteed to African-Americans (such as marriage, access to the courts, and property), such laws were all “qualified,” by complicated passages written into them that explained under exactly what circumstances blacks could exercise their rights as free people.
 

Restrictions placed against black Freedmen:

1) Interracial marriage outlawed

2) Gun possession outlawed

3) Possession of alcoholic beverages outlawed

4) Public assembly outlawed

5) After hours (evenings) presence within cities outlawed (curfew) – violators or “vagrants” could be fined $50. And if such persons could not pay, then they were “apprenticed” for six months in lieu of the fine.

6) Train travel restricted to riding in baggage compartments

7) Property ownership extremely limited

8) Limited testimony of blacks in cases involving whites

Ultimately, however, the primary purpose of the Black Codes was simply to keep African-Americans subordinate to the concerns of the white cultural hegemony by controlling the freedman’s economic status by limiting their mobility so as to keep them perpetually available as plantation laborers.  All in all, nothing had changed, and thought blacks were technically free, they were also virtually enslaved once again as coercive black labor programs became the norm in the South.

The North, meanwhile, having early on judged that it achieved gains in favor of blacks in the South, faced the dilemma of accepting the region’s new abusive racial laws rather than risk losing its gains.  The abstract question was about democratic reform and civil rights versus self-interest and property rights, hearkening back somewhat, to the debates of the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Northern leaders came to the painful realization (as early as late 1865) “that almost none of their postwar goals – moral, political or psychological – were being fulfilled.  The South seemed far from reconstructed and was taking advantage of the president’s program to restore the power of the prewar planter aristocracy” at the expense of black independence and civil rights.
 

Presidential Reconstruction:

The Lincoln Plan for Reconstruction:

Abraham Lincoln was primarily dedicated to rejoining the Union, contending that since the South could not legally secede; that they never technically left the Union to begin with.  Thus, using his executive power, he issued a proclamation on December 8, 1863 that instituted his policies for “political Reconstruction.”  Under this plan, were the following points:

1) All Confederates (except the most important political and military leaders) were to be allowed immediate reestablishment of their citizenship once they had taken an oath of support of the Constitution of the United States that also affirmed their compliance with the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery.

2) The “Ten Percent Plan” allowed for the readmission of former Confederate states, once ten percent of the voters in the election of 1860 had taken the oath described above (in 1864, Lincoln used this policy to readmit into the Union the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee).

With a “pocket-veto,” President Lincoln disposed of the Wade-Davis Bill, causing the Congress to issue the Wade-Davis Manifesto (August 5, 1864) that chastised the President for usurping the authority of the Congress and declared Congress as the primary authority with regard to matters of Reconstruction.

Unfortunately, Lincoln was unable to employ his notable political skills in the working of a compromise to end this dispute, because of his assassination on April 14, 1865.

Lincoln’s death at the hands of a southern sympathizer convinced the Radical Republicans that the Confederates must be severely punished.  Lincoln’s replacement was a former southern Democrat and slaveholder Andrew Johnson (1808–75), who had neither the support of the Radicals nor the political sagacity of Lincoln.

Based largely on Lincoln’s Reconstruction Plan, Johnson’s Reconstruction Plan was equally moderate and allowed for the readmission of all the former Confederate states once they had dismissed their war debts, renounced their ordinances of secession, and abolished slavery (and ratified the 13th Amendment); amnesty would be granted to all ex-Confederates except those primary leaders whose total value exceeded $20,000.

Under Johnson, the following states were recognized as readmitted under Lincoln’s Plan: Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia.  By December 4, 1865, all former Confederate states except Texas had fulfilled the terms of readmission into the Union.

With the readmission of almost all of the former Confederate states, they sent representatives to the Senate and the House at Washington, D.C.  When the Congress reconvened, northern legislators refused to recognize the legitimacy of their southern counterparts, claiming that the since the South had seceded, it had reverted to territorial status, and had no right to members of the House of Representatives of the Senate.  Thus, according to these northern members of Congress, the southern “territories” were under the jurisdiction of the Congress.

In keeping with this strategy, the so-called Committee of Fifteen, a group of powerful Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, began issuing its own Reconstruction Policy, known as the Congressional Reconstruction Plan.

The Congressional Reconstruction Program contained the following elements:

1) The Freedmen’s Bureau (February 1866) was established (over President Johnson’s veto) to care for ex-slaves.

2) The Civil Rights Act (April 1866) made to illegal to discriminate against African-Americans, guaranteed equal protection under the law, and designated the federal courts for the prosecution of violations of the Act.

3) Because the Radical Republicans feared that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 might be declared unconstitutional, they formed the Fourteenth Amendment that stipulated the following:

a) This law granted full rights of citizenship to any and all persons born or naturalized in the United States.

b) Blacks were to be granted the franchise in the South under threat that resisting states should lose their representation in Congress.

c) Former Confederates restricted from holding public office until after they had received full Congressional pardons.

d) The Confederate war debt was repudiated.

e) Congress was declared the authority (not the President or the Supreme Court) to enforce the laws outlined in the 14th Amendment.

Under the formal Congressional Reconstruction Plan (March 2, 1867) were the following points:

1) With the exception of Tennessee, no legitimate government existed.

2) The entire South was divided into five military districts.

3) No state could return to the Union unless African-Americans were given the franchise and ratify the 14th Amendment.

1) The Supreme Court was denied jurisdiction over all Reconstruction legislation.

2) The President was denied authority over Reconstruction policy.

a) The Army Appropriations Act (March 2, 1867) effectively removed the President as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, requiring that the highest military orders within the five southern military districts were to be issued only by the General of the Army.

b) The Tenure of Office Act (March 2, 1867) forbade the President to remove any federal officials from office without the consent of the Senate.

February 21, 1868:

President Andrew Johnson fired Stanton,  thus giving the Radical Republican-controlled Congress the opportunity they wanted to remove the President from office.  Charging President Johnson with “usurpations of power” and supporting the “interests of the great criminals” that led the “rebellion” of the southern states against the Union, the judiciary committee of the House of Representatives held impeachment hearings.

On February 24, 1868, the House voted to impeach President Johnson for violating the Tenure of Office Act and for other “high crimes and misdemeanors.”  The Senate, however, after a three-month trial, refused to convict the President (by only one vote), and he remained in office, though his power was considerably reduced.
 

Election of 1868:

Calling themselves the “National Union Republican Party,” the Radical Republicans nominated General Ulysses S. Grant for the presidency.   At issue (besides Congressional Reconstruction) was whether or not the national debt should be paid in gold (Republican idea) or in “greenbacks” (the Democratic idea, carried by their candidate, New York Governor Horatio Seymour (1810–86),  an idea that appealed to eastern laborers and western farmers that were suffering from a severe post-war recession that began in 1867).

Grant won the election by only 300,000 popular votes (though the Electoral College returns were 214 to 80 in his favor).  Thus, with no real mandate from the voters, Grant was unlikely to pursue any real racial policy against the South.

By July 1868, all of the former Confederate states (except Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia) had accepted the terms of Congressional Reconstruction and ratified the 14th Amendment.  The Radical Republicans then pushed a new Amendment – the Fifteenth Amendment that forbade any state to deny the franchise to anyone based on “race, color, of previous condition of servitude.”

By 1870, the three remaining states of Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia complied with these new rules and were readmitted into the Union.  Between 1870 and 1877, the Reconstruction debate continued primarily in the South between two factions in each state:
 

1) Southern Democrats who sought to reestablish white supremacy.

2) Radical Republicans who continued to seek more gains in the area of black civil rights.  Of this group, there were the following components:

a) African-Americans

b) Northern Radicals who had gone to the South to assist African-Americans.

i) Of this group, many were northern businessmen, known as Carpetbaggers and entrepreneurs (like Henry K. Winchester of Boston) that also sought to make much money in the South).

c) Southern whites that had deserted the sectional position of many of their countrymen and converted to the Republican camp were known as Scalawags.  They found ready support from Radical Republicans in Congress.

1) Debt and increased taxation; inflation and high interest rates.

2) Corrupt “Carpetbaggers” lined their own pockets instead of helping African-Americans as they promised, leading to the erosion of their former support.  They were responsible for the southern state government corruption that came to be synonymous with Reconstruction in the 1870s.

3) The southern tradition of white rule was too entrenched within the culture to be eradicated.

4) Conservative Bourbons, a rising class of southern landholders and businessmen were able to garner enough power to land successful attacks on Radical Republican policies in the South.  Though a minority in the poor South, they successfully used racism to drive a wedge between whites and blacks in order to secure a cheap African-American labor supply and maintain white supremacy.

Of these extralegal racist terrorist groups, were the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia.  The terrorist tactics of these clandestine organizations kept Radical Republicans and African-Americans from voting, thus allowing conservative Democrats to recapture the southern state legislatures.

Through the Force Act (1870) and the Ku Klux Klan Act (1871) these organizations were suppressed by federal measures by the end of 1872.

Congressional Reconstruction was steadily losing support, and in the elections of 1872, the Republican Party split into to rival factions; the Radicals and the anti-Reconstructionists.  Ulysses S. Grant narrowly won reelection to the presidency, and Republican leaders in the Congress indicated their fading hostility toward conservative southerners by passing the Amnesty Act (1872) that granted the vote to nearly all former Confederates.
 

Election of 1876:

Prior to the Election of 2000, the Election of 1876 has been called “the most famous election dispute in American history.”

Republican nominee: Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–93) the former governor of Ohio.  Henry Adams asserted that Hayes was chosen as the Republican presidential candidate because he was “obnoxious to no one.”

Democratic nominee: New York governor Samuel J. Tilden (1814–86), who was popular for having successfully prosecuted a corrupt state canal repair ring in that state.

Tilden clearly won the popular vote with 4,284,885 votes to Hayes’ 4,033, 950 votes, and appeared to have enough electoral votes to win the office.  But twenty of the electoral votes were disputed (there were double and other conflicts related to the returns for these electoral votes) in the federally-occupied states of Florida (all electors), Louisiana (all but one elector), and South Carolina (all electors), and another in Oregon (involving just one elector there).

Because this problem was not addressed in the Constitution, the Congress established a special electoral commission made up of five members of the House of Representatives, five Senators, and five Supreme Court justices (8 were Republicans and 7 were Democrats).

Voting along party lines, (8 to 7), all 20 disputed electoral votes were given to Hayes.  Having therefore received 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184 electoral votes, the Republican candidate was elected President of the United States.  In order to quell the growing dispute (some observers wondered if civil war might again break out), President-elect Hayes sought a compromise.

By March 1877, when Rutherford B. Hayes assumed the office of President of the United States, only Louisiana and South Carolina were still occupied by federal troops (the governments in these states were split along “Carpetbagger/ Scalawag”/ black and white supremacist lines).  President Hayes, asserting that the Radical Republicans did not support the will of the majority of the American people in the Compromise of 1877,  withdrew federal troops from these two states in April 1877, formally ending Reconstruction and completely abandoning all programs of racial reform in the South, and allowing Democrats to seize control in a movement they called “redemption.”

Agricultural revitalization and land distribution in the South helped bolster a shattered economy (and reduced the great plantations), but benefited whites at the expense of African-Americans.  The vast majority of blacks became tenant farmers and sharecroppers in a system that perpetually indebted them to white landowners.

Overall, the South benefited from the shift from plantation production to small farming, and by 1879, crop yields were higher than before the Civil War.

In evaluating the effects of Reconstruction (1865–1877), the following observations can be made (both positive and negative):

1) Negative “harmful” results:

a) The elevation of poor uneducated “piney woods” whites to governmental positions increased racism in the South.

b) African-Americans became associated with Reconstruction policies, further aggravating already existent white fears of them.

c) Faced with the expensive costs of Reconstruction governments, the conservative South became convinced that the only good government is one that cuts expenses and taxes at the expense of social programs.

d) Creation of the “Solid South.”  A single party system became entrenched in the South.  Since the Republican Party was associated with African-Americans and Reconstruction, the Democratic Party became the dominant (white) party below the Mason-Dixon Line between 1876 and 1916, and it was not until 1928 that this condition changed.  This situation had negative effects both locally and nationally:

i) Locally, single party rule restricted blacks from voting, and with a narrow votership generally, social and educational programs were limited at best or nonexistent.

ii) Nationally, one-party rule in the South prevented the development of a crucial political alliance between lower class persons in the South and the West, thus allowing northern industrialists to control national legislation.  Southern conservative Democrats dominated their party into the twentieth century, when the northern Democrats pursued a decidedly liberal course of social and economic reforms benefiting labor and education.  Southern Democrats, using their seniority in Congress to become seated on important committees, used their clout to frustrate liberal legislation and the majority will into the 1900s.

e) Persistent sectional hatred was aggravated by Reconstruction, hampering the healing of the nation’s wounds suffered by the Civil War, that Lincoln called for.

2) Beneficial results of Reconstruction:

a) Redistribution of property and the rise of the small farmer in the South.

b) Though far from what was desired by Radical Reconstructionists, a southern educational system (including “freedmen’s schools) was established in the region.

c) Ex-Confederates were treated fairly; none were executed, few were punished, and almost no land was confiscated permanently.

With conservative control of the southern state governments, the states began to create new sets of laws that forced the separation of the races.  Beginning in the 1880s, these “Jim Crow” laws  effectively eliminated the gains made in behalf of African-Americans during Reconstruction.

Jim Crow laws established separate “[r]ailway and streetcars, public waiting rooms, restaurants, boarding houses, theaters, and public parks were segregated; separate schools, hospitals and other institutions, generally of inferior quality, were designated for blacks.”

In 1896, the United States Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson ruled that "separate but equal" southern Jim Crow laws were constitutional.  It would be another six decades (1954) for this ruling to be overturned, when the South underwent a "Second Reconstruction" during the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights movement.