The Impact of Reconstruction on African-Americans

The Reconstruction Era is normally considered by historians to have occurred between the years of 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln, and 1877 when the last federal military forces were withdrawn from the South by President Rutherford B. Hayes. Reconstruction accompanied the granting of freedom to the African-American people who had previously been enslaved in the South, and efforts by the United States federal government to reintegrate the eleven states of the Confederacy into the federal union. Reconstruction also involved the granting of suffrage to African-Americans living in the South. Efforts were made to create a biracial, democratic society. Reforms in the areas of economics and education were also implemented. As the efforts to advance African-American equality did not endure, Reconstruction came to be widely regarded as a failure. However, the experience of Reconstruction also served as a precedent for the far-reaching revolution in African-American civil rights which emerged during the 1960s.

At the time of the secession by the Confederate states in 1861, there were approximately ten million people living in these states. Four million, or forty percent, of these Southerners were African-American slaves. The Confederacy seceded in part because of fears that anti-slavery forces would come to dominate the U.S. federal government and threaten slaveholder interests (Foner). As the Civil War progressed, President Abraham Lincoln enacted the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, granting freedom to African-American slaves. Following the final surrender of the Confederate forces in 1865, the task facing the United States was the successful reintegration of the seceding states into the federal system (Faragher, et. al). President Lincoln began by granting land rights to the newly freed slaves, or “freedmen” as they came to be called. However, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in April of 1865, and his successor President Andrew Johnson held more conservative attitudes about issues pertaining to Reconstruction, particularly on racial issues (Altman). Johnson wished to quickly reintegrate the Southern states into the federal union and to quickly end the process of reconstruction.

Johnson’s positions were strongly opposed by Republicans in the U.S. Congress, and in the 1866 elections, Congress came to be dominated by so-called “Radical Republicans” who favored a far-reaching reorganization of Southern society. The civilian governments of the Southern states, which included many Confederate loyalists, were dismissed by Congress, and the South was placed under the direct military rule of the U.S. Army. Elections were held under the supervision of the Army, and new governments came into existence in the former Confederate states, commencing what came to period known as the period of “Radical Reconstruction.” These new governments were comprised of “freedmen” who had recently been emancipated, and free African-Americans who had been given the right to vote, thereby marking the first time African-Americans were allowed to directly participate in government in the United States (Franklin). These Reconstruction governments were also heavily influenced by Northerners who had migrated to the South (sometimes referred to derisively by native Southerners as “carpetbaggers”), and by Southern whites who had remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War, and supported the ambitions of Reconstruction (sometimes referred to with the equally derisive term of “scalawags” by conservative Southerners).

The new biracial democratic governments in the South set out to transform Southern society, and to enhance racial equality and social progress in a variety of ways. One of the most primary impacts the Reconstruction Era had on the African-American population in the South was the restoration of the black family. Under the slave system, families were often separated and worked apart. It was not uncommon for slaves to be sold and transported away from their communities of origin, thereby being forced to leave their families behind. The process of Emancipation and Reconstruction allowed for the reunion of many African-American families, and the black family became the focal point of the community life of African-Americans. Reconstruction also profoundly impacted the religious life of African-Americans in the South. The Southern churches had been entirely white-dominated prior to Reconstruction. Blacks were treated as inferiors in church just as they were in every other area of Southern society. For instance, blacks were normally required to sit in the back pews during worship services. The Reconstruction era saw the emergence of independent black church life in the South. This development impacted African-American society in the South rather profoundly and had an effect that reached far into the future (Altman). The church was to become a principal unit of African-American society, and it was the black church that often provided leadership during the struggles for basic human and civil rights for African-Americans over the century to come.

Reconstruction was also accompanied by efforts to raise the educational standards of African-Americans. Under the previous slave system, the white ruling class feared that literacy among blacks would lead to political sedition. Therefore, every slave state had criminalized the provision of education to African-American slaves. In some states, teaching a black person to read could be punished by death through hanging. During the Reconstruction period, efforts were made to provide universal education to both African-Americans and poor whites in the South, and the literacy rates of African-Americans improved dramatically. In addition to advancements in education, another area of African-American society in the South that experienced rapid and far-reaching change was in the realm of economics. During the era of slavery, blacks had been forced to work in labor gangs under overseers who meted out harsh discipline. Following Emancipation and the efforts of President Lincoln to provide land to former slaves, many African-Americans found it difficult to become independent farmers because of their lack of access to equipment and supplies (Altman). Instead, many blacks became tenant farmers under the “sharecropping system” or merely worked as wage laborers on the plantation where they had been previously held as slaves.

In the early years of Reconstruction, opposition by white Southerners to any advances in the social or economic status of African-Americans was virulent. In 1866, the Southern states began to enact the now infamous “Black Codes” which severely limited not only the political and civil rights of African-Americans but also sought to limit the mobility of blacks by, for example, prohibiting free blacks from traveling without first having secured employment. The Black Codes were greeted with outrage in the North and led in part to the downfall of the administration of President Andrew Johnson and the implementation of a more radical agenda for reconstructing the South during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. As Reconstruction progressed, several amendments to the U.S. Constitution were enacted that helped to advance the rights of African-Americans (Foner). The first of these was the Thirteenth Amendment, which formally outlawed slavery, and was passed in 1865. The Fourteenth Amendment was enacted in 1868 and granted citizenship and federal recognition of civil rights to all persons born or naturalized in the territory of the United States. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited the denial of voting rights on the basis of race, was enacted. The eleven former Confederate states were readmitted to the U.S. and allowed to formally regain Congressional representation during the years between 1866 and 1870. Elections were held to determine new representatives to Congress, and also to hold constitutional conventions and to create new state legislatures in the South. African-Americans voted widely in these elections and significant numbers of African-American candidates were actually elected to statewide offices during this phase of Reconstruction. A small number of African-Americans were also elected to Congress, and at one point the majority of South Carolina’s Congressional delegation was African-American.

The political empowerment of blacks in the former Confederate states was eventually met with militant and violent resistance by Southern whites. White delegates to constitutional conventions in the South and elected officials attempted to write voter registration laws in ways designed to disenfranchise African-Americans. Armed paramilitary groups began to form which were committed to the reversal of any and all gains achieved by blacks following the Civil War (Perman). The most well-known of these is, of course, the Ku Klux Klan. Others included the White League, White Liners, and the Red Shirts. In 1874, the White League temporarily overthrew the state government of Louisiana after gaining the upper hand in a battle with the state militia and local police forces. Only when federal troops intervened was the rebellion by the White League put down. During state elections in Mississippi in 1875, the anti-Reconstruction paramilitary groups conducted an extensive campaign of terrorism and assassinated many Republican candidates for office. Massacres of African-Americans occurred during the 1876 elections throughout the South (Foner). When the last federal troops were withdrawn by President Hayes in 1877, the Democratic Party which was at the time dominated by anti-Reconstruction forces had managed to reclaim political supremacy in the South (Altman).

Reconstruction was a noble experiment in self-government for African-Americans and poor whites alike in the former Confederate states. It signified the possibility of the eventual triumph of a biracial democracy, even if such a triumph would not occur for another century. The Constitutional amendments enacted during Reconstruction established the legal infrastructure that subsequent generations of African-Americans were able to utilize as part of the process of securing their rights. Reconstruction set in motion a process that would continue to unfold whereby African-Americans would gradually achieve political, economic, and social self-advancement through determined struggle.

Works Cited

Altman, Susan. Encyclopedia of African American Heritage. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1997. Web. September 30, 2013.

Faragher, John Mack and Mari Jo H. Buhle, Susan H. Armitage, Daniel H. Czitrom. Out of Many- A History of the American People. Sixth Edition. Vol. 2. New York: Pearson, 2012. Print.

Franklin, John Hope. Reconstruction after the Civil War. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Print.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper Collins, 1988. Print.

Perman, Michael. The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Print.