Episode 21: Reconstruction
Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course
U.S. History and huzzah!
The Civil War is over!
The slaves are free!
Huzzah!
That one hit me in the head?
It’s very dangerous, Crash Course.
So when you say, “Don’t aim at a person,”
that includes myself?
The roller coaster only goes up from here,
my friends.
Huzzah!
Mr. Green, Mr. Green, what about the epic
failure of Reconstruction?
Oh, right.
Stupid Reconstruction always ruining everything
intro
So after the Civil War ended, the United States
had to reintegrate both a formerly slave population
and a formerly rebellious population back
into the country, which is a challenge that
we might’ve met, except Abraham Lincoln
was assassinated and we were left with Andrew
“I am the Third Worst President Ever”
Johnson.
I’m sorry, Abe, but you don’t get to be
in the show anymore.
So, Lincoln’s whole post-war idea was to
facilitate reunion and reconciliation, and
Andrew Johnson’s guiding Reconstruction
principle was that the South never had a right
to secede in the first place.
Also, because he was himself a Southerner,
he resented all the elites in the South who
had snubbed him, AND he was also a racist
who didn’t think that blacks should have
any role in Reconstruction.
TRIFECTA!
So between 1865 and 1867, the so-called period
of Presidential Reconstruction, Johnson appointed
provisional governors and ordered them to
call state conventions to establish new all-white
governments.
And in their 100% whiteness and oppression
of former slaves, those new governments looked
suspiciously like the old confederate governments
they had replaced.
And what was changing for the former slaves?
Well, in some ways, a lot.
Like, Fiske and Howard universities were established,
as well as many primary and secondary schools,
thanks in part to The Freedman’s Bureau,
which only lasted until 1870, but had the
power to divide up confiscated and abandoned
confederate land for former slaves.
And this was very important because to most
slaves, land ownership was the key to freedom,
and many felt like they’d been promised
land by the Union Army.
Like, General Sherman’s Field Order 15,
promised to distribute land in 40 acre plots
to former slaves.
But that didn’t happen, either through the
Freedman’s Bureau or anywhere else.
Instead, President Johnson ordered all land
returned to its former owners.
So the South remained largely agricultural
with the same people owning the same land,
and in the end, we ended up with sharecropping.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
The system of sharecropping replaced slavery
in many places throughout the South.
Landowners would provide housing to the sharecroppers--no,
Thought Bubble, not quite that nice.
There ya go--also tools and seed, and then
the sharecroppers received, get this, a share
of their crop--usually between a third and
a half, with the price for that harvest often
set by the landowner.
Freed blacks got to control their work, and
plantation owners got a steady workforce that
couldn’t easily leave, because they had
little opportunity to save money and make
the big capital investments in, like, land
or tools.
By the late 1860s, poor white farmers were
sharecropping as well--in fact, by the Great
Depression, most sharecroppers were white.
And while sharecropping certainly wasn’t
slavery, it did result in a quasi-serfdom
that tied workers to land they didn’t own--more
or less the opposite of Jefferson’s ideal
of the small, independent farmer.
So, the Republicans in Congress weren’t
happy that this reconstructed south looked
so much like the pre-Civil War south, so they
took the lead in reconstruction after 1867.
Radical Republicans felt the war had been
fought for equal rights and wanted to see
the powers of the national government expanded.
Few were as radical as Thaddeus “Tommy Lee
Jones” Stephens who wanted to take away
land from the Southern planters and give it
to the former slaves, but rank-and-file Republicans
were radical enough to pass the Civil Rights
Bill, which defined persons born in the United
States as citizens and established nationwide
equality before the law regardless of race.
Andrew Johnson immediately vetoed the law,
claiming that trying to protect the rights
of African Americans amounted to discrimination
against white people, which so infuriated
Republicans that Congress did something it
had never done before in all of American history.
They overrode the Presidential veto with a
2/3rds majority and the Civil Rights Act became
law.
So then Congress really had its dander up
and decided to amend the Constitution with
the 14th amendment, which defines citizenship,
guarantees equal protection, and extends the
rights in the Bill of Rights to all the states
(sort of).
The amendment had almost no Democratic support,
but it also didn’t need any, because there
were almost no Democrats in Congress on account
of how Congress had refused to seat the representatives
from the “new” all-white governments that
Johnson supported.
And that’s how we got the 14th amendment,
arguably the most important in the whole Constitution.
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
Oh, straight to the mystery document today?
Alright.
The rules here are simple.
I guess the author of the Mystery Document
and try not to get shocked.
Alright let’s see what we’ve got today.
Sec. 1.
Be it ordained by the police jury of the parish
of St. Landry, That no negro shall be allowed
to pass within the limits of said parish without
special permit in writing from his employer.
Sec. 4.
. . . Every negro is required to be in the
regular service of some white person, or former
owner, who shall be held responsible for the
conduct of said negro..
Sec. 6.
. . . No negro shall be permitted to preach,
exhort, or otherwise declaim to congregations
of colored people, without a special permission
in writing from the president of the police
jury.
. . .
Gee, Stan, I wonder if the President of the
Police Jury was white.
I actually know this one.
It is a Black Code, which was basically legal
codes where they just replaced the word “slave”
with the word “negro.”
And this code shows just how unwilling white
governments were to ensure the rights of new,
free citizens.
I would celebrate not getting shocked, but
now I am depressed.
So, okay, in 1867, again over Johnson’s
veto, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act,
which divided the south into 5 military districts
and required each state to create a new government,
one that included participation of black men.
Those new governments had to ratify the 14th
amendment if they wanted to get back into
the union.
Radical Reconstruction had begun.
So, in 1868, Andrew Johnson was about as electable
in the U.S. as Jefferson Davis, and sure enough
he didn’t win.
Instead, the 1868 election was won by Republican
and former Union general Ulysses S. Grant.
But Grant’s margin of victory was small
enough that Republicans were like, “Man,
we would sure win more elections if black
people could vote.”
Which is something you hear Republicans say
all the time these days.
So Congressional Republicans pushed the 15th
Amendment, which prohibited states from denying
men the right to vote based on race, but not
based on gender or literacy or whether your
grandfather could vote.
So states ended up with a lot of leeway when
it came to denying the franchise to African
Americans, which of course they did.
So here we have the federal government dictating
who can vote, and who is and isn’t a citizen
of a state, and establishing equality under
the law--even local laws.
And this is a really big deal in American
history, because the national government became,
rather than a threat to individual liberty,
“the custodian of freedom,” as Radical
Republican Charles Sumner put it.
So but with this legal protection, former
slaves began to exercise their rights.
They participated in the political process
by direct action, such as staging sit-ins
to integrate street-cars, by voting in elections,
and by holding office.
Most African Americans were Republicans at
the time, and because they could vote and
were a large part of the population, the Republican
party came to dominate politics in the South,
just like today, except totally different.
Now, Southern mythology about the age of radical
Reconstruction is exemplified by Gone with
the Wind, which of course tells the story
of northern Republican dominance and corruption
by southern Republicans.
Fortune seeking northern carpetbaggers, seen
here, as well as southern turncoat scalawags
dominated politics and all of the African
American elected leaders were either corrupt
or puppets or both.
Yeah, well, like the rest of Gone with the
Wind, that’s a bit of an oversimplification.
There were about 2,000 African Americans who
held office during Reconstruction, and the
vast majority of them were not corrupt.
Consider for example the not-corrupt and amazingly-named
Pinckney B.S. Pinchback, who from 1872 to
1873 served very briefly in Louisiana as America’s
first black governor.
And went on to be a senator and a member of
the House of Representatives.
By the way, America’s second African American
governor, Douglas Wilder of Virginia was elected
in 1989.
Having African American officeholders was
a huge step forward in term of ensuring the
rights of African Americans because it meant
that there would be black juries and less
discrimination in state and local governments
when it came to providing basic services.
But in the end, Republican governments failed
in the South.
There were important achievements, especially
a school system that, while segregated, did
attempt to educate both black and white children.
And even more importantly, they created a
functioning government where both white and
African American citizens could participate.
According to one white South Carolina lawyer,
“We have gone through one of the most remarkable
changes in our relations to each other that
has been known, perhaps, in the history of
the world.”
That’s a little hyperbolic, but we are America
after all.
(libertage)
It’s true that corruption was widespread,
but it was in the North, too.
I mean, we’re talking about governments.
And that’s not why Reconstruction really
ended: It ended because 1.
things like schools and road repair cost money,
which meant taxes, which made Republican governments
very unpopular because Americans hate taxes,
and 2.
White southerners could not accept African
Americans exercising basic civil rights, holding
office or voting.
And for many, the best way to return things
to the way they were before reconstruction
was through violence.
Especially after 1867, much of the violence
directed toward African Americans in the South
was politically motivated.
The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 and it
quickly became a terrorist organization, targeting
Republicans, both black and white, beating
and murdering men and women in order to intimidate
them and keep them from voting.
The worst act of violence was probably the
massacre at Colfax, Louisiana where hundreds
of former slaves were murdered.
And between intimidation and emerging discriminatory
voting laws, fewer black men voted, which
allowed white Democrats to take control of
state governments in the south, and returned
white Democratic congressional delegations
to Washington.
These white southern politicians called themselves
“Redeemers” because they claimed to have
redeemed the south from northern republican
corruption and black rule.
Now, it’s likely that the South would have
fallen back into Democratic hands eventually,
but the process was aided by Northern Republicans
losing interest in Reconstruction.
In 1873, the U.S. fell into yet another not-quite-Great
economic depression and northerners lost the
stomach to fight for the rights of black people
in the south, which in addition to being hard
was expensive.
So by 1876 the supporters of reconstruction
were in full retreat and the Democrats were
resurgent, especially in the south.
And this set up one of the most contentious
elections in American history.
The Democrats nominated New York Governor
(and NYU Law School graduate) Samuel Tilden.
The Republicans chose Ohio governor (and Kenyon
College alumnus) Rutherford B. Hayes.
One man who’d gone to Crash Course writer
Raoul Meyer’s law school.
And another who’d gone to my college, Kenyon.
Now, if the election had been based on facial
hair, as elections should be, there would’ve
been no controversy, but sadly we have an
electoral college here in the United States,
and in 1876 there were disputed electoral
votes in South Carolina, Louisiana, and, of
course, Florida.
Now you might remember that in these situations,
there is a constitutional provision that says
Congress should decide the winner, but Congress,
shockingly, proved unable to accomplish something.
So they appointed a 15 man Electoral Commission--a
Super-Committee, if you will.
And there were 8 Republicans on that committee
and 7 Democrats, so you will never guess who
won.
Kenyon College’s own Rutherford B. Hayes.
Go Lords and Ladies!
And yes, that is our mascot.
Shut up.
Anyway in order to get the Presidency and
win the support of the supercommittee, Hayes’
people agreed to cede control of the South
to the Democrats and to stop meddling in Southern
affairs and also to build a transcontinental
railroad through Texas.
This is called the Bargain of 1877 because
historians are so good at naming things and
it basically killed Reconstruction.
Without any more federal troops in Southern
states and with control of Southern legislatures
firmly in the hands of white democrats the
states were free to go back to restricting
the freedom of black people, which they did.
Legislatures passed Jim Crow laws that limited
African American’s access to public accommodations
and legal protections.
States passed laws that took away black people’s
right to vote and social and economic mobility
among African Americans in the south declined
precipitously.
However, for a brief moment, the United States
was more democratic than it had ever been
before.
And an entire segment of the population that
had no impact on politics before was now allowed
to participate.
And for the freedmen who lived through it,
that was a monumental change, and it would
echo down to the Civil Rights movement in
the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes called the
second reconstruction.
But we’re gonna end this episode on a downer,
as we are wont to do here at Crash Course
US History because I want to point out a lesser-known
legacy of Reconstruction.
The Reconstruction amendments and laws that
were passed granted former slaves political
freedom and rights, especially the vote, and
that was critical.
But to give them what they really wanted and
needed, plots of land that would make them
economically independent, would have required
confiscation, and that violation of property
rights was too much for all but the most radical
Republicans.
And that question of what it really means
to be “free” in a system of free market
capitalism has proven very complicated indeed.
I’ll see you next week.
Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan
Muller.
Our script supervisor is Meredith Danko.
The associate producer is Danica Johnson.
The show is written by my high school history
teacher, Raoul Meyer, and myself.
And our graphics team is Thought Café.
Every week there’s a new caption for the
libertage.
You can suggest those in comments where you
can also ask questions about today’s video
that will be answered by our team of historians.
Thank you for watching Crash Course.
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And as we say in my hometown, don’t forget
to be awesome.
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