RECONSTRUCTION-AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY

Even before the war ended, the government had begun discussing how to deal with the aftermath of the war. In March 1865 the U.S. War Department established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly called the Freedmen’s Bureau. The bureau was headed by Union General Oliver Otis Howard and furnished food and medical supplies to former slaves. It also established schools and helped former slaves negotiate fair wages and working conditions.

But when the war ended, the national government had not yet determined how best to reunite the country. Views on how to treat the defeated Confederacy varied. Some people felt that the South could be reconciled with the Union by simply acknowledging the abolition of slavery, while others were convinced that the region’s social, economic, and political systems would have to be thoroughly reconstructed.

President Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee, advocated leniency for the South. He granted amnesty freely to Southern whites, and his only requirement for readmitting a state to the Union was the adoption of a state constitution that outlawed slavery and disavowed secession. Encouraged by Johnson, Southern planters maintained much of their political power and passed black codes to restrict blacks’ land ownership and freedom of movement.

People in the North became upset by the ease with which the Southern planters were reestablishing their dominance. Republicans in Congress fought with the president to change his Reconstruction policies. After the Democratic Party suffered a major defeat in the elections of 1866, the Republican Party took charge of Reconstruction, pursuing a more radical course. Congress passed the 14th Amendment in 1866 (ratified by the states in 1868). It extended citizenship to blacks and protected their civil rights by forbidding the states to take away “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

In March 1867 Congress passed the Reconstruction Act which was strengthened by three supplemental acts later the same year and in 1868. The Reconstruction acts divided the former ten Confederate states into five military districts, each headed by a federal military commander. This created a federal military occupation of the former Confederate states. (Tennessee was exempt because it had ratified the 14th Amendment and was considered reconstructed.) Before applying for readmission to the Union, the Southern states were required to ratify the 14th Amendment and revise their constitutions to ensure that blacks had citizenship rights, including the right to vote.

In 1870 the states ratified the 15th Amendment. This amendment prohibited the denial of the right to vote based on race. Finally, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which forbade racial discrimination in “inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of amusement.”

Federal occupation temporarily extended democracy in the South, assuring former slaves the vote and thereby enabling them to elect black leaders to political office. In states with the largest black populations, African Americans and their white Republican allies established and improved public education for white and black students, ended property qualifications for voting, abolished imprisonment for debt, and integrated public facilities.

In 1868 John W. Menard became the first African American elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana, where nearly 50 percent of the population was black. Congress refused to seat Menard, but others followed. In 1870 Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first black person to sit in the U.S. Senate. In all, 20 blacks from Southern states served in the U.S. House of Representatives and 2 in the U.S. Senate during Reconstruction.

In addition, hundreds of African Americans were elected to state and local offices in the South. In South Carolina, African Americans were almost 60 percent of the population, and at times they held the offices of lieutenant governor, secretary of state, treasurer, and speaker of the house. Although no state elected a black governor, Louisiana's lieutenant governor, P.B.S. Pinchback, who had once been denied a seat in the U.S. Senate, served as acting governor after the white governor was removed from office on charges of corruption.

Southern Democrats were determined to restore conservative Southern government. They charged Republican officials, especially blacks, with corruption. They cited rising taxes as evidence of wasteful spending. In reality, however, taxes rose as services such as public education were instituted for the first time or expanded in the South. The political corruption that characterized this era was led primarily by Northern business interests exploiting the government for their own ends, not by black Southern politicians.

To regain power in state governments, Southern Democrats used violence to keep black voters away from the polls. Throughout Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups conducted terrorist attacks on African Americans and their allies to limit Republican political power and restrict black opportunities. Hundreds of blacks were killed for attempting to vote, for challenging segregation, for organizing workers, or even for attending school. In 1871 President Ulysses S. Grant declared martial law in nine South Carolina counties because of the proliferation of lynchings and beatings. In 1873 white terrorists massacred more than 60 blacks on Easter Sunday in Colfax, Louisiana, and killed 60 Republicans, both blacks and whites, during the summer of 1874 in nearby Coushatta. They killed 75 Republicans in Vicksburg, Mississippi in December 1874.

Even as Reconstruction ended, blacks continued to make some gains. In 1877 former slave and abolitionist, John Mercer Langston, became U.S. minister to Haiti, and Frederick Douglass served as federal marshal of the District of Columbia. During the late 1870s and the 1880s, several additional black colleges founded in the South joined Howard University in Washington, D.C., Morehouse College in Georgia, and Morgan State University in Maryland in broadening educational opportunities for black students. In 1888 Capital Savings Bank of Washington, D.C., opened as the first African American bank in the United States, and others followed in Richmond, Virginia; Birmingham, Alabama; and elsewhere in the South.