A Short History of Reconstruction

Eric Foner

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062036254
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

An abridged version of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, the definitive study of the aftermath of the Civil War, winner of the Bancroft Prize, Avery O. Craven Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Award, Francis Parkman Prize, and Lionel Trilling Prize.

1

The World the War Made

The Coming of Emancipation

On January 1, 1863, after a winter storm swept up the east coast of the United States, the sun rose in a cloudless sky over Washington, D.C. At the White House, Abraham Lincoln spent most of the day welcoming guests to the traditional New Year’s reception. Finally, in the late afternoon, the President retired to his office to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Excluded from its purview were the 450,000 slaves in the loyal border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, 275,000 in Union-occupied Tennessee, and tens of thousands more in portions of Louisiana and Virginia under the control of federal armies. But, the Proclamation decreed, the remainder of the nation’s slave population, well over 3 million men, women, and children, “are and henceforth shall be free.”

Nearly two and a half centuries had passed since twenty black men and women were landed in Virginia from a Dutch ship. From this tiny seed had grown the poisoned fruit of plantation slavery, which, in profound and contradictory ways, shaped the course of American development. Even as slavery mocked the ideals of a nation supposedly dedicated to liberty and equality, slave labor played an indispensable part in its rapid growth, expanding westward with the young republic, producing the cotton that fueled the early industrial revolution. The slavery question divided the nation’s churches, sundered political ties between the sections, and finally shattered the bonds of the Union. On the principle of opposing the further expansion of slavery, a new political party rose to power in the 1850s, placing in the White House a son of the slave state Kentucky who had grown to manhood on the free Illinois prairies and believed the United States could not endure forever half slave and half free. In the crisis that followed Lincoln’s election, eleven slave states seceded from the Union, precipitating in 1861 the bloodiest war the Western Hemisphere has ever seen.

The Emancipation Proclamation not only culminated decades of struggle, but evoked Christian visions of an era of unbounded progress for a nation purged at last of the sin of slavery. Even the staid editors of the New York Times believed it marked a watershed in American life, “an era in the history … of this country and the world.” For 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. Begun to preserve the Union, the Civil 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.

In one sense, however, the Proclamation only confirmed what was already happening on farms and plantations throughout the South. War, it has been said, is the midwife of revolution, and well before 1863 the disintegration of slavery had begun. As the Union Army occupied territory on the periphery of the Confederacy, first in Virginia, then in Tennessee, Louisiana, and elsewhere, slaves by the thousands headed for the Union lines. Even in the heart of the Confederacy, the conflict undermined the South’s “peculiar institution.” The drain of white men into military service left plantations under the control of planters’ wives and elderly and infirm men, whose authority slaves increasingly felt able to challenge. Reports of “demoralized” and “insubordinate” behavior multiplied throughout the South.

But generally it was the arrival of federal soldiers that spelled havoc for the slave regime, for blacks quickly grasped that the presence of occupying troops destroyed the coercive power of both the individual master and the slaveholding community. On the Magnolia plantation in Louisiana, the arrival of the Union Army in 1862 sparked a work stoppage and worse: “We have a terrible state of affairs here negroes refusing to work… . The negroes have erected a gallows in the quarters and give as an excuse for it that they are told they must drive their master … off the plantation hang their master etc. and that then they will be free.” Slavery in southern Louisiana, wrote a Northern reporter in November 1862, “is forever destroyed and worthless, no matter what Mr. Lincoln or anyone else may say on the subject.”

“Meanwhile,” in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, “with perplexed and laggard steps, the United States government followed in the footsteps of the black slave.” The slaves determination to seize the opportunity presented by the war initially proved an embarrassment to the Lincoln administration and a burden to the army. Lincoln fully appreciated, as he would observe in his second inaugural address, that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the war. But he also understood the vital importance of keeping the border slave states in the Union, generating support among the broadest constituency in the North, and weakening the Confederacy by holding out to irresolute Southerners the possibility that they could return to the Union with their property, including slaves, intact. In 1861, the restoration of the Union, not emancipation, was the cause that generated the widest support for the war effort.

Yet as the Confederacy set slaves to work as military laborers, and the presence of Union soldiers precipitateted large-scale desertion of the plantations, the early policy quickly unraveled. Increasingly, military authorities adopted the plan, inaugurated in Virginia by Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, of designating fugitive slaves “contraband of war” who would be employed as laborers for the Union armies. Then, too. Northern abolitionists and Badical Republicans recognized that secession offered a golden opportunity to strike a fatal blow at slavery. Their agitation kept at the forefront of Northern politics the question of the struggle’s ultimate purpose.

The steps by which Congress and the President moved toward abolition have often been chronicled. In March 1862, Congress enacted an article of war expressly prohibiting the army from returning fugitives to their masters. Then came abolition in the District of Columbia (with compensation for loyal owners) and the territories, followed by the Second Confiscation Act, liberating slaves who resided in Union-occupied territory or escaped to Union lines, if their masters were disloyal. Finally, in September, came the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, the final edict, a turning point in national policy as well as in the character of the war. In effect, it transformed a war of armies into a conflict of societies. In December 1861, Lincoln had admonished Congress that the Civil War must not degenerate into “a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.” The Emancipation Proclamation announced that this was precisely what it must become.

Of the Proclamation’s provisions, few were more essential to breathing life into the promise of emancipation than the massive enrollment of blacks into military service. By the war’s end, some 180,000 blacks had served in the Union Army. The highest percentage originated in the border states, where enlistment was, for most of the war, the only route to freedom.

Although obliged to serve in segregated units under white officers and initially paid less than white troops, black soldiers played a crucial role not only in winning the Civil War, but also in defining the war’s consequences. The “logical result” of their military service, one Senator observed in 1864, was that “the black man is henceforth to assume a new status among us.” For the first time in American history, large numbers of blacks were treated as equals before the law—if only military law. It was in the army that numerous former slaves first learned to read and write, either from teachers employed by Northern aid societies or in classrooms and literary clubs established and funded by the soldiers themselves. For men of talent and ambition, the army flung open a door to advancement and respectability. From the army would come many of the black political leaders of Reconstruction, including at least forty-one delegates to state constitutional conventions, sixty legislators, three lieutenant governors, and four Congressmen. In time, the black contribution to the Union war effort would fade from the nation’s collective memory, but it remained a vital part of the black community’s sense of its own history. “They say,” an Alabama planter reported in 1867, “the Yankees never could have whipped the South without the aid of the negroes.” Here was a crucial justification for blacks self-confident claim to equal citizenship during Reconstruction.

For upholders of the South’s “peculiar institution,” the Civil War was a terrible moment of truth. The most perceptive among them realized they had never really known their slaves. “I believed that these people were content, happy, and attached to their masters,” South Carolina rice planter A. L. Taveau confessed two months after the war’s close. But if this were the case, why did the slaves desert their masters “in [their] moment of need and flock to an enemy, whom they did not know?” Blacks, Taveau now understood, had, for generations, been “looking for the Man of Universal Freedom.”

The Inner Civil War

Like a massive earthquake, the Civil War and the destruction of slavery permanently altered the landscape of Southern life, exposing and widening fault lines that had lain barely visible just beneath the surface. White society was transformed no less fully than black, as traditional animosities grew more acute, longstanding conflicts acquired altered meanings, and new groups emerged into political consciousness.

From the earliest days of settlement, there had never been a single white South, and in the nineteenth century the region as a whole, and each state within it, was divided into areas with sharply differing political economies. The plantation belt, which encompassed the South’s most fertile lands, supported a flourishing agriculture integrated into the world market for cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco. It contained the majority of slaves, as well as the planters who dominated Southern society and politics and commanded most of the region’s wealth and economic resources. A larger number of white Southerners lived in the upcountry, an area of small farmers and herdsmen who owned few or no slaves and engaged largely in mixed and subsistence agriculture. The upcountry itself encompassed the Piedmont, where slavery was a significant presence, and the mountains and hill country, where small communities of white families lived in frontier conditions, isolated from the rest of the South. Self-sufficiency remained the primary goal of upcountry farm families, a large majority of whom owned their land and worked it with their own labor, without slaves or hired hands.

Within the South, state borders did not coincide with lines of economic specialization. The Appalachian South, a vast mountain region of extraordinary beauty, stretched from western Virginia through parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. The cotton kingdom, dominated by slave plantations, reached from the Carolinas southwest into Louisiana and eastern Texas. Tennessee had a western region with numerous cotton plantations, a middle section with prosperous medium-sized farms growing corn and livestock for the market, and a large mountainous area to the east, with small subsistence-oriented farms and few slaves.

Many small farmers (nearly half in both Mississippi and South Carolina) owned a slave or two, and even in the mountains slavery was “firmly entrenched” among a small but influential local elite: the few large-scale farmers, professional men, merchants, and small-town entrepreneurs. Outside the plantation belt, however, the majority of yeomen had little economic stake in the institution. Yet slavery affected society everywhere in the South, and even mountaineers shared many attitudes with the planters, beginning with a commitment to white supremacy. So long as slavery and planter rule did not interfere with the yeomanry’s self-sufficient agriculture and local independence, the latent class conflict among whites failed to find coherent expression.

It was in the secession crisis and Civil War that large numbers of upcountry yeomen discovered themselves as a political class. The elections for delegates to secession conventions in the winter of 1860–61 produced massive repudiations of disunion in yeoman areas. Once the war had begun, most of the upcountry rallied to the Confederate cause. But from the outset, disloyalty was rife in the Southern mountains. Its western counties seceded from Virginia in 1861 and two years later reentered the Union as a separate state. From East Tennessee, long conscious of its remoteness from the rest of the state, thousands of men made their way through the mountains to enlist in the Union Army. Secret Union societies flourished in the Ozark mountains of northern Arkansas, from which 8,000 men eventually joined the federal army.

Discontent developed more slowly outside the mountains. It was not simply devotion to the Union but the impact of the war and the consequences of Confederate policies that awakened peace sentiment and social conflict. In any society, war demands sacrifice, and public support often rests on the conviction that sacrifice is equitably shared. But the Confederate government increasingly molded its policies in the interest of the planter class. Slavery’s disintegration compelled the Confederate government to take steps to preserve the institution, and these policies, in turn, sundered white society.

The impression that planters were not bearing their fair share of the war’s burdens spread quickly among Southern yeomen. The upcountry became convinced that it bore an unfair share of taxation; it particularly resented the tax-in-kind and the policy of impressment that authorized military officers to appropriate farm goods to feed the army. During the war, poverty descended upon thousands of upcountry families, especially those with men in the army. Food riots broke out in Virginia and North Carolina, and in Randolph County, Alabama, crowds of women seized government stores of corn “to prevent starvation of themselves and families.” But, above all, conscription convinced many yeomen that the struggle for Southern independence had become “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Beginning in 1862, the Confederacy enacted the first conscription laws in American history, including provisions that a draftee could avoid service by producing a substitute, and that one able-bodied white male would be exempted for every twenty slaves. This “class legislation” was deeply resented in the upcountry, for the cost of a substitute quickly rose far beyond the means of most white families, while the “twenty Negro” provision, a response to the decline of discipline on the plantations, allowed many overseers and planters sons to escape military service.

In large areas of the Southern upcountry, initial enthusiasm for the war was succeeded by disillusionment, draft evasion, and eventually outright resistance to Confederate authority—a civil war within the Civil War. By war’s end, more than 100,000 men had deserted, almost entirely, one officer observed, from among “the poorest class of non slaveholders whose labor is indispensable to the daily support of their families.” In western and central North Carolina, whose white inhabitants supported the Confederacy at the outset, the Heroes of America, numbering perhaps 10,000 men, established an “underground railroad” to enable Unionists to escape to federal lines.

More than ever before, the Southern upcountry was divided against itself between 1861 and 1865. Yeomen supplied both the bulk of Confederate soldiers and the majority of deserters and draft resistors. Lying at the war’s strategic crossroads, portions of upcountry Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi were laid waste by the march of opposing armies. In other areas, marauding bands of deserters plundered the farms and workshops of Confederate sympathizers, driving off livestock and destroying crops, while Confederate troops and vigilantes routed Union families from their homes. In this internal civil war, atrocities were committed on both sides, but since the bulk of the upcountry remained within Confederate lines for most of the war, Unionists suffered more intensely. In East Tennessee, hundreds were imprisoned by military tribunals and their property seized “to the total impoverishment of the sufferers.”

Thus the war permanently redrew the economic and political map of the white South. Military devastation and the Confederacy’s economic policies plunged much of the upcountry into poverty, thereby threatening the yeomanry’s economic independence and opening the door to the postwar spread of cotton cultivation and tenancy. The war ended the upcountry’s isolation, weakened its localism, and awakened its political sell-consciousness. Out of the Union opposition would come many of the most prominent white Republican leaders of Reconstruction. The party’s Southern governors would include Edmund J. Davis, who during the war raised the First Texas Cavalry for the Union army; William W. Holden, whose unsuccessful 1864 peace campaign for governor of North Carolina became the backbone of white Republicanism in the state; and William G. Brownlow, a circuit-riding Methodist preacher and Knoxville editor who gave violent speeches in the North against the Confederacy. Regions like East Tennessee and western North Carolina and individual counties in the hill country of other states would embrace the Republican party after the Civil War and remain strongholds well into the twentieth century. Their loyalty first to the Union and then to Republicanism did not, however, imply abolitionist sentiment during the war (although they were perfectly willing to see slavery sacrificed to preserve the Union) or a commitment to the rights of blacks thereafter. Upcountry Unionism, Northern reporter Sidney Andrews explained in the fall of 1865, rested above all on “hatred of those who went into the Rebellion” and of “a certain ruling class” that had brought upon the region the devastating impact of the Civil War.

The North’s Transformation

For the Union too, the Civil War was a time of change. The Northern states did not experience a revolution as far-reaching as emancipation, but aspect of life emerged untouched from the on conflict. The policies of a national government whose powers were magnified each year the war continued offered unparalleled economic opportunities to some Northerners while spurring determined opposition among others. As in the South, how Northerners reacted to the war and its consequences reflected prior divisions of class, race, and politics, even as these were themselves reshaped by the conflict.

If economic devastation stalked the South, for the North the Civil War was a time of unprecedented prosperity. Railroads thrived on carrying troops and supplies, and profited from the closing of the Mississippi River. On a tide of demand from the army, the meat-packing industry boomed; Chicago, the city of railroad and slaughterhouse, experienced unprecedented growth in population, construction, banking, and manufacturing. By 1865 it stood unchallenged as the Midwest’s preeminent commercial center. The woolen mills of New England and the mid-Atlantic states worked day and night to meet the military’s demand for blankets and uniforms, reaping enormous profits. Agriculture also flourished, for even as farm boys by the thousands were drawn into the army, the frontier of cultivation pushed westward, with machinery and immigration replacing lost labor.

Deep structural changes accompanied the North’s wartime boom. Accelerating the emergence of an American industrial bourgeoisie, the war tied the fortunes of this class to the Republican party and the national state. More was involved than profits wrung from government contracts, for faced with the war’s unprecedented financial demands, Congress adopted economic policies that promoted further industrial expansion and permanently altered the conditions of capital accumulation. To mobilize the financial resources of the Union, the government created a national paper currency, an enormous national debt, and a national banking system. To raise funds it increased the tariff and imposed new taxes on nearly every branch of production and consumption. To help compensate for the drain of men into the army, a federal bureau was established to encourage immigration under labor contracts. To promote agricultural development, the Homestead Act offered free land to settlers on the public domain, and the Land Grant College Act assisted the states in establishing “agricultural and mechanical colleges.” And to further consolidate the Union, Congress lavished grants of public land and government bonds upon internal improvements, most notably the transcontinental railroad, which, when completed in 1869, expanded the national market, facilitated the penetration of capital into the West, and heralded the final doom of the Plains Indians. The policies of the Union embodied a spirit of national economic activism unprecedented in the prewar years.

In their expansion of federal power and their effort to organize a decentralized economy and fragmented polity, these measures reflected the birth of the modern American state. On t...