The Plantation Complex in the American South had been expanding in the years leading up to the Civil War. They had not embraced the liberalism spreading through the broader Atlantic World that espoused the notion that "free labor," that is, workers who were paid and were ostensibly free to leave their jobs if they so desired, was more efficient than slave labor. This had caught on among the British, French, Dutch, and would eventually spread to Latin America, as well. Most white southerners deeply resented the humiliation of the war, much less the efforts by the North to reconstruct the South according to these liberal doctrines.
Early Reconstruction
The first efforts of Reconstruction began in the Sea Islands of South Carolina where the Gullah culture was predominant. The Gideon religious sect was given leeway to conduct educational and evangelical efforts on the islands as early as 1862. Northern money went into supplying seed and other expenses of planting staple crops, essentially keeping enslaved peoples in their condition of servitude while the Civil War unfolded.
As the Union army began to occupy parts of the seceded southern states, some sort of "reconstruction" policy was needed and the federal government had not really established one yet. In the lower Mississippi valley and in Mississippi itself, General Nathaniel Bank established the "Banks System." This was a policy that forbade enslaved peoples from leaving their plantation residences and forced them to put staple crops as they normally would have done. Banks was afraid of a chaotic situation and destruction of property if he did not show a strong hand.
The placing of property rights ahead of what many perceived as human rights was pretty standard procedure during Reconstruction. The exception was the "Confiscation of 1862" when the lands of Confederate leaders were seized by the government. Eventually, with the exception of Robert E. Lee's plantation, which became Arlington Cemetery, all these lands were returned. Indeed, "Sherman Land" was land given to freedmen who had followed General William T. Sherman's march across Georgia to the sea. Sherman, like Banks, was interested in keeping order and so gave a strip of land along the South Carolina coast to the freedmen. Sherman had no authority to do this, and the land was eventually returned to the planters.
A debate arose in the northern government around the issue of how to bring the seceded states back into the Union when the war was over. President Lincoln proposed a "10% Plan," where a state needed 10% of its 1860 voting population to swear allegiance to the Union before it was allowed back in. "Radical Republicans" in Congress, who had a more punitive view toward the South, proposed the Wade-Davis Plan. According to this plan, 50% of 1860 voters would have to swear the "Iron-Clad Oath," which stated that they had never helped the South during the war -- an unlikely scenario. Neither of these plans were ultimately adopted.
What the government did do was create the Freedmen's Savings and Trust -- a government-run bank that would provide low-cost loans to the Freedmen. This would ostensibly help them avoid the debt slavery proposals of southern banks and planters who wanted to maintain the old social order in spite of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery. The Freedmen's Savings and Trust was headed for a time by Frederick Douglass and was a primary repository for African American soldiers' money. Ultimately, the "Panic of 1873" overwhelmed the bank and it was closed in 1874.
Presidential Reconstruction
After the assassination of President Lincoln just days after General Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House through the Reconstruction process into even more disarray than it was already in. Union troops were occupying the former Confederacy, and resentment was high. "Radical" Republicans in Congress wanted not only to punish the South but to make the four million former slaves into voting citizens, something southern whites were dead set against. The new President Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat, would ensure that some form of this dilemma would be played out in the federal government.
It was Johnson who guaranteed that the planters' lands would not be redistributed to the freedmen who had built them up and produced the wealth to maintain them. He also pardoned most Confederate officers and allowed "Black Codes" to be passed. These were restrictions on the freedmen such as not allowing them to own firearms, testify at trials, travel without being employed, and other oppressive measures. It also helped expand the system of sharecropping, which kept freedmen enslaved in all but name.
Congress responded to President Johnson's pro-southern measures by supporting the Freedmen's Bureau and the Freedmen's Savings and Loan. Congress also was concerned that Johnson would replace Lincoln's cabinet with men who were supportive of southern interests. The result was the Tenure of Office Act, which called for Senate approval for the removal of cabinet members in addition to the already existing "advice and consent" clause of the Constitution. Johnson vetoed the bill, but Congress had enough votes to override the veto.
Johnson elected to ignore the new law and fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, replacing him with General Lorenzo Thomas. The House of Representatives responded by voting to impeach Johnson and sending the case to the Senate. While it was debatable whether the Tenure of Office Act was constitutional, there was little doubt that Johnson had violated it. Nevertheless, in the end the Senate fell one vote short of removing the President from office. The deciding vote was cast by Kansas Senator Edmund G. Ross, who later said that if the President is to be removed from office, it must be for actions that were unquestionably "high crimes and misdemeanors" and not for political reasons since it would set a precedent that could be repeated.
Congressional Reconstruction
While President Johnson remained in office, he was a lame-duck for the rest of his term, and the period of "Radical" or Congressional Reconstruction began. This as good as it got for the freedmen during the Reconstruction period. The South was divided into military districts and Congress employed the "forfeited-rights" theory of re-entry into the Union. Southern states were to draw up new Constitutions -- anti-slavery -- and submit them to Congress for approval. The 14th Amendment protecting the civil rights of citizens, which now included the freedmen. By 1871, during Ulysses S. Grant's first administration, the 15th Amendment was passed giving adult male freedmen the right to vote.
These actions and others, such as efforts to educate blacks and set them up financially to become self-sufficient, led to intense reaction among southern whites. This reaction is generally referred to as "Redemption" and it took two basic forms. The first was the formation of the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee in 1866 led by Nathan Bedford Forrest. The other was the system of debt slavery - most commonly taking the form of sharecropping -- that kept freedmen enslaved in all but name. Many freedmen were murdered outright, and those who might be inclined to either speak out or flea would possibly have to reckon with the KKK.
The struggle between Reconstruction and Redemption began to favor the latter by Grant's second term. The "Panic" of 1873 was the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of northern enthusiasm for Reconstruction. It became politically untenable as most northern whites became far more concerned about the economy and colonizing the Great Plains than they were about the fate of their black brothers and sisters in the South.
In 1876, the presidential election between Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democrat Samuel J. Tilden was a watershed event. Southern whites refused to accept that the majority African American vote in states like Florida had given the state's electoral votes to the Republican Hayes. Redeemer Democrats in Florida threatened to send their own delegation to the Electoral College to counter the "Black" Republicans. A deal was struck between Democrats and Republicans, rather than holding the electors to voting the same as their states' popular votes.
The deal has gone down in history as the "Compromise of 1877." The essence of it was that the Democrats agreed to let Hayes be the President; in exchange, northern capital would flow to the South, and northern troops would be removed from the South. With the removal of the troops, the door slammed shut on Reconstruction, leaving the freedmen to fend for themselves in a hostile environment. It would not be until the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision of 1954 emboldened a civil rights movement that the promise of Reconstruction began to be realized in the 1960s.
In the end, Reconstruction was and is an ongoing historical process that is the legacy of the Plantation Complex that created the bulk of wealth produced in the New World in the early modern period.
Sources:
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper, 1988).
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