Civil rights legislation

The South during Reconstruction

In the South the Reconstruction period was a time of readjustment accompanied by disorder. Southern whites wished to keep African Americans in a condition of quasi-servitude, extending few civil rights and firmly rejecting social equality. African Americans, on the other hand, wanted full freedom and, above all, land of their own. Inevitably, there were frequent clashes. Some erupted into race riots, but acts of terrorism against individual African American leaders were more common.

During this turmoil, Southern whites and Blacks began to work out ways of getting their farms back into operation and of making a living. Indeed, the most important developments of the Reconstruction era were not the highly publicized political contests but the slow, almost imperceptible changes that occurred in Southern society. African Americans could now legally marry, and they set up conventional and usually stable family units; they quietly seceded from the white churches and formed their own religious organizations, which became centres for the African American community. Without land or money, most freedmen had to continue working for white masters; but they were now unwilling to labour in gangs or to live under the eye of the plantation owner in the quarters where they had lived as enslaved persons.

Sharecropping gradually became the accepted labour system in most of the South—planters, short of capital, favoured the system because it did not require them to pay cash wages; African Americans preferred it because they could live in individual cabins on the tracts they rented and because they had a degree of independence in choosing what to plant and how to cultivate. The section as a whole, however, was desperately poor throughout the Reconstruction era; and a series of disastrously bad crops in the late 1860s, followed by the general agricultural depression of the 1870s, hurt both whites and Blacks.

The governments set up in the Southern states under the congressional program of Reconstruction were, contrary to traditional clichés, fairly honest and effective. Though the period has sometimes been labeled “Black Reconstruction,” the Radical governments in the South were never dominated by African Americans. There were no Black governors, only two Black senators and a handful of congressmen, and only one legislature controlled by Blacks. Those African Americans who did hold office appear to have been similar in competence and honesty to the whites. It is true that these Radical governments were expensive, but large state expenditures were necessary to rebuild after the war and to establish—for the first time in most Southern states—a system of common schools. Corruption there certainly was, though nowhere on the scale of the Tweed Ring, which at that time was busily looting New York City; but it is not possible to show that Republicans were more guilty than Democrats, or Blacks than whites, in the scandals that did occur.

Though some Southern whites in the mountainous regions and some planters in the rich bottomlands were willing to cooperate with the African Americans and their Northern-born “carpetbagger” allies in these new governments, there were relatively few such “scalawags”; the mass of Southern whites remained fiercely opposed to African American political, civil, and social equality. Sometimes their hostility was expressed through such terrorist organizations as the Ku Klux Klan, which sought to punish so-called “uppity Negroes” and to drive their white collaborators from the South. More frequently it was manifested through support of the Democratic Party, which gradually regained its strength in the South and waited for the time when the North would tire of supporting the Radical regimes and would withdraw federal troops from the South.

The Ulysses S. Grant administrations, 1869–77

During the two administrations of President Grant there was a gradual attrition of Republican strength (see U.S. presidential election of 1868). As a politician the president was passive, exhibiting none of the brilliance he had shown on the battlefield. His administration was tarnished by the dishonesty of his subordinates, whom he loyally defended. As the older Radical leaders—men like Sumner, Wade, and Stevens—died, leadership in the Republican Party fell into the hands of technicians like Roscoe Conkling and James G. Blaine, men devoid of the idealistic fervour that had marked the early Republicans. At the same time, many Northerners were growing tired of the whole Reconstruction issue and were weary of the annual outbreaks of violence in the South that required repeated use of federal force.

Efforts to shore up the Radical regimes in the South grew increasingly unsuccessful. The adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), prohibiting discrimination in voting on account of race, had little effect in the South, where terrorist organizations and economic pressure from planters kept African Americans from the polls. Nor were three Force Acts passed by the Republicans (1870–71), giving the president the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and imposing heavy penalties upon terroristic organizations, in the long run more successful. If they succeeded in dispersing the Ku Klux Klan as an organization, they also drove its members, and their tactics, more than ever into the Democratic camp.

Growing Northern disillusionment with Radical Reconstruction and with the Grant administration became evident in the Liberal Republican movement of 1872, which resulted in the nomination of the erratic Horace Greeley for president. Though Grant was overwhelmingly reelected (see U.S. presidential election of 1872), the true temper of the country was demonstrated in the congressional elections of 1874, which gave the Democrats control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the outbreak of the Civil War. Despite Grant’s hope for a third term in office, most Republicans recognized by 1876 that it was time to change both the candidate and his Reconstruction program, and the nomination of Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, a moderate Republican of high principles and of deep sympathy for the South, marked the end of the Radical domination of the Republican Party.

The circumstances surrounding the disputed election of 1876 strengthened Hayes’s intention to work with the Southern whites, even if it meant abandoning the few Radical regimes that remained in the South. In an election marked by widespread fraud and many irregularities, the Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, received the majority of the popular vote, but the vote in the Electoral College was long in doubt. In order to resolve the impasse, Hayes’s lieutenants had to enter into agreement with Southern Democratic congressmen, promising to withdraw the remaining federal troops from the South, to share the Southern patronage with Democrats, and to favour that section’s demands for federal subsidies in the building of levees and railroads. Hayes’s inauguration marked, for practical purposes, the restoration of “home rule” for the South—i.e., that the North would no longer interfere in Southern elections to protect African Americans and that the Southern whites would again take control of their state governments.

The era of conservative domination, 1877–90

The Republican regimes in the Southern states began to fall as early as 1870; by 1877 they had all collapsed. For the next 13 years the South was under the leadership of white Democrats whom their critics called Bourbons because, like the French royal family, they supposedly had learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the revolution they had experienced. For the South as a whole, the characterization is neither quite accurate nor quite fair. In most Southern states the new political leaders represented not only the planters but also the rising Southern business community, interested in railroads, cotton textiles, and urban land speculation.

Even on racial questions the new Southern political leaders were not so reactionary as the label Bourbon might suggest. Though whites were in the majority in all but two of the Southern states, the conservative regimes did not attempt to disfranchise African Americans. Partly their restraint was caused by fear of further federal intervention; chiefly, however, it stemmed from a conviction on the part of conservative leaders that they could control African American voters, whether through fraud, intimidation, or manipulation.

Indeed, African American votes were sometimes of great value to these regimes, which favoured the businessmen and planters of the South at the expense of the small white farmers. These “Redeemer” governments sharply reduced or even eliminated the programs of the state governments that benefited poor people. The public school system was starved for money; in 1890 the per capita expenditure in the South for public education was only 97 cents, as compared with $2.24 in the country as a whole. The care of state prisoners, the insane, and the blind was also neglected; and measures to safeguard the public health were rejected. At the same time these conservative regimes were often astonishingly corrupt, and embezzlement and defalcation on the part of public officials were even greater than during the Reconstruction years.

The small white farmers resentful of planter dominance, residents of the hill country outvoted by Black Belt constituencies, and politicians excluded from the ruling cabals tried repeatedly to overthrow the conservative regimes in the South. During the 1870s they supported Independent or Greenback Labor candidates, but without notable success. In 1879 the Readjuster Party in Virginia—so named because its supporters sought to readjust the huge funded debt of that state so as to lessen the tax burden on small farmers—gained control of the legislature and secured in 1880 the election of its leader, Gen. William Mahone, to the U.S. Senate. Not until 1890, however, when the powerful Farmers’ Alliance, hitherto devoted exclusively to the promotion of agricultural reforms, dropped its ban on politics, was there an effective challenge to conservative hegemony. In that year, with Alliance backing, Benjamin R. Tillman was chosen governor of South Carolina and James S. Hogg was elected governor of Texas; the heyday of Southern populism was at hand.