Reconstruction

Reconstruction One of the most dramatic and argumentatively most important time period in the United States of America is the era following the Civil War, which lasted from eighteen sixty three through eighteen seventy seven. This time period known as Reconstruction has remained a controversial topic among historians throughout the years. It has been described by many as a bloody and unmoving battleground for many civil war and post civil war historians . There are different arguments as to what exactly the plight of African Americans was during the reconstruction era. Three major works on the subject will be used to study and analyze the ultimate question in this essay: What were the lives like of African Americans in the South during the reconstruction period' From eighteen sixty one to eighteen sixty five, the United States of America was divided in a civil war that pitted the eleven southern states that succeeded from the United States officially known as the Confederated States of America (also South or Confederacy) against the remaining twenty five states (also known as the North or Union) . This war lasting from eighteen sixty one to eighteen sixty five, pitted family against family, neighbor against neighbor, and community against community. When it was done over five hundred thousand American’s lost their lives and left economy and infrastructure of the loosing southern states in a shamble . Being that the war that was fought was a civil war to maintain the unification of the country, the responsibility for the reconstruction of the economical, political, social, and physical infrastructure was the responsibility of the United States of America. This period of reconstruction and readjustment, lasting from eighteen sixty five through eighteen seventy seven, in United States of America history is known as Reconstruction . At the end of the Civil War, the South was a defeated and ruined land. The physical destruction wrought by the invading Union forces was enormous, and the old social and economic order founded on slavery had collapsed completely with nothing to replace it. With the passing of the thirteenth amendment, freeing the slaves, the once free labor that slavery provided was done away with and could no longer be depended on to rebuild the collapsed economy. Many felt that this was necessary to permanently destroy all forms of Confederate nationalism, which some felt could be easily accomplished as soon as the Confederate armies surrendered and the Southern states repealed secession and accepted the thirteenth Amendment, which freed all the slaves. But this still left an issue on how could the defeated eleven Confederate states be somehow restored to their positions within the Union as well as be depended on being able to provided with loyal governments, and the role of the newly emancipated slaves in Southern society had to also be defined. On March second eighteen sixty seven, the United States Congress enacted the Reconstruction Act, which was supplemented later by three acts that divided the South into five military districts in which the authority of the army commander was supreme . Under the terms of the Reconstruction Acts, new state constitutions were written in the South. By August eighteen sixty eight, six states (Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida) had been readmitted to the Union, having ratified the Fourteenth Amendment as required by the first Reconstruction Act . The four remaining unreconstructed states—Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia—were later readmitted in eighteen seventy after ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment as well as the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed the black man's right to vote . According to historian Eric Foner, “basic socio-economic facts limited the reforms that Reconstruction would introduce and contributed to its downfall”. One of the newly freed slaves fondest hopes and most fundamental need, was to see their former plantations broken up and the land distributed among the black families that had once labored on them for so many generations, but this desire was soon rejected. ”In 1870, only about thirty thousand black southerners owned any land and these were generally small plots, while more than four million owned none at all, leaving them economically dependent upon landowners for employment and income”. Many white landowners however believed that economic power alone was not insufficient enough to restore them to their prewar prosperity. In order to do this, they were convinced that they must be able to dominate black labor not only with economic forces but also with physical coercion and threats. That, in turn, would require destroying the Reconstruction regime and ultimately regaining the political supremacy that they lost throughout the South. Further damaged was done to the newly freed slaves, when a deep and protracted national depression weakened the freed people economically. One way that the white southern governments tried to do this was by enacting “black codes.” These codes placed limitation on newly freed slaves, while they had more rights than a freeman before the war, they had had only a limited set of second-class civil rights, no voting rights, and, since they were not citizens, they could not own firearms, serve on a jury in a lawsuit involving whites or move about without employment. But this was soon was overturned by the Civil Rights Act of eighteen sixty six, which gave black men full legal equality, except the right to vote prior to the passing of the fifteenth Amendment. Another turning point during the period of Reconstruction was the black’s ability to realize just how important their labor was to the southern economy. While early on in Reconstruction, the newly freed slaves were utilized in a system in “gang labor,” wherein the worker worked on land owned in return for food and a place to stay. But with their realization of their economical worth, many of the Freeman was able to negotiated for their services, which resulted in sharecropping were the slaves owned or leased the land in return for giving a portion of their crops. Meanwhile, members of the elite Southern planters managed to rally myriad poor whites to the cause of "redeeming" the South from Reconstruction carpet baggers and restoring white supremacy. It was during this time that organizations like the Ku Klux Klan killed, began to use tactics such as intimidation, mutilation, murder, and rape to oppress blacks throughout the south. They would deliberately singling out the ablest and most courageous of the freed blacks, in "the most extensive example of homegrown terrorism in American history,” to serve as an example to anyone who stood in their way. All of the authors agree on these issues as causes of the decline of Reconstruction. Chunchang calls it the “racist structure of the south rising again”, Foner calls it the “ills of the reconstruction era” and Franklin calls it the “corruption if the south”. It is at this point in which all the authors found common ground. African Americans during reconstruction faced many changes in their lives and many different historians have different views on how and in what ways were they actually challenged. Eric Foner’s book Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction shares some of the same arguments as the other two major works but differ in some aspects, but they all share one common theme. The common theme these entire works share is that they have all set out to debunk the myths and distortions that were perpetuated by historians who came before them. The historian and author of the Reconstruction after the Civil War, John Hope Franklin’s main goal as stated in parts of his introduction of his book was to counter the myths and untruths in one of the most popular books on the subject at the time entitled The South during Reconstruction by E. Merton Coulter. “ He points out the fallacies that are still believed today. He writes of how there was no long military occupation of the South, there was no seizure of power by incompetent blacks, and finally shows that Reconstruction ended because of white southern corruption and lack of interest from the North”. The last major work examined in this essay is entitled African Americans in the Reconstruction Era by Gao Chunchang. The author basically agrees with the other two authors on many of the issues that are presented in their works. He sets out as well to debunk myths and dispel untruths but he disagrees in one very important way. While the other two authors suggest that Reconstruction was a time for some triumph and achievement among African Americans and that Reconstruction failed because of reasons not involving blacks fault, Chunchang argues that black issues such as little understanding ,limited power and limited resources along with racism led to the demise of the Reconstruction era. Chunchang suggest that the decline of the Reconstruction was solely the result of slavery. It seems as if the author is saying that if blacks stood up for more their rights in greater numbers and in more ways that the Reconstruction era would not have ended the way it did. In his book he states, “While whites bore the main responsibility for the decline of reconstruction blacks had their own obligations for self improvement and their own reconstruction. Under the oppression of slavery blacks related labor to physical punishment and when freedom came to them those old habits were exaggerated by whites”. He states that blacks had a responsibility to themselves that they did not hold up during reconstruction. These three works stress the many issues and many different viewpoints in the debate about Reconstruction in the South. After examining three major works on the subject by some of the leading experts in the field, one still has to come to their own conclusions on the issues at hand. Although the historians agree in some aspects, in others they have total opposite viewpoints. While Franklin and Foner see the reconstruction as a forward struggle for African Americans being pushed back by whites. Chunchang, whom I should note is not an American native, see African Americans not doing enough as part of their struggle during the reconstruction period. This goes to show how personal viewpoints and opinions will differ even in historical works.