Transcript
Edisto
October 1865
In January, the Union army set this island aside for the people who had worked it in slavery.
In October, the man in charge of the freedpeople's welfare came to tell them to give it back.
Then General Howard explained. The President had pardoned the owners. The land was going back.
A freedman in the Edisto gallery Why, General Howard, why do you take away our lands? You take them from us who are true, always true to the Government! You give them to our all-time enemies! That is not right!
Over the next five years, the country wrote freedom, citizenship and the vote into its Constitution. Over the seven after that, it let those rights be taken back.
Forty Acres
1865–1870
Howard's memoir says a woman began the hymn. A songbook printed in 1867 describes a meeting like it, where Howard asked for the song, and wept. They disagree about the general. Both remember an angry room and a song.
In Savannah that January, Sherman and War Secretary Stanton asked twenty Black church leaders what freedom needed.
Garrison Frazier The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor …
Four days later, Sherman's Field Orders No. 15 set aside coastal land for them, up to forty acres a family.
By summer, about forty thousand freedpeople had settled on about four hundred thousand acres.
Then President Johnson pardoned ex-Confederates by the thousands, and a pardon returned their land.
Henry Bram You ask us to forgive the land owners of our Island, You only lost your right arm. In war and might forgive them.
Henry Bram The man who tied me to a tree & gave me 39 lashes … & who will not let me stay In His empty Hut except I will do His planting & be Satisfied with His price …
Henry Bram that man, I cannot well forgive.
Howard promised to defend any land they bought. Few could afford to buy. Most of Sherman's land went back to its owners.
Congress did more with words. Three amendments ended slavery, made freedpeople citizens, and barred denying the vote because of race.
Black men voted, and more than fifteen hundred held office, from sheriff to senator.
How do you take back rights written into the Constitution?
The amendments were never repealed. So how do you take back rights written into the Constitution? You make them stop working. It took twelve years, and it came four ways.
Settlement Day
1866–1900
Planters kept the land. They wanted the old gangs and the bell. Freedpeople refused. They wanted their own plots and hours, and women and children out of the fields.
Sharecropping was the compromise: each family on its own plot. On this Georgia plantation, cabins stood in a row in 1860. By 1881, they were scattered.
On January 1, 1867, in Marshall County, Mississippi, two freedmen signed a contract with a farmer. Cooper Hughs and Charles Roberts made their marks. Isham G. Bailey wrote his name.
What the contract left out, families bought on credit, from the landowner or a merchant. Lien laws gave the lender first claim on the crop, before it was even planted.
Corn, July 1878 middle Georgia · per bushel
Credit cost more. A bushel of corn in middle Georgia, 1878: 78 cents cash, $1.04 on credit. That works out to a hundred percent a year.
Lenders wanted cotton, the crop that always sold. Families planted it to the cabin door and wore out the soil.
As the South grew more cotton, each pound sold for less. Debt rolled into the next year's contract.
By 1900, about three in four Black farmers in the South worked land they didn't own. So did more than a third of white farmers. The trap caught them too.
That was the first way. It ran on paper, and it lasted into the 1940s.
Crop lien laws
The Invisible Empire
1866–1872
Around the end of 1865, in Pulaski, Tennessee, six Confederate veterans started a club. They called it the Ku Klux Klan.
Klansmen rode at night, disguised. They whipped and murdered Black voters, officeholders, teachers and preachers, and white Republicans too.
They burned the schools and churches freedpeople had built for themselves.
In York County, South Carolina, Klansmen dragged Elias Hill, a disabled Baptist preacher, from his bed and whipped him.
Elias Hill Yes, sir; so alarmed that they did not sleep in the houses at night.
With an election coming, Georgia's legislature voted to expel nearly all its Black members.
Henry McNeal Turner I am here to demand my rights, and to hurl thunderbolts at the men who would dare to cross the threshold of my manhood.
Sixteen days later, Philip Joiner, one of the expelled members, led a march to a Republican rally in Camilla.
Townsmen opened fire on the marchers.
The reader saw James Johns, running up with a gun in his hand, saw soon afterwards a flash from his gun level with and straight forward towards the waggon, in which the band was sitting
This time, Washington answered. The Enforcement Acts made it a federal crime to keep citizens from voting by force or terror.
Grant suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties, and troops and marshals arrested hundreds. By 1872 the first Klan was broken. When the government used its power, it worked.
The Courthouse and the Court
1872–1876
Louisiana's 1872 election ended with two governors, each claiming he'd won. In Colfax, armed Black men held the parish courthouse for nearly three weeks, to keep its Republican officials in office.
On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, a white force with a cannon attacked the courthouse. They set it on fire. Men who surrendered were shot.
Colfax, Louisiana · April 13, 1873
No one knows how many died. Historian Eric Foner calls it the bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era.
The next day, in Washington, the Supreme Court decided a case about butchers. New Orleans butchers had sued to break a state-granted monopoly, citing the Fourteenth Amendment.
Samuel F. Miller …there is a citizenship of the United States, and a citizenship of a State, which are distinct from each other…
Most rights, the majority said, belonged to the states to protect.
The United States charged about a hundred men over Colfax under the Enforcement Act. Three were convicted, among them William Cruikshank.
Their appeal reached the Supreme Court in March 1876.
Morrison R. Waite That duty was originally assumed by the States; and it still remains there.
The Court threw out the convictions. No one was ever punished for Colfax.
The amendment still promised equal protection. The Court said protecting people from their neighbors was the states' job. Louisiana wasn't doing it.
Tired
1872–1876
By 1872, many Northern Republicans wanted to be done with the South. Liberal Republicans demanded amnesty and an end to federal troops. Congress passed the Amnesty Act that May.
Most white Southerners never accepted governments elected by Black votes. Taxes had risen to pay for the South's first public schools, and some officials were corrupt. So were officials in New York and Washington.
In September 1873, the banking house of Jay Cooke failed, and a depression began that lasted years.
Thomas Nast drew the Klan and the White League shaking hands.
In 1875, Congress passed one last civil rights law, banning segregation in inns, on trains and in theaters. It was rarely enforced.
In 1875, Mississippi Democrats followed a plan. Armed clubs broke up Republican rallies and stood guard at the polls.
Governor Adelbert Ames asked Washington for troops. The President wrote to his attorney general:
Ulysses S. Grant The whole public are tired out with these annual, autumnal outbreaks in the South.
Grant's letter still allowed troops. The reply Ames received stressed the complaint. None came.
November 1875 Mississippi
Adelbert Ames …a revolution has taken place—by force of arms—and a race are disfranchised—
Adelbert Ames they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery.
Blanche K. Bruce …we will not forget our instincts for freedom nor our love of country.
White Democrats called it Redemption. By 1876, three states were left.
The Deal
1876–1877
In 1876 the Mississippi Plan spread to South Carolina. Armed men in red shirts rode for Wade Hampton, the Democrat running for governor.
Democrat Samuel Tilden won about a quarter million more votes than Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. But Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina each sent Congress two sets of returns.
Tilden needed one of the twenty disputed votes. Hayes needed all twenty.
Congress named a commission of fifteen: five senators, five representatives, five justices. It split eight to seven, by party, every time. Hayes got all twenty.
Democrats threatened to stall the count past Inauguration Day. Hayes's allies met Southern Democrats in private, once at Wormley's Hotel. What they promised, historians still argue.
In April, President Hayes sent the soldiers guarding the last two Republican statehouses back to barracks. Within days, both governments fell. The army stayed in the South.
Redeemers cut taxes and school budgets, and leased out prisoners. About a third of New Orleans schools taught Black and white children together. In 1877 the board segregated every one.
Frederick Douglass Though they were not slaves, they were not yet quite free.
What Waited
1871–1965
Some things could not be taken back.
In 1871, Fisk, a five-year-old school for freedpeople, was nearly broke. Nine students went north to sing.
They sang the songs of slavery in concert halls. One was the song from Edisto.
Their tours paid for Jubilee Hall, dedicated New Year's Day, 1876. It still stands.
In 1860, two percent of Black children were in school. By 1880, a third were.
For half a century, most historians taught that Reconstruction was a crime against the white South.
In 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois answered them.
W. E. B. Du Bois The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.
The old story lasted. In 1950, a marker at Colfax called the massacre a riot that ended carpetbag misrule. It came down in 2021.
The amendments waited. Nobody had repealed a word. In 1954, the Supreme Court used the Fourteenth to strike down segregated schools.
In 1965, Congress used the Fifteenth to pass the Voting Rights Act.