Failure of Reconstruction in two minutes
- Sherman's Field Orders No. 15 (January 1865) set aside coastal land for freedpeople, and about 40,000 settled on it. President Johnson's pardons returned most of that land to former owners.
- Sharecropping and crop liens let landowners and merchants claim the harvest, and cotton debt trapped families year after year. By 1900 most Black Southern farmers did not own the land they worked.
- The Ku Klux Klan, founded by Confederate veterans in Tennessee, terrorized Black voters. The Enforcement Acts (1870–71) made attacks on voters a federal crime, and Grant's troops broke the Klan by 1872.
- The Colfax Massacre of 1873 killed at least 60 Black men. The Supreme Court read the Fourteenth Amendment narrowly in the Slaughter-House Cases and Cruikshank (1876), leaving protection of rights to states.
- Northern support faded as Liberal Republicans wanted federal intervention to end, Congress passed the Amnesty Act (1872) and the Panic of 1873 shifted focus. In 1875 Mississippi Democrats used violence to win.
- A commission gave the disputed 1876 election to Hayes, 8 to 7. After the Compromise of 1877, he pulled troops from the last Southern statehouses, and Redeemers took over.
- On the exam: expect causation and continuity and change, since the amendments stayed while enforcement ended. Link the Court's rulings and Redemption to Jim Crow and the 1950s–60s civil rights movement.
Topic 5.11 key terms
- Presidential pardon
President Andrew Johnson's amnesty proclamation of May 29, 1865 forgave most ex-Confederates who swore an oath of loyalty and restored their property, except enslaved people. Wealthy planters had to apply to him personally.
- Comparing sources (AP skill 3.C)
Ask what two sources agree on, where they differ, and why. Who wrote each one, when, and for whom?
- Special Field Orders No. 15
Sherman's order of January 16, 1865. It set aside land from Charleston south to Florida's St. Johns River for freedpeople, up to 40 acres a family. It says nothing about mules.
- Freedmen's Bureau
Federal agency (1865–1872) that helped refugees and freedpeople. Its March 1865 act let it rent abandoned land to them, up to forty acres a family, with a chance to buy.
- Reconstruction Amendments
The 13th (1865) ended slavery. The 14th (1868) made anyone born here a citizen and promised equal protection of the laws. The 15th (1870) barred denying the vote because of race.
- Crop-lien system
Credit for supplies, secured by the lender's legal claim on the coming crop. Most Southern states passed lien laws in 1866 and 1867.
- Time price
The higher price a merchant charged for goods bought on credit, compared with the cash price for the same goods.
- Tenant farming
Farming land owned by someone else and paying for it in cash or a share of the crop. Sharecroppers were the poorest tenants.
- Ku Klux Klan
A secret society founded by Confederate veterans in Tennessee about 1865–66. Its members used threats, whipping and murder to stop Black Southerners and white Republicans from voting, holding office and organizing.
- Georgia's expulsions
Georgia's white majority claimed the state constitution let Black men vote but not hold office, and expelled nearly all of its Black legislators. Congress forced the state to reseat them in 1870.
- Enforcement Acts (Force Acts)
Three laws of 1870–71 that protected voting and civil rights with federal courts and troops. The third, in April 1871, is known as the Ku Klux Klan Act.
- Habeas corpus
A court order that makes officials show a judge why they are holding someone. The Ku Klux Klan Act let the President suspend it where terror had overwhelmed local courts.
- Colfax Massacre
The April 13, 1873 attack by a white force on Black men defending the Grant Parish courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana. Many of the dead were killed after they surrendered.
- Slaughter-House Cases (1873)
The Supreme Court's first ruling on the Fourteenth Amendment, decided 5–4. It said the 'privileges or immunities' clause protects only a short list of rights of national citizenship and leaves most rights to the states.
- United States v. Cruikshank (1876)
The Supreme Court threw out the Colfax convictions. It ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment limits what states may do, and that protecting citizens from one another was the states' job.
- State action
The rule that the Fourteenth Amendment restrains governments, not private people. After Cruikshank, federal prosecutors could not use it to charge individuals for attacking their neighbors' rights.
- Liberal Republicans
Northern reformers who broke from Grant in 1872. They wanted amnesty for former Confederates and an end to federal troops in the South.
- Crédit Mobilier and the Whiskey Ring
Scandals of the Grant years. Railroad stock was handed to congressmen; distillers and federal tax officials stole whiskey revenue.
- Panic of 1873
A financial crash set off when Jay Cooke & Co. failed. It brought a depression that lasted for years and pushed Northern voters to think about jobs before the South.
- White League
An armed Democratic organization formed in Louisiana in 1874. It drove Republican officials from office by force.
- Mississippi Plan
The 1875 Democratic campaign of open intimidation and violence that ended Republican rule in Mississippi. Democrats copied it in other states in 1876.
- Redeemers
Southern Democrats who took back state governments in the 1870s, promising lower taxes, less spending and white supremacy.
- Red Shirts
Armed white Democratic clubs in South Carolina in 1876. They broke up Republican meetings and threatened Black voters to help Wade Hampton win the governor's race.
- Election of 1876
Tilden won the popular vote and led the electoral count, 184 to 165, but stood one vote short of the 185 needed. Twenty votes from four states were disputed, and Congress had to decide.
- Electoral Commission (1877)
A fifteen-member panel Congress created to settle the disputed 1876 returns. It voted 8–7 along party lines on every disputed state, and every vote went to Hayes.
- Compromise of 1877
The understanding that let Hayes take office. Southern Democrats accepted his election, and Hayes's allies signaled that federal troops would leave the last two Republican statehouses, South Carolina and Louisiana. No signed agreement has ever been found, and historians still debate its terms.
- Convict leasing
Southern states rented out prisoners, most of them Black, to planters, mines and railroads. The state collected the fees, the employer controlled the labor, and many prisoners died at it.
- Black colleges
Colleges founded during Reconstruction to educate Black students and to train Black ministers and teachers. Howard, Atlanta University, Fisk and Morehouse all began in these years, many with help from the Freedmen's Bureau and Northern missionary societies.
- Dunning School
Early-1900s historians, led by William A. Dunning of Columbia University, who taught that Reconstruction was a corrupt failure forced on the white South by Northern radicals and Black voters. Du Bois and later historians such as Eric Foner overturned this account.
- Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
Supreme Court decision, May 17, 1954, that struck down segregated public schools under the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection of the laws, overturning the 'separate but equal' rule of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
- Second Reconstruction
Historians' name for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which finally achieved the promise of the first Reconstruction. Eric Foner argued that it took this second Reconstruction to enforce the Reconstruction amendments.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Edisto
October 1865
Key terms: Presidential pardon
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
Key terms: Comparing sources (AP skill 3.C), Special Field Orders No. 15, Freedmen's Bureau, Reconstruction Amendments
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
Key terms: Sharecropping, Crop-lien system, Time price, Tenant farming
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
Key terms: Ku Klux Klan, Georgia's expulsions, Enforcement Acts (Force Acts), Habeas corpus
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
Key terms: Colfax Massacre, Slaughter-House Cases (1873), United States v. Cruikshank (1876), State action
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
Key terms: Liberal Republicans, Crédit Mobilier and the Whiskey Ring, Panic of 1873, White League, Mississippi Plan, Redeemers
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
Key terms: Red Shirts, Election of 1876, Electoral Commission (1877), Compromise of 1877, Convict leasing
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
Key terms: Black colleges, Dunning School, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Second Reconstruction
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.