Reconstruction and its Effects on African Americans
by Derell Kennedo
Was Reconstruction a complete failure? This question has plagued historians of the Civil War for over a century now, and it is experiencing a new revival today. Most historians today recognize that Reconstruction did fail because it did not achieve its initial goal of rebuilding the Union and giving freed slaves some basic protections, while at the same time helping them transition from slave to freedmen. However, certain events changed the course of Reconstruction, and its goal became more radical: the complete integration of freedmen into American society. For this reason, Reconstruction was a very important period in the history of blacks in America. It was the period where blacks were first completely freed from slavery and tasted the fruits of citizenship for a while. During Reconstruction, blacks were granted civil rights, the right to sue and sit on juries, the right to vote and hold office, the right to own property, and all of the other benefits that all other citizens in America had. There was even a black Governor of Louisiana. So, what went wrong? Many things happened during this period, which greatly affected the future for African Americans, all of which are worth examining. How did Reconstruction affect the lives of freedmen?
President Lincoln was a moderate Republican and, as such, favored a lenient policy towards the abolition of slavery because his main purpose was to maintain, or rebuild, the Union. First, Lincoln detested slavery because it went against the nature of the U.S. Constitution, which preached life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. However, Lincoln was a very cautious politician who believed in taking small steps when it came to slavery, even though he knew it would be abolished eventually. In America's Unfinished Revolution, Eric Foner mentions that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was designed to free the slaves in enemy slave states only, so that he would not alienate allied slave states and lose support for the war (37). Even though Lincoln's main concern was the preservation of the Union he continued to argue and agitate with allied slave states to change their constitutions and recognize the abolition of slavery, gradually if necessary (Simpson 38-39). Lincoln felt the Union was fragile, since he had to appease allied states and moderate Southerners, and his conciliatory and compromising manner is evident in his reconstruction policy.
Announced in December 1863, Lincoln's reconstruction policy was designed to achieve a speedy recovery of the Union. According to Brooks D. Simpson, except for Confederate leaders, Southerners would qualify for pardon and reclamation of their property on the condition that they swear allegiance to the Union and recognize emancipation. Furthermore, a state would be able to form a government and rejoin the Union once the amount of individuals who qualified for amnesty reached 10 percent of the votes cast in the 1860 election (39-40). Lincoln's plan virtually ignored freedmen and would have handed the South, along with vulnerable blacks, over to whites, most of them could not conceive of anything besides white supremacy and the subordination of blacks. However, Lincoln's reconstruction policy was not wholly supported by Congress. Radical Republicans had a different plan for reconstruction and put forward the Wade-Davis Bill, which made it more difficult for a state to be readmitted to the Union (Foner, Reconstruction 61). Lincoln vetoed the bill and neither of the plants went into effect.
Lincoln was assassinated in April 1864, and his successor, Andrew Johnson, was even more lenient than Lincoln was toward the South. Andrew Johnson, originally a Democrat, was a Southerner who himself owned slaves but was loyal to the Union. According to Donna L. Dickerson, Johnson's policy was similar to Lincoln's in that, once a pledge of allegiance to the Union was obtained, it pardoned individuals, except Confederate leaders, and restored their property. His plan differed from Lincoln's in that, if they applied for pardon directly to Johnson, it allowed former Confederate leaders to be pardoned and regain their property (15). Whereas Lincoln's proposal completely excluded rebel leaders, Johnson's proposal gave all southerners the chance to be officially forgiven and reinstated. It turned out that Johnson was willing to allow the former rebels reestablish Southern society without much punishment.
The South was free to deal with freedman and Southern society as they wished under Johnson, and many of the former Confederate leaders came back to power and tried to bring Southern society as close to its pre-war state as legally possible (Foner, Reconstruction 38). First, as John Hope Franklin mentions, as former rebel states began to quickly form governments, many former Confederate leaders, some unpardoned, were elected and dominated state governments (44). However, this was not limited to state governments, as &"the Vice-President of the Confederacy, four Confederate generals, five Confederate colonels, six Confederate cabinet officers, and fifty-eight Confederate congressmen were elected to the Thirty-ninth Congress, which met in December, 1865" (Franklin 43).
With their former power basically restored, the major difference in Southern society was that Negroes were free to do as they pleased. However, large plantation owners who needed laborers dominated Southern society. And since former slaves were now free, the former owners sought to control the movement and freedom of slaves as much as possible (Dickerson 43). Southerners sought to accomplish this with the enactment of &"Black Codes." According to Heather Cox Richardson, the Black Codes were designed to limit the free movement of freedmen and, at the same time, ensure Southern planters a stable and cheap labor force (19). While all black codes varied in degree of severity, they were all-harsh and were meant to maintain white supremacy.
The Mississippi Black Codes are one of the more extreme examples of the restriction of freedmen. The Mississippi Black Codes, an Act to regulate the Master and Apprentice, Section 1 states that a Negro under the age of eighteen, whose parents are in trouble with the law or unable to provide for them, must be apprenticed to work for a competent person; Section 3 states that this guardian can punish and inflict moderate pain on an apprentice as if he or she is the parent of the apprentice; Section 4 states that if an apprentice should run away, the guardian can pursue the apprentice and bring him or her back to work, or take the apprentice to court (Trefousse, 103-105). These laws could be interpreted many ways and could end with the taking of young children from their families because of something as simple as that child's father being arrested for offending a white person. Furthermore, the apprenticeship was binding and the child had no say in the matter. In an Act to amend the Vagrant Laws of the State, Section 2 states that freedmen not employed by January of 1866 shall be fined up to fifty dollars and up to ten days in prison; Sections 6 and 7 state that freedom between the ages of eighteen and sixty are to pay a poll tax of one dollar annually, and anyone that fails to do so can be arrested and hired out to someone who can pay the tax (Trefousse, 105-106). These laws meant that freedmen had to earn wages somehow, and if they did not they would be reduced to forced labor and servitude. The Black Codes succeeded in restoring blacks to a position of subordination in a white controlled society, but this would not last long.