Reconstruction and its Effects on African Americans, continued
by Derell Kennedo
Northerners, especially Radical Republicans, were outraged at how Southern society had descended so close to its pre-war period and they attempted to reverse this trend. According to Richardson, "Northern Republicans abhorred the Black Codes and other indications [...] that Southerners were clinging to the past" (28-29). Meanwhile, Johnson did nothing to reprimand the Southerners. Seeing that the president was not going to stop the trends in the South, Congress put forward the Civil Rights Act of 1866. According to Dickerson, "It said nothing about black suffrage, the rights of blacks to hold office, or about the broad area of social equality. The law declared that every person born in the United States (except Indians) was a U.S. citizen. Citizens would receive full and equal benefit of the laws [...]" (97). The law was a moderate one, which was accepted by both moderate and radical Republicans, and did not give any benefits to blacks that was not received by all other citizens. Nevertheless, Johnson vetoed the bill, which shocked everyone, and this action would change the entire course of Reconstruction.
Johnson's veto would push moderate Republicans to ally with Radical Republicans, and the elections of 1866 would cement this alliance against the Johnson administration. "Johnson might have made his peace with the moderates by signing the bill ... [but] he couched his veto in language particularly offensive to the lawmakers. His intransigent policies had alienated such large segments of his party that the Senate ... [was] now willing to go along with the radicals ..." (Trefousse, 28). Furthermore, because Johnson's Reconstruction Plan was considered unacceptable by many Republicans, they decided to put one forward in the form of a Constitutional Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment passed on June 13, 1866. The Fourteenth Amendment stated that anyone born within the United States is a citizen and under the jurisdiction of the state that they reside (Trefousse, 109-110). This amendment did not mention freedmen or blacks but it made them citizens and gave them the same rights as all other citizens with the protection of Congress. The amendment was considered moderate because it did not mention blacks or give them benefits over whites, nor did it severely punish former rebels. Furthermore, ratification would mean a swift reentry into the Union for Southern states (Simpson 102). Nevertheless, Johnson opposed the amendment, even though a president does not have the power to veto an amendment, and went on a speaking tour to urge state governments not to ratify it (Foner, Forever Free, 120). The amendment became the main issue of the 1866 Congressional elections, in which Republicans would gain large majorities in both houses (Simpson 109). The election results would completely change the direction of Reconstruction, which would now be controlled by Congress.
But before going into "Congressional Reconstruction," there were some achievements in the effort to help freedmen during the period of Reconstruction controlled by President Johnson, called "Presidential Reconstruction." For instance, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedman's Bureau, was first designed to help the transition of blacks from slavery to freedom. Before the Civil War ended, "slaves and former slaves abandoned plantations and moved toward Union lines. It fell on government to create a mechanism by which hundreds of thousands of refugees could be clothed, fed, and housed" (Dickerson 29). The government formed the federal agency known as the Freedman's Bureau in March 1865, which was only to last for one year, and was supposed to help both white and black refugees (Cimbala, Reconstructing the American South after the Civil War, 8). The Freedman's Bureau would be an important tool for attempting to integrate freedmen into American society.
Officials realized that the land ownership was the key to helping the freedmen care for themselves without government aid. First, as former slaves, the freedmen received little or no money for their labor, and as they left plantations to get Union protection, they had absolutely no way to sustain themselves or families. Claude F. Oubre mentions that before the Freedman's Bureau was created, the government began a policy of confiscating Confederate abandoned lands and leasing them, or selling them at about one dollar an acre, to freedmen (9-11). When the bureau was created in 1865, Congress authorized, in Section 4 of the Freedman's Bureau Act (March 3, 1865), that the commissioner of the bureau shall use land that was confiscated to lease to freedmen, in no more than forty acre plots, for three years when the tenant can then buy the land (Fleming 320). Control of the bureau was placed in the hands of Major General Oliver Otis Howard, whose aim was to make the freedmen self-sufficient and not dependant on others. According to Oubre, the bureau decided to "rent land to the freedmen and use the rents thus generated to pay for the rations, clothing, medical supplies, and shelter that were provided for the destitute. During the entire first year of the bureau's activities ... the freedmen ...paid for the care of many who were unable to work" (xiii). Nevertheless, Andrew Johnson's Amnesty Proclamation would mean the end of these experiments.
With Johnson's Amnesty Proclamation went the hopes that freedmen would be able to create self-sustaining communities on confiscated land. On May 29, 1865, President Johnson issued his amnesty proclamation, which pardoned most southerners and restored their property rights (Oubre 31). This act meant that all of the land that freedmen had been leasing and working on was to be returned to their owners, who were many times the freedmen's former masters. This was a devastating blow to the freedmen's sense of independence and freedom. They did not want to go back to work for these men who had kept them in bondage for so long and would probably attempt to subjugate them again. Many freedmen put together petitions, in many different parts of the South, which sounded similar. "First, they wanted land because without it they were not truly free. Second, they did not expect the land to be given to them but were ready to pay whatever the government asked. Third, they wanted the land which their toil had made productive" (Oubre 54). According to Martin Abbott, many of the freedmen refused to return the land. "In some instances freedmen armed themselves and threatened violence against whites whom they suspected of coming to take the lands from them" (60). While freedmen were determined to keep their independence there was nothing that they could do to remain independent. The land was eventually returned to its former owners and freedmen would have to work as tenants and sharecroppers. As the land reforms were failing, blacks looked with hope to the field of education as a way to better their lives.
There was great enthusiasm about the bureau's educational endeavors from both freedmen and teachers. "Observers everywhere reported that the young and old, from far and near, were flocking to attend newly created schools. Responding to the call of churches and benevolent societies, young women and men from all over the North … came to teach in the Negro schools that were being established in [the] South" (Abbott 82). The freedmen wanted to learn because they knew that education was at the core of freedom and advancement in society, while Northerners were on something of a moral crusade. According to Paul A. Cimbala, "For these Bureau men, education could help to erase the bad habits and the moral laxity they attributed to slavery and remake the freed people into disciplined, sober, and thrifty Yankees" (Cimbala, Reconstruction of the American South after the Civil War, 78). The educators and bureau officials wanted to integrate the freedmen and teach them the essentials of being a "good citizen."
Freedmen put in a lot of effort to maintain schools to educate not only themselves and their children, but also their community and some freedmen established school that were run, controlled, and funded by them. As early as 1862, semi-literate and literate freedmen and free-born blacks in Mississippi began setting up schools, in which they taught, for what would be, as Christopher M. Span states, "the catalyst for Mississippi's first tax-supported comprehensive public school system&" (197). Also, according to Howard Ashley White, in Louisiana, in 1866, as funds were drying up from the Freedman's Bureau, as Northerners ceased sending aid, "private schools for Negroes sprung up outside Bureau control. Enrollment in such schools grew from 150 in February to nearly 3,000 in December, and actually exceed the number registered in Bureau schools&" (177). This shows the drive and eagerness for freedmen to get some sort of education because when it could not be provided they were willing to use the meager resources that they had to educate themselves. Blacks during this period equated literacy with independence, self-determination, and citizenship (Span 198). Sadly, as philanthropic funds dried up, along with the federal government's refusal to fund Negro education, and crop failure or violence by whites which made blacks unable to keep up funding, the schooling continued to deteriorate and the Freedman's Bureau ceased to be a factor in education until it was finally abolished in 1868. Nevertheless, by this time there was a new force behind Reconstruction that was willing to take radical steps to help freedmen.