Reconstruction: With Malice Toward None and Charity for All

Reconstruction: With Malice Toward None and Charity for All

1.  Economy.  The distribution of landownership in the South changed considerably in the postwar years.  Among whites, there was a striking decline in landownership, from 80 percent before the war to 67 percent by the end of Reconstruction.  Some whites lost their land because of unpaid debt or increased taxes; some left the marginal lands they had owned to move to more fertile areas, where they rented.  Among blacks, during the same period, the proportion who owned land rose from virtually none to more than 20 percent. 

Alan Brinkley, The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People, Volume One: To 1877 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), 410.

In some respects, the postwar years were a period of remarkable economic progress for African Americans in the South.  The per capita income of blacks (when the material benefits of slavery are counted as income) rose 46 percent between 1857 and 1879, while the per capita income of whites declined 35 percent.  African Americans were also able to work less than they had under slavery. Women and children were less likely to labor in the fields, and adult men tended to work shorter days.  In all, the black labor force worked about one-third fewer hours during Reconstruction than it had been compelled to work under slavery--a reduction that brought the working schedule of blacks roughly into accord with that of white farm laborers.

Alan Brinkley, 411.

The southern share of national manufacturing doubled in the last twenty years of the century, but it was still only 10 percent of the total.  The region's per capita income increased 21 percent in the same period, but average income in the South was still only 40 percent of that in the North; in 1860 it had been more than 60 percent.  And even in those industries where development had been most rapid-textiles, iron, railroads-much of the capital had come from, and many of the profits thus flowed to, the North. 

Alan Brinkley, 421.

2.  Sharecropping.  The 1870s and 1880s saw an acceleration of the process that had begun in the immediate postwar years: the imposition of systems of tenantry and debt peonage on much of the region; the reliance on a few cash crops rather than on a diversified agricultural system; and increasing absentee ownership of valuable farmlands.  During Reconstruction, perhaps a third or more of the farmers in the South were tenants; by 1900 the figure had increased to 70 percent.

Alan Brinkley, 421-2.

“The average wage of Negro farm laborers in the South was about 50¢ a day, Thomas Fortune, a young black editor of the New York Globe, said.  He was usually paid in orders, not money, which he could only uses store controlled by the planter, ‘a system of fraud.’”

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (New York: Harper Perennial, 1980), 204.

Some African Americans, usually through hard work and incredible sacrifice, were able to obtain land.  The percentage of blacks who owned property increased from less than 1 to 20 percent.  African Americans seemed to fare better than poor whites, for whom the percentage of land ownership dropped from 80 to 67 percent.

James Kirby Martin, University of Houston, Randy Roberts, Purdue University, Steven Mintz, University of Houston, Linda O. McMurry, North Carolina State University, James H. Jones, University of Houston and Sam W. Haynes, University of Texas at Arlington, America and Its People: A Mosaic in the Making (New York: HarperCollins College Publishers, 1995), 405.

In 1865, planters offered freed workers provisions and housing plus money wages of only $5 or $6 per month or share wages of one-tenth of the crop.  By 1867, the freedmen had pushed this up to an average of $10 per month for a full hand (an adult male) or as much as one-third of the crop.

James McPherson, Ordeal by Fire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 577.

To blacks, sharecropping offered an escape from gang labor and day-to-day white supervision. For planters, the system provided a way to reduce the cost and difficulty of labor supervision, share risk with tenants, and circumvent the chronic shortage of cash and credit.  Most important of all, it established the work force, for sharecroppers utilized the labor of all members of the family and had a vested interest in remaining until the crop had been gathered.

Eric Foner, Professor of American History at Columbia University, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Resolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 174.

Interest rates for goods purchased on credit rose to exorbitant levels (often exceeding 50 percent), reflecting both the South's capital shortage and the fact that many rural merchants faced no local competition.  In many cases, too, they inflicted outright fraud upon illiterate tenants.  "A man that didn't know how to count would always lose," an Arkansas freedman later remarked, and in some rural areas, blacks banded together to find men able to check merchants' calculations "to keep thorn from taking all our labor away from us."

Eric Foner, 408.

Most local stores had no competition.  As a result, they were able to set interest rates as high as 50 or 60 percent.  Farmers had to give the merchants a lien (or claim) on their crops as collateral for the loans (thus the term "crop-lien system," generally used to describe Southern farming in this period).  Farmers who suffered a few bad years in a row, as many did, could become trapped in a cycle of debt from which they could never escape.

Alan Brinkley, 411.

3.  Freedman’s Bureau.  Reformers established a large network of schools for former slaves--4,000 schools by 1870, staffed by 9,000 teachers (half of them black), teaching 200,000 students.  In the 1870s, Reconstruction governments began to build a comprehensive public school system in the South.  By 1876, more than half of all white children and about 40 percent of all black children were attending schools in the South (although almost all such schools were racially segregated).  Several black "academies," offering more advanced education, also began operating.  Gradually, these academies grew into an important network of black colleges and universities.

Alan Brinkley, 410.

The Freedman’s Bureau established 3,695 hospitals, issued more than 21 million rations, and provided free transportation to more than 30,000 people dislocated by war.

Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross, The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 12.

By the end of the war, the Freedmen's aid movement had sent hundreds of thousands of dollars, and more than 1,000 teachers, most of them women, had taught over 200,000 Southern black pupils.  The experience left a complex legacy for postwar women's reform. It produced a generation of leaders-like Annie Wittenmyer of Iowa, subsequently the first president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and Josephine Shaw Lowell, later prominent in various New York charities-who believed women should direct their energy toward social welfare activities.

Eric Foner, Professor of American History at Columbia University, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Resolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 25.

4.  Education.  Since it was no longer illegal to learn to read and write, African Americans pursued education with much zeal.  A growing number also sought higher education.  Between 1860 and 1880 over 1,000 African Americans earned college degrees.  Some went north to college, but most attended one of the 13 Southern colleges established by the American Missionary Association or by black and white churches with the assistance of the Freedmen's Bureau.  Such schools as Howard University and Fisk University were a permanent legacy of Reconstruction.

James Kirby Martin, 405.

The efforts of these institutions and of the public schools slowly and painfully reduced the black illiteracy rate from more than 80 percent in 1870 to 45 percent by 1900.

James McPherson, 575.

Texas and Florida, the only states to make any arrangements for black education during Presidential Reconstruction, financed these schools by a separate black poll lax, supplemented by tuition charges.  Louisiana, on the other hand, whose school superintendent Robert M. I. usher believed education should "vindicate the honor and supremacy of the Caucasian race," dismantled the thriving black school system General Banks had established.

62  Eric Foner, 207.

62. Howard N. Rabinowitz, "From Exclusion to Segregation: Southern Race Relations, 1865-1890," JAH, 63 (September 1976), 326-7.

5.  Taxes.  Taxation provided yet another example of the inequitable turn taken by public policy.  Before the war, landed property in most Southern states had gone virtually untaxed, while poll taxes and levies on slaves, luxuries, commercial activities, and professions provided the bulk of revenue.  As a result, white yeomen paid few taxes, planters paid more, although hardly an amount commensurate with their wealth and income (partly because they generally assessed the value of their own holdings), and urban and commercial interests complained of an excessive tax burden.  War and emancipation inevitably increased the demands upon state revenues while the region's poverty made even low tax rates seem a hardship under these circumstances, the tax system became a battleground where the competing claims of various classes of Southerners were fought out.

59. Eric Foner, 205-6.

59. Foner, Nothing But Freedom, 67-8; J. Mills Thornton III, "Fiscal Policy and the Failure of Radical Reconstruction in the Lower South," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Van Woodward (New York: 1982), 351-60.

Levies on landed property remained extremely low (one tenth of 1 percent in Mississippi, for example), shielding planters and yeomen from the burden of rising government expenditures.  As a result, "the man with his two thousand acres paid less tax than any one of the scores of hands he may have had in his employ who owned not a dollar's worth of property."  He also paid less than town craftsmen, whose earnings were taxed at rates far higher than real estate.  In Mississippi's Warren County, the three largest landowners each paid less than $200 in taxes, while the owner of a liven stable paid nearly $700, a butcher over $200, and a shoemaker $75.  In addition, localities added poll taxes of their own, sometimes, in black belt counties, raising the bulk of their revenue in this manner.  Mobile levied a special tax of $5 on every adult male "and if the tax is not paid," reported the city's black newspaper, "the chain-gang is the punishment."  With state, county, and local levies, blacks might find themselves paying $15 in poll taxes alone.

60. Eric Foner, 206.

60. Murdo J. MacLeod, "The Sociological Theory of Taxation and the Peasant," Peasant Studies Newsletter, July 4, 1975), 2-6.

Even though taxes on blacks as well as whites helped fill their coffers, states and municipalities barred blacks from poor relief, orphanages, parks, schools, and other public facilities, insisting that the Freedmen's Bureau should provide whatever services blacks required.  Georgia in 1866 appropriated $200,000 to aid children and widows of Confederate (but not Union) soldiers and other "aged or infirm white persons."

Eric Foner, 207.

The rising- tax burden fueled opposition to Reconstruction among both planters and yeomen.  But blacks embraced the activist, reforming state as a counterbalance to the forces of wealth and tradition arrayed against them.  "They look to legislation," commented an Alabama newspaper, "because in the very nature of things, they can look nowhere else."

Eric Foner, 365.

6.  Corruption.  The necessary tax increases for schools were unpopular, as were soaring state debts.  Both were blamed on corruption, with some justification.  Louisiana Governor Henry C. Warmouth netted some $100,000 during a year in which his salary was only $8,000.  One black man was paid $9,000 to repair a bridge with an original cost of only $500.  Contracts for rebuilding and expanding railroads, subsidies to industries, and bureaucracies for administering social services offered abundant opportunities for graft and bribery.  James Kirby Martin, 404.

The Radical governments were, in many cases, incompetent, extravagant, and corrupt.  The corruption was pervasive.  In Florida the cost of public printing in 1869 exceeded the total cost for all of the state government in 1860; in South Carolina the state maintained a restaurant and barroom for the legislators at a cost of $125,000 for a single session.  In Arkansas clerical costs of the auditor’s office alone increased from $4,000 to $92,000 in a single year.  In Louisiana the youthful Governor Warmouth managed to garner a fortune of half a million dollars during four years of office, while bartering away state property and dissipating school funds.  Samuel Eliot Morison, Professor of History at Harvard, The Oxford History of the American People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 43.

The Louisiana state convention of 1864 spent $9,400 on liquor and cigars for its members, and $156,000 for printing the journal of the convention.  In 1873 the state treasurer of Virginia was indicted for looting the treasury, and as late as 1883 the treasurer of Tennessee absconded with $400,000 of state monies.  Samuel Eliot Morison, 43.

Radical reconstruction was expensive, and taxes and indebtedness mounted throughout the South.  In Alabama taxes increased fourfold, in Louisiana eightfold and in Mississippi fourteen fold.

Samuel Eliot Morison, 43.

The financial program of the Republican governments was a compound of blatant corruption and well-designed, if sometimes impractical, social legislation.  The corruption and extravagance are familiar aspects of the Reconstruction story.  State budgets expanded to hitherto unknown totals, and state debts soared to previously undreamed-of heights.  In South Carolina, for example, the public debt increased from $7 million to $29 million in eight years.

T. Harry Williams, 23.

Black Republicans were hardly immune to the lure of illicit gain.  Governor P.B.S. Pinchbeck used his position on the New Orleans Park Commission to orchestrate the purchase of land, at an inflated price, of which he was part¬ owner.  He also made a handsome profit speculating in state bonds. Inside information, he frankly admitted, allowed his operations to succeed: "I belonged to the General Assembly, and knew about what it would do, etc.  My investments were made accordingly."  Thomas W. Cardozo appears to have embezzled state funds while serving as Mississippi's superintendent of education.  And black lawmakers supported aid to corporations in which they held directorships or stock, and took money for other votes.  The bribing of black legislators helped Texas railroads overcome Governor Davis' opposition to state aid.  "Our leading men . . ." wrote one disgusted freedman, "sold themselves for gold."  Eric Foner, 388.

Overall, however, blacks' share of the take paled before that of governors like Warmoth and Scott, for few occupied political positions that allowed them access to plunder.  And in the bribery of lawmakers, the going rate for whites usually exceeded that for blacks.

79  Eric Foner, 388.

79.  James Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (New York, 1973), 85-86.

7.  North.  Other Republicans were embarrassed by the hypocrisy of forcing black suffrage on the South while only 7 percent of Northern African Americans could vote.

James Kirby Martin, 398.

Numbering fewer than quarter million in 1860, blacks comprised less than 2 percent of the North's population, yet they found themselves subjected to discrimination in every aspect of their lives.  Barred in most states from the suffrage, schools, and public accommodations, confined by and large to menial occupations, living in the poorest, unhealthiest quarters of cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati, reminded daily of the racial prejudice that seemed as pervasive in the free states as in the slave, many Northern blacks had by the 1850s all but despaired of ever finding a secure and equal place within American life.

Eric Foner, 25-6.

The political conflict between free and slave societies seemed to deepen racial anxieties within the North.  The rise of political antislavery in the 1840s and 1850s was accompanied by the emergence of white supremacy as a central tenet of the Northern Democratic party, and by decisions by Iowa, Illinois, Indi¬ana, and Oregon to close their borders entirely to blacks, reflecting the fear that, if slavery weakened, the North might face an influx of black migrants.

45  Eric Foner, 26.

45.  Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: the Negro In the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, Illinois, 1961).

Before the war, black men did not enjoy first-class citizenship in most Northern states.  Several states had "black laws" that barred Negroes from immigration into the state, prohibited testimony by blacks against whites in courts, and otherwise discriminated against people with dark skin.

James M. McPherson, “Reconstruction: A Revolution Manqué,” (1969), Allen F. Davis, Temple University, Harold D. Woodman, Purdue University, Conflict and Consensus in Early American History (Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath And Company, 1976), 416.

8.  Jim Crow Laws.  The slave codes prohibited assemblies of five or more blacks.  All Southern codes forbade slaves to carry guns or other weapons, or to own dogs.  In Mississippi and Florida, if any black or mulatto, bond or free, used abusive and provoking language to a white, the penalty was thirty nine lashes.

Wyn Craig Wade, 19.

Under Mississippi’s Reconstruction era black codes blacks were not allowed to conduct any kind of independent business.  Unemployed blacks could be declared vagrants, arrested, and hired out to any white who paid their fines.  Whites who associated with blacks on terms of equality could be arrested and fined.

Wyn Craig Wade, 22.

Black Codes in all states prohibited racial intermarriage, and some forbade freed persons from owning certain types of property, such as alcoholic beverages and firearms.  Most so tightly restricted black legal rights that they were practically nonexistent.  Black Codes imposed curfews on African Americans, segregated them, and outlawed their right to congregate in large groups.  Some laws required that African Americans obtain special licenses for any job except agricultural labor or domestic service.  Some required African Americans to call the landowner "master" and allowed withholding wages for minor infractions. Mississippi even prohibited black ownership or rental of land.

James Kirby Martin, 395.

Under Louisiana’s Reconstruction era black codes any black could be arrested as a vagrant on the complaint of any white man and, if unable to pay the fine, could be hired out for a year usually to the white who brought the complaint.

Wyn Craig Wade, 22.

In the Reconstruction era black codes of South Carolina, blacks were legally barred from pursuing any occupation other than farmer or house servant.

Wyn Craig Wade, 22.

The Black Codes "excluded blacks from juries and prohibited racial intermarriage.

James McPherson, 512.

Florida's code, drawn up by a commission whose report praised slavery as a "benign" institution deficient only in its inadequate regulation of black sexual behavior, made disobedience, impudence, and even "disrespect" to the employer a crime.  Blacks who broke labor contracts could be whipped, placed in the pillory, and sold for up to one year's labor, while whites who violated contracts faced only the threat of civil suits.

Eric Foner, 200.

9.  Separate But Equal.  The highest tribunal was just as pliant in ruling on the segregation laws.  In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a case involving a statute that required separate seating arrangements for the races on railroad cars, the Court held that separate accommodations did not deprive the Negro of equal rights if the accommodations were equal.  The Court extended the same principle to education in the case of Cumming v. County Board of Education (1899).

T. Harry Williams, 30.

The object of the amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.  Laws permitting, and even requiring their separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power.  The most common instance of this is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children, which have been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of states where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enforced.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), T. Harry Williams, 30.

Louisiana's law ordered blacks to ride in separate railroad cars was passed in 1890; separation was required irrespective of whether the passenger's destination was out of state or within Louisiana itself. 

Mark Whitman, Removing a Badge of Slavery (New York: Markus Wiener Publishing Inc, 1993), 7.

Albion Tourgee, a key figure in the Republican carpetbagger regime of North Carolina served six years as a state judge.  New Orleans lawyer, James C. Walker.  Tourgee and Walker now moved to attack the statute as a violation of the equal protection clause.  On June 7th, 1892, Homer Adolph Plessy, who was an octoroon (7/8th Caucasian and one-eighth African blood), boarded the East Louisiana Railroad bound for Convington, Louisiana, and seated himself in the white coach.

Mark Whitman, 7.

Majority Opinion of Justice Henry Brown, for the Supreme Court.  (A) conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment is concerned, the case reduces itself to the question whether the statute of Louisiana is a reasonable regulation, and with respect to this there must necessarily be a large discretion on the part of the legislature.  In determining the question of reasonableness it is at liberty to act with reference to the established usages, customs and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort, and the preservation of the public peace and good order.  Gauged by this standard, we cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveniences is unreasonable, or more obnoxious to the Fourteenth Amendment than the act of Congress requiring separate schools for colored children in the District of Columbia, the constitutionality of which does not seem to have been questioned, or the corresponding acts of state legislators.

1  Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 US 537 (1896), Mark Whitman, 14.

1  Roberts v. Boston 59 Mass. 198 (1849).

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.  If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 US 537 (1896), Mark Whitman, 14.

As Harlan predicted, the Plessy decision was quickly followed by state laws mandating racial segregation in every aspect of life, from schools to hospitals, waiting rooms to toilets, drinking fountains to cemeteries.  In some states, taxi drivers were forbidden by law to carry members of different races at the same time.  But more than simply a form of racial separation, segregation was part of a complex system of white domination, in which each component disenfranchisement, unequal economic status, inferior education reinforced the others.  The system's major premise, as Dunbar Rowland, a Mississippi historian, explained in 1903, was that no black person would "be accepted as an equal no matter how great his advancement."  The was ¬not so much to keep the races apart as to ensure that when they came into contact each other, whether in politics, labor relations, car life, whites held the upper hand. 

Eric Foner, (2005), 208.

10.  Equal Education.  “In 1910 the eleven states of the former Confederacy spent three times more per capita on white students than on their black counterparts . . . The results were predictable: black schools were run-down, overcrowded, and often without heat in the winter; busses were unavailable to transport black children to school . . .student-teacher rations were far higher than in white schools.” 

Donald G. Nieman, 116-7.

“By the mid-1930s, only nineteen percent of southern black children between the ages of fourteen and seventeen attended high school; the comparable figure for whites was fifty-five percent.” 

Donald G. Nieman, 117.

In 1935, black teachers “taught classes that were thirty percent larger and took home paychecks that were forty percent smaller than those of their white peers.” 

Donald G. Nieman, 117.

In 1929, for instance, the state of Alabama spent $36 a year per white student on schools, and $10 per black student.  In Arkansas, blacks constituted 23% of the school enrollment, yet received 12% of the funds.  In Florida, Georgia and Louisiana, the ratio was more than 4 to 1 in favor of white education.  That figure typified the South as a whole.  In 1930, per capita expenditures for black education were only 28% of the amount spent on whites. 

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 US 483 (1954), Mark Whitman, 14.

11.  Laws.  In April 1871, the Ku Klux Klan Act made it a federal crime to conspire to deprive any person of equal protection of the laws. 

Donald G. Nieman, 83.

The Enforcement Act in May 1870 “made it a federal crime for state officials to deny otherwise qualified voters the right to register to vote.  It also established criminal penalties for private citizens who used force, violence, intimidation, bribery, or economic coercion to deny any person the right to vote.” 

Donald G. Nieman, 83.

US Constitution Article XIII (adopted 1865).  Slavery Abolished.  Section 1. Abolition of Slavery.  Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Enforcement.  Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

US Constitution Article XIV (adopted 1863).  Citizenship Defined.  Section 1.  Definition of Citizenship.  All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.  No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2. Apportionment of Representatives.  Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.  But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a State, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Section 3.  Disability Resulting from Insurrection.  No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or Elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of an, State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State to support the Constitution of the United States shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.  But Congress may by vote of two thirds of each house, remove such disability.

Section 5.  Enforcement.  The Congress shall have power to enforce by appropriate legislation the provisions of this article.

US Constitution Article XV (adopted 1870).  Right of Suffrage.  Section 1.  The Suffrage.  The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous, condition of servitude.

Section 2.  Enforcement.  The Congress shall have power article by appropriate legislation.