We had a constitutional revolution but didn't rebuild the South? (April 2023) | Freedom Online Library (2023)

Revolution(s) "a violent overthrow of a government or social order in favor of a new system."

How many constitutional revolutions has America experienced? I'm sure everyone agrees with the first one. Was there another constitutional revolution after the Civil War with Reconstruction? Did Reconstruction really achieve its intended goals, or "old habits die hard"? We asked these questions to a group of scientists to get their opinions. Read on as the conversation unfolds in this month's Liberty Matters.

The discussion

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Twists and Twists of Reconstruction

Vernon Burton, Reconstruction Revolution

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Twists and Twists of Reconstruction

Assessing the impact of Reconstruction and its constitutional changes is complex. The three decades following the Civil War were a turbulent period for the American South, with several major turning points. To recognize the successes and failures of this period, an overview of the sequence of events is needed. The story is not as simple as it sometimes seems.

the ratification ofThirteenth Amendmentin December 1865, all slaves in the nation were fully emancipated. It took place during a period called the Presidential Reconstruction, initiated byAbraham Lincolnbefore the end of the war, but now under the lenient policies of President Andrew Johnson. The then-reconvened Congress found functioning governments in ten of the eleven former Confederate states. All but two of the ten contributed to the eventual ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, although the Republican-controlled Congress refused to nominate representatives from any of these states. Their governments were filled with former Confederate officials, and presidential pardons allowed former plantation owners to reclaim nearly all of their land that had been confiscated or abandoned during the war. Nowhere were former slaves allowed to vote, and the new Black Codes enforced strict racial subservience which—although it varied from state to state—denied African Americans in general the right to bear arms, assemble after sunset, and practice certain trades, often imprisoning them or doing forced labor. if they were idle or unemployed.

What followed was a battle between Congress and President Johnson. Congress passed two civil rights bills over his veto and proposed a Fourteenth Amendment that would enshrine those rights in the United States.Constitution. But it was not until 1867, nearly two years after hostilities ended, that Congress instituted a new Reconstruction policy that would actually enforce these rights. All state governments recognized by Johnson were dissolved except Tennessee, which was rewarded by ratification.Fourteenth Amendment. The remainder of the former Confederacy was divided into five military districts. The vote was taken from the former Confederates and given to South African Americans. New governments were formed under military supervision, and only after the new governments ratified the proposed Fourteenth Amendment did Congress promise to restore them to their former status within the Union.

Under Congressional (or Radical) Reconstruction, a growing Southern Republican party united underprivileged former slaves with Southern whites who were either poor or former Unionists and idealistic Northerners who moved south to help modernize the region and to help the freed. This Republican coalition initially dominated most of the rebuilt state governments. African Americans held many elected offices throughout the former Confederacy. Not only were they two U.S. Senators, they were also a majority in one house of the South Carolina Legislature. But nowhere did blacks hold office in proportion to their numbers, although in three states they made up a majority of voters. New state constitutions eliminated archaic and undemocratic features, and several states revised their penal codes to make them less barbaric. These governments also initiated spending on internal improvements, public education, and other social services such as orphanages, insane asylums, and asylums for the poor. When Ulysses Grant was elected president in 1868, seven southern states had already completed the terms of Congressional Reconstruction and were readmitted to the Union. Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment officially made it part of the Constitution.

Radical Republicans in Congress now had enough momentum to pursue a goal they could not add to the Fourteenth Amendment: making permanent, statewide suffrage for African Americans. The proposedFifteenth AmendmentThe wording of prohibited any denial or restriction of the right to vote "by the United States or any other state on the basis of race, color, or prior conditions of servitude." The Republican majority in Congress then offered a deal to the three remaining southern states. This would allow former Confederate officials from those jurisdictions to vote and hold office if the states ratify the proposed amendment. Virginia, Mississippi and Texas accepted the terms. While theFifteenth AmendmentIn March 1870 it became official, these last states regained their representation in Congress.

But opposition from white southerners to what they denounced as Black Reconstruction turned violent. OKu Klux Klanwas already active in the 1868 presidential election. The resulting atrocities—including torture, murder, rape, arson, and beatings—not only against African Americans, but at times against white pro-Republican Southerners, denounced as “Scalawags,” and resettled Northerners as well. , nicknamed “Carpetbaggers”. too known and extensive to tell. The Grant administration enacted three consecutive acts of violence, each giving Union military commanders more power to quell the violence. These measures achieved temporary success against the Klan, which formally disbanded in 1869, but other paramilitary and vigilante groups soon took their place.

Northerners eventually grew weary of the expense and frustration of what some self-proclaimed liberal republicans now openly acknowledge as "bayonet rule". The Amnesty Act of 1872 restored political rights to all but a few former Confederates. In the same year theCabinet of the Freedmen, which had been created by the War Department shortly before the end of the war to become the first major federal relief organization to help former slaves, was dissolved. The national government had effectively turned its back on white Southerners engaged in a process euphemistically called Redemption. Persistent physical intimidation—coupled with economic pressures—kept blacks from the polls, drove whites from Republican ranks, and drove former northerners back north. The Redeemers overthrew the republican government in state after state, imposing a regime of government cuts, austerity and partial debt rejection.

At the end of Grant's term, only South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana remained in Republican hands. Redemption also contributed to the national resurgence of the Democratic Party, which strengthened the alliance between the South and the urban immigrants of the North. This led to the controversial presidential election of 1876. Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes was also hit by an economic downturn and his party's notorious political scandals during the Grant era. Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden thus won a majority of the popular vote. But electoral votes in the three unredeemed Southern states were contested, along with an electoral vote from Oregon — and the Democrats only needed one of them to put Tilden in the White House. The country faced an all-out election crisis, with Democrats darkly hinting at armed resistance to what they said would become a Republican military coup. But complicated behind-the-scenes maneuvers that lasted until two days before the inauguration brought all contested voters to the Republicans. In return, Hays agreed to withdraw the last of the Federal troops from the South and support generous government subsidies to the Southern railroads, in what became known as the Compromise of 1877.[1].

That wasn't the end of the story, however. Although the Redeemers manipulated the vote through intimidation, election taxes – and later the Australian or secret ballot – African Americans in the South still successfully voted in large numbers. In most southern states, the only way todiscriminationprivate facilities are required by law and applied to passenger trains. Social segregation was widespread, of course, and public schools were racially segregated, but that was true even during Congressional Reconstruction, except for a brief period in New Orleans. It wasn't until 1900, more than a decade after the controversial election, that most of the infamous Jim Crow laws, which mandated segregation in train stations, streetcars, workplaces, hotels and other public facilities, became widespread. The first southern state to deprive most African Americans was Mississippi in 1890 with a literacy test. Louisiana didn't do so until 1898, and then North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia and Georgia followed, most recently Texas in 1908. Now that the public schools first created during Congressional Reconstruction are being conquered by government forces white, spending has been steadily decreasing for black students compared to white students[2].

Why this new wave of racist measures? One factor was that proponents of the country's latest statist reform movement, progressivism, with its frequentembrace eugenia, generally supported these changes. A notable outpouring of progressive support for Jim Crow was whenWoodrow Wilson, shortly after his election to the presidency in 1912, segregated the federal workforce and introduced federal employment discrimination. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was another source of rising racism. At thePlessy v. fergusonIn the 1896 case, the Supreme Court, with only one dissent, upheld a Louisiana law that required segregation as long as the institutions were "separate but equal". Southern Democrats were also alarmed by the growing alliance between Southern populists and Republicans, which threatened to produce a coalition of blacks and poor whites similar to that seen during early congressional reconstruction. The new voting restrictions also disenfranchised many poor whites, thus creating the solidly democratic South that would rule for the next half century.[3].

But despite these political setbacks, Southern blacks still made great economic gains. One should not underestimate the immense benefits of emancipation itself. The combined value of all slaves in 1860 is estimated at $2.7 to $3.7 billion, making it one of the largest capital investments in the United States at the time. Emancipation returned all this human capital from slave owners to freed slaves. Despite facing serious legal and social deficiencies, former slaves occupied more free time. Women and children left the fields and the elderly no longer needed to work, while men gained more control over their labor force. The economic wealth of former slaves was tied to a region that remained the poorest in the country, but their real income was increasing. By 1879, the average farm income of South African Americans had increased by at least 45%, or even more if you put a dollar value on extra leisure time. Despite Reconstruction's failure to redistribute large plantations to former slaves, African Americans purchased 10% of the South's farmland at a time when many white planters were losing their titles due to high state taxes imposed by Reconstruction regimes. Of course, blacks in the South remained relatively poor, with per capita income lower than that of the white population in the region. But African Americans not only accumulated real estate and other forms of wealth, their real incomes were growing at a rate of 2.7% a year - faster than whites' incomes - and there was more than doubled by the time of Jim Crow.[4].

final notes

[1]This overview of Reconstruction is now pretty standard in most general accounts for the period. Kenneth M. Stampp is still reliableThe Age of Reconstruction: 1865-1877(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965) was one of the first works to refute the old interpretation of the "Dunning School", which irritated the state governments that came to power during Congressional Reconstruction and asserted that a triumvirate of illiterates, rascals and rascals reveled in an orgy of extravagance and corruption. A later and more comprehensive survey that also covers contemporary events in the North is that of Eric FonerRebuilding: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877(New York: Harper & Row, 1988), an updated edition of which was published in 2014. Many other fine works are available, some detailing certain aspects of the reconstruction, but none significantly changed the interpretation of this period.

[2]The classic work that first drew attention to the late origins of Jim Crow legislation, the first edition of which was published in 1955, is that of C. Vann WoodwardThe Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). Two articles dealing with restrictions on voting rights are by Morgan KousserShaping Southern Politics: Suffrage Restrictions and the Establishment of a One-Party South(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974) e Michael PerlmansChampionship struggle: disenfranchisement in the south, 1888–1908(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

[3]For the role of progressives, see David W. SouthernThe Malicious Legacy: Yankee Progressives and the Negro Question, 1901–1914(Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1968); Süd.The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900–1917(Nova York: Harlan Davidson, 2005); e William L. Anderson e David Kiriazis „Rents and Race: Legacies of Progressive Policies“,Independent Verification, 18 (2013): 115–133.

[4]"The Value of Freedom" by Kenneth Ng and Nancy VirtsEconomic History Magazine, 49 (Dec 1989): 938-965; Roger L. Ransom and Richard SutchA Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), S. 3–7; Richard Vedder, Lowell Gallaway and David C. Klingmans „Black Exploitation and White Benefits: The Civil War Income Revolution“ inThe Wealth of Races: The Present Value of the Benefits of Past Injustices, Hrsg. von Richard F. America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990): 125-137; Robert HiggsCompetition and Coercion: Blacks in American Business, 1865–1914(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); "Accumulation of Property by Southern Negroes Before World War I" by HiggsAmerican Economic Review, 72 (September 1982), pp. 725–35; and Robert A. Margos „Accumulation of Property by Southern Blacks Before World War I: Further Comments and Evidence“ibid., 74 (September 1984), 777–781.

Author Biographies

Jeffrey Rogers Hummelis a retired Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics at San Jose State University and has taught history and economics. He is the author ofslave emancipation,Enslavement of Free Men: A History of the American Civil War(2013). His articles and reviews have appeared inEconomic History Magazine,Econ Journal Watch, to dieTexas Law Revision, to dieIndependent Verification, to dieinternational philosophical quarterly, to dieRevision of the Chapman Act, and popular publications like this oneWall Street Journal,Forbes.com,Investor's Business Diary, Ethe free man. No Liberty FundBusiness and Freedom Library, he published several articles, including “U.S. Slavery and Economic Thought” and “Benefits of the American Revolution: An Examination of Positive Externalities”. He has also contributed to volumes such asBanks boom and bust(David Beckworth, ed.),American government and economy(Price Fishback, Hrsg.), morrerEncyclopedia of American Business History and Biography,Reassessment of the Presidency(John V. Denson, ed.) eWeapons, politics and economics(Robert Higgs, Sr.).

Orville Vernon Burtonis a Matthew J. Perry Distinguished Chair of History judge and professor of Global Black Studies, Sociology and Anthropology, and Computer Science at Clemson University. Burton taught for 34 years at the University of Illinois, where he is University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar Emeritus and Professor of History, African American Studies and Sociology. His research and teaching interests are American history with a particular focus on race relations and community. He was president of the Southern Historical Association and the Agricultural History Society. Burton is a prolific, award-winning author and scholar (over twenty books and nearly three hundred articles).the age of lincoln(2007) won theChicago TribuneHeartland Literary Award for Nonfiction and was shortlisted for Book of the Month Club, History Book Club, and Military Book Club. One critic proclaimed, "If the American Civil War era was the 'Iliad,' then historian Orville Vernon Burton is our last Homer."Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court(2021) was rated "authoritative and easy to read" by reviewer Randall Kennedy of Harvard University Law SchoolDie Nation. In 2022, he was appointed to the South Carolina Commission on African American Heritage, was inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College and received the John Hope Franklin Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southern Historical Association.

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