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Reconstruction, in U.S. History, The Period (1865-77) That Followed The
Reconstruction, in U.S. History, The Period (1865-77) That Followed The
Introduction:
Reconstruction, in U.S. history, the period (1865–77) that followed the American Civil War the
American civil war fought in the united states between northern nad southern states from 1861-
1865 reconstruction is the name given to the period from 1865-1877 when the federal government
of the united statesreincorporated the south states in the union .during which attempts were made
Attempt to achieve national reunification and reconciliation after the Civil War and to improve the
status of formerslaves (freedmen). this period begin shortly before the end of first civil war April
1865. The Civil War is over. The North prevailed during the Civil War. The South prevailed afterthe
war,Parts of the South lay in ruins prostrate at the feet of conquering Union armies. A president has
been assassinated. Four million enslaved African Americans are now free. It is time to rebuild the
nation. to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social, and economic legacy and to solve
the problems arising from the readmission to the Union of the 11 states that had seceded at or
before the outbreak of war. Long portrayed by many historians as a time when vindictive Radical
Republicans fastened black supremacy upon the defeated Confederacy, Reconstruction has since the
late 20th century been viewed more sympathetically as a laudable experiment in
interracial democracy. Reconstruction witnessed far-reaching changes in America’s political life. At
the national level, new laws and constitutional amendments permanently altered the federal system
and the definition of American citizenship. In the South, a politically mobilized
black community joined with white allies to bring the Republican Party to power, and with it a
redefinition of the responsibilities of government.
Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate
Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed slaves into the United States. Under
the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures
passed restrictive “black codes” to control the labor and behavior of former slaves and other African
Americans. Outrage in the North over these codes eroded support for the approach known as
Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical wing of the Republican Party.
During Radical Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867,
newly enfranchised blacks gained a voice in government for the first time in American history,
winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade,
however, reactionary forces–including the Ku Klux Klan–would reverse the changes wrought by
Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South.
During the reconstruction the government of the victorious unioun northern directed the
confederated the southern states to rebuild their social institution with a view to those states with
reincorporation into the federal syatem the rights of formla slaves were significant in this process
CONTENTS
3. Radical Reconstruction
I.
South:
1. How to rebuild the South after its destruction during the Civil War?
Congress?
period saw the frustruation of federal government attempt to integrate the newely freely slaved into
the American and political system and economic system ,it ended in frustruation disillusionment and
even violence with individuals southern states denying rights to freed slaves preventing them from
voting and largely focusing on forcing them back in to the roles that exploited their labour and
preventing them from gaining from acess to education for much of the 20 th century the pre
dominant view of the reconstruction period wsa that of the dunning school ,which argued that
former slaves were unprepared for the responsibilities of voting and holdin goffices ,and that it was
there incapability of handling such responsibilities and not the racist action of whites that was
largely responsiblr for the failure of the reconstruction period .
eric foners great work reverse those judgemnets former adopts a proble his verdivct that slaves and
freed men wer often key figures who shaped the eventual emergence of a more progressive
americasn democracy is backed up by persusasive reasoning which explain how this result came
about and shows how the wjhite establishment led by president Andrew johnson was primarily
responisblie for the disaster of the reconstruction era.reconstuction generally reflects Americas
racial politicsa revolution to incorporate African americaninto full equality occurred beween 1863-
1877recons is bout black peoples race relation are the significant factors within this complex story of
reconstruction other broadline themes are in addition to freed menremaking of southern society
interaction of freed men carpet beggar republican unionist white planters merchants and yeoman in
in the new south as agrarian commercialisation also the interconnection of racial and
classsreconstruction in context of national context shows how civil war and reconstruction affected
the development of powerful nation stateand in turn how amore activistfederal govt affected the
evolution of reconstruction How did the US cope with the aftermath of the bloodiest conflict ever
fought on the continent? The reality is that it was enormously difficult to satisfy both these
goals.
This course examines the aftermath of slavery and the Civil War. It focuses on three main themes:
the abolition of slavery, the political and economic reconstruction of the South, and the ways these
have been remembered by later generations.
In this essay s will seek to understand the fierce debates surrounding Reconstruction. Some of
these occurred during Reconstruction (over its policies), but many of the fiercest occurred after it
(over its legacy and meaning). The course starts with a reflection on the historiography of
Reconstruction
• 1865: 13
th Amendment
Lincoln’s proposal
nationwide by the 15
th Amendment.
Reconstruction usually is associated with the period after the civil war actually it began in 1861 when
Abraham lincon in his inaugural address announced his intenetion to preserve the union and by
implication to restore the seceded the states to the union ,the reconstruction of these states or as
he preferred restoration wa his duty under the constitution by virtue of his levation to the
presidency, for linco it was the indivual bnot the states who were the rebels and barriers for the
unification of the country so he belived that it was the supreme constitutional responsibility of the
president as a commander in chief of American military forceds to supress the rebellion and restore
legimate loyal government in the southern atates. Lincon aim he insisted was to return to the
southern states to their proper practical relation too the union even lincn emancipation policy which
emrged in 1862 63 an eventually became an essential part of his reconstruction plan was designed
to win the war and achived the over arching purpose of restoring the union clearly Lincoln opposed
slavery for moral and human reasons but these concerns were secondary and not primarily in his
justification for the emancipation proclomatioon he justified his action against slavery on the
constitutional ground of military necessity to suppress the southern rebellion.
Most historians usually haveignored or given short shift to political efforts during the war to restore
the southern states to the union general accounts of the civil wwar mention lincolns 1863
proclomaiton as reconstruction outlining his ten % for southern restoration, but they conclude that
this effort was premature and of noo lasting significance eric former viewd Lincoln ten percent
percent plan viewed as reconstruction as adevice to shortn the war and solidify white support
emsancipaction. For Lincoln wartime reconsruction was designed to initiate the restoration of civil
self government in the south according to him the pace of reconstruction would vary with military
and political circumstances in each state he did not believe that a riguid rue should or could be
applied for south as a whole a poin that Lincoln made in his proclamation adreeses on
reconstruction .
Restoratiobn usually meant restoration of relation between seccesionist states and the federal
government not a reconstruction of society and government as the term suggest today
reconstruction according to this definition included the reorganization of state and local government
by sothern white unionist largely along prewar lines and the acceptance of southern senators and
representwatives by congress though nortehners disagree on what guarantees of future loyalty
should be required of the south most expected few changes in the fundamental laws or the states or
the political rights or rsnaks and file confederates ,as the war progressed an important exception
regarding construction particularly among Lincoln nad republicNS WAS THE ABOOTION OF SLAVERY
IN THE sothern states Lincoln nonethlesssintended the word reconstruction to mean political
resotoration ,not the revamping of southern governmental structures northern radicals on the other
hand belonged to a specific faction in the republican party that particularly as the war progressed sa
the need for s more thorough reconstruction program that incoln advocated ,they supported policies
tthat most contemporaries and later historians have considered radicals for the period ,many
congressional radicals preferred that confiscated property should be sold by the government to pay
for the war others thought that it shouldbe distributed to the blacks and white unionist,by the end
of the war radicals favouredA RECONSTRUCTION POLICY THAT ASLO INCLUDED BLACK POLIITCAL
AND CIVIL EQUlity as aprotection for freedom and loyalty in the south lincolns rejection of a
stringent southern policy dictated from washingotn cause dradicals ot seek congressional control of
reconstruction
All republicans united behind a non compromise policy on the suppression of rebellions and
ultimately on emancipations though conservatives wavered on black freedom unlike congressinla
radicals few soyhtrn radicals like Andrew johnson of tenesses though viewed as extremist at home
did not normally identify with the radical faction in congress despite their passionate hatred of
rebels and their desire to see the confederate leader ship punished and rank and filerebel
disfranchised unlike congressional radicasl few souhetern rsdicsala sever supposed black rights or
the reconstruction theory that the seceding stated had reverted to a territorial status under
congressional control because they belong to no specific national faction erbn northern and border
state conservatives including many non affliated former whigs like lincon fundamentally favoured a
reconstruction policy that would restore republican union government in the south as son as
possible and with minimum federal ntervention along eith staunch southern unionists northern
conservatist generally but not always demanded punishment fofr high ranking confederate laedaers
they expected political and radical and even sovcialc changes to occur in the wakee of
emancipactions and confederate defeat but insisted that south ern unionist acting in stated
converntions and legislative bodies should determine the changes not federal authorities most
conservatists including Lincoln opposed the national consfication of rebel property on constitutional
grounds conservatist also objected to any expansion of federal power except when necessary to
supress the rebellion in the south
Some conservatist whom we can acall the ultra conservatisrts consistently opposed emancipation
determined to sunjugate the south and supress individual liberties in the union states ,though in
most case loyal to the union ultra consefvatists lodged mainly in democratic pary ultra conservatives
labelled all republicsnsas radicals bent upon destruoing the union and undermining theconstituions ,
the president purpose as it had been from the beginning of the war was not to impose a new
political system on south rather Lincoln sought to replace in power those disloyal southerners who
had usurped constitutional authority with royal southerners who would restore legitimate
government in tehir states in addition to pledge of loyalty in his 1853 plan lincon insisted only that
southerners ablish slavery and provide for the education of young blacks such a change though
radical on the surface could hardly be revolutionary as lomng as the white supremacy was not
threatehened by a reconstrucyion atttleemnt neither in his emancipaction policy nor in his
reconstruction plan did Lincoln seek to challenge south er white control
Later in the war the president signed a the freenamen bureau act creating a federal agency to aid
displaced black and white southerners after 1863 lincoln also repeatedly reminded uinionist of the
great need as a warmeasure to abolish slavery in their states only then could the root cause of civil
war be eradicate republican or loyal government could be secured and just a lasting peace be
achieved
eventually released.
A. Slavery abolished
legislation.
C. Agriculture
3. Agricultural output did not return to 1860 level until 1870; much
poor whites
read Bible
towns and forcing them to sign labor contracts to work for their
former masters.
significant.
Republicans.
-- Johnson had tried to kill it repeatedly as he was a whitesupremacist along with most white
Southerners
5. THE POLITICS
6. OF RECONSTRUCTION
10. Reconstruction
17. OF FREEDOM
31. RECONSTRUCTING
35. of 1872
Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate
Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed slaves into the United States. Under
the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures
passed restrictive “black codes” to control the labor and behavior of former slaves and other African
Americans. Outrage in the North over these codes eroded support for the aReconstruction (1865-
1877), . Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern
state legislatures passed restrictive “black codes” to control the labor and behavior of former slaves
and other African Americans. Outrage in the North over these codes eroded support for the
approach known as Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical wing of
the Republican Party
. During Radical Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867,
newly enfranchised blacks gained a voice in government for the first time in American history,
winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade,
however, reactionary forces–including the Ku Klux Klan–would reverse the changes wrought by
Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South.
no period of the American experience has, in the last twenty-five years, seen a broadly accepted
point of view so completely overturned as Reconstruction—the dramatic, controversial era that
followed the Civil War. Since the early 1960s, a profound alteration of the place of blacks within
American society,
Emancipation and Reconstruction
At the outset of the Civil War , to the dismay of the more radical
abolitionists in the North, President Abraham Lincoln did not make
abolition of slavery a goal of the Union war effort. To do so, he feared,
would drive the border slave states still loyal to the Union into the
Confederacy and anger more conservative northerners. By the
summer of 1862, however, the slaves themselves had pushed the
issue, heading by the thousands to the Union lines as Lincoln’s troops
marched through the South. Their actions debunked one of the
strongest myths underlying Southern devotion to the “peculiar
institution”–that many slaves were truly content in bondage–and
convinced Lincoln that emancipation had become a political and
military necessity. In response to Lincoln’s Emancipation
Proclamation , which freed more than 3 million slaves in the
Confederate states by January 1, 1863, blacks enlisted in the Union
Army in large numbers, reaching some 180,000 by war’s end.
Did you know? During Reconstruction, the Republican Party in the South represented a
coalition of blacks (who made up the overwhelming majority of Republican voters in the
region) along with "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags," as white Republicans from the North
and South, respectively, were known.
Emancipation changed the stakes of the Civil War, ensuring that a
Union victory would mean large-scale social revolution in the South. It
was still very unclear, however, what form this revolution would take.
Over the next several years, Lincoln considered ideas about how to
welcome the devastated South back into the Union, but as the war
drew to a close in early 1865, he still had no clear plan. In a speech
delivered on April 11, while referring to plans for Reconstruction
in Louisiana , Lincoln proposed that some blacks–including free blacks
and those who had enlisted in the military–deserved the right to vote.
He was assassinated three days later, however, and it would fall to his
successor to put plans for Reconstruction in place. So began a period
in which Democrats, like Republicans, proclaimed their realism and
moderation and promised to ease racial tensions II.
Presidential Reconstruction
Radical Reconstruction
After northern voters rejected Johnson’s policies in the congressional
elections in late 1866, Radical Republicans in Congress took firm hold
of Reconstruction in the South. The following March, again over
Johnson’s veto, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867,
which temporarily divided the South into five military districts and
outlined how governments based on universal (male) suffrage were to
be organized. The law also required southern states to ratify the 14th
Amendment , which broadened the definition of citizenship, granting
“equal protection” of the Constitution to former slaves, before they
could rejoin the Union. In February 1869, Congress approved the 15th
Amendment (adopted in 1870), which guaranteed that a citizen’s right
to vote would not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous
condition of servitude.”
By 1870, all of the former Confederate states had been admitted to the
Union, and the state constitutions during the years of Radical
Reconstruction were the most progressive in the region’s history. The
participation of African Americans in southern public life after 1867
would be by far the most radical development of Reconstruction, which
was essentially a large-scale experiment in interracial democracy
unlike that of any other society following the abolition of slavery.
Southern blacks won election to southern state governments and even
to the U.S. Congress during this period. Among the other
achievements of Reconstruction were the South’s first state-funded
public school systems, more equitable taxation legislation, laws
against racial discrimination in public transport and accommodations
and ambitious economic development programs (including aid to
railroads and other enterprises). VI.
The scholarly study of Reconstruction began early in this century with the work of William A.
Dunning, John W. Burgess, and their students. The interpretation elaborated by the
Dunning school
may be briefly summarized as follows: When the Civil War ended, the white South accepted the
reality of military defeat, stood ready to do justice to the emancipated slaves, and desired above all
a quick reintegration into the fabric of national life. Before his death, Abraham Lincoln had
embarked on a course of sectional reconciliation, and during Presidential Reconstruction (1865-67)
his successor, Andrew Johnson, attempted to carry out Lincoln’s magnanimous policies. Johnson’s
efforts were opposed and eventually thwarted by the Radical Republicans in Congress. Motivated by
an irrational hatred of Southern “rebels” and the desire to consolidate their party’s national
ascendancy, the Radicals in 1867 swept aside the Southern governments Johnson had established
and fastened black suffrage on the defeated South.
Historians view
During the 1920s and 1930s, new studies of Johnson’s career and new investigations of the
economic wellsprings of Republican policy reinforced the prevailing disdain for Reconstruction.
Johnson’s biographers portrayed him as a courageous defender of constitutional liberty whose
actions stood above reproach. From the first appearance of the Dunning School, dissenting voices
had been raised, initially by a handful of survivors of the Reconstruction era and the small fraternity
of black historians. In 1935, the black activist and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois published Black
Reconstruction in America, a monumental study that portrayed Reconstruction as an idealistic effort
to construct a democratic, interracial political order from the ashes of slavery, as well as a phase in a
prolonged struggle between capital and labor for control of the Souths economic resources. His book
closed with an indictment of a profession whose writings had ignored the testimony of the principal
actor in the drama of Reconstruction —the emancipated slave—and sacrificed scholarly objectivity
on the altar of racial bias. “One fact and one alone,” Du Bois wrote, “explains the attitude of most
recent writers toward Reconstruction; they cannot conceive of Negroes as men.” In many ways,
Black Reconstruction anticipated the findings of modern scholarship
If the traditional interpretation reflected, and helped to legitimize, the racial order of a society in
which blacks were disenfranchised and subjected to discrimination in every aspect of their lives,
Reconstruction revisionism bore the mark of the modern civil rights movement.
By the end of the 1960s, Reconstruction was seen as a time of extraordinary social and political
progress for blacks. If the era was “tragic,” it was because change did not go far enough, especially in
the area of Southern land reform. Even when revisionism was at its height, however, its more
optimistic findings were challenged, as influential historians portrayed change in the post-Civil War
years as fundamentally “superficial.” Persistent racism, these postrevisionist scholars argued, had
negated efforts to extend justice to blacks, and the failure to distribute land prevented the freedmen
from achieving true autonomy and made their civil and political rights all but meaningless.
Studies of federal policy in the South portrayed the army and the Freedmen’s Bureau as working
hand in glove with former slaveholders to thwart the freedmen’s aspirations and force them to
return to plantation labor. At the same time, investigations of Southern social history emphasized
the survival of the old planter class and the continuities between the Old South and the New. The
postrevisionist interpretation represented a striking departure from nearly all previous accounts of
the period, for whatever their differences, traditional and revisionist historians at least agreed that
Reconstruction was a time of radical change
. Summing up a decade of writing, C. Vann Woodward observed in 1979 that historians now
understood “how essentially nonrevolutionary and conservative Reconstruction really was.” In
emphasizing that Reconstruction was part of the ongoing evolution of Southern society rather than a
passing phenomenon, the postrevisionists made a salutary contribution to the study of the period.
The description of Reconstruction as “conservative,” however, did not seem altogether persuasive
when one reflected that it took the nation fully a century to implement its most basic demands,
while others are yet to be fulfilled. Nor did the theme of continuity yield a fully convincing portrait of
an era that contemporaries all agreed was both turbulent and wrenching in its social and political
change.
Over a half-century ago, Charles and Mary Beard coined the term “the Second American Revolution”
to describe a transfer in power, wrought by the Civil War, from the South’s “planting aristocracy” to
“Northern capitalists and free farmers.” And in the latest shift in interpretive premises, attention to
changes in the relative power of social classes has again become a central concern of historical
writing. Unlike the Beards, however, who all but ignored the black experience, modern scholars tend
to view emancipation itself as among the most revolutionary aspects of the period.
blacks were active agents in the making of Reconstruction whose quest for individual and
community autonomy did much to establish the era’s political and economic agenda. Although
thwarted in their bid for land, blacks seized the opportunity created by the end of slavery to
establish as much independence as possible in their working lives, consolidate their families and
communities, and stake a claim to equal citizenship. Black participation in Southern public life after
1867 was the most radical development of the Reconstruction years. The transformation of slaves
into free laborers and equal citizens was the most dramatic example of the social and political
changes unleashed by the Civil War and emancipation.
A second purpose of this study is to trace the ways Southern society as a whole was remodeled, and
to do so without neglecting the local variations in different parts of the South. By the end of
Reconstruction, a new Southern class structure and several new systems of organizing labor were
well on their way to being consolidated. The ongoing process of social and economic change,
moreover, was intimately related to the politics of Reconstruction, for various groups of blacks and
whites sought to use state and local government to promote their own interests and define their
place in the region’s new social order. The evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations,
and the complex interconnection of race and class in the postwar South, form a third theme of this
book. Racism was pervasive in mid-nineteenth-century America and at both the regional and
national levels constituted a powerful barrier to change. Yet despite racism, a significant number of
Southern whites were willing to link their political fortunes with those of blacks, and Northern
Republicans came, for a time, to associate the fate of the former slaves with their party’s raison
d’être and the meaning of Union victory in the Civil War. Moreover, in the critical, interrelated issues
of land and labor and the persistent conflict between planters’ desire to reexert control over their
labor force and blacks quest for economic independence, race and class were inextricably linked. As
a Washington newspaper noted in 1868, “It is impossible to separate the question of color from the
question of labor, for the reason that the majority of the laborers … throughout the Southern States
are colored people, and nearly all the colored people are at present laborers.” The chapters that
follow also seek to place the Southern story within a national context. The book’s fourth theme is
the emergence during the Civil War and Reconstruction of a national state possessing vastly
expanded authority and a new set of purposes, including an unprecedented commitment to the
ideal of a national citizenship whose equal rights belonged to all Americans regardless of race.
Originating in wartime exigencies, the activist state came to embody the reforming impulse deeply
rooted in postwar politics. And Reconstruction produced enduring changes in the laws and
Constitution that fundamentally altered federal-state relations and redefined the meaning of
American citizenship. Yet because it threatened traditions of local autonomy, produced political
corruption, and was so closely associated with the new rights of blacks, the rise of the state inspired
powerful opposition, which, in turn, weakened support for Reconstruction. Finally, this study
examines how changes in the North’s economy and class structure affected Reconstruction. That the
Reconstruction of the North receives less attention than its Southern counterpart reflects, in part,
the absence of a detailed historical literature on the region’s social and political structure in these
years. Nonetheless, Reconstruction cannot be fully understood without attention to its distinctively
Northern and national dimensions. This account of Reconstruction begins not in 1865, but with the
Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. I do this to emphasize the Proclamation’s importance in uniting
two major themes of this study—grass-roots black activity and the newly empowered national state
—and to indicate that Reconstruction was not only a specific time period, but also the beginning of
an extended historical process: the adjustment of American society to the end of slavery. The
destruction of the central institution of antebellum Southern life permanently transformed the war’s
character and produced far-reaching conflicts and debates over the role former slaves and their
descendants would play in American life and the meaning of the freedom they had acquired. These
were the questions on which Reconstruction persistently turned.
n a bright Saturday morning in May 1867, 4,000 former slaves eagerly streamed into the town of
Greensboro, the bustling seat of Hale County in west-central Alabama. They came to hear speeches
from two delegates to a recent freedmen’s convention in Mobile and to find out about the political
status of black people under the Reconstruction Act just passed by Congress. Tensions mounted in
the days following this unprecedented gathering, as military authorities began supervising voter
registration for elections to the upcoming constitutional convention that would rewrite the laws of
Alabama. On June 13, John Orrick, a local white, confronted Alex Webb, a politically active freedman,
on the streets of Greensboro. Webb had recently been appointed a voter registrar for the district.
Orrick swore he would never be registered by a black man, and shot Webb dead. Hundreds of armed
and angry freedmen formed a posse to search for Orrick, but failed to find him. Galvanized by
Webb’s murder, 500 local freedmen formed a chapter of the Union League, the Republican Party’s
organizational arm in the South. The chapter functioned as both a militia company and a forum to
agitate for political rights. Violent political encounters between black people and white people were
common in southern communities in the wake of the Civil War. Communities throughout the South
struggled over the meaning of freedom in ways that reflected their particular circumstances. The 4
million freed people constituted roughly one-third of the total southern population, but the black–
white ratio in individual communities varied enormously. In some places, the Union army had been a
strong presence during the war, hastening the collapse of the slave system and encouraging
experiments in free labor. Other areas had remained relatively untouched by the fighting. In some
areas, small farms prevailed; in others, including Hale County, large plantations dominated economic
and political life. West-central Alabama had emerged as a fertile center of cotton production just
two decades before the Civil War. There, African Americans, as throughout the South’s black belt,
constituted more than three-quarters of the population. With the arrival of federal troops in the
spring of 1865, African Americans in Hale County, like their counterparts elsewhere, began to
challenge the traditional organization of plantation labor. One owner, Henry Watson, found that his
entire workforce had deserted him at the end of 1865. “I am in the midst of a large and fertile cotton
growing country,” Watson wrote to a partner. “Many plantations are entirely without labor, many
plantations have insufficient labor, and upon none are the laborers doing their former accustomed
work.” Black women refused to work in the fields, preferring to stay home with their children and
tend garden plots. Nor would male field hands do any work, such as caring for hogs, that did not
directly increase their share of the cotton crop. Above all, freed people wanted more autonomy.
Overseers and owners thus grudgingly allowed them to work the land “in families,” letting them
choose their own supervisors and find their own provisions. The result was a shift from the gang
labor characteristic of the antebellum period, in which large groups of slaves worked under the
harsh and constant supervision of white overseers, to the sharecropping system, in which African
American families worked small plots of land in exchange for a small share of the crop. This shift
represented less of a victory for newly freed African Americans than a defeat for plantation owners,
who resented even the limited economic independence it forced them to concede to their black
workforce. Only a small fraction—perhaps 15 percent—of African American families were fortunate
enough to be able to buy land. 71193_17_ch17_p0566-0603.QXD 4/12/10 3:30 PM Page 568 The
majority settled for some version of sharecropping, while others managed to rent land from owners,
becoming tenant farmers. Still, planters throughout Hale County had to change the old routines of
plantation labor. Local African Americans also organized politically. In 1866, Congress had passed the
Civil Rights Act and sent the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to the states for ratification;
both promised full citizenship rights to former slaves. Hale County freedmen joined the Republican
Party and local Union League chapters. They used their new political power to press for better labor
contracts, demand greater autonomy for the black workforce, and agitate for the more radical goal
of land confiscation and redistribution. “The colored people are very anxious to get land of their own
to live upon independently; and they want money to buy stock to make crops,” reported one black
Union League organizer. “The only way to get these necessaries is to give our votes to the
[Republican] party.” Two Hale County former slaves, Brister Reese and James K. Green, won election
to the Alabama state legislature in 1869. It was not long before these economic and political gains
prompted a white counterattack. In the spring of 1868, the Ku Klux Klan—a secret organization
devoted to terrorizing and intimidating African Americans and their white Republican allies—came
to Hale County. Disguised in white sheets, armed with guns and whips, and making nighttime raids
on horseback, Klansmen flogged, beat, and murdered freed people. They intimidated voters and
silenced political activists. Planters used Klan terror to dissuade former slaves from leaving
plantations or organizing for higher wages. With the passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871, the
federal government cracked down on the Klan, breaking its power temporarily in parts of the former
Confederacy. But no serious effort was made to stop Klan terror in the west Alabama black belt, and
planters there succeeded in reestablishing much of their social and political control. The events in
Hale County illustrate the struggles that beset communities throughout the South during the
Reconstruction era after the Civil War. The destruction of slavery and the Confederacy forced African
Americans and white people to renegotiate their old economic and political roles. These community
battles both shaped and were shaped by the victorious and newly expansive federal government in
Washington. In the end, Reconstruction was only partially successful. Not until the “Second
Reconstruction” of the twentieth-century civil rights movement would the descendants of Hale
County’s African Americans begin to enjoy the full fruits of freedom—and even then not without
challenge. RECONSTRUCTION, 1863–1877 CHAPTER 17 569 Competing political plans for
reconstructing the defeated Confederacy Difficult transition from slavery to freedom for African
Americans The political and social legacy of Reconstruction in the southern states Post-Civil War
transformations in the economic and political life of the North