And Second Reconstructions Essay, Research Paper
The Goals and Failures of the First and Second Reconstructions
Some people say we’ve got a lot of malice some say its a lot of nerve. But, I
say we won’t quit moving until we get what we deserve. We have been bucked and
we have been conned. We have been treated bad, talked about as just bones. But
just as it takes two eyes to eyes make a pair. Brother we won’t quit until we
get our share. Say it loud- I’m Black and I’m Proud.
James Brown
The First and Second Reconstructions held out the great promise of rectifying
racial injustices in America. The First Reconstruction, emerging out of the
chaos of the Civil War had as its goals equality for Blacks in voting, politics,
and use of public facilities. The Second Reconstruction emerging out of the
booming economy of the 1950’s, had as its goals, integration, the end of Jim
Crow and the more amorphous goal of making America a biracial democracy where,
“the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave holders will be able to
sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” Even though both movements, were
borne of high hopes they failed in bringing about their goals. Born in hope,
they died in despair, as both movements saw many of their gains washed away. I
propose to examine why they failed in realizing their goals. My thesis is that
failure to incorporate economic justice for Blacks in both movements led to the
failure of the First and Second Reconstruction.
The First Reconstruction came after the Civil War and lasted till 1877. The
political, social, and economic conditions after the Civil War defined the goals
of the First Reconstruction. At this time the Congress was divided politically
on issues that grew out of the Civil War: Black equality, rebuilding the South,
readmitting Southern states to Union, and deciding who would control
government.1 Socially, the South was in chaos. Newly emancipated slaves wandered
the South after having left their former masters, and the White population was
spiritually devastated, uneasy about what lay ahead. Economically, the South was
also devastated: plantations lay ruined, railroads torn up, the system of slave
labor in shambles, and cities burnt down. The economic condition of ex-slaves
after the Civil War was just as uncertain; many had left former masters and
roamed the highways.2
Amid the post Civil War chaos, various political groups were scrambling to
further their agendas. First, Southern Democrats, a party comprised of leaders
of the confederacy and other wealthy Southern whites, sought to end what they
perceived as Northern domination of the South. They also sought to institute
Black Codes, by limiting the rights of Blacks to move, vote, travel, and change
jobs,3 which like slavery, would provide an adequate and cheap labor supply for
plantations. Second, Moderate Republicans wanted to pursue a policy of
reconciliation between North and South, but at the same time ensure slavery was
abolished.4 Third, Radical Republicans, comprised of Northern politicians, were
strongly opposed to slavery, unsympathetic to the South, wanted to protect newly
free slaves, and keep there majority in Congress.5 The fourth political element,
at the end of the Civil War was President Andrew Johnson whose major goal was
unifying the nation. The fifth element were various fringe groups such as,
abolitionists and Quakers. Strongly motivated by principle and a belief in
equality, they believed that Blacks needed equality in American society,
although they differed on what the nature of that should be.6
The Northern Radical Republicans, with a majority in Congress, emerged as the
political group that set the goals for Reconstruction which was to prevent
slavery from rising again in the South. At first, the Radical Republicans
thought this could be accomplished by outlawing slavery with the passage of the
Thirteenth Amendment. But Southern Democrats in their quest to restore their
rule in the South brought back slavery in all but name, by passing Black Codes
as early as 1865. Both Moderate Republicans and Radical Republicans in Congress
reacted. Joining together in 1866, they passed a bill to extend the life and
responsibilities of the Freedmen’s Bureau to protect newly freed slaves against
the various Black Codes. President Johnson vetoed the bill, but Radical and
Moderate Republicans eventually were able to pass it.7
The Black Codes and President Johnson’s veto of all Reconstruction legislation
that was unfavorable to the South caused Moderate and Radical Republicans to
change their goals from just ending slavery to seeking political equality and
voting rights for Blacks.8 The new goals, were based on humanitarian and
political considerations. Northerners had grown increasingly sympathetic to the
plight of the Blacks in the South following numerous well publicized incidents
in which innocent Blacks were harassed, beaten, and killed.9 The extension of
suffrage to Black males was a political move by the Republicans in Congress who
believed that Blacks would form the backbone of the Republican Party in the
South, preventing Southern Democrats from winning elections in Southern states,
and uphold the Republican majority in Congress after the Southern States
rejoined the Union. As one Congressman from the North bluntly put it, “It
prevents the States from going into the hands of the rebels, and giving them the
President and the Congress for the next forty years.”10
Until the 1890’s, this policy of achieving equality through granting political
rights to Blacks worked moderately well. During Reconstruction, newly freed
slaves voted in large numbers in the South. Of the 1,330,000 people registered
to vote under Reconstruction Acts 703,000 were Black and only 627,000 were
White.11 Even after 1877, when federal troops were withdrawn12, Jim Crow laws
did not fully emerge in the South and Blacks continued to vote in high numbers
and hold various state and federal offices. Between 1877 and 1900, a total of
ten Blacks were elected to serve in the US Congress.13 This occurred because
Southern Democrats forged a unlikely coalition with Black voters against White
laborers14. Under this paternalistic order Southern Democrats agreed to protect
Blacks political rights in the South in return for Black votes15.
But voting and election figures hide the true nature of Black political power
during and after Reconstruction. Few Blacks held elective offices in relation to
their percentage of the South’s population.16 And those in office usually did
not wield the power, which during Reconstruction continued to reside with
Moderate and Radical Republicans in Congress, whites who ran Southern state
governments, and federal troops. Emancipated slaves had little to do with either
fashioning Reconstruction policy or its implementation. Blacks political rights
were dependent upon alliances made with groups with conflicting interests White
Northern Republicans and White elites in the South.17 Though they pursued
political equality for Blacks, their goals were shaped more by self-interest
than for concern for Black equality.
By 1905 Blacks lost their right to vote. In Louisiana alone the number of Black
voters fell from 130,334 in 1896 to 1,342 in 1904.18 The number of elected Black
public officials dropped to zero. The disenfranchisement of Blacks was
accomplished through good character tests, poll taxes, White primaries, literacy
tests, grandfather clauses, and intimidation. By 1905, whatever success
politically and socially the Reconstruction had enjoyed had been wiped out.19
Following on the heels of disenfranchisement came implementation of
comprehensive Jim Crow laws segregating steamboats, toilets, ticket windows and
myriad of other previously non-segregated public places. 20
Two historians, C. Van Woodward and William Julius Wilson, both pin point
specific events such as, recessions, class conflicts, imperialist expansion to
explain the rise of Jim Crow. Wilson’s21 and Woodward’s22 analysis is lacking
because the United States has undergone many recessions and many times minority
groups such as Jews, Irish, and Eastern Europeans and have been blamed for
taking away the jobs of the lower-class; and yet these groups have not had their
votes stripped away from them and did not have an elaborate set of laws
constructed to keep them segregated in society as Blacks have. The only
community of people in the Untied States who have been victims of systematic,
long-term, violent, White Supremacy have been Native Americans. And Native
Americans, like Afro-Americans, have been predominately powerless economically
and politically. This points to the conclusion that the systemic demise of the
First Reconstruction stems from the failure of Reconstruction leaders to include
economic justice for Blacks as a goal; thus dooming the Reconstruction movement
from the outset. The failure of pursuing a policy of economic redistribution
forced Blacks into fragile political alliances that quickly disintegrated (as
can be seen in 1877 and 1896); Blacks were forced to rely on the Radical
Republicans and Federal troops to give them their rights and later their former
slave masters, the Southern Democrats, to safeguard their rights.23 The
disintegration of these agreements were caused directly by the events that
Woodward and Wilson point to, but these political agreements were inherently
fragile and would have inevitably unraveled because of their very nature. These
political alliances had conflicting interests. The poor sharecropper and the
White elites of the South were inherently unequal. The former slaves were looked
on not as equals, but as inferior.24 Whatever well meaning reforms were
instituted were done so paternalistically and for Southern Democrats own
interests. And when an alliance with Blacks no longer served the interests of
the whites they were easily abandoned. When the Blacks agreement with the
Southern Democrats unraveled Blacks were left economically naked except for the
loin cloth of political rights. But this loin cloth was easily stripped from
them, because lacking economic power, they were unable to make other political
allies, their economic position allowed them to be easily intimidated by White
land owners, they had no way to lobby the government, no way to leave the South,
few employment opportunities, and for many Blacks no education.25 The leaders of
the Reconstruction failed to understand that without economic justice Blacks
would be forced into a dependency on the White power structure to protect their
rights and when these rights no longer served the interests of this power
structure they were easily stripped away. Reconstruction Acts and Constitutional
Amendments offered little protection to stop this stripping away of Black
political rights.
The Reconstruction leaders failed to understand the relationship between
political rights and economic power, if they had they might not have rejected
measures that could have provided former slaves with the economic power to
safeguard their political rights. Two possibilities presented themselves at the
outset of the First Reconstruction. A Quaker and Radical Republican Congressman
from Pennsylvania, Thaddeus Stevens, proposed that the North seize the land
holdings of the South’s richest land owners as a war indemnity and redistribute
the land giving each newly freed Negro adult male a mule and forty acres.26
Thaddeus Stevens a bitter foe of the South,27 explained that a free society had
to be based on land redistribution:
Southern Society has more the features of aristocracy then a democracy….. It
is impossible that any practical equality of rights can exist where a few
thousand men monopolize the who landed property. How can Republican institutions,
free schools, free churches, free social intercourse exist in a mingled
community of nabobs and serfs, of owners of twenty-thousand-acre manors, with
lordly palaces, and the occupants of narrow huts inhabited by low White trash?
Stevens plan in the Republican Press though drew unfavorable responses. The plan
was called brash and unfair. Only one newspaper endorsed it and that was the
French paper La Temps which said, “There cannot be real emancipation for men who
do no possess at least a small portion of soil.”28 When the bill was introduced
in Congress it was resoundingly defeated by a majority of Republicans. Stevens
was alone in understanding the tremendous institutional changes that would have
to take place to guarantee the emancipation of a people. If the former slave did
not have his own land he would be turned into a serf in his own nation a
stranger to the freedoms guaranteed to him and a slave all but in name.
The other alternative the leaders of Reconstruction had was expanding the
Freedmen’s Bureau from a temporary to a permanent institution that educated all
former slaves and ensured that former slaves had a viable economic base that did
not exploit them. Instead, the Freedmen’s Bureau lasted merely five years, and
only five million dollars were appropriated to it. Its mission to educate and
protect the Freedmen was meet in only a small way in this short amount of time
and when the Freedmen’s Bureau shutdown it left the education of former slaves
to local governments which allocated limited if any funds.29 Although proposed
by a few Republicans the Freedmen’s Bureau also refused to set a minimum wage in
the South to ensure that former slaves received a fair wage from their former
slave masters. Instead, the Freedmen’s Bureau was instrumental in spearheading
the formation of sharecropping by encouraging both former slaves and plantation
owners to enter into sharecropping agreements.30 By the time the Bureau ceased
operations in 1870, the sharecropping system was the dominant arrangement in the
South. This arrangement continued the poverty and oppression of Blacks in the
South. As one Southern governor said about sharecropping, “The Negro skins the
land and the landlord skins the Negro.”31 The Freedmen’s Bureau missed a great
opportunity; had its mission been broadened, its funding increased, and its
power been extended, it could have educated the Black population and guaranteed
some type of land reform in the South. Because neither Thaddeus Stevens plan for
land redistribution or an expansion of the Freedmen’s Bureau took place, Blacks
were left after slavery much as they were before, landless and uneducated. In
the absence of an economic base for Blacks, three forces moved in during the
1890’s wiping out the political successes of Reconstruction: the white sheets of
White supremacy, the blue suits of politicians all too eager to unify whites
with racism, and the black robes of the judiciary in cases like Plessy vs.
Ferguson in 1896 stripped away Blacks’ social and political rights.
The Civil Rights movement came nearly ninety years after the First
Reconstruction. The goals of the Second Reconstruction involved at first tearing
down the legal Jim Crow of the South, but by the March on Washington in 1964 the
goals had changed to guaranteeing all Americans equality of opportunity,
integration both social and political, and the more amorphous goal of a biracial
democracy.32 But the goals did not include the need to transform the economic
condition of Blacks. Instead they emphasized the need to transform the political
and social condition of Blacks.33
At the beginning, the Civil Rights Movement sought solutions to racial injustice
through laws and used the Federal courts to secure them. The Supreme Court set
the stage in 1954 with Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka Kansas: the
Brown decision focused the attention of dominant Black institutions such as CORE
(Congress On Racial Equality) and the NAACP (National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People) on fighting the illegality of segregation in
Congress and courts. Subsequent organizations that came to play larger roles in
the Civil Rights Movement such as, SNCC (Students Non-violent Coordinating
Committee) and SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Council) fell into this same
pattern– combating mainly legal segregation. Although they pioneered different
tactics– sit-ins, boycotts, and marches, the goal was to focus attention on
getting rid of Jim Crow.34
The Civil Rights movement, successfully pressured Congress and the President to
enact the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Civil Rights