BACKGROUND
When the Civil War began in 1861, President Abraham Lincoln was very careful to frame the purpose of the war as one to restore the Union rather than as a crusade to eliminate slavery. In his first inaugural address (delivered on March 4, 1861) Lincoln said: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Although Lincoln’s election in 1860 had been seen by Southerners as a victory for the abolitionists (those who wanted to totally abolish slavery), he had been careful to maintain his position as a moderate Republican who sought only an end to the growth of slavery.[1] Some Republican radicals favored abolition, but they constituted a minority within the Republican Party.
The secession of the Southern states did, however, greatly strengthen the radical Republicans who favored abolition. Gone from Congress were the Southern defenders of slavery. During the war Congress consisted of three main factions: Democrats who were generally opposed to any form of emancipation, moderate Republicans who favored gradual emancipation (freedom), and the radical Republicans who wanted the war to be given the purpose of the immediate abolition of slavery.
During the first two years of the war, Lincoln had been stung by criticism from both the Democrats, who generally favored allowing the South to secede, and the radical Republicans who charged that the war was pointless unless it was fought to eradicate the evil of slavery that they believed had been responsible for its cause. As Union defeats mounted in the first two years of the war, both sides became more strident in their criticism of the president. Anti-war Democrats (often called Copperheads) became so strong in their opposition to the war that Lincoln was forced to suspend the right of habeas corpus and jail many of his political opponents without charge or trial. Lincoln justified this extraordinary action by maintaining that he could not allow the entire constitution to be destroyed (by a Union defeat) in order to preserve only one small part of it. Democrats accused Lincoln of being a dictator while radicals accused him of incompetence and charged that his leadership was mainly responsible for the almost continuous military defeats that the North suffered in 1861-1862.
At the beginning of the war, Lincoln believed that a more aggressive position against slavery would doom the Union’s cause. Four key slave states (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri) had remained loyal to the Union, and Lincoln feared that the abolitionists would drive these crucial border states into the arms of the Confederacy. As the war progressed, these border states became more under the influence of the Union Army, and their secession became much less of a threat. Lincoln gradually became more pragmatic in his view toward slavery, telling newspaper editor Horace Greeley: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” Lincoln made several attempts to persuade the loyal slave states to agree to a program of compensated gradual emancipation but without notable success. Meanwhile, the radicals in Congress became more aggressive in their attack on slavery. In August 1861, they passed the Confiscation Act, declaring free all slaves who were being utilized in the Confederate war effort. Subsequent laws in the spring of 1862 abolished slavery, with compensation to owners, in the District of Columbia and in the Western territories. In the summer of 1862, the radicals decided that Northern opinion had reached a point where they could move still further. In July, they pushed through Congress the Second Confiscation Act, which declared free the slaves of persons aiding and supporting the insurrection, and authorized the president to employ blacks, including freed slaves, as soldiers.
Aware that he could not continue to withstand the political pressure of both the Anti-war Democrats and the radical Republicans, the president realized that he would have to move to accommodate one of the groups. To appeal to the Democrats would require Lincoln to accept the permanent division of the country, a step contrary to his efforts to restore the Union at all cost. As the war progressed, the North seemed slowly to accept emancipation as a central war aim; nothing less, many believed, would justify the enormous sacrifices of the prolonged and costly struggle. As a result, the radicals gained increasing influence within the Republican Party, a development that did not go unnoticed by the president who was an astute master at judging the shifts in political sentiment. Lincoln, however, feared that to move toward emancipation in the wake of a series of military failures would appear to be the act of a desperate president on the brink of defeat. During the summer of 1862, Lincoln decided to alter his war aims and make slavery an issue in the war. He delayed any public announcement of this change in policy until it could be given in the aftermath of a military victory. The Battle of Antietam in September 1862 finally provided Lincoln with an opportunity to issue the Emancipation Proclaimation.[2]
The Emancipation Proclamation declared forever free the slaves in those areas of the Confederacy that were still in a state of rebellion as of January 1, 1863. It did not include the border slave states, which had never seceded from the Union, or areas already under Union control: (Tennessee, Western Virginia, and Southern Louisiana). Since these areas were not enemy territory, the president reasoned that they were not subject to his war powers and he had no legal right to free them. As an immediate measure, the Emancipation Proclamation freed no slaves, since it only applied to areas outside of the Union’s control. It did, however, indicate that the abolition of slavery had become a central goal of the war effort. As Northern armies captured Southern territory, the proclamation would be enforced and the slaves would be considered freedmen. Even in the slave areas not covered by the proclamation, it was a clear sign that slavery would not survive the war. It was unrealistic to believe that slavery would long survive in the border states, where it had never been a major presence anyway, if it were abolished in the Deep South.
Eventually, as federal armies occupied much of the South, the proclamation became a practical reality and led directly to the freeing of thousands of slaves. About 186,000 of these emancipated blacks served as soldiers, sailors, and laborers for the Union forces. And even in areas not directly affected by the proclamation, the antislavery impulse was gaining strength. By the end of the war, slavery had been abolished in two Union slave states, Maryland and Missouri, and in three “reconstructed” or occupied Confederate states, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The final step came early in 1865, when Congress approved the Thirteenth Amendment, which freed all slaves everywhere and abolished slavery as an institution. The required number of states ratified the amendment shortly after the end of the war in April 1865. After more than two centuries, legalized slavery ceased to exist in the United States.
Although slavery had ended as a result of the war, there was no consensus of opinion, even in the North, as to the future status of the former slaves. Most radical Republicans demanded that complete social and political equality be swiftly granted to the freedmen. But many Northerners had no desire to integrate blacks into American society. Edwin Godkin, editor of a prominent periodical, The Nation, wrote “I do not see … how the Negro is ever to be worked into a system of government for which you and I would have much respect.” President Lincoln seemed to agree with these sentiments. In the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 he had steadfastly opposed the social and political equality of free blacks. And as president he had written, “[Shall we] free them and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this.” Lincoln had frequently spoken to aides of favoring the resettlement of the former slaves to Africa or the Caribbean.
In addition to the questions surrounding the status of the freedmen, the president also had to consider the question of the readmission of the Southern states. Lincoln favored a generous peace that would: “With malice toward none and charity for all … bind up the nation’s wounds.” Lincoln’s plans for Reconstruction required only that most Southerners take an oath of loyalty to the central government. Seceding states would be readmitted and eligible to return to Congress when only 10% of their 1860 voting population had taken this oath.
Lincoln’s lenient plans for Reconstruction infuriated radical Republicans who strongly opposed the return of the “Old South,” unchanged from its prewar attitudes. With the return of the Southern states, the radicals would lose their slender control of Congress to a new majority of Southern and Northern Democrats.[3] Radicals were insistent that the South not be readmitted until significant changes had occurred to insure that it would not threaten their control of the government. For this to occur, former Confederate leaders would need to be disenfranchised (prevented from voting), and freedmen would have to be swiftly granted the right to vote. Although roundly criticized during his first term in office, Lincoln’s personal popularity by the end of the war would have probably frustrated the ambitions of the radicals and provided for the swift readmission of the Southern states under white control. But Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865 severely damaged the chances for a swift, generous Reconstruction. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, was a Democrat from a former Confederate state, Tennessee. During the war Johnson had remained loyal to the Union despite Tennessee’s secession and refused to resign his seat in the Senate. As a reward, he had been elevated to the vice-presidency in 1864 as a sign of Union solidarity during the war. Despite his loyalty to the Union, Johnson was no opponent of slavery. He had opposed secession mainly due to his hatred of the planter aristocracy that had dominated the South prior to the war. He had commented previously that, “I wish to God every head of a family in the United States had one slave to take the drudgery and menial service off his family.” As president, Johnson intended to carry out Lincoln’s plans but lacked his political support. Any effort by Johnson to appease the South would be roundly denounced by the radical Republicans as the act of a slavery sympathizer.
The plight of the freedmen was in desperate need of assistance. As a result of the war, four million men and women emerged from the bondage of slavery. Nearly 200,000 had fought as combat troops in the Union ranks, and more than 38,000 had given their lives for the Union cause. Countless other blacks had assisted the Union forces as spies or scouts. Still others had run off from the plantations and flocked to the Union lines in search of freedom and protection, often to be put to work for the Union armies. As soon as the war ended, many thousands more left the plantations in search of a new life in freedom. Old and young, many of them feeble and ill, they trudged to the nearest town or city or roamed the countryside, camping at night on the bare ground. Few had any possessions except the clothes they wore. Many Southern whites were determined to retain the essence of slavery even if its legal basis was now destroyed. Some planters continued to detain their black workers and refused to allow them to leave the plantations. In some cases, the former slaves simply did not learn that slavery had been abolished. But in other cases, they fell victim to efforts by white Southerners to re-create slavery in another form. Most planters agreed with a former Confederate leader who said that slavery had been “the best system of labor that could be devised for the Negro race” and that the wise thing to do now would be to “provide a substitute for it.”
Blacks, of course, had a very different vision of the postwar South. They wanted, above all, to know and feel their freedom and to be assured that they were not again to lose it. In the short run, they wanted protection from the threat of starvation. Beyond that, they wanted economic independence; and since the vast majority had always worked as farmers, that meant ownership of land. Blacks also longed for schooling for their children if not for themselves. Finally, many blacks demanded political rights. “The only salvation for us besides the power of the Government is in the possession of the ballot,” a convention of the black people of Virginia resolved in the summer of 1865. “All we ask is an equal chance.”
In the immediate aftermath of the war, the federal government made modest efforts to help the emancipated slaves achieve their dreams of freedom. The government kept troops (many of them black) in the South to preserve order and protect the freedmen. In March 1865, Congress established the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands (known as the Freedmen’s Bureau) as an agency of the army. The bureau was empowered to provide former slaves with food, transportation, schools, assistance in getting jobs and fair wages, and also to settle them on abandoned or confiscated lands. Under the able direction of General Oliver O. Howard, the bureau distributed 20 million rations.[4] Missionaries and teachers, who had been sent to the South by Freedmen’s Aid Societies and other private and church groups in the North, cooperated with the bureau in setting up schools for the former slaves. There were efforts as well to settle blacks on lands of their own. But the Freedmen’s Bureau was only a temporary expedient, not a permanent solution. Congress had given it authority to operate for only one year; and it was, in any case, far too small to deal by itself with the enormous problems facing the former slaves.
Meanwhile, Southerners were determined to quickly reassert their control of their state governments by returning to power many of the same men who had led the efforts to secede from the Union just five years before. South Carolina’s governor, James Orr, had been a member of the Confederate Congress, and Mississippi’s, Benjamin Humphreys, had been a Confederate General. Georgia elected Alexander Stephens, who had served as Vice President to Jefferson Davis in the Confederacy, to the United States Senate. Throughout the South in 1865 and early 1866, state legislatures, controlled by former secessionists, were enacting sets of laws known as the Black Codes. These measures were the white South’s solution to the problem of the free black laborer, and they were modeled in many ways on the codes that had regulated free blacks in the pre-war South. As such, they created a new set of devices to guarantee white supremacy. Although there were variations from state to state, all of the codes authorized local officials to apprehend unemployed blacks, fine them for vagrancy, and hire them out to private employers to satisfy the fine. Some of the codes tried to force blacks to work on plantations by forbidding them to own or lease farms or to take other jobs except as agricultural workers or domestic servants. Socially, the codes were designed to ensure that blacks would remain clearly subordinate to whites. To the North, and to most blacks, they seemed to herald a return to slavery in all but name. In February 1866, Congress passed a bill to prolong the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and to widen its powers. It would now be permitted to establish special courts, which could disallow work agreements forced on freedmen under the Black Codes. President Johnson infuriated Congress by vetoing the bill, denouncing it as unconstitutional. Efforts to override him fell just short of the necessary two-thirds majority. In April, Congress struck again at the Black Codes by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which declared blacks to be U.S. citizens and empowered the federal government to intervene in state affairs when necessary to protect the rights of citizens. Johnson vetoed this bill, too. With moderates and radicals acting together, Congress promptly overrode the veto.[5] Then Congress repassed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act and overrode a second presidential veto of that law.
In the wake of these victories over President Johnson, the radicals in Congress proposed an addition to the Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment, which constituted their own formula for reconstruction. The first section of the amendment confirmed citizenship on all former slaves by declaring that all persons born or naturalized in the United States were citizens of the United States and of the state of their residence. Next came a statement that no state could abridge the rights of citizens of the United States or deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law or deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Section two provided that if a state denied suffrage (the right to vote) to any of its adult male inhabitants, its representation in the House of Representatives and the electoral college would suffer a proportionate reduction. The third section prohibited persons who had previously taken an oath to support the Constitution and later had aided the Confederacy (in other words, former Southern members of Congress and other former officials) from holding any state or federal office until Congress by a two-thirds vote of each house should remove their disability.
Predictably, the new Southern governments refused to ratify the amendment. Only Tennessee, of the former Confederate states, ratified it. The other ten, joined by Kentucky and Delaware, voted it down. The amendment thus failed to receive the required approval of three-fourths of the states and was defeated, but its rejection by the South strengthened the radical cause as many Northerners realized that the South was unrepentant and unwilling to change from its pre-war attitudes. Bloody race riots in New Orleans and other Southern cities, in which blacks were the victims, were viewed by Northerners as further evidence of the inadequacy of Johnson’s lenient policies. Northern business interests also began to strongly support the radicals out of the fear that Southern congressmen, if readmitted to the Union, would oppose the interests of Northern industries as they had prior to the war. In the congressional elections of 1866, Northern voters returned to Congress an overwhelming majority of Republicans, most of them radicals. In the Senate, there were to be 42 Republicans to 11 Democrats; in the House, 143 Republicans to 49 Democrats. Now the Republicans could enact any kind of Reconstruction plan they could themselves agree on. Confidently they looked forward to the struggle with Johnson that would ensue when Congress assembled in December 1866 and to their final victory over the president.
The new Congress moved swiftly in early 1867 to repudiate the actions taken by the president. The Lincoln-Johnson governments of the South were declared to have no legal standing, Southern congressmen were refused their seats, and the ten seceded states (Tennessee was now out of the Reconstruction process) were combined into five military districts under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. Each district was to have a military commander, supported by troops, who was to prepare his provinces for readmission as states. To this end, he was to institute a registration of voters, which was to include all adult black males and those white males who were not disqualified by participation in the war. After the registration was completed, the voters were to elect a convention to prepare a new state constitution which had to include provisions for black suffrage. If this document was ratified by the voters, elections for a state government could then be held. Finally, if Congress approved the constitution, the state legislature ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, and the amendment was adopted by the required number of states and became a part of the Constitution, only then could the state be restored to the Union. [6]
By 1868, seven of the former Confederate states (Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida) had complied with the process of restoration outlined in the Reconstruction Acts including ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, which now became part of the Constitution. These states were readmitted to the Union. Delaying tactics by whites held up the return of Virginia and Texas until 1869 and Mississippi until 1870. And by then, Congress had added an additional requirement for readmission, the states had to ratify another constitutional amendment, the Fifteenth, which forbade the states and the federal government to deny the suffrage to any citizen on account of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Sponsors of the Fifteenth Amendment were motivated by both idealistic and practical considerations. They wished to be consistent in extending to blacks in the North a right they had already given to them elsewhere. The great majority of the Northern states still denied the suffrage to blacks when the Reconstruction Acts granted it to blacks in the Southern states. At the same time, the amendment would put into the Constitution, where it would be safe from congressional repeal, a provision that would serve as a basis of Republican strength in the South. Sponsors of the amendment also saw it as a vehicle for protecting the party’s future in the North. In several of the Northern states, the black vote, although proportionally small, would be large enough to decide close elections in favor of the Republicans. A number of Northern and border states refused to approve the Fifteenth Amendment, and it was adopted only with the support of the four Southern states that had to ratify it in order to be readmitted to the Union.
For a short period of time, congressional reconstruction changed the face of Southern politics. New Republican Reconstruction governments, in which blacks played a prominent role, governed. In the reconstructed states, blacks were elected to public offices of practically every kind. Some were relatively uneducated former slaves, but many were well-educated men, most of whom had never been slaves and many of whom had grown up in the North or abroad. Altogether (between 1869 and 1901), twenty blacks were sent to the House of Representatives in Washington from the former Confederate states. Two went to the Senate, both of them from Mississippi. In 1870, Hiram R. Revels, an ordained minister and a former North Carolina free black who had been educated at Knox College in Illinois, took the Senate seat that Jefferson Davis had once occupied. In 1874, Blanche K. Bruce, who had escaped from slavery in Virginia and studied in the North, also became a senator.
Yet while Southern whites complained loudly about “Negro rule” during Reconstruction, no such thing ever truly existed in any of the states. No black man was ever elected governor of a Southern state, although Lieutenant Governor P.B.S. Pinchback briefly occupied the governor’s chair in Louisiana.[7] Blacks never controlled any of the state legislatures, although for a time they held a majority in the lower house of South Carolina. In the South as a whole, the number of black officeholders was less than proportionate to the number of blacks in the population. Initially in 1867, black voters constituted a majority in half the states (Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana), although only in the last three of these states did blacks outnumber whites in the population as a whole. But once new state constitutions had been framed and new governments launched, most of them permitted nearly all whites to vote (although for several years the Fourteenth Amendment continued to keep the leading ex-Confederates from holding office). This meant that in almost all of the Southern states the Republicans could maintain control only with the support of some Southern whites and the continuing presence of the Union army. These Southern white Republicans, whom their opponents derisively called “scalawags,” mainly consisted of poorer farmers living in areas where slavery had been unimportant or nonexistent before the war or the new class of white businessmen that emerged in the South during Reconstruction. White men from the North also often served as Republican leaders in the South. Opponents of Reconstruction referred to them pejoratively (negatively) as “carpetbaggers,” thus giving the impression that they were opportunists who had arrived with all their possessions in a carpetbag (then a common kind of cheap suitcase covered with carpeting material) in order to take advantage of the black vote for their own power and profit. In fact, the majority of the so-called carpetbaggers were either veterans of the Union army, who looked on the South as a new frontier and had settled as hopeful planters or businessmen, or idealistic veterans of the abolitionist movement who went South to aid the freedmen and prevent a return of racist power.
The Reconstruction governments remain controversial to this day. Southern whites maintained that they were corrupt and spent their states into bankruptcy. Defenders of the Reconstruction governments point out that they were the first truly democratic governments that the South had ever experienced, and that they managed the problems of rebuilding the ravaged South as well as could be expected. Defenders point out that the Reconstruction governments made important contributions in building public improvements (such as roads and railroads) and creating systems of universal public education. In addition, large property qualifications to vote were dropped, allowing many poor whites, as well as blacks, to vote for the first time.
Examples of corruption, however, are not hard to find. Governor Henry Warmouth of Louisiana made $100,000 his first year in office despite an official salary of $8,000. In South Carolina, the speaker of the state legislature was voted a $1,000 bonus, which was immediately applied to cover a gambling debt that was long overdue. One must keep in perspective, however, that the decades following the Civil War were a time of rampant political corruption throughout the country, and the examples often cited to discredit the Reconstruction governments are similar both to scandals in other state governments of the time and to charges of corruption long after the fall of the Reconstruction governments. State budgets certainly expanded, 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. The expenditures, however, mainly represented an effort to provide the Southern states with services they desperately needed and that no governments had ever attempted to provide in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) period: public education, poor relief, and the building of roads and railroads.
Perhaps the most important accomplishment of the Reconstruction governments was a dramatic improvement in Southern education, an improvement that benefited both whites and blacks. In the first years of Reconstruction, much of the impetus for educational reform in the South came from outside groups such as the Freedmen’s Bureau and other mainly Northern groups who went South to educate the freedmen. Over the opposition of many Southern whites, who feared that education would give blacks “false notions of equality,” these reformers established a large network of schools for former slaves. There were 4,000 of these schools by 1870, staffed by 9,000 teachers (half of them black) and with 200,000 students (about 12% of the total school-age population of the freedmen). In the course of the 1870s, moreover, the Reconstruction governments of the states assumed the initiative and began to build the first comprehensive public school systems in the South. By 1876, more than half of all white children and about 40% of all black children were being educated in Southern schools. Several black “academies” were also beginning to operate. These institutions were not yet genuine colleges but offered more advanced education to freedmen than the public schools provided. Gradually, these academies grew into an important network of black colleges and universities which would form the basis of black higher education in the South for many decades. Among the early institutions, for example, were schools that later became Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee and Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. Already, however, Southern education was becoming divided into two separate systems one black and one white. Many efforts to integrate the schools of the region were a dismal failure. The Freedmen’s Bureau schools, for example, were open to students of all races, but almost no whites attended them. New Orleans set up an integrated school system under the Reconstruction government, but again whites almost universally stayed away. The one federal effort to mandate school integration, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, had its provisions for educational desegregation removed before it was passed.
The Reconstruction governments of the South lasted for over a decade. It would be over-simplistic and inaccurate to say that they were totally successful in achieving a measure of equality for the former slaves; however, the change from the pre-war status of blacks was truly astounding. It was not to last. By the end of the century, black Americans were once again reduced to a level of virtually powerless servitude. A number of factors were responsible for the failure of Reconstruction; however, the most significant were the inability of the freedmen to gain any lasting form of economic equality and the ability of white Southerners to prevent blacks from exercising their right to vote.
Congressional Republicans had been quick to provide the freedmen with the right to vote because it was largely in their own self-interest, and in this effort they were successful. Blacks did vote, both in the North and the South, and were a key to maintaining Republican political power. There was less concern with addressing the economic needs of Southern blacks. Without an economic base, Southern blacks were soon at the mercy of white landowners.
In the last years of the war and the first years of Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau did oversee the redistribution of substantial amounts of land to freedmen in some areas, notably the Sea Islands off South Carolina and Georgia, and areas of Mississippi that had once belonged to the family of Jefferson Davis. By June 1865, the bureau had settled nearly 10,000 black families on their own land, most of it drawn from abandoned plantations. Republican congressional leaders spoke of guaranteeing every freedman “forty acres and a mule.” By the end of 1865, however, the experiment was already collapsing. Southern plantation owners were returning and demanding the restoration of their property and President Johnson supported their demands. Despite the resistance of the Freedmen’s Bureau, most of the confiscated land was eventually returned to the original white owners. Congress, moreover, never exhibited much enthusiasm for the idea of land redistribution. Despite the pleas of such radicals as Pennsylvania’s Thaddeus Stevens, very few Northern Republicans believed that the federal government had the right to confiscate property. As a result, land reform did not become a lasting part of Reconstruction. Despite congressional indifference, some blacks did manage to obtain their own land as the proportion of black landowners rose from virtually none to more than 20%. Black landowners acquired their property through hard work, luck, and at times through the assistance of such agencies as the Freedmen’s Bank, established in 1865 by anti-slavery whites in an effort to promote land ownership among blacks.
Despite some impressive achievements, however, the vast majority of blacks did not own their own land during Reconstruction, and some of those who acquired land in the 1860s lost it by the 1890s. These non-landowners worked for others through a great variety of systems. Many black agricultural laborers, perhaps 25% of the total, simply worked for wages. Most, however, became tenants of white landowners and engaged in a practice known as sharecropping where they were allowed to farm land owned by whites in return for sharing a portion of their crop with the landowner. For blacks and poor whites alike, whatever gains there might have been as a result of obtaining or at least being able to work their own land were destroyed by the crop lien system. Unable to afford the basic necessities of life, such as food, clothing, seed, and farm implements, poor farmers had to rely on credit supplied by local merchants in order to purchase what they needed. This credit came at high cost. Interest rates were as high as 50 or 60%. Suppliers held liens (claims) on the crops of debtor farmers as collateral on the loans. If a farmer suffered a few bad years in a row, as often happened in the troubled agricultural markets of the 1870s, he could become trapped in a cycle of debt from which he could never escape. Indebted blacks were often held in a state of peonage (legally prohibited from leaving the land) until their debts were paid. Many blacks who had acquired land during the early years of Reconstruction gradually lost it as they fell into debt. Moreover blacks were increasingly dependent on the goodwill of whites who owned the stores to which they were indebted or the land which they sharecropped.
The most devastating event to Southern blacks was the fall of the sympathetic Reconstruction governments during the 1870s. Even the continuing presence of federal troops was not enough to prevent white Southerners from overturning many of the Republican governments that they so strongly despised. In a few states the Democrats (the traditional party of Southern white-supremacists) returned to power almost as soon as civilian government was restored. In Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, Republican rule came to an end before or by 1871. In other states, the Democrats gradually regained control over a period of several years. Texas was “redeemed,” as Southerners liked to call the restoration of Democratic rule, in 1873; Alabama and Arkansas in 1874; and Mississippi in 1876. For three other states, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida, the end of Reconstruction had to wait for the withdrawal of the last federal troops in 1877.
In the states where whites constituted a majority, the states of the upper South, overthrow of Republican control was a relatively simple matter. The redeemers had only to organize and win the elections. Restoration of suffrage to those whites who had been deprived of it helped them in their task. Presidential and congressional pardons returned the vote to numerous individuals; and in 1872, Congress passed the Amnesty Act, which restored political rights to 150,000 ex-Confederates and left only 500 excluded from political life. In other states, where blacks were in the majority or the populations of the two races were almost equal, the whites resorted to intimidation and violence. Secret societies such as the Ku Klux Klan, which had been organized in December, 1865 by former Confederate officers in Pulaski, Tennessee, sought to frighten or physically prevent blacks from voting or otherwise exercising the normal rights of citizenship. More potent than the secret orders were open semi-military organizations in the South that operated under such names as Red Shirts and White Leagues. The first such society was founded in Mississippi, and the idea soon spread to other states. Their tactics were called the Mississippi Plan. This plan called for whites in each community to organize and arm, and to be prepared, if necessary, to use force to win elections (One Mississippi newspaper editorial blatantly proclaimed: “Carry the election peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must”). By one method or another, legal or illegal, every white man was to be forced to join the Democratic Party or leave the community. By similar methods, every black male was to be excluded from political activity. In a few states blacks were to be permitted to vote if they voted Democratic, but in most cases any black who attempted to vote met swift punishment. Debts were called in, sharecropping agreements ended, physical beatings administered, and many times murder, in the form of lynchings, was employed to deny blacks the right to vote.
As the Mississippi Plan went into force, Congress did little to protect Southern blacks. In the congressional elections of 1874, the Democrats gained a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives, thus denying the Republicans control of the whole Congress for the first time since 1861. As time went on, Northern voters, and their elected officials, became less concerned with the plight of Southern blacks. The rapid westward expansion made Republican control of the South less crucial, and the advent of the industrial revolution in the Northern cities created other pressing political issues. During the presidency of Ulysses Grant, a series of political scandals made it impossible for the administration to focus a great deal of attention on Reconstruction. The national government was no longer willing to use military force to prop up the Republican regimes that were still standing in the South. In 1875, when the Mississippi governor, Adelbert Ames (originally from Maine), appealed to Washington for troops to protect blacks from the terrorism of whites, he received in reply a telegram that quoted President Grant as saying: “The whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South, and the great majority are now ready to condemn any interference on the part of the government.”
After the Democrats gained political control of Mississippi, only three states were left in the hands of the Republicans: South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. In the elections of 1876, again using terrorist tactics, the Democrats claimed victory in all three. But the Republicans claimed victory as well, and they were able to continue holding office because federal troops were still on the scene. If the troops were to be withdrawn, however, it was obvious that the last of the Republican regimes would fall. Resolution of the conflict depended upon the presidential election of 1876 which was itself in dispute because of the electoral controversies in the South.
Ulysses S. Grant was eager to run for a third term in 1876, but the majority of the Republican leaders refused to consider him. They were impressed by the recent upsurge of Democratic strength and fearful that a third-term campaign and the rampant scandals with which Grant was by now associated would spell defeat for their party. Accordingly, they searched for a candidate who was not associated with the problems of the past eight years. The Republican convention eventually nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, a former Union army officer and congressman, three times governor of Ohio, and a champion of civil-service reform.
After failing to win a national election since 1856, the Democrats were poised for victory. The country seemed tired of Republican rule and eager for reform in the wake of Grant’s corrupt administration. Their candidate, Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York, had become virtually synonymous with governmental reform by battling the corrupt Tweed Ring of New York City’s powerful Tammany Hall machine. His fight against “Boss” Tweed brought him national fame and the governorship. As governor he increased his reputation for honest administration.
The campaign was an unusually bitter one, but there were in fact almost no differences of principle between the candidates. The November election produced an apparent Democratic victory. Tilden carried the South and several large Northern states, and his popular vote edged Hayes 51% to 48%. But the situation was complicated by the disputed returns from Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida, whose total electoral vote was 19. Both parties claimed to have won these states, and double sets of returns were presented to Congress. The election returns in these states showed a Democratic victory, but the Reconstruction governments refused to certify the results because of the widespread efforts to intimidate black voters who certainly would have voted Republican. Adding to the confusion was a contested vote in Oregon.[8] The disputed returns denied Tilden a clear majority and threw the outcome of the election into doubt. As tension and excitement gripped the country, two clear facts emerged from the welter of conflicting claims: Tilden had undisputed claim to 184 electoral votes, only one short of the majority needed to make him president. Of the twenty votes in controversy, Hayes would need to be awarded all of them to win the presidency.
The constitution provided no way to resolve the disputed election results. Not until the last days of January 1877 did Congress act to break the deadlock by creating a special electoral commission to settle all the disputed votes. The commission was to be composed of five senators, five representatives, and five justices of the Supreme Court. The congressional delegation would consist of five Republicans and five Democrats. The Court delegation would consist of two Republicans, two Democrats, and an independent. But before the commission could meet, the designated independent was elected to the Senate and resigned his seat on the Court. His place on the commission fell to a more partisan Republican. The commission sat throughout February and reached decisions by a straight party vote of 8 to 7, awarding every disputed vote to Hayes. Democrats howled about “The Crime of ’76,” but Congress accepted the final verdict of the commission on March 2, only two days before the inauguration of the new president.
The peaceful acceptance of the commission’s findings, however, required a series of elaborate compromises among leaders of both parties. Republican leaders met secretly with Southern Democratic leaders to work out terms by which they would support the election of Hayes. As the price of their cooperation, the Southern Democrats exacted several pledges from the Republicans: the appointment of at least one Southerner to the Hayes cabinet, control of federal patronage (politically appointed jobs) in their areas, generous internal improvements, federal aid for the Texas and Pacific Railroad, and, finally, withdrawal of all federal troops from the South. Since withdrawal would mean the downfall of the last Reconstruction governments, the Southerners, convinced they were getting as much from Hayes as they could get from Tilden, agreed to accept the election committee’s decision. In his inaugural address, Hayes spoke primarily about the Southern problem. While he was careful to say that the rights of blacks must be preserved, he announced that the most pressing need of the South was the restoration of “wise, honest, and peaceful local self-government,” a signal that he planned to withdraw the troops and let whites take over control of the state governments. For Southern blacks, this Compromise of 1877 ended over a decade of federal protection. As white governments totally dominated the South, they quickly moved to legally disenfranchise blacks. The era of extra-governmental terror against blacks ended as white Southerners now controlled the legal means to enforce their will.[9]
In the years following the end of Reconstruction, white Southerners began to establish the Democratic Party as the only viable political organization for the region’s whites. They also created a social system that once again concentrated most political and economic power in the hands of a powerful white aristocracy. This white leadership systematically excluded black Southerners (and often poor whites) from any significant access to power. Many of the most valuable accomplishments of Reconstruction were also dismantled. For example, in one state after another, state support for public school systems was reduced or eliminated. “Schools are not a necessity,” commented a governor of Virginia.
The new, white-controlled, governments moved swiftly to deny blacks the right to vote. In devising laws to disfranchise black males (black females, like white women, had never voted), the Southern states had to find ways to evade the intent of the Fifteenth Amendment. That measure had not guaranteed suffrage to blacks; it had simply prohibited states from denying anyone the right to vote because of color. The Southern problem, then, was to exclude blacks from the franchise without seeming to base the exclusion on race. Two devices emerged before 1900 to accomplish this goal. One was the poll tax (a tax required in order to vote) which poor blacks could not afford to pay. These taxes were often cumulative, so that the inability to pay at one election doubled the cost at the next. Another was the “literacy” or “understanding” test, which required voters to demonstrate the ability to read and to interpret the Constitution. The laws permitted local registrars to administer impossibly difficult reading tests to would-be voters or to rule that their interpretation of the Constitution was inadequate.
Such restrictions affected poor white voters as well as blacks. By the late 1890s, the black vote had decreased by 62%, the white vote by 26%. In order to address the problem of the disenfranchisement of poor, illiterate whites, some states passed so-called grandfather laws, which permitted men who could not meet the literacy and property qualifications to vote if their ancestors had voted before 1867, thus barring the descendants of slaves from the polls while allowing poor whites access to them. In other states, however, the ruling elites were quite content to see poor whites, a potential source of opposition to their power, barred from voting. The United States Supreme Court generally refused to apply the obvious intent of the Fifteenth Amendment to strike down the efforts to disenfranchise blacks. The Court eventually voided the grandfather laws, but it validated the literacy tests, in Williams v. Mississippi (1898), and displayed a general willingness to let the Southern states define their own suffrage standards as long as their evasions of the Fifteenth Amendment were not too glaring.
The courts were signaling a retreat in other areas as well. In a series of decisions in the 1880s and 1890s, the Supreme Court effectively stripped the Fourteenth Amendment of much of its significance. In deciding the so-called Civil-Rights Cases of 1883, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited state governments from discriminating against people because of race but did not restrict private organizations or individuals from doing so. Thus railroads, hotels, theaters, and the like could legally practice segregation. Eventually, the Court also validated state legislation that discriminated against blacks. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a case involving a law that required separate seating arrangements for the races on railroads, the Court held that separate accommodations did not deprive blacks of equal rights if the accommodations were equal, a decision that survived for 58 years. In Cumming v. County Board of Education (1899), the Court went even further. Laws establishing separate schools for whites, the justices ruled, were valid even if they provided no comparable schools for blacks. As one Virginia newspaper later commented: “When they learn to spell dog and cat, they throw away the hoe.”
Laws restricting the franchise and segregating schools were only part of a network of state statutes known as Jim Crow Laws that had by the first years of the twentieth century established an elaborate system of segregation reaching into almost every area of Southern life.[10] Blacks and whites could not ride together in the same railroad cars, sit in the same waiting rooms, use the same washrooms, eat in the same restaurants, or sit in the same theaters. Blacks were denied access to parks, beaches, and picnic areas; and were also barred from many hospitals. Much of the new legal structure did no more than confirm what had already been widespread social practice in the rural South since well before the end of Reconstruction. But the Jim Crow Laws also served as a means for whites to retain control of social relations between the races in the newly growing cities and towns of the South, where traditional patterns of deference and subjugation were more difficult to preserve than in the countryside. What had been maintained by custom in the rural South was to be maintained by law in the urban South.
More than legal efforts were involved in this process. The 1890s witnessed a dramatic increase in a phenomenon that had been a part of Southern life for many years: white violence against blacks which (along with the Jim Crow Laws) served to inhibit black agitation for equal rights. The worst such violence, the lynching of blacks by white mobs either because the victims were accused of crimes or because they had seemed somehow to violate their “proper station,” reached appalling levels. In the nation as a whole in the 1890s, there was an average of 187 lynchings each year, more than 80% of them in the South and the vast majority of those inflicted on blacks. The most celebrated lynchings occurred in cities and towns, where large, well-organized mobs, often with the tacit cooperation of local authorities, seized black prisoners from the jails and hung them in great public rituals. Such public lynchings were often highly orchestrated, planned well in advance, and attracted large audiences from surrounding regions. Much more frequent, and more dangerous to blacks because they were less predictable, were lynchings performed by small vigilante mobs, often composed of friends or relatives of the victim of a crime. Those who perpetrated the lynchings often saw their actions as a legitimate form of law enforcement; and indeed, some victims of lynchings had in fact committed crimes. But lynchings were also a means by which whites controlled the black population through terror and intimidation. Thus, some lynch mobs killed blacks whose only “crime” had been to refuse to accept second class status.
The rise of lynching shocked the conscience of many white Americans in a way that other forms of racial injustice did not. Almost from the start there was a substantial anti-lynching movement. Ida B. Wells, a black journalist, launched what became a substantial international anti-lynching movement with a series of impassioned articles in 1892 after the lynching of three of her friends in Memphis, her home town. The movement gradually gathered strength in the first years of the twentieth century, attracting substantial support from whites in both the North and South (particularly from white women). Its goal was a federal anti-lynching law, which would allow the national government to do what state and local governments in the South were generally unwilling to do: punish those responsible for lynchings. Despite the general disapproval of lynching in the North, repeated efforts to win approval of a federal anti-lynching law failed in Congress for decades.
Black Americans faced enormous legal, economic, social, and political obstacles in challenging their oppressed status. Thus it was not surprising, perhaps, that so many embraced the message of the famous black educator Booker T. Washington, founder and president of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, in the late nineteenth century: a message that urged them to “put down your bucket where you are,” to work for immediate self-improvement rather than long-range social change. Born into slavery, Washington had worked his own way out of poverty by virtue of having acquired an education (at Virginia’s famous Hampton Institute). Once established, he urged other blacks to follow the same road to self-improvement.
Washington’s message was both cautious and hopeful. The “great leap from slavery to freedom,” he warned, should not permit blacks to forget how to work with their hands. Whites might not accept blacks as social equals, participants in government, or competitors in the professions, but blacks should attend school, learn skills, and establish a solid footing in agriculture and the trades. Industrial, not classical, education should be their goal. Blacks should, moreover, refine their speech, improve their dress, and adopt habits of thrift and personal cleanliness. They should, in short, adopt the standards of the white middle class. Only thus, he claimed, could they win the respect of the white population, the prerequisite for any larger gains. In a famous speech in Georgia in 1895, Washington outlined a philosophy of race relations that became widely known as the Atlanta Compromise. “The wisest among my race understand,” he said, “that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly.” Blacks should, rather, engage in “severe and constant struggle” for economic gains; for, as he explained, “no race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.” If blacks were ever to win the rights and privileges of citizenship, they must first show that they were “prepared for the exercise of these privileges.” In essence, Washington suggested that blacks avoid challenging segregation and disenfranchisement and concentrate instead on educational and economic progress.[11]
In the context of his time, Washington’s message was not
as timid and conservative as it would later sound. As the first black leader since Frederick Douglass to acquire a
wide audience among members of his race, he offered a powerful challenge to
those whites who strove to discourage blacks from acquiring an education or
winning any economic gains. He helped
to awaken the interest of a new generation to the possibilities for
self-advancement. But Washington’s
message was comforting to Southern whites as well. For in it was an implicit promise that blacks would not challenge
the system of segregation that they were then in the process of erecting.
Some blacks succeeded in elevating themselves into a distinct middle class, one economically inferior to the white middle class, but nevertheless significant. These were former slaves (and, as the decades passed, their offspring) who managed to acquire property, establish small businesses, or enter some of the professions. A few blacks accumulated substantial fortunes by establishing banks and insurance companies for their race. One of those was Maggie Lena who became the first female bank president in the United States when she founded the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond in 1903. Madame C.J. Walker of Indianapolis became the nation’s first female millionaire by developing a line of beauty products for black women and then devising a sales scheme that spread her product to virtually all middle-class black women. Middle-class blacks also experienced more modest gains by becoming ministers, nurses, or teachers serving members of their own race.
Not all blacks, however, were content with this approach. And by the turn of the century a powerful challenge was emerging to the philosophy of Washington and, more important, to the entire structure of race relations. The chief spokesman for this new approach was W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois, unlike Washington, had never known slavery. Born in Massachusetts, educated at Fisk University and at Harvard, he grew to maturity with a far more expansive view than Washington of the goals of his race and the responsibilities of white society to eliminate prejudice and injustice. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he launched an open attack on the philosophy of the Atlanta Compromise, accusing Washington of encouraging white efforts to impose segregation and of unnecessarily limiting the aspirations of his race. “Is it possible and probable,” he asked, “that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meager chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic No.” Rather than content themselves with education at the trade and agricultural schools, Du Bois advocated that talented blacks should accept nothing less than a full university education. They should aspire to the professions. They should, above all, fight for the immediate restoration of their civil rights, not simply wait for them to be granted as a reward for patient striving.
In 1905, Du Bois and a group of his supporters met at Niagara Falls (on the Canadian side of the border because no hotel on the American side of the Falls would have them), and launched what became known as the Niagara Movement. Four years later they joined with white progressives sympathetic to their cause to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Whites held most of the offices in the organization, but Du Bois, its director of publicity and research, was the guiding spirit. In the ensuing years, the new organization led the drive for equal rights, using as its principal weapon lawsuits in the federal courts. Within less than a decade, the NAACP had begun to win some important victories. In Guinn v. United States (1915), the Supreme Court supported their position that the grandfather clause in an Oklahoma law was unconstitutional. In Buchanan v. Worley (1917), the Court struck down a Louisville, Kentucky law requiring residential segregation. Disfranchisement and segregation would survive through other methods for many decades to come, but the NAACP had established a pattern of black resistance that would ultimately bear important fruits. It had also established itself, particularly after Booker T. Washington’s death in 1915, as one of the nation’s leading black organizations, a position it would maintain for many years.
The NAACP was not a radical, or even an egalitarian (focusing on equality), organization. It relied, rather, on the efforts of the most intelligent and educated members of the black race, the “talented tenth” as Du Bois called them. And it stressed not so much the elevation of all blacks from poverty and oppression as the opportunity for exceptional blacks to gain positions of full equality. Ultimately, its members believed, such efforts would eventually benefit all blacks. By creating a trained elite, blacks would, in effect, be creating a leadership group capable of fighting for the rights of the race as a whole.
The First World War produced dramatic changes for black Americans. Nearly half a million migrated from the rural South to industrial cities in search of the factory jobs that the war was rapidly generating. This was the beginning of what became known as the “Great Migration.” Almost overnight, the nation’s racial demographics (population patterns) were transformed; prior to the war 90% of the United State’s black population had resided in the states of the former Confederacy. Between 1915 and 1918, approximately 350,000 Southern blacks migrated to the North. Suddenly there were enormous black communities in the Northern cities, most of which had been home to only a relatively few blacks in the past. The wartime industrial opportunities were only part of the reason for this migration. Conditions had become so bad in the rural South that many blacks were willing to risk abandoning the life that they had always known for uncertainty elsewhere. A Chicago black newspaper noted the effect that lynchings had on the migration by commenting that after a lynching, “colored people from that community will arrive in Chicago inside of two weeks.” Racial prejudice was not absent in the North, but the contrast with the increasingly hostile environment of the South could not be ignored. As one recent migrant wrote:
I should have been here twenty years ago. I just begin to feel like a man. It’s a great deal of pleasure in knowing that you have got some privilege. My children are going to the same school with whites and I don’t have to [h]umble to no one. I have registered—Will vote the next election and there isn’t any “yes sirs” and “no sir”—its all yes and no and Sam and Bill.[12]
Blacks were generally limited to certain, segregated, neighborhoods and relations between white and black workers were seldom cordial, but as long as jobs remained plentiful, racial tensions remained under control.
360,000 blacks also served in the army during the war, half of them in Europe, with over 40,000 experiencing combat. They had been placed in segregated units, often under the command of white officers who held them in contempt. Eventually, however, 1,400 blacks were commissioned as officers. Many blacks hoped that their wartime service would earn them the gratitude of the nation when they returned. Just as black soldiers expected their military service to enhance their social status, so black factory workers regarded their move north as a permanent escape from racial prejudice and an opportunity for economic gain. This was not meant to be.
After the war ended, racial tensions swiftly rose as abundant jobs disappeared. Returning white soldiers assumed that they would have priority over blacks hired during the war. As a severe recession struck in 1919, wartime hopes for racial progress soon evaporated. In the South, there was a sudden increase in lynchings as more than seventy blacks, some of them war veterans, died at the hands of white mobs in 1919 alone. In the North, conditions were in many respects even worse. In Chicago, a black teenager swimming in Lake Michigan on a hot July day happened to drift toward a white beach. Whites on shore stoned him unconscious; he sank and drowned. The incident ignited the severe racial tensions in the city; for more than a week, Chicago was virtually at war. White mobs roamed into black neighborhoods, shooting, stabbing, and beating passers-by, destroying homes and properties. Blacks fought back and inflicted violence and destruction of their own. In the end, 38 people died--15 whites and 23 blacks--and 537 were injured; over 1,000 people were left homeless. The Chicago riot was the worst but not the only racial violence during the summer of 1919; in all, 120 people died in such racial outbreaks in the space of little more than three months. A rebirth of the KKK in the North, although the new Klan was also anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant, was also a sign of the atmosphere of racial hostility.
Blacks responded to the turmoil in various ways. The NAACP urged blacks to fight back, to defend themselves, and demand government protection. At the same time, a black Jamaican, Marcus Garvey, began to attract a wide American following with an ideology of black nationalism. Garvey encouraged American blacks to take pride in their own achievements and to develop an awareness of their African heritage, to reject assimilation (blending) into white society and develop pride in their own race. Black culture was superior to white culture, Garvey told supporters; blacks should leave America and return to Africa, where they could create a new society of their own. At the peak of his popularity, Garvey claimed a following of four million. It was his efforts to start a shipping company to ferry American blacks to Africa that led to his downfall. Financial mismanagement led to federal charges of mail fraud. Garvey was sentenced to federal prison and deported to Jamaica by President Coolidge in 1927. As a result, his “Back to Africa Movement” died. In the end most blacks had little choice but to acquiesce (go along with) in the social and economic subjugation being forced on them during the 1920s.
In some areas of the North, blacks were able to weather the storm of the post-war backlash. Major cities had strong black communities, and while conditions were difficult for most blacks, there was a small, but thriving black upper-class. In these cities, a rich urban black culture began to develop. The Harlem Renaissance emerged during the 1920s as New York City became the center of this new cultural development. Black writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Georgia Douglas Johnson attracted a wide readership. Black musicians William Handy, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington attracted both white and black audiences, and the development of jazz brought black musicians to the forefront of world music. The concentration of blacks in major cities also gave them an element of political power. In 1928, Oliver DePriest became the first black elected to Congress from the North when he was elected to represent a Chicago district. Blacks made contributions outside of the black community as well between the wars. George Washington Carver transformed Southern agriculture with his development of products derived from peanuts, sweet potatoes, and soybeans and Charles Drew developed a method of preserving blood plasma for transfusions that saved countless lives during the Second World War.[13]
The onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s hit both urban and rural blacks very hard. On the bottom of the economic ladder, many blacks were among the first Americans to suffer from the economic disaster. In the South, the median income for black couples dropped to only 34% of that of whites. The New Deal brought some progress. President Roosevelt ordered relief aid to be issued without discrimination, but many New Deal jobs programs remained segregated in areas where segregation was the norm (and NRA codes actually permitted employers to pay lower wages to black workers).[14] The sympathy of Eleanor Roosevelt for the plight of black Americans was well-known and some blacks served in government positions. Among these were Mary McLoed Bethune and Robert Weaver (Weaver later became the First Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the 1960s). Despite this, the president was unwilling to endanger the support of Southern Democrats by supporting federal anti-lynching laws or efforts to change segregation. In retrospect, progress for black Americans during the New Deal was primarily symbolic; however, even symbolic advancement was more than had occurred since the days of Reconstruction. As a result, the voting patterns of Northern blacks changed from support for the “Party of Lincoln” to the “Party of Roosevelt.” To this day, black voters have remained the among the most loyal Democratic Party voters.
Just as the First World War had brought enormous changes
in racial demographics, World War II proved also to be an important turning
point for black Americans. Industrial
jobs, and the high wages that accompanied them, again became available. In a second Great Migration some 1.5 million blacks left the South during the
1940s, mainly for the industrial cities of the North. Largely through the efforts of black labor leader A. Phillip Randolph, President
Roosevelt was persuaded to sign an executive order banning discrimination in
defense industries. The military,
however, remained segregated. Over
700,000 blacks served in the U.S. military during the war. While many were forced to serve in menial
support positions, the need for manpower eventually increased opportunities for
black servicemen. By the end of the war some training camps were
being at least partially integrated; blacks were being allowed to serve on
ships with white sailors; more black units were being sent into combat; and
Benjamin O. Davis. became the country’s first black brigadier general.
The inconsistency of fighting against Nazi racism abroad and returning to Jim Crow at home was not lost on black Americans after the war. In one celebrated instance, black servicemen in the South were required to ride in a segregated cattle car while German POWs rode in the white-only passenger cars. Even petty forms of segregation remained. Black customers were prohibited from trying on clothes, even hats and gloves, in stores lest the “contaminate” them. When waiting for service, blacks were always considered last in line if white customers were waiting. After World War II, black leaders were determined to prevent a repeat of the 1920s in which black wartime gains were quickly reversed. In the White House they found a surprising ally in President Harry Truman. Truman, a Democrat from the former slave state of Missouri, was initially viewed with distrust by black leaders. He soon proved to be, however, the strongest supporter of civil rights to ever sit in the White House. In 1947, he appointed a committee on civil rights to study the status of black Americans. More importantly, he was willing to act upon the recommendations contained in its report To Secure These Rights. In 1948, he asked Congress for federal legislation to end laws which maintained segregation in the South. He also proposed laws to punish those responsible for lynching, protect the voting rights of blacks, eliminate poll taxes, and establish a fair employment practices commission to end job discrimination. When Congress was unresponsive to these requests, Truman took what action he could on his own. He was the first president to address the NAACP and, in July of 1948, he issued an executive order banning segregation in the armed forces. All of these actions angered Southern Democrats who threatened to withdrawal their support from Truman in his bid to retain the presidency in 1948. This fear of alienating the “Solid Democratic South” had prevented Franklin Roosevelt from being more supportive of civil rights. The election of 1948 would put to the test Truman’s supposition that a Democrat could win the White House without the support of white Southerners opposed to civil rights. This election would usher in two dramatic decades of progress in civil rights that would change the nation more profoundly than at any other time in its history.[15]
Jeffrey T. Stroebel, The
Sycamore School, 1997
[1] Southern slavery was accepted by most Northerners as an unchangeable situation. The constitution protected slavery, and this could be changed only by a constitutional amendment. Most Northerners held little sympathy for the plight of black Americans. The small free black population of the North (around 250,000, less than 2% of the total Northern population) had few civil or political rights. Only five New England states permitted free blacks to vote and several states prohibited blacks from testifying against whites in court. Only in Massachusetts could blacks serve on juries. A few Northern states (including Indiana) even prohibited blacks from entering the state. Public accommodations were also segregated by tradition in the North. In a notable 1865 incident, a black war hero, who had stolen a Confederate ship and delivered it to the United States Navy, was thrown off a streetcar in Philadelphia because of his race.
[2] Antietam had been a bloodbath as both sides suffered over 12,000 casualties (the United States had lost only 11,000 men in all of its wars prior to the Civil War), and remains to this day the single bloodiest day in American history. Although the Union had not administered a crushing defeat to the forces of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Lee had been forced to abandon his invasion of the North and the battle was generally viewed as a Northern victory.
[3] This was not an unrealistic fear as the coalition of Northern and Southern Democrats had predominately ruled the country between the 1820s and the late 1850s. Republicans realized that the swift readmission of an “unreconstructed” South would place them in political peril.
[4] Howard University in Washington D.C., one of the most renowned historically black universities in the country, is named after General Howard, who was white.
[5] This was the first time that a presidential veto was successfully overridden by Congress.
[6] In addition to seizing total control of Reconstruction, the Republicans in Congress also sought to remove President Johnson. The House of Representatives voted to impeach the president in March 1868 on largely political charges. This is the only time in the country’s history that the House ever approved articles of impeachment against a president. Johnson survived his trial in the Senate by only one vote as the Republicans failed to obtain the necessary 2/3 majority in favor of conviction. The fascinating story of the key Republican Senator who refused to support Johnson’s conviction, Edmund Ross of Kansas, is well told in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.
[7] Pinchback served as governor for 46 days following the impeachment of Governor Henry Warmouth.
[8] This dispute emerged because one of the Republican electors was found to be a federal officeholder and thus ineligible to serve as an elector.
[9] The original Ku Klux Klan died out in the 1870s. With white redeemers in control of Southern governments, it was simply no longer necessary.
[10] The term “Jim Crow” was derived from an 1830s Northern stage act in which a white actor, Thomas “Daddy” Rice, played an ignorant black man for the amusement of white audiences.
[11] Evidence exists that Washington did use some of his wealth to oppose segregation. He helped finance legal challenges to Louisiana’s grandfather clause and laws that excluded blacks from juries in Texas and Alabama.
[12] Jeffrey C. Stewart 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African American History (New York: Doubleday, 1996), p. 57.
[13] Drew became the first director of the Red Cross Blood Bank in 1941 although Red Cross policy prohibited blacks from donating blood. Blood donations during the war were kept segregated despite Drew’s research that showed conclusively that blood from blacks and whites was identical.
[14] Due to high black unemployment, blacks did receive a sizable amount of New Deal relief. While blacks were only 10% of the overall population, the made up 18% of the WPA rolls.
[15] Portions of this chapter have been adapted from Compton’s Encyclopedia of American History, 1994.