A Just and Lasting Peace: A Documentary History of Reconstruction (2 page)

April 16, 1862 Slaves in the District of Columbia emancipated.

September 22, 1862 Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation issued.

January 1, 1863 Final Emancipation Proclamation issued.

December 8, 1863 Lincoln issued Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction and announced the Ten Percent Plan of Reconstruction.

July 2, 1864 Wade-Davis Reconstruction Bill passed. First Freedmen's Bureau Bill passed.

July 8, 1864 Lincoln issued pocket-veto proclamation on Wade-Davis Bill.

August 5, 1864 Wade-Davis Manifesto issued.

January 31, 1865 Thirteenth Amendment passed by Congress.

March 3, 1865 Freedmen's Bureau established. Freedman's Savings Bank incorporated.

April 14, 1865 Lincoln assassinated.

April 15, 1865 Johnson succeeded to the presidency.

May 9, 1865 Johnson recognized Pierpont government in Virginia.

May 10, 1865 Jefferson Davis captured at Irwinsville, Georgia.

May 29, 1865 Johnson issued Proclamation of Amnesty and inaugurated Presidential Reconstruction in North Carolina.

July to December 1865 Former Confederate states (except Texas) reorganized under Johnson's plan.

December 4, 1865 Congress reconvened and refused to admit Southern members-elect.

December 6, 1865 Thirteenth Amendment ratified.

December 13, 1865 Congress established Joint Committee on Reconstruction.

February 19, 1866 Freedmen's Bureau Bill vetoed by Johnson.

April 9, 1866 Civil Rights Bill passed over Johnson's veto.

May 1866 Ku Klux Klan organized.

May 1–3, 1866 Memphis Race Riot.

June 13, 1866 Fourteenth Amendment passed by Congress.

June 20, 1866 Joint Committee on Reconstruction recommended that the former Rebel states were not entitled to representation and should remain under Congressional authority.

July 16, 1866 The second Freedmen's Bureau Bill passed over Johnson's veto.

July 24, 1866 Tennessee's representatives readmitted to Congress.

July 30, 1866 New Orleans Race Riot.

August 28 to

September 15, 1866 Johnson's “swing around the circle.”

January 7, 1867 Johnson's impeachment proposed in Congress.

January 8, 1867 Black suffrage granted in District of Columbia.

January 25, 1867 Black suffrage extended to the territories.

March 2, 1867 First Reconstruction, Tenure of Office, and Army Appropriation Acts passed (first two over Johnson's veto).

March 23, 1867 Second Reconstruction Act passed over Johnson's veto.

July 19, 1867 Third Reconstruction Act passed over Johnson's veto.

August 12, 1867 Johnson suspended Stanton and appointed Grant secretary of war.

October to

November 1867 Democratic victories in various Northern states.

December 7, 1867 Resolution for impeachment of Johnson failed.

January 13, 1868 Stanton restored to office by Senate.

February 21, 1868 Covode Resolution impeachment resolution made against Johnson.

February 24, 1868 Johnson impeached.

March 11, 1868 Fourth Reconstruction Act passed.

May 16, 1868 Johnson acquitted.

June 22–25, 1868 Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana readmitted to the Union.

July 6, 1868 Freedmen's Bureau continued by Congress.

July 9, 1868 Fourteenth Amendment ratified.

November 3, 1868 Grant elected president.

February 26, 1869 Fifteenth Amendment passed by Congress.

January 26, 1870 Virginia readmitted to the Union.

February 3, 1870 Fifteenth Amendment ratified.

February 23, 1870 Mississippi readmitted to the Union.

March 30, 1870 Texas readmitted to the Union.

May 31, 1870 First Enforcement Act enacted.

July 15, 1870 Georgia permanently readmitted to the Union.

February 28, 1871 Second Enforcement Act enacted.

March 3, 1871 Civil Service Law enacted.

April 20, 1871 Third Enforcement Act (Ku Klux Klan Act) passed by Congress.

May 22, 1872 General Amnesty Act passed.

November 5, 1872 Grant reelected.

September 18, 1873 Panic of 1873 began.

March 1, 1875 Civil Rights Act passed.

November 7, 1876 Disputed presidential election.

December 1876 to

March 1877 Congressional deadlock leading to Compromise of 1877.

January 29, 1877 Electoral Commission established.

March 2, 1877 Hayes declared victor over Tilden.

March 5, 1877 Hayes inaugurated.

April 3, 1877 Federal troops withdrawn from South Carolina statehouse and abandonment of state Republican administration.

April 20, 1877 Federal troops withdrawn from Louisiana statehouse and abandonment of state Republican administration.

October 15, 1883
Civil Rights
Cases
decided.

May 18, 1896
Plessy v. Ferguson
decided.

 

I
NTRODUCTION

The bloody American Civil War ground to a halt in April 1865, abolishing chattel slavery, establishing the sanctity of free labor, and maintaining the integrity of the American union. Despite the internecine struggle that cost possibly as many as 750,000 lives, the nation had survived.
1
As historian Eric Foner, the foremost authority on postwar Reconstruction, has explained, “The Civil War changed the nature of warfare, gave rise to an empowered nation-state, vindicated the idea of free labor and destroyed the modern world's greatest slave society. Each of these outcomes laid the foundation for the country we live in today. But as with all great historical events, each outcome carried with it ambiguous, even contradictory, consequences.”
2

In his Second Inaugural Address, delivered March 4, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln looked ahead to the reunification of the Union. He urged Americans, north and south, “to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
3
Lincoln, whose life would be cut down by a Southern sympathizer on April 14, just five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, had hoped to restore the Southern states to the Union smoothly and expeditiously. Months before his assassination the president had taken steps to ensure the constitutionality of the Emancipation Proclamation by supporting the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment (ultimately ratified on December 6, 1865). In his last public address, Lincoln referred to his 1863 “plan of re-construction (as the phrase goes)” and supported conferring the vote “on the very intelligent” African-American men, “and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.”
4

War-weary Americans, however, soon learned that their much sought-after peace led to a bewildering array of constitutional, economic, and social problems. White Southerners, for example, struggled under the new order of things: life in a world without mastery over slaves. Though many feared retribution by their formerly “loyal” slaves, in fact most of the freedpeople sought to find loved ones separated by slavery, stabilize their families, find jobs either as laborers for wages or on “shares” of the crop, and create lives for themselves and their children. A former plantation mistress recorded in her diary late in 1865 her surprise at the behavior of the ex-slaves. “They are orderly & subordinate but incorrigibly lazy. Occasional acts of insubordination by the returned negro soldiers occurs here & there, but in this neighborhood we are exempt from all the ills of Emancipation save those which spring from Laziness & Theft.”
5

Modern historians increasingly expand the traditional beginning and ending dates of Reconstruction. “If we come to regard emancipation as a protracted national process,” writes Steven Hahn, “we must also take a new look at the dimensions of what we call Reconstruction. Either Reconstruction must be seen as a similarly extended phenomenon, initiated in the Northern states well before the Southern (and thus almost coincidental with American nation building more generally), or we have to acknowledge a great many ‘rehearsals' for the large-scale Reconstruction of the Civil War era: rehearsals that suggest different and more wide-ranging political dynamics (involving class, ethnicity, gender, and culture as much as race) than we are accustomed to recognizing.”
6

Some scholars interpret the postwar years as a continuation of the war, as Americans north and south confronted the obstacles of restoring the Union, generating new battles over sovereignty, representation, and race relations. Though armed conflict between Union and Confederate forces ground to a halt in April 1865, over the next dozen years new forms of violence—including murder, mob beatings, urban race riots, and guerrilla warfare in the countryside directed against blacks and Unionists—vexed the period that historians term Reconstruction. “The belligerence of Southern leaders did not end with Appomattox,” explains historian John Stauffer. “They neither laid down their arms nor accepted the terms of their unconditional surrender. Instead they went home and engaged in a terrorist war for the next twelve years.”
7

This book is the first major documentary history of Reconstruction since the early twentieth century when historian Walter Lynwood Fleming published his popular two-volume
Documentary History of Reconstruction
:
Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational, and Industrial, 1865 to 1906
(1906–7)
.
8
Fleming, trained in Professor William Archibald Dunning's famous Columbia University history seminar, underscored slavery's righteousness, the inherent inferiority of African-Americans, and what historian Robert D. Reid termed “the noble purposes of the white South, and the deleterious effects of Reconstruction.”
9

The documents in
A Just and Lasting Peace
reflect all sides of the Reconstruction experience—constitutional, economic, legal, social, and, above all, the pull and tug of human adjustment during the post–Civil War years. But whereas Fleming's excerpted texts combined to depict Reconstruction as an exceptional, extreme, radical moment in American history, the documents in
A Just and Lasting Peace
highlight the inertia and the limitations on politicians and reformers determined to remake the South and, in doing so, to transform the nation into a biracial representative democracy predicated on true freedom and citizenship. The historical texts included in
A Just and Lasting Peace
also reflect Foner's “rejuvenated revisionism” captured in his path-breaking and influential
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877
(1988).
10
As historian Gregory P. Downs has noted correctly, Foner, without dismissing the ideals and contributions of white Northern reformers and Republicans, showcased the agency and experiences of the ex-slaves during the postwar period. Foner and those historians who have followed him, most notably Steven Hahn in
A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggle in the South from Slavery to the Great Migration
(2003), have emphasized the emancipated slaves' determination for full freedom, including economic autonomy and citizenship on a par with whites. They underscore Reconstruction as a nonlinear historical process with many twists and turns, but nevertheless identify a leitmotif in the hopes and dreams of blacks, who, during the dozen years following the war, acted as agents of their own economic, political, and social freedom.
11

Reconstruction, a critical period of American history that began during the Civil War and continued into the 1880s, remains an amazingly complex and complicated historical epoch, a watershed in American political, social, cultural, and economic history. For scholars, the period presents a many-headed hydra. Reconstruction signified an end to the Civil War and, after a stormy interlude, led to the readmission of the former Confederate states to the Union. But it also represented an experiment in economic, social, and political democracy—America's first civil rights movement—and, ultimately, it launched a new beginning for Americans north and south. Significantly, Reconstruction marked the end of an era: the end of slavery, the end of the so-called “slavocracy,” and the end of the serious idea of state interposition and secession in American politics. Yet, as much as Reconstruction signaled a termination point, it also marked a new beginning. With Reconstruction, Americans commenced a period of experimentation in interracial democracy—a period of civil and political rights for the freedmen, a period of strong federalism, and a new nationalism. Each was tested.

Revisionist scholars of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, responding to the traditional, or “tragic era,” interpretation of Dunning-era historians like Fleming, approached the period sympathetically and optimistically. These historians highlighted Reconstruction's triumphs. “If the era was ‘tragic,' revisionists insisted, it was because change did not go far enough, especially in the area of Southern land reform,” Foner explained, but Reconstruction was still “a time of extraordinary social and political progress for blacks.”
12

Disappointed by the slow pace of racial change during the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s, historians in the 1970s and 1980s, whom Foner terms “postrevisionists,” viewed the so-called gains of Reconstruction skeptically and went to great lengths to describe the period's essential conservatism, whether in terms of land distribution, in the courts, or in the persistence of white planter economic, racial, and social control. According to Foner, “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.”
13
Prior to the appearance of Foner's book, most scholars emphasized the limitations of reuniting the nation occasioned by Northern racism, capitalism, and politics.

Foner, as Downs points out, revitalized the 1950s revisionist interpretation by privileging not only the accomplishments but also the struggles of the freedpeople. Reconstruction did not signify a triumph of egalitarianism over entrenched racism, state-rights particularism, and economic control by wealthy agricultural and urban capitalists. But Reconstruction nonetheless was not a totally failed experiment.

The Thirteenth Amendment (ratified 1865) freed the slaves permanently by law, not by military order; the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified 1868) defined American citizenship to include African-Americans and included penalties for states that denied citizenship rights; and the Fifteenth Amendment (ratified 1870) enfranchised black men. Beyond this, probably as many as 1,800 blacks held public office—as congressmen, state legislators, constables, trial justices, and other local officials—during the Reconstruction era.
14
Many African-Americans served in all-black militia companies while others began commercial and communal enterprises that served their communities, some continuing today. That said, even before the 1870s, many of the early gains of Reconstruction began to wither away, returning former Confederates to power, ushering in white racial control, and rendering most of the freedmen and -women to the status of landless peasants.

Ironically, as white Southerners reentered the Union, they seemingly captured in peace what had eluded them in war: newfound racial control, not by slavery, but rather by controlling the region's capital and land. Farm tenantry, sharecropping, and peonage replaced the racial control of slavery without providing the freedpeople with any of the alleged benefits of chattel slavery. Whites fashioned so-called free labor into an effective mode of labor and racial control. In 1879, Albion W. Tourgée, the Union officer–turned–North Carolina carpetbagger, lawyer, judge, and leading novelist, critic, and racial radical, remarked, “In all except the actual results of the physical struggle, I consider the South to have been the real victors in the war. . . . The way in which they have neutralized the results of the war and reversed the verdict of Appomattox is the grandest thing in American politics.”
15

This story and many others play out in the documents presented in
A Just and Lasting Peace.
The texts, arranged chronologically, provide insights into the ebb and flow of the emancipation process, debates over programs of “restoration” versus “reconstruction,” Presidential Reconstruction and its reversal, then Radical Reconstruction and its eventual retreat. The powerful first-person accounts document the oft-sidetracked project of reuniting the nation after a blood-soaked civil war and the construction of new nationhood. The Civil War and Reconstruction freed the slaves, included African-Americans as citizens, and enabled blacks to vote and participate in political activities. Even though black agency sparked obstructionism by whites at every turn and culminated in decades of racially motivated violence, Reconstruction nevertheless settled the question of state rights versus federalism, establishing the ultimate locus of power in the United States in the federal government, not in the states. Concomitantly, Reconstruction witnessed the enormous growth of central state government authority in the North, what historian Richard Franklin Bensel appropriately termed the emerging “Yankee Leviathan.”
16

Despite Reconstruction's gains, and the courage and conviction of reformers black and white, North and South, the postwar period fell short of true biracial justice and representative democracy. State centralization had little direct impact on the day-to-day lives of the South's ex-slaves. No sooner had the smoke of battle between Northerners and Southerners cleared but proscription, intolerance, and racial tension began to hover over the Reconstruction South like a miasma, choking the freedmen and -women as they marched determinedly ahead toward true freedom. The Black Codes of Presidential Reconstruction first blocked their path. Then extra-legal violence threatened the exercise of the freedmen's newfound political rights. De facto segregation circumscribed their social interactions. And finally, starting soon after Reconstruction ground to a halt in 1877, Southern states began codifying Jim Crow–era segregation laws. “The destruction of slavery,” notes historian Edward L. Ayres, “a major moral accomplishment of the United States Army, of Abraham Lincoln, and of the enslaved people themselves, would be overshadowed by the injustice and poverty that followed in the rapidly changing South, a mockery of American claims of moral leadership in the world.”
17
Reflecting in 1935 on the gains and losses of Reconstruction, the great African-American historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois explained: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
18
Universal freedom and equality proved elusive.