Reconstruction Period
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Reconstruction, the post Civil War effort to re integrate the states of the defeated Confederacy into the United States, and to reform the economy and society of the South to fit a new world without slavery, is at once one of the most familiar and least understood chapters of American history. It gave the American language the term "carpetbagger," among others.1 The popular image of Reconstruction is still essentially that of Gone With The Wind: of enduring white Southerners trying to put their lives together in the shadow of outside rule and endemic corruption. In fact, Reconstruction was America's first, abortive Civil Rights era. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation officially freed the slaves those in the Confederacy, at least, where it had no direct force; slaves in Union territory were not freed but in fact slavery was effectively ended by the fact of the Civil War itself, as many Southerners realized long before 18652 But while slavery itself was moribund before Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, the future of the freed blacks was left unsettled by the end of the Confederacy. Likewise unsettled was the future of the entire Southern social, economic, and political order of which the "peculiar institution" had been the central and defining feature. 1Richard Nelson Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xi. A carpetbagger was originally a Northerner who wen
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n though many Southerners with ties to the rebellion were barred from voting, the planter element dominated many of the elections. Southern states passed a series of "Black Codes" which sought to reduce the freed blacks to legal serfdom.6 Laws restricted their mobility, forced them into long term labor contracts at whatever wages white planters offered, and often subjected them to whippings and other slavery like conditions.
Accounts of these laws, and the attitudes behind them, were reported back to the North by both military officials and civilian travellers. Even Northerners who had been far from "Radical," and who were previously largely indifferent to the condition of the blacks, were incensed by what they felt to be Southern arrogance.7 Support for sweeping social and racial
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6Ibid., 189 200.
7Albert Castel, The Presidency of Andrew Johnson (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979), 58 60.
reform in the South was thus widespread.
President Johnson, however, completely misread this sentiment. He had been a Unionist, but never a radical. His approach towards Reconstruction was shaped in part by his "strict constructionist" attitude towards the Constitution, and in part by his
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Approximate Word count = 2425
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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