Blacks and the Reconstruction

The Goals of Reconstruction
President Lincoln stated in his Second Inaugural that the U.S., now whole again, should work “to bind up the nation’s wounds”—but with his assassination, and the voice of America’s better angels now gone, Reconstruction got off to a rockier start than the deceased president would have hoped to have seen. Reconstruction was supposed to be a new dawn of brotherhood; the South was to be forgiven, and blacks were supposed to be equal. What had been razed to the ground during Sherman’s March to the Sea was now to be rebuilt so that order could be re-established. Frederick Douglass, writing in The Atlantic in 1866, stated that enfranchisement of the free black would only come if the federal government passed laws to protect the newly freed former slaves and brought the law of the North into the South. What happened, however, was something else entirely. The spirit of the south continued on: the Ku Klux Klan arose from the ashes of Sherman’s March. Jim Crow laws reigned where Douglass had hoped to see Yankee law prevail. Reconstruction floundered and racism persisted. This paper will show how the goals of Reconstruction regarding African-Americans were not achieved by 1900 because of a failure of the federal government to oversee effectively the Era of Reconstruction and to eradicate the racist doctrines and organizations of the South.
President Johnson essentially gave the South a free hand in determining how the Reconstruction Lincoln had envisioned would be effected: this set the tenor for the times. Free blacks were not provided for: Johnson returned most of the land of the South to its original owners. The Southern aristocracy returned to power, ensuring that free blacks would not be enfranchised. Johnson stated in his 1865 pardon: “I hereby grant and assure to all persons of color who have, directly or by implication, participated in the existing rebellion, a free pardon; and that I hereby grant and assure to all white persons who have, directly or indirectly, participated in the existing rebellion, except as hereinafter excepted, a full pardon.” A year later, however, Douglass was offering his own take on the so-called Reconstruction that Johnson was really offering:
They demand such a reconstruction as shall put an end to the present anarchical state of things in the late rebellious States,—where frightful murders and wholesale massacres are perpetrated in the very presence of Federal soldiers… They want a reconstruction such as will protect loyal men, black and white, in their persons and property; such a one as will cause Northern industry, Northern capital, and Northern civilization to flow into the South, and make a man from New England as much at home in Carolina as elsewhere in the Republic. No Chinese wall can now be tolerated. The South must be opened to the light of law and liberty.
The problem was that Douglass’s vision was not the same as the so-called Reconstruction that Johnson was really offering. Johnson wanted a laissez-faire approach: he wanted hands off. He wanted to let the South police itself and reconstruct itself. He had no sense of the better angels that Lincoln made talk of. He surely had no intention to effect the sort of Reconstruction that Douglass noted was needed.
Even though the 15th Amendment, passed in 1870, would grant suffrage to blacks, Jim Crow still lurked in the corners of the judicial system. The infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 proved as much: the Supreme Court decision stated that blacks were “separate but equal” to whites and that though they could enjoy the same rights and privileges as their white countrymen, they were to remain separate in public (McBride). The writing was on the wall by that point: the spirit of Reconstruction that Lincoln had called for (“with malice towards none”) was dead—Reconstruction was a failure—Jim Crow and the KKK stood over its grave.
When the carpetbaggers arrived in the South to gain political influence and leverage in areas where they had no ties, the failure was even more keenly felt. The carpetbaggers came to exploit the weaknesses of the South in the aftermath of the War. The carpetbaggers were “opportunists looking to exploit and profit from the region’s misfortunes” (A&E). Scalawags joined them as white Republicans who supported Reconstruction though the actual Republican Party failed to provide any sufficient amount of spending to actually aid in reconstructions of the South’s infrastructure (Guelzo). Moreover, scalawags and carpetbaggers failed to represent the South’s best interests towards African Americans, who were essentially freed without anywhere to go and without any support from the government. It was as though they had been dropped in their own same land as yesterday but now without any titles, any lodgings or any place to call home. Thus, the blacks took flight in what became known as the Great Migration, as whole families of freed blacks flocked north to the cities to find work and shelter. African Americans found themselves unwanted everywhere they went.
In conclusion, Reconstruction failed to achieve its goals because nothing was done to reduce the animosity that the old aristocracy felt towards the new radical Republicans who supported the federal government’s program. The Old South was still bitter about the war—and that “south will rise again” feeling was evident in the rise of the KKK, which emerged from the Southern resentment towards the Union, which had taken away the slaves and overturned the order. The Supreme Court did nothing to prevent Jim Crow from taking over as its “separate but equal” ruling showed what the Union really thought of African Americans.
Works Cited
A&E. “Carpetbaggers and Scalawags.” History, 2018. https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/carpetbaggers-and-scalawags
Douglass, Frederick. “Reconstruction.” The Atlantic, 1866. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1866/12/reconstruction/304561/
Guelzo, Allen. Reconstruction Didn't Fail. It Was Overthrown. Time, 2018. http://time.com/5256940/reconstruction-failure-excerpt/
McBride, Alex. “Plessy v. Ferguson.” Thirteen, 2007. https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/supremecourt/antebellum/landmark_plessy.html
Johnson, Andrew. “A Proclamation.” Digital History, 1865. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/exhibits/reconstruction/section4/section4_pardon1.html
Lincoln, Abraham. Second Inaugural Address, 1865. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp