Reconstruction Era: The Defeated South and Its Aftermath

The Defeated South

The Confederacy was confronted by a crushing defeat. This was a time for the nation to come to grips with the idea of democracy and what it truly meant. The period was one of deep uncertainty — no one was quite sure how the defeated states of the Confederacy would blend cohesively back into the Union while preserving and maintaining the unity and power of America. Significant numbers of lives had been lost, two-thirds of the region's wealth had been destroyed, and the enslaved people who had counted for one-third of the population were now free.

Questions began to build regarding how the North could feel confident that it could reestablish a working governance dealing with citizens who might prove defiant in the wake of their defeat. The time had come for a restructuring of southern culture. Race relations needed to be reworked and class conflicts addressed — these matters were considered of the highest importance not merely regionally but on a national level. For a large number of Northerners, the end of the war raised the question of how to define democracy for freed men and how to ensure that, in exercising their democratic rights at the national level, Southerners still embracing Confederate ways of thinking would not complicate the process of governance (Smith, 1994, p. 92).

Reconstruction brought about issues that were unique but deeply rooted in racism, compounded by class differences, making reform enormously difficult. The North was now obligated to reintegrate the South into the United States on the basis of full constitutional equality. Research suggests that the North's policy during Reconstruction serves as more of an analogy than as a template for understanding the character of America (Smith, 1994, p. 97). The battle had been won, but there were still battles to be fought in order to bring the North and South together as one nation.

Lincoln's Plan for Reconstruction

The initial step in the creation and development of Lincoln's plan for Reconstruction emerged in the states of the Upper South and became known as his border state policy. The plan began with politics: Lincoln attempted to prevent any further breach of the Union. He believed that Southerners were fundamentally loyal but had been misled by their political leaders, and that all they needed were new leaders to follow in order to return to the fold. It has been noted that Lincoln gave very little thought to the possibility that principle and duty might motivate the South's leaders and people. Therefore, Lincoln's plan of Reconstruction included the idea of installing a new governor under military auspices, supported by whatever popular backing could be marshaled (Hiesseltine, 1960, p. 9).

Various regional and economic factors came together to shape Lincoln's plan. The western counties of Virginia, from the Alleghenies to the Ohio River, had long been unhappy, yoked to eastern Virginia's Tidewater, Piedmont, and Valley regions. In the west, the Kanawha River drained a rich valley into the Ohio. Counties north of it, adjacent to the Ohio, looked away from Richmond. And if the "mystic chords" of sentiment did not bind these people to the Union, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad tied their commerce to Chesapeake Bay — which, if nothing else, provided some basis for cohesion between the states (Hiesseltine, 1960, p. 25).

Once senators were seated, the restored legislature set in motion the steps leading to a new state. During the winter of 1861 to 1862, a constitutional convention formed the instrument of government for West Virginia; however, Lincoln remained only a passive observer of the movement. The division of Virginia became no precedent for Reconstruction either during or after the war. No one — social reformer, economic entrepreneur, or political manipulator — seriously proposed readjusting the historical boundaries of the Southern states. Instead, Virginia's contribution to the development of Lincoln's plan was consistent with lessons learned from Maryland and Missouri. By the summer of 1861, the experiences of the Border States had given a basic outline to Lincoln's plan of Reconstruction: to implement it, he would use patronage to build a Unionist party (Hiesseltine, 1960, p. 57).

The Civil Rights Bill

The first permanent English colony in North America was founded at Jamestown, Virginia, in May 1607. Twelve years later, in 1619, a Dutch ship sailed into the harbor at Jamestown and sold twenty African slaves to the Virginia colonists. Thus did "slavery" and "involuntary servitude," as they are referred to in the United States Constitution, come to the American South. The flat farmlands, served by meandering Tidewater rivers, were ideal for creating large plantations for growing cotton and other agricultural products. The African slaves provided a cheap and reliable source of agricultural and household labor for the emerging southern economy (Humphrey, Rauh & Stewart, 1997, p. 1).

Any civil rights bill to come before the U.S. Senate would face a filibuster by a determined group of Southern senators, and the filibuster could only be stopped by a "cloture vote," which required a two-thirds majority in the Senate. Thus, from the very beginning of the Black civil rights movement, the Senate filibuster was regarded as the great obstacle — and a successful cloture vote to stop a civil rights filibuster was the great goal. The Civil War Amendments "worked," but only for a short while. During the twelve-year period of Reconstruction in the South following the Civil War, Black Americans were allowed to vote and a number were elected to important state and national political offices. But after the war ended, white Southern politicians and government officials went to work subverting and diminishing the position of Black citizens in the American South. As early as 1865 — the year the Civil War ended — a number of Southern state legislatures began passing Black Codes, laws designed to place Black citizens in a state of near-slavery by severely limiting their rights and privileges (Humphrey, Rauh & Stewart, 1997, p. 3).

The Republican majority in the United States Congress responded to the Black Codes with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which made it illegal to deprive a person of civil rights regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Additional civil rights laws were passed by Congress in 1870, 1871, and 1875, all designed to have the national government in Washington, D.C., protect Black Americans from white-dominated Southern state governments. Throughout this period, Republicans in Congress sought to "nationalize" the issue of Black civil rights so that Southern white-dominated state legislatures could not undo the work of the Civil War (Humphrey, Rauh & Stewart, 1997, p. 4).