Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

As the determination of federal authority weakened, the failure of the Reconstruction governments to put a solid economic footing under black civil rights slowly allowed the free-spending Republican administrations of the old South to sink into political quicksand. Without land, the freedmen were forced into sharecropping arrangements on white-owned land that bound them into new webs of dependency on white landowners. As white economic leverage over the freedpeople increased, their willingness to politically challenge Southern whites shrank. As it was, in none of the Reconstructed states did African Americans ever have control of the Reconstruction government, and only in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana did blacks ever gain a majority of the registered voters. Now even those majorities began to falter, and African Americans soon learned that there were few whites eager to shore those majorities up. Southern Unionist scalawags had entered into the Reconstruction alliance with misgiving, and over time the enemies of Reconstruction were able to play on the residual loyalty of poor whites to a whites-only democracy at least enough to paralyze Southern white support for black civil rights.

The Northern carpetbaggers were longer in their support of Southern blacks, but the Panic of 1873, with its catastrophic fall in world agricultural prices, ruined the economic base of the carpetbaggers and forced many of them to sell out. The Northerners who worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau began leaving the South after 1869, when Congress unwisely closed down the bureau, and in 1876 the federal troops who had been stationed in the South to stiffen the resolve of the Reconstruction governments were gradually cut back by a cost-conscious Congress to only 3,000 (out of a total army enlistment of 17,000).96

Southern whites did not wait for the Reconstruction governments to stagger to their end unaided. It would be interesting to speculate what might have happened if Andrew Johnson had obeyed his original impulse in the spring of 1865 to hang a dozen, or even more, of the Confederate leaders, since a punitive action on that scale would have decapitated the potential leadership of any future Southern resistance. Instead, Johnson issued more than 13,000 pardons to former Confederate officers and officials, and as the political resolve of President Grant and the Congress evaporated, many of the former Confederate leaders stepped forward to reassert their old roles. The veteran survivors of the Confederate armies, without jobs, often without land, and frequently without direction, found it all too easy to fall in behind them.97

What resulted was little better than a low-level resumption of hostilities, only this time in the form of terrorism against blacks and their white Republican allies. Quasi-guerilla movements such as the Knights of the White Camellia, the White League, and the Ku Klux Klan became, in effect, the armed struggle of the old Southern white leadership and the Southern Democrats to restore whites-only rule in the South. In a few cases, such as that of Arkansas Unionist governor Powell Clayton, the Reconstruction governments successfully struck back at the Klan’s use of assassination, intimidation, and fraud. More often, it was easier to inundate Washington with demands for federal military protection—demands that, under the Grant administration, were treated with mounting annoyance as tokens that the Reconstruction governments were failures, and that it might be better to let political matters in the South take their course with a minimum of federal intervention.98

Playing to that concern, other Southern Democrats portrayed themselves as “Redeemers,” struggling to free themselves not from blacks but from corrupt and bribe-ridden regimes. To sweeten their image, many of the Redeemers promoted the image of a “New Departure” in which the interests of both blacks and whites for better government would converge in the election of virtuous Southern Democrats who, in public at least, had made their peace with Reconstruction. Once installed, however, “Redeemer” governments turned their attention first to disenfranchising African Americans through literacy tests and poll taxes, fastening the bondage of sharecropping and indebtedness on black farmers, and eventually, between 1890 and 1908, creating elaborate codes of “Jim Crow” laws that rigorously segregated African Americans into the poorest housing, the worst educational opportunities, and political oblivion. As the once formidable Republican voter base paled and faded, the road to white Democratic Redemption lay fearfully open.99

The presidential election of 1876, which pitted Republican Rutherford B. Hayes against New York Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, has generally been singled out as the end of Reconstruction. Actually, Southern Redeemers had been picking off isolated Reconstruction governments all through the 1870s, until by 1876, only South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana were still under some form of Republican rule. In the fall of 1876, the Republican lock on the White House was closely challenged by Tilden and the promise of the Democrats to sweep away the corruptions of the Grant administration. Tilden might have won the election—in fact, should have won it, since he topped Hayes by a quarter of a million popular votes, and ought to have been awarded the 185 electoral votes needed to win the Electoral College—but the Southern and Northern wings of the Democratic Party had fractured over the disposition of lucrative new harbor-clearing projects and a new transcontinental rail line that Southern Democrats wanted built from Memphis and New Orleans westward through Texas. In the five politically volatile months between the election and inauguration day, Hayes and the Southern Democrats patched together an electoral deal that permitted the Republicans to claim favorable recounts in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina, in exchange for the proposed “internal improvements” and a promise of non-interference by federal troops in future Southern elections. On March 1, 1877, Hayes was declared president-elect by a margin of exactly one electoral vote. The next day, President Grant informed the Reconstruction governments that he could no longer respond to their requests for federal troops in protecting black voters.100

Hayes was inaugurated three days later, and he immediately appointed an ex-Confederate as his postmaster general, one of the most influential patronage-dispensing posts in the federal government.