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At Issue In History
Reconstruction
After the Civil War, the country was confronted with the difficult task of admitting the southern states back into the Union, rebuilding government institutions, and assisting the freed slaves. This anthology focuses on the debates that arose concerning these and other issues that faced the nation as it attempted to heal the wounds of war.
1 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2002
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November 18, 2017
This is a useful, brief book that presents extracts from Civil War era speeches, reports, or Congressional testimony, about aspects of the topic of post-Civil War Reconstruction, so that the student (or reader) can become a better reader of history (as the book's blurb claims). The pro and con format is a good one - it is interesting that extracts of writings or speeches by sometimes-obscure/forgotten political or social figures are presented to the modern reader, their eyewitness accounts of conditions and writings bring public opinion or scholarly thought about the era to life. It is really an introduction to the topic from the perspective of presenting either mid 19th C or early 20th C scholarly or political writings or speeches on Reconstruction, mostly by those who were Civil War political leaders, and in the case of W.E.B. DuBois, early 20th C thinkers. The book includes a bibliography for those who may with to explore the topic further.
The USA attempted nation-building in the conquered areas of the South after the CW - as it instantly implemented African American political participation, and arranged labor contracts in the devastated agricultural economy, as well as housing for freedmen and refugees. The South remained devastated for years - eventually the Federal gov withdrew its last troops from the South (1877) unfortunately the goal of the war was practically reversed with the institution of various anti-voting laws that reduced African American political participation, Jim Crow laws that essentially recreated the antebellum apartheid in the South, and many other onerous economic laws and practices one again reduced many African Americans to near-servitude or serfdom. Along with the rise of the KKK after the CW, there were also many race riots, such as the December 1874 race riot in Vicksburg, MS, in which an estimated 300 blacks were killed by bands of armed whites. The following month, Pres. Grant dispatched Federal troops to Vicksburg; Grant also had to send Federal troops to South Carolina in October 1876, following race riots in Hamburg SC (July 1876, 7 African American killed) Ellenton SC (September 1876, several whites and about 100 African Americans killed), and Cainhoy SC (October 1876, 6 whites and one African American killed). In November 1876, "the presidential election resulted in a dispute over who won." In February 1877, "the Compromise of 1877 secured Republican Rutherford B. Hayes's claim to the presidency in exchange for the return of home rule to the South. " The above information (quotes/paraphrases) is taken from a useful Chronology of Reconstruction that is also included in the book.
Considering the suffering, terror, and violence in the South for African Americans once Reconstruction officially ended (and even before it ended) it is not surprising that by 1970, about six million African Americans had left the South for other regions of the USA, in what is termed the Great Migration. "The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million African-Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970.[1] Until 1910, more than 90 percent of the African-American population lived in the American South.[2] In 1900, only one-fifth of African-Americans living in the South were living in urban areas.[3] By the end of the Great Migration, 53 percent of the African-American population remained in the South, while 40 percent lived in the North, and 7 percent in the West,[4] and the African-American population had become highly urbanized. By 1970, more than 80 percent of African-Americans lived in cities,[5] and by 1960, of those African-Americans still living in the South, half now lived in urban areas.[3] In 1991, Nicholas Lemann wrote that the Great Migration:
was one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements in history—perhaps the greatest not caused by the immediate threat of execution or starvation. In sheer numbers it outranks the migration of any other ethnic group—Italians or Irish or Jews or Poles—to [the United States]. For blacks, the migration meant leaving what had always been their economic and social base in America, and finding a new one.[6]
Some historians differentiate between a first Great Migration (1916–1930), which saw about 1.6 million people move from mostly rural areas to northern industrial cities, and a Second Great Migration (1940–1970), which began after the Great Depression and brought at least 5 million people—including many townspeople with urban skills—to the north and to California and other western states.[7]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_M...
Quotes:
From the Introduction:
"The leaders of the antislavery cause in Congress were members of the Republican Party and came to be known as Radical Republicans."
"Republicans feared that with the readmission of the Southern states to Congress, the Democratic Party would take over."
"The 1866 Civil rights Act defined all persons born in the United States as citizens, thus granting the ex-slaves U.S. citizenship."
"With enough votes to easily override President Johnson's continued vetoes, Congress passed the Reconstruction acts of 1867."
"These state governments did achieve a number of goals. They expanded social services, established public school systems (previously lacking in the South), and attempted to promote economic development. However, many whites never fully accepted their legitimacy and blamed government corruption and incompetence for the continued economic hardships the region experienced after the Civil War."
"The national Republican Party became more conservative as former Radicals died or retired."
"The gains blacks experienced during Reconstruction in voting and civil rights soon vanished as state governments, free of federal interference, passed laws to segregate public schools and facilities and limit black voting rights. The South continued to violate the civil rights of blacks for decades after 1877. However, Reconstruction's legacy also includes the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which became the legal basis for the Civil Rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s."
From (conservative) journalist Benjamin C. Truman's report to the 1865-1866 Session of Congress:
"Petty, unjust, and discriminating licenses are levied in this State [of Mississippi] upon mechanics, storekeepers, and various artisans."
"When one believes that a certain race of beings are incapable of advancement, he is very prone to withhold the means of that advancement."
From German immigrant and Civil War veteran Carl Schurz 1866 report to President Johnson on the "Conditions of the South:"
"When the rebellion was put down, they found themselves not only conquered in a political and military sense, but economically ruined."
"If, as long as the change from slavery to free labor is known to the Southern peole only by its destructive results, these people must be expected throw obstacles in its way, would it not seem necessary that the movement of social "reconstruction" be kept in the right channel by the hand of the power which originated the change, until that change can have disclosed some of its beneficial effects?"
"The South stands in need of an increase and not of a diminution of its laboring force to repair the losses and disasters of the last four years."
From speech delivered before Congress on 12/18/1863 by leading Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens:
"...I know of no arrangement so proper for them as territorial governments. There they can learn the principles of freedom and eat the fruit of foul rebellion."
"We have turned, or are about to turn, loose four million slaves without a hut to shelter them or a cent in their pockets. The infernal laws of slavery have prevented them from acquiring an education, understanding the commonest laws of contract, or of managing the ordinary business of life. This Congress is bound to provide for them until they can take care of themselves."
"If we have not yet been sufficiently scourged for our national sin to teach us to do justice to all God's creatures, without distinction of race or color, we must expect the still more heavy vengeance of an offended Father, still increasing his inflictions as he increased the severity of the plagues of Egypt until the tyrant consented to do justice."
"...equal rights to all the privileges of the Government is innate in every immortal being, no matter what the shape or color of the tabernacle which he inhabits."
From (Democrat/conservative) President Andrew Johnson's 12/3/1867 State of the Union address:
"The Union which [the Founding Fathers] ... established can exist only where all the States are represented in both Houses of congress; where one State is as free as another to regulate its internal concerns according to its own will, and where the laws of the central government, strictly confined to matters of national jurisdiction, apply with equal force to all the people of every section."
"It was ordained not only to form a more perfect union between the States, but to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
"The victory of the nation's arms was not the disgrace of her policy; the defeat of secession on the battlefield was not the triumph of its lawless principle."
From 1870 letter by Northern lawyer, Civil War veteran, leading Republican, "carpetbagger" and North Carolina Judge Albion W. Tourgee to North Carolina Republican Senator Joseph C. Abbott:
"There have been twelve murders in five counties of the district during the past eighteen months, by bands of disguised villains [KKK]."
"I could stand it very well to fight for Uncle Sam, and was never known to refuse an invitation on such an occasion; but this lying down, tied hand and foot with the shackles of the law, to be killed by the very dregs of the rebellion, the scum of the earth, and not allowed either the consolation of fighting or the satisfaction that our "fall" will be noted by the Government, and protection given to others thereby, is somewhat too hard."
"Fifty thousand dollars given to good detectives would secure, if well used, a complete knowledge of all this gigantic organization of murderers."
"Put detectives to work to get hold of this whole organization. Its ultimate aim is unquestionably to revolutionize the Government."
From 1866 Congressional committee testimony by "Irish-born minister who was a Union army chaplain during the Civil War. Following the war he became a Freedmen's Bureau agent in Louisiana."
"In some portions of the State of Louisiana, now, they have organized patrols of militiamen, who go up and down the roads the same as if they were scouting in time of war, to prevent the negroes from going from one place to another."
"They [the African Americans] read the newspapers pretty generally. I believe two-thirds of the negroes in Louisiana can read. They publish a newspaper there, read it, and sustain it."
From 1865 Congressional committee testimony by ex-Confederate official James D.B. De Bow:
"Whatever may be tolerated in monarchical and despotic governments, no republic is safe that tolerates a privileged class, or denies to any of its citizens equal rights and equal means to maintain them."
From an 1874 Congressional speech by former Confederate officer, later North Carolina Democratic Representative Robert B. Vance, opposing second civil rights bill, introduced in 1870, that was designed to ban racial segregation in schools and public facilities:
"There has been enough trouble and enough sorrow in this world already. War has stamped its foot upon human sympathies."
From African American Congressman Richard H. Cain's speech before Congress in January 1874 in support of the federal civil rights bill that called for desegregation of public schools and facilities:
"For two hundred years the colored men of this nation have assisted in building up its commercial interests."
"And if, for the space of time I have noted, we have been hewers of wood and drawers of water; if we have made your cotton-fields blossom as the rose; if we have made your rice-fields wave with luxuriant harvests; if we have made your corn-fields rejoice; if we have sweated and toiled to build up the prosperity of the whole country by the productions of our labor, I submit, now that the war has made a change, now that we are free -- I submit to the nation whether it is not fair and right that we should come in and enjoy to the fullest extent our freedom and liberty."
"I cannot regard that our rights will e secured until the jury-box and the school-room, hose great palladiums of our liberty, shall have been opened to us."
"We come here, five millions of people -- more than composed this whole nation when it had its great tea-party in Boston Harbor, and demanded its rights at the point of the bayonet -- asking that unjust discriminations against us be forbidden."
"In the name of the dead soldiers of our race, whose bodies lie at Petersburgh and on other battle-fields of the South; in the name of the widows and orphans they have left behind; in the name of the widows of the confederate soldiers who fell upon the same fields, I conjure you let this righteous act be done. I appeal to you in the name of God and humanity to give us our rights, for we ask nothing more."
From historian, sociologist, and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois 1909 paper presented before "the American Historical Association in which he defended Reconstruction-era reforms:"
"Property in slaves to the extent of perhaps two thousand million dollars had suddenly disappeared. One thousand five hundred more millions, representing the Confederate war debt, had largely disappeared. Large amounts of real estate and other property had been destroyed, industry had been disorganized, 250,000 men had been killed and many more maimed. With this went the moral effect of an unsuccessful war with all its letting down of social standards and quickening of hatred and discouragement - a situation which would make it difficult under any circumstances to reconstruct a new government and a new civilization."
"In general the words of Judge Albion W. Tourgee, a "carpetbagger," are true when he says of the Negro governments: They obeyed the Constitution of the United States, and annulled the bonds of states, counties, and cities which had been issued to carry on the war of rebellion and maintain armies in the field against the Union. They instituted a public school system in a realm where public schools had been unknown. They opened the ballot box and jury box to thousands of white men who had been debarred from them by a lack of earthly possessions. They introduced home rule to the South. They abolished the whipping post, the branding iron, the stocks and other barbarous forms of punishment which up to that time prevailed. They reduced capital felonies from about twenty to two or three. In an age of extravagance they were extravagant in the sums appropriated for public works. In all of that time no man's rights of person were invaded under the forms of law. Every Democrat's life, home, fireside and business were safe. No man obstructed any white man's way to the ballot box, interfered with his freedom of speech, or boycotted him on account of his political faith."
"Serfdom and education have ever proven contradictory terms."
I would recommend this book to any adult or teen interested in finding out about Reconstruction by reading extracts from eyewitnesses and political leaders who lived through this fraught era of American history.
The USA attempted nation-building in the conquered areas of the South after the CW - as it instantly implemented African American political participation, and arranged labor contracts in the devastated agricultural economy, as well as housing for freedmen and refugees. The South remained devastated for years - eventually the Federal gov withdrew its last troops from the South (1877) unfortunately the goal of the war was practically reversed with the institution of various anti-voting laws that reduced African American political participation, Jim Crow laws that essentially recreated the antebellum apartheid in the South, and many other onerous economic laws and practices one again reduced many African Americans to near-servitude or serfdom. Along with the rise of the KKK after the CW, there were also many race riots, such as the December 1874 race riot in Vicksburg, MS, in which an estimated 300 blacks were killed by bands of armed whites. The following month, Pres. Grant dispatched Federal troops to Vicksburg; Grant also had to send Federal troops to South Carolina in October 1876, following race riots in Hamburg SC (July 1876, 7 African American killed) Ellenton SC (September 1876, several whites and about 100 African Americans killed), and Cainhoy SC (October 1876, 6 whites and one African American killed). In November 1876, "the presidential election resulted in a dispute over who won." In February 1877, "the Compromise of 1877 secured Republican Rutherford B. Hayes's claim to the presidency in exchange for the return of home rule to the South. " The above information (quotes/paraphrases) is taken from a useful Chronology of Reconstruction that is also included in the book.
Considering the suffering, terror, and violence in the South for African Americans once Reconstruction officially ended (and even before it ended) it is not surprising that by 1970, about six million African Americans had left the South for other regions of the USA, in what is termed the Great Migration. "The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million African-Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970.[1] Until 1910, more than 90 percent of the African-American population lived in the American South.[2] In 1900, only one-fifth of African-Americans living in the South were living in urban areas.[3] By the end of the Great Migration, 53 percent of the African-American population remained in the South, while 40 percent lived in the North, and 7 percent in the West,[4] and the African-American population had become highly urbanized. By 1970, more than 80 percent of African-Americans lived in cities,[5] and by 1960, of those African-Americans still living in the South, half now lived in urban areas.[3] In 1991, Nicholas Lemann wrote that the Great Migration:
was one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements in history—perhaps the greatest not caused by the immediate threat of execution or starvation. In sheer numbers it outranks the migration of any other ethnic group—Italians or Irish or Jews or Poles—to [the United States]. For blacks, the migration meant leaving what had always been their economic and social base in America, and finding a new one.[6]
Some historians differentiate between a first Great Migration (1916–1930), which saw about 1.6 million people move from mostly rural areas to northern industrial cities, and a Second Great Migration (1940–1970), which began after the Great Depression and brought at least 5 million people—including many townspeople with urban skills—to the north and to California and other western states.[7]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_M...
Quotes:
From the Introduction:
"The leaders of the antislavery cause in Congress were members of the Republican Party and came to be known as Radical Republicans."
"Republicans feared that with the readmission of the Southern states to Congress, the Democratic Party would take over."
"The 1866 Civil rights Act defined all persons born in the United States as citizens, thus granting the ex-slaves U.S. citizenship."
"With enough votes to easily override President Johnson's continued vetoes, Congress passed the Reconstruction acts of 1867."
"These state governments did achieve a number of goals. They expanded social services, established public school systems (previously lacking in the South), and attempted to promote economic development. However, many whites never fully accepted their legitimacy and blamed government corruption and incompetence for the continued economic hardships the region experienced after the Civil War."
"The national Republican Party became more conservative as former Radicals died or retired."
"The gains blacks experienced during Reconstruction in voting and civil rights soon vanished as state governments, free of federal interference, passed laws to segregate public schools and facilities and limit black voting rights. The South continued to violate the civil rights of blacks for decades after 1877. However, Reconstruction's legacy also includes the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which became the legal basis for the Civil Rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s."
From (conservative) journalist Benjamin C. Truman's report to the 1865-1866 Session of Congress:
"Petty, unjust, and discriminating licenses are levied in this State [of Mississippi] upon mechanics, storekeepers, and various artisans."
"When one believes that a certain race of beings are incapable of advancement, he is very prone to withhold the means of that advancement."
From German immigrant and Civil War veteran Carl Schurz 1866 report to President Johnson on the "Conditions of the South:"
"When the rebellion was put down, they found themselves not only conquered in a political and military sense, but economically ruined."
"If, as long as the change from slavery to free labor is known to the Southern peole only by its destructive results, these people must be expected throw obstacles in its way, would it not seem necessary that the movement of social "reconstruction" be kept in the right channel by the hand of the power which originated the change, until that change can have disclosed some of its beneficial effects?"
"The South stands in need of an increase and not of a diminution of its laboring force to repair the losses and disasters of the last four years."
From speech delivered before Congress on 12/18/1863 by leading Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens:
"...I know of no arrangement so proper for them as territorial governments. There they can learn the principles of freedom and eat the fruit of foul rebellion."
"We have turned, or are about to turn, loose four million slaves without a hut to shelter them or a cent in their pockets. The infernal laws of slavery have prevented them from acquiring an education, understanding the commonest laws of contract, or of managing the ordinary business of life. This Congress is bound to provide for them until they can take care of themselves."
"If we have not yet been sufficiently scourged for our national sin to teach us to do justice to all God's creatures, without distinction of race or color, we must expect the still more heavy vengeance of an offended Father, still increasing his inflictions as he increased the severity of the plagues of Egypt until the tyrant consented to do justice."
"...equal rights to all the privileges of the Government is innate in every immortal being, no matter what the shape or color of the tabernacle which he inhabits."
From (Democrat/conservative) President Andrew Johnson's 12/3/1867 State of the Union address:
"The Union which [the Founding Fathers] ... established can exist only where all the States are represented in both Houses of congress; where one State is as free as another to regulate its internal concerns according to its own will, and where the laws of the central government, strictly confined to matters of national jurisdiction, apply with equal force to all the people of every section."
"It was ordained not only to form a more perfect union between the States, but to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
"The victory of the nation's arms was not the disgrace of her policy; the defeat of secession on the battlefield was not the triumph of its lawless principle."
From 1870 letter by Northern lawyer, Civil War veteran, leading Republican, "carpetbagger" and North Carolina Judge Albion W. Tourgee to North Carolina Republican Senator Joseph C. Abbott:
"There have been twelve murders in five counties of the district during the past eighteen months, by bands of disguised villains [KKK]."
"I could stand it very well to fight for Uncle Sam, and was never known to refuse an invitation on such an occasion; but this lying down, tied hand and foot with the shackles of the law, to be killed by the very dregs of the rebellion, the scum of the earth, and not allowed either the consolation of fighting or the satisfaction that our "fall" will be noted by the Government, and protection given to others thereby, is somewhat too hard."
"Fifty thousand dollars given to good detectives would secure, if well used, a complete knowledge of all this gigantic organization of murderers."
"Put detectives to work to get hold of this whole organization. Its ultimate aim is unquestionably to revolutionize the Government."
From 1866 Congressional committee testimony by "Irish-born minister who was a Union army chaplain during the Civil War. Following the war he became a Freedmen's Bureau agent in Louisiana."
"In some portions of the State of Louisiana, now, they have organized patrols of militiamen, who go up and down the roads the same as if they were scouting in time of war, to prevent the negroes from going from one place to another."
"They [the African Americans] read the newspapers pretty generally. I believe two-thirds of the negroes in Louisiana can read. They publish a newspaper there, read it, and sustain it."
From 1865 Congressional committee testimony by ex-Confederate official James D.B. De Bow:
"Whatever may be tolerated in monarchical and despotic governments, no republic is safe that tolerates a privileged class, or denies to any of its citizens equal rights and equal means to maintain them."
From an 1874 Congressional speech by former Confederate officer, later North Carolina Democratic Representative Robert B. Vance, opposing second civil rights bill, introduced in 1870, that was designed to ban racial segregation in schools and public facilities:
"There has been enough trouble and enough sorrow in this world already. War has stamped its foot upon human sympathies."
From African American Congressman Richard H. Cain's speech before Congress in January 1874 in support of the federal civil rights bill that called for desegregation of public schools and facilities:
"For two hundred years the colored men of this nation have assisted in building up its commercial interests."
"And if, for the space of time I have noted, we have been hewers of wood and drawers of water; if we have made your cotton-fields blossom as the rose; if we have made your rice-fields wave with luxuriant harvests; if we have made your corn-fields rejoice; if we have sweated and toiled to build up the prosperity of the whole country by the productions of our labor, I submit, now that the war has made a change, now that we are free -- I submit to the nation whether it is not fair and right that we should come in and enjoy to the fullest extent our freedom and liberty."
"I cannot regard that our rights will e secured until the jury-box and the school-room, hose great palladiums of our liberty, shall have been opened to us."
"We come here, five millions of people -- more than composed this whole nation when it had its great tea-party in Boston Harbor, and demanded its rights at the point of the bayonet -- asking that unjust discriminations against us be forbidden."
"In the name of the dead soldiers of our race, whose bodies lie at Petersburgh and on other battle-fields of the South; in the name of the widows and orphans they have left behind; in the name of the widows of the confederate soldiers who fell upon the same fields, I conjure you let this righteous act be done. I appeal to you in the name of God and humanity to give us our rights, for we ask nothing more."
From historian, sociologist, and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois 1909 paper presented before "the American Historical Association in which he defended Reconstruction-era reforms:"
"Property in slaves to the extent of perhaps two thousand million dollars had suddenly disappeared. One thousand five hundred more millions, representing the Confederate war debt, had largely disappeared. Large amounts of real estate and other property had been destroyed, industry had been disorganized, 250,000 men had been killed and many more maimed. With this went the moral effect of an unsuccessful war with all its letting down of social standards and quickening of hatred and discouragement - a situation which would make it difficult under any circumstances to reconstruct a new government and a new civilization."
"In general the words of Judge Albion W. Tourgee, a "carpetbagger," are true when he says of the Negro governments: They obeyed the Constitution of the United States, and annulled the bonds of states, counties, and cities which had been issued to carry on the war of rebellion and maintain armies in the field against the Union. They instituted a public school system in a realm where public schools had been unknown. They opened the ballot box and jury box to thousands of white men who had been debarred from them by a lack of earthly possessions. They introduced home rule to the South. They abolished the whipping post, the branding iron, the stocks and other barbarous forms of punishment which up to that time prevailed. They reduced capital felonies from about twenty to two or three. In an age of extravagance they were extravagant in the sums appropriated for public works. In all of that time no man's rights of person were invaded under the forms of law. Every Democrat's life, home, fireside and business were safe. No man obstructed any white man's way to the ballot box, interfered with his freedom of speech, or boycotted him on account of his political faith."
"Serfdom and education have ever proven contradictory terms."
I would recommend this book to any adult or teen interested in finding out about Reconstruction by reading extracts from eyewitnesses and political leaders who lived through this fraught era of American history.
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