Reconstruction Essay, Research Paper

The time following the Emancipation Proclamation was at first a time when the color line was blurred. Blacks and whites intermingled freely, more so then ever before, yet these interactions were not representative of the South accepting the freedman into society. The Black Codes were enacted so that the former enslaved was not treated as equals in social and political relations. During the Reconstruction the freedman was searching for the meaning of his freedom and the responsibility it brought. The emergence of people trying to profit off the instability of the South added upon the troubles. Groups rose up in the South speaking out against the blacks and Northern influence. The freedom which the freedman sought was not truly found until he gained his enfranchisement. The new voters became a point of debate between the Republicans and the Democrats. The most significant strides toward equality came through education which was previously unavailable to the blacks. The growing division of whites and blacks became evident but it was always present.

Immediately following their emancipation the blacks of the South made an effort to take part in every thing kept for them in slavery. The freedman took active roles in politics and made their voices heard. The 14th Amendment gave the blacks citizenship and the 15th gave them suffrage. The people of the South, black and white, interacted on all levels of society and the freedman saw one of his most enfranchised times in American history. Yet these newfound freedom was not evenly distributed; some states made steady progress toward for equality, while others reached a plateau soon after the freedom was given.1

In an attempt to keep the system the way it had been many states enacted Black Codes which later became the Jim Crow Laws. These codes were the attempt of the wealthy bureaucrats of the South to protect their control of the government by attempting to re-establish slavery .2 Blacks had become the most active group in politics and those in power attempted to keep the balance of power as it was. Southern planters relied on a disciplined labor force in order to profit with their plantations and likewise needed this labor force to remain intact in order for their dominance in politics to remain.3 The interdependence between economic and political power in the South was a key issue throughout the Reconstruction.

Slavery, like all other great systems of wrong, is so strong that it could exist, not only without law, but even against law. Custom, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South. 4 Everything that was a part of the South was entwined in slavery, slavery made the South what it was. Both whites and blacks had been raised with the institution all around them and they knew no other way. The newly freed blacks looked to the poor white farmers as examples of how to led their life, for these farmers were not slaves and no longer were the blacks. The system of sharecropping grew out of this search for new identity, though it was a small step forward, for it emulated the system of slavery from which the blacks had just been freed. A family worked off the land and earned a third of the profit if using the landowners tools and animals or half the profit if supplying their own instruments.5

Northern men who came down to the rebuilding South with little more then their ambition to make a profit, these were the carpetbaggers. The Republicans saw the freedman as voters who could be used to keep their control of the government. These men came to the south to help the newly freed slave but often not for the good of the freedman, but for their own personal gain, financially and politically, and this became the stereotype. The political party of this group was Republican and any Republican already in the South became known as a scalawag. These stereotypes were used by the Democrats to take credit from the Republicans in the South, the Democrats saw the Reconstruction Acts unconstitutional and that those who have used these acts to gain power revolutionary.6 The Democrats used this issue to rally the people of the South against the Northern interest.

Southerners saw the influx of Northern business men as an attempt of the North to push their interest on to the South, much the same way the South viewed the North before the war. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan grew out of the unrest, speaking out for white supremacy which in turn would give the South the self reign it was seeking. This group grew out of the meetings of young men in Tennessee, but its actions were far from novel. The men felt they were performing a service to the public by terrorizing blacks in order to keep them in line.7 Violence and intimidation were the methods used by the Klan and similar groups in order to reestablish white supremacy in the South. The desire to regain this supremacy could be traced to the pre war feelings that the North was trying to impose its will on the South and the freedman were a vehicle for the North to achieve this goal.

The true embodiment of freedom is the ability to vote and take part in the government of one s country. The newly emancipated former slave may not have seen this as his goal, but they knew there was something missing in their freedom. If I can not do like a white man I am not free, 8 these are the words of a black man struggling to find what was lacking in his freedom. After the 15th Amendment passed the blacks flocked to take advantage of this new right. Unfortunately many of the former slaves were uneducated and illiterate and unable to fully partake in the democratic system. Many of the whites in the South saw this as evidence to the inferiority of the Africans as a people. This apparent inability to take part in voting was in fact due to the former slave owners keeping the blacks from receiving any kind of formal education.

These newly enfranchised blacks became eagerly sought out by the Republicans in order to gain influence in the South. Likewise the Democrats fed the notion that the carpetbaggers and scalawags were evil and should be driven out of the South. The republicans therefore pushed bills such as the Freedman s Bureau, Civil Rights Act, and the 13th-15th Amendments. The Democrats were the conservatives and had the majority of the white voters in the South, gaining support from ex-Confederates.

In the newly written constitutions the Southern states had to allow for public education. By allowing for free education to all the hope was to help educate and assimilate the former enslaved into the community. Still even this benevolent action was questioned as parents did not want the children of different colors interacting.9 Every where an observer looked there was evidence on the growing divide that was the color line. In trying to help the problem there still arises issues that seemingly will not be unheard.

The cleft between the colors came from the original migration of the two peoples. One group, the Europeans came seeking new wealth and freedom, and did so at the expense of the natives and other migrants. The second group, the Africans, were forced know nothing of where or why they were being taken. The Europeans felt themselves superior and always acted as such with total disregard to the humanity of the people it effects. Even those later seeking to help slaves and later freedman often did so for reasons of their own. In the end it comes down to people having the need to categorize and physical features are often the easiest to pick out.

Works Cited

Foner, Eric. (1988). Reconstruction America s Unfinished Revolution. New York: Harper and Row.

Franklin, John Hope. (1994). Reconstruction After the Civil War. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Current, Richard Nelson. (1988). Those Terrible Carpetbaggers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Douglass, Frederick. (N/A) Race & Ethnicity: Douglass: Reconstruction. Retrieved February 4, 2001. from the World Wide Web: http://eserver.org/race/reconstruction.html.

Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt . (N/A) The Freedman s Bureau. Retrieved February 4, 2001. from the World Wide Web: http://eserver.org/ freedmens-bureau.txt

Endnotes

1 Eric Foner, Reconstruction America s Unfinished Revolution, ed. Henery Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris (New York: Harper and Row, 1988) 118.

2 John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994) 49.

3 Eric Foner, Reconstruction America s Unfinished Revolution, ed. Henery Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris (New York: Harper and Row, 1988) 129.

4 Douglass, Frederick. (N/A) Race & Ethnicity: Douglass: Reconstruction. . Retrieved February 4, 2001. from the World Wide Web: http://eserver.org/race/reconstruction.html.

5 Eric Foner, Reconstruction America s Unfinished Revolution, ed. Henery Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris (New York: Harper and Row, 1988) 173.

6 Richard Nelson Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) 125.

7 John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994) 152.

8 Eric Foner, Reconstruction America s Unfinished Revolution, ed. Henery Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris (New York: Harper and Row, 1988) 78.

9 John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994) 109.