checked by the defeat of their attempt to impeach Johnson, with
the appearance of moderates who refused to back the measure. Th
e
Republican Party recovered in 1868 by endorsing General Ulysses
S. Grant, the hugely popular Union commander, as its candidate in
the presidential election. Th
ough this ensured a Republican victory,
it gave the White House to a man who lacked political experience
and judgment, surrounded himself with mediocrities, and failed to
include a single Southern Republican in his cabinet. However, as a
military commander Grant had at least learned how fi ckle, short-
sighted, and cowardly was the “public opinion” manufactured by the
newspapers.
President Grant lent his backing to a Republican strategy of
restoring some of the sanctions on former Confederate offi
cials
and obliging the reconstructed states to give freedmen the vote
as the price of reentry into the Union. For a while the Radical
Republicans could still infl uence Grant, but they failed to register
that the revolution in the South was generating its own counterrev-
olution and could only be sustained by strong and constant support
from Washington, and by a far-reaching mobilization of those who
supported the new order in the South.
Reconstruction set out to make freedom and equality more
tangible, and for a while it succeeded in curbing white terror
and promoting black representation and equality. Congressional
Reconstruction had given the vote to the freedmen, and the result
was to be Republican majorities in the occupied states and the
election of some 600 black legislators and offi
cials throughout
the occupied South. By itself this was an extraordinary develop-
ment. African Americans now sat in the Senate and House of
Representatives in Washington as well as in the state assemblies.
97
In Louisiana attempts had been made to segregate public space
and means of transport. Th
e state’s 1868 Constitutional Convention
asserted the novel concept of “public rights,” which would give equal
access to public space. Th
e Constitution’s Bill of Rights declared
that all citizens of the state should enjoy “the same civil, political,
and public rights and privileges, and be subject to the same pains
and penalties.” Th
e concept of public rights was clarifi ed by a pro-
97 Foner,
Reconstruction, pp. 351–63.
64 an unfinished revolution
hibition of racial discrimination on public transport and in places of
public resort or accommodation. Rebecca Scott, quoting the docu-
ment, contrasts this clear requirement with the “oblique language”
of the Fourteenth Amendment.
98
Many abolitionists and Radical Republicans believed that the
suppression of slavery was not enough and that the freedmen
deserved at least free education, and preferably land and the vote
as well. In this situation it was important that some Union Leagues
were responsive to abolitionist appeals and that a convention of
150 colored men from 17 states met in Syracuse, New York, in
October 1864. Th
e Syracuse convention and subsequent gather-
ings in Charleston and New Orleans framed a broad program for
equal civic and political rights. Many of the participants in these
events were already free before the war. Th
ey articulated the aspira-
tions of colored communities in Louisiana, South Carolina, and
Tennessee—areas occupied by Unionist forces long before the fi nal
collapse. Th
eir leaders argued that black soldiers had earned citizen-
ship by helping to save the Union. Th
ey also paid their taxes, and
therefore deserved representation. At Syracuse, Charleston, and
elsewhere the call was not simply for rights in the abstract but for
tangible expressions of a new status—the right to vote and serve on
juries—and a Homestead Act for the South that would give land to
the freedmen. A “Declaration of Rights and Wrongs,” adopted at
both Syracuse and Charleston, warned that passing measures favo-
rable to the freedmen would be a hollow mockery if planters were
still free to intimidate and dragoon them.
99
Th
e Reconstruction administrations were elected by precarious
majorities, achieved by the votes of black men, and also by reach-
ing out to whites who had never owned slaves or supported the
Secession, or who had found the Confederacy a nightmare. Th
e
Freedmen’s Bureau, established in 1865, was wound up in 1870.
Radical Republicans and abolitionists were too inclined to believe
that once slavery had been struck down a new regime of wages
98 Rebecca
Scott,
Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery,
Cambridge, MA, 2005, pp. 43–5.
99 Steven
Hahn,
A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the
Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, Cambridge, MA, 2003,
pp. 103–5.
introduction 65
and “free labor” would automatically follow. Many freedmen and
women devoted more time to cultivating tiny plots that they rented
or claimed as squatters. Th
ough some entered into agreements with
the planters, who still owned the best land, their new employers
complained that the freed people thought that they could withdraw
their labor whenever convenient or demand higher pay just when
the harvest had to be brought in. An early recovery of the Southern
economy was not sustained because of a credit famine. Merchants
were only willing to advance credit for staple production, leading
to shortfalls in the production of subsistence crops. Th
e plantation
economy went into decline, with many landowners in the cotton
belt off ering sharecropping arrangements to the freedmen. In some
cases the sharecropper would be the tenant of a piece of land, some
of which could be used for subsistence production. But to begin
with it was more common for the sharecropper to work on a plant-
er’s land for a modest wage and the promise of further pay once the
crop was sold. Th
us the sharecropper bore the risk of a poor market
on his own shoulders, and this was not the end of his problems.
Tenants and sharecroppers often needed to borrow money, and they
became indebted to store owners, who would charge them high
rates of interest on loans as well as high prices for merchandise.
Th
ese arrangements narrowed the scope of the Southern market,
fostered stagnation and decline, and caused economic pain to white
farmers as well as black laborers and tenants.
100
With Union soldiers on call, the freedmen voted in new offi
cials
and sent black representatives and senators to Washington. Th
e
Reconstruction administrations also fostered a variety of social pro-
grams. Th
ese regimes, lasting from four to ten years, were innovative.
As Eric Foner explains, they sought to introduce social institutions
that the old slave-state authorities had neglected: “Public schools,
hospitals, penitentiaries, and asylums for orphans and the insane
were established for the fi rst time or received increased funding.
South Carolina funded medical care for poor citizens, and Alabama
100 Th
e postbellum miseries of the freed people are trenchantly explored
by Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch in One Kind of Freedom: the Economic
Consequences of Emancipation, second ed., Cambridge 2001, especially
pp. 244–53.
66 an unfinished revolution
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