Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Identify the political achievements of African Americans during the era of Reconstruction
- Explain how former slaves’ lives both improved and failed to improve during the era of Reconstruction
While the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments greatly complicated white women’s quest for political equality, they promised to usher in a new era of freedom for the men, women, and children who had been enslaved across the South. But would the passage of new laws and the revision of the Constitution be enough to protect the rights of the newly emancipated? As Radical Republicans worked to enact their legislative agenda in Washington, D.C., a new reality was taking shape on the ground in the South. Laws could only go so far in shaping this reality, particularly if they weren’t enforced. For their parts, former slaves embraced all that emancipation had to offer, from the freedom to reunite with lost loved ones to the chance to get an education.
BLACK POLITICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
The First Vote, by Alfred R. Waud, appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1867. The Fifteenth Amendment gave black men the right to vote for the first time.
For black men, the right to vote seemed poised to achieve what Lincoln had characterized as “a new birth of freedom.” Freedmen across the South enthusiastically joined in the political process, often by founding their own Union Leagues. Started by northern Republicans to promote loyalty to the Union during the war, Union Leagues expanded into the South after the war and were transformed into political clubs that served both political and civic functions. As centers of the black communities in the South, African American leagues became vehicles for the dissemination of information, acted as mediators between members of the black community and the white establishment, and served other practical functions like helping to build schools and churches for the community they served. As extensions of the Republican Party, these leagues worked to enroll newly enfranchised black voters, campaign for candidates, and generally help the party win elections.
The political activities of the leagues launched a great many African Americans and former slaves into politics throughout the South. For the first time, blacks began to hold political office, and several were elected to the U.S. Congress. In the 1870s, fifteen members of the House of Representatives and two senators were black. The two senators, Blanche K. Bruce and Hiram Revels, were both from Mississippi, the home state of former U.S. senator and later Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Hiram Revels, was a freeborn man from North Carolina who rose to prominence as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and then as a Mississippi state senator in 1869. The following year he was elected by the state legislature to fill one of Mississippi’s two U.S. Senate seats, which had been vacant since the war. His arrival in Washington, DC, drew intense interest: as the New York Times noted, when “the colored Senator from Mississippi, was sworn in and admitted to his seat this afternoon . . . there was not an inch of standing or sitting room in the galleries, so densely were they packed. . . . When the Vice-President uttered the words, ‘The Senator elect will now advance and take the oath,’ a pin might have been heard drop.”
Sen. Hiram R. Revels of Mississippi
Senator Revels on Segregated Schools in Washington, DC
Hiram R. Revels served as a preacher throughout the Midwest before settling in Mississippi in 1866. When he was elected by the Mississippi state legislature in 1870, he became the country’s first African American senator. In 1871, he gave the following speech about Washington’s segregated schools before Congress.
Will establishing such [desegregated] schools as I am now advocating in this District harm our white friends? . . . By some it is contended that if we establish mixed schools here a great insult will be given to the white citizens, and that the white schools will be seriously damaged. . . . When I was on a lecturing tour in the state of Ohio . . . [o]ne of the leading gentlemen connected with the schools in that town came to see me. . . . He asked me, “Have you been to New England, where they have mixed schools?” I replied, “I have sir.” “Well,” said he, “please tell me this: does not social equality result from mixed schools?” “No, sir; very far from it,” I responded. “Why,” said he, “how can it be otherwise?” I replied, “I will tell you how it can be otherwise, and how it is otherwise. Go to the schools and you see there white children and colored children seated side by side, studying their lessons, standing side by side and reciting their lessons, and perhaps in walking to school they may walk together; but that is the last of it. The white children go to their homes; the colored children go to theirs; and on the Lord’s day you will see those colored children in colored churches, and the white family, you will see the white children there, and the colored children at entertainments given by persons of their color.” I aver, sir, that mixed schools are very far from bringing about social equality.”
According to Senator Revels’s speech, what is “social equality” and why is it important to the issue of desegregated schools? Does Revels favor social equality or social segregation? Did social equality exist in the United States in 1871?
Though the fact of their presence was dramatic and important, as the New York Times description above demonstrates, the few African American representatives and senators who served in Congress during Reconstruction represented only a tiny fraction of the many hundreds, possibly thousands, of blacks who served in a great number of capacities at the local and state levels. The South during the early 1870s brimmed with freed slaves and freeborn blacks serving as school board commissioners, county commissioners, clerks of court, board of education and city council members, justices of the peace, constables, coroners, magistrates, sheriffs, auditors, and registrars. This wave of local African American political activity contributed to and was accompanied by a new concern for the poor and disadvantaged in the South. The southern Republican leadership did away with the hated black codes, undid the work of white supremacists, and worked to reduce obstacles confronting freed people.
Reconstruction governments invested in infrastructure, paying special attention to the rehabilitation of the southern railroads. They set up public education systems that enrolled both white and black students. They established or increased funding for hospitals, orphanages, and asylums for the insane. In some states, the state and local governments provided the poor with basic necessities like firewood and even bread.
BUILDING FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES
After emancipation, many fathers who had been sold from their families as slaves—a circumstance illustrated in the engraving above, which shows a male slave forced to leave his wife and children—set out to find those lost families and rebuild their lives.
Some of the most profound changes that came with emancipation were those affecting the basics of life, from the ability to freely move about to the opportunity to live together with loved ones. Understanding these new realities requires an understanding of what life was like as an enslaved person in the prewar South. Slave marriages were not recognized under the laws of the Old South. So, although enslaved men and women could and did marry, they did so without any legal protections. The system empowered white masters to separate spouses at whim, and brutalize and impregnate the women they owned. Enslaved men had no authority to protect or defend their wives. Nor could enslaved parents protect their children, who could be bought, sold, put to work, beaten, and abused without their consent. Parents, too, could be sold away from their children. Additionally, the division of labor idealized in white southern society, in which men worked the land and women performed the role of domestic caretaker, was null and void where slaves were concerned. Both enslaved men and women were made to perform hard labor in the fields.
With emancipation, former slaves could enjoy the bonds of love and family that had been so difficult to maintain while they were the property of others. Many thousands of freed blacks who had been separated from their families as slaves took to the road to find their long-lost spouses and children and renew their bonds. In one instance, a journalist reported having interviewed a freed slave who traveled over six hundred miles on foot in search of the family that was taken from him while in bondage. Couples that had been spared separation quickly set out to legalize their marriages, often by way of the Freedmen’s Bureau, now that this option was available. Many women took pride in maintaining their own families’ households (rather than their masters’), and sought other ways of helping to support their families beyond regular work in the fields. Men and women who had no families would sometimes relocate to southern towns and cities, so as to be part of the larger black community where schools, churches, and other mutual aid societies offered help and camaraderie.
Freed people placed a great emphasis on education for their children and themselves. The ability to finally read the Bible for themselves induced many work-weary men and women to spend all evening or Sunday attending night school or Sunday school classes. It was not uncommon to find a one-room school with more than fifty students ranging in age from three to eighty. As Booker T. Washington famously described the situation, “it was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn.”[1]
One of the more marked transformations that took place after emancipation was the proliferation of independent black churches and church associations, many of which also operated schools. In the 1930s, nearly 40 percent of 663 black churches surveyed had their organizational roots in the post-emancipation era.[2] Many independent black churches emerged in the rural areas, and most of them had never been affiliated with white churches. Liberated from white-controlled churches, black Americans remade their religious worlds according to their own social and spiritual desires.[3]
Black churches provided centralized leadership and organization in post-emancipation communities. Many political leaders and officeholders were ministers. Churches were often the largest building in town and served as community centers. Groups like the Union League, militias, and fraternal organizations all used the regalia, ritual, and even hymns of churches to inform and shape their practice.
THE RISE OF THE SHARECROPPING SYSTEM
Most freed people stayed in the South on the lands where their families and loved ones had worked for generations as slaves. They hungered to own and farm their own lands instead of the lands of white plantation owners. In one case, former slaves on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina initially had hopes of owning the land they had worked for many decades after General Sherman directed that freed people be granted title to plots of forty acres.
The Freedmen’s Bureau provided additional cause for such hopes by directing that leases and titles to lands in the South be made available to former slaves. However, these efforts ran afoul of President Johnson. In 1865, he ordered the return of land to white landowners, a setback for those freed people, such as those on the South Carolina Sea Islands, who had begun to cultivate the land as their own. Ultimately, there was no redistribution of land in the South. The last ember of hope for land redistribution was extinguished when the Radical Republicans’ proposed land reform bills were tabled in Congress. Radicalism had its limits, and the Republican Party’s commitment to economic stability eclipsed their interest in racial justice.
Without realistic hope of owning land anytime soon, for most freed slaves emancipation meant the transition to wage labor. This conversion usually did not entail a new era of economic independence. Although they no longer faced forced labor under the lash, working for wages still subjected freed slaves to the whims of white supervisors. Many preferred to rent land, in hopes of gaining more control over their earnings and daily work life. But tenancy came with its own challenges. Slaves had emerged from bondage without any money and needed farm implements, food, and other basic necessities to start their new lives. Under the crop-lien system, store owners extended them credit based upon the promise that they would pay with a portion of their future harvest. In essence, the freed slaves used their future crops as collateral. However, the store owners charged high interest rates, making it even harder for freed people to get ahead. Store owners also commonly charged higher prices for goods purchased on credit as opposed to cash.
These are the circumstances under which the sharecropping system took root. Sharecropping functioned as a crop-lien system that worked to the advantage of landowners. Under the system, freed people rented the land they worked, often on the same plantations where they had been slaves. Some landless whites also became sharecroppers. Sharecroppers paid their landlords with the crops they grew, often as much as half their harvest. Sharecropping favored the landlords and ensured that freed people could not attain independent livelihoods. The year-to-year leases meant no incentive existed to substantially improve the land, and high interest payments siphoned additional money away from the farmers. Sharecroppers often became trapped in a never-ending cycle of debt, unable to buy their own land and unable to stop working for their creditor because of what they owed. The consequences of sharecropping affected the entire South for many generations, severely limiting economic development and ensuring that the South remained an agricultural backwater.
Section Summary
Following the end of the Civil War, former slaves looked to the future with both joy and uncertainty. The Reconstruction Era brought many positive changes for African Americans in the South, not the least of which was the opportunity to participate in the political process and serve in public office. A number of African Americans were elected to positions in local, state, and even national levels of government. While in office, they and other Republicans enacted a number of reforms that assisted blacks. One of the most glorious parts of freedom, however, was the opportunity to reunite with lost loved ones and establish family households. Schools and churches became the center of black community life and built bonds of mutual support among black neighbors. Such bonds were important in the midst of economic hardship. Unable to purchase land, most former slaves ended up sharecropping the land of wealthy whites who rigged the system to keep blacks from getting ahead.
Review Question
- Why was it difficult for southern free blacks to gain economic independence after the Civil War?
Answer to Review Question
- Southern blacks emerged from slavery with no money to begin their new lives, so they had to rely on the crop-lien and sharecropping systems. These systems enabled freed people to get tools and rent land to farm, but the high interest rate (paid in harvested crops) made it difficult for them to rise out of poverty.
- Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (New York: Doubleday, 1900), 30, as quoted in The American Yawp, http://www.americanyawp.com. ↵
- Benjamin Mays and Joseph Nicholson, The Negro’s Church (New York: Russell and Russell, 1933), 29–30, as referenced in The American Yawp, http://www.americanyawp.com. ↵
- Henry H. Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings: The Long-Hidden Realities of the First Years (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 141–174, as referenced in The American Yawp, http://www.americanyawp.com. ↵