Reconstruction: Reunion, Labor, Community & Its Limits · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · What freedom was used for

The first thing people did was look for their families. Newspapers aimed at freedpeople carried thousands of advertisements through the 1870s and 1880s: a name, a last known owner, a place and a year of sale, sometimes thirty years earlier. Many were never answered, and reading a column of them is the most direct evidence of what the domestic slave trade had done.

The second was to make marriages legal. Slavery had recognised no marriage among the enslaved, and Union chaplains and Freedmen's Bureau agents registered them by the tens of thousands in 1865 and 1866, often couples who had considered themselves married for decades.

The third was schools. Freedpeople built and paid for schools before any government offered them, and by 1870 something like 4,000 were operating across the South with around 250,000 pupils. Northern missionary societies sent teachers, many of them Black women, and the colleges founded in these years -- Fisk in 1866, Howard in 1867, Hampton in 1868 among them -- are still running.

The fourth was churches of their own. Congregations that had sat in the galleries of white churches walked out and founded their own, which then served as the schoolhouse, the meeting hall and the political organisation. When the violence came in the 1870s, churches and schoolhouses were burned first, which tells you what they were understood to be.

Part 2 · Land, promised and taken back

In January 1865 General Sherman issued Special Field Order 15, setting aside a strip of coastal land from Charleston to Florida for freed families in plots of up to forty acres; the army lent out surplus mules. About 40,000 people settled roughly 400,000 acres under it.

That autumn Johnson revoked it. The land was restored to its former owners and the families on it were given a choice between signing labour contracts with the people who had held them in slavery or being removed by the army. Some had to be removed at gunpoint.

The decision mattered more than any other made in these years. Everywhere else slavery ended in the nineteenth century the freed people were landless, and the result was almost always a return to working someone else's land on someone else's terms. Thaddeus Stevens argued in Congress for breaking up the largest plantations and distributing them, and lost, because a Congress that had just abolished property in people was not willing to confiscate property in land.

The Freedmen's Bureau, created in March 1865, was given the job instead: distribute food, run hospitals and schools, supervise labour contracts, and adjudicate disputes. It did real work -- it issued around 21 million rations and ran the school system described above -- with a staff never larger than about 900 agents for the entire South, which is one agent for several thousand people.

Part 3 · Black Codes and the congressional answer

Mississippi passed the first Black Code in November 1865 and the others copied it. Freedpeople had to produce written proof of employment each January; leaving before the contract ended forfeited the year's wages; anyone without a contract could be arrested for vagrancy, fined, and hired out to pay the fine. Courts could apprentice Black children to employers, with the former enslaver given first refusal.

The codes were slavery's working arrangements rewritten as labour law, and they were enacted in public with numbered sections, which is why they are such useful evidence. Congress read them and concluded that Johnson's plan had restored the old order under a new name.

The answer came in stages. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 made everyone born in the United States a citizen with equal rights to contract, sue and own property; Johnson vetoed it and Congress overrode him, the first time in American history that a major bill became law over a presidential veto. The Fourteenth Amendment followed, to put the same guarantee beyond a later Congress.

The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 went further: the ten unreconstructed states were placed under military districts and required to write new constitutions with Black male suffrage and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before readmission. Johnson obstructed, Congress impeached him in 1868, and the Senate acquitted him by a single vote.

Part 4 · Officeholding, overthrow, and the crop

Between 1867 and 1877 roughly 2,000 Black men held public office in the South: sheriffs, judges, legislators, sixteen members of Congress, and two United States senators from Mississippi, Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce. South Carolina's lower house had a Black majority from 1868. These governments built the South's first public school systems and its first public hospitals, and taxed land to pay for them.

The reaction was organised violence. The Ku Klux Klan began in 1866 and spread as a paramilitary wing of the Democratic Party, attacking officeholders, teachers and voters; at Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873, a white militia killed scores of Black men after they had surrendered. Federal enforcement acts in 1870 and 1871 broke the Klan for a few years, and nothing broke what came after it.

The end was political. After the disputed presidential election of 1876, the settlement that made Rutherford Hayes president withdrew the remaining federal troops from the South in 1877. The state governments fell one by one to men who called the process redemption, and Black voting was suppressed first by violence and then, from the 1890s, by poll taxes and literacy tests written to be applied selectively.

Underneath the politics sat the economics. Sharecropping emerged as the compromise nobody chose: the landowner supplied land, tools and seed; the family worked it and handed over a third to a half of the crop; the merchant advanced food and supplies on credit at interest rates often above 50 per cent, secured against the crop. A bad year meant a debt carried into the next one, and the law in most states made leaving while in debt a crime. By 1880 about three quarters of Black farmers in the South were sharecroppers or tenants.

Poor white farmers were caught in the same arrangement in large numbers, which is worth saying plainly because it cuts against the way the period is often summarised. Sharecropping was a system for extracting a crop from whoever had no land, and by the 1890s roughly a third of southern white farmers were in it too. That shared position is exactly what the Populist movement briefly tried to organise, and exactly what the politics of racial division was deployed to prevent.