Reconstruction, 1860-1880

Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War
1 January 1863 Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation decreeing that the nation's slave population of over 3 million "are and henceforth shall be free." This excluded 450,000 slaves in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri (border slave states that remained within the Union); 275,000 in Union-occupied Tennessee; and tens of thousands more in portions of Louisiana and Virginia under the control of federal armies. Nevertheless, next to the war, the freeing of the slaves represented the greatest uncompensated revolutionary seizure of property (that is, slaves) in world history prior to the Soviet revolution!

Freedman's Bureau
Congress created the 1863 Freedman's Bureau (its full title was Bureau for Refugees, Freedman, and Abandoned Lands), which was placed within the War Department without an independent budget. The job of the bureau was to assist the emancipated slaves by distributing clothing, food, and fuel to destitute "freedmen," as ex-slaves were called. For ex-slaves, land distribution of the former plantations seemed a logical consequence of emancipation. The Bureau employed a maximum of 900 agents in the entire South. In South Carolina, one agent we responsible for 40,000 freedmen! By 1865, the Bureau controlled 850,000 acres of abandoned land in every Southern state except Alabama, Florida, and Texas, hardly enough to accommodate all the ex-slaves. Freedmen were to receive 40 acres of abandoned or confiscated land at nominal rents or they were given the option to buy the land for a fairly appraised price. Blacks had to occupy the land to gain it; whites had to occupy the land to retain it. Thus, virtually all the land in Bureau hands, as well as that which Sherman had distributed, was returned to former owners! The restoration of land required the displacement of tens of thousands of freedmen throughout the South, and the army evicted freedmen who did not voluntarily leave their newly occupied homes! Optional: read a detailed account of the long struggle of Black farmers -- Anuradha Mittal with Joan Powell on "The Last Plantation" in Food First, Winter 2000, Vol 6, No. 1.

During the Reconstruction era, Congress passed the

• first Confiscation Act, 1861: authorized Union seizure of rebel property, and all slaves who fought with or worked for the Confederate military services were freed of further obligations to their masters.

• second Confiscation Act, 1862: said that the slaves of civilian and military Confederate officials "[would] be forever free" but it was enforceable only in areas of the South occupied by Union troops.

• Captured and Abandoned Property Acts, 1863 and 1864: let the federal government seize property of absent individuals who supported the South.
  During Reconstruction, vast tracts of land fell into the hands of state governments for non-payment of taxes--in Mississippi over 6 million acres alone (20% of the entire state). Despite state laws requiring that these lands be sold to small-scale farmers, almost none were. In Mississippi, for example, 95 percent of the forfeited lands eventually found their way back to their original owners. After Lincoln's assassination, Vice President Andrew Johnson became president, and he promptly granted amnesties and pardons to participants in the rebellion, thereby restoring their land to them. Major Confederate officials and owners of taxable property values of more than $20,000 were required to apply individually for presidential pardons. By 1886 President Johnson restored the economic and political hegemony of the prewar elite. Cotton constituted nearly all the Southern nonslave property that was confiscated. With the 13th amendment, slaveholders lost an estimated $2 billion of human property.
  Only slaveholding Indians who had sided with the Confederacy had to provide land to their former slaves!

• Southern Homestead Act, 1866: gave whites loyal to the Union and blacks preference for public lands in the South until 1867.

Charleston
On 15 January 1865, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 setting aside the Sea Islands and a portion of the low country rice coast of Charleston, extending 30 miles inland, for the exclusive settlement by blacks. Each family received 40 acres, and later Sherman authorized the army to assist these settlers with the loan of mules--hence, the phrase, "40 acres and a mule." Over 40,000 freedmen settled 400,000 acres in coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Although almost all these freedmen were ultimately removed by the U.S. army from these lands, rural settlement changed forever.
See what happened to the rural settlement patterns as sharecropping took hold.

After New Orleans, the South's largest and wealthiest community of free blacks resided in Charleston, although it was neither as rich nor as culturally distinct as its Louisiana counterpart. Before the Civil War, none of the free blacks owned much property. They spoke English and worshipped in Protestant churches. Again the lighter-colored blacks had their separate society, called the Brown Fellowship Society, which excluded men with dark skins.

Urban patterns
Before the Civil War, blacks and whites lived scattered throughout Southern cities.
With Reconstruction came spatially segregated Southern cities:

• whites occupied the finer houses in the inner cities and

• blacks lived in poverty and squalor on the outskirts of cities, called "free town" or what whites called "Liberia."
  After Reconstruction, white racists used terror, largely in the form of lynchings, to control blacks.
  From 1882 to 1964, the Tuskegee Institute/University recorded 4,752 lynchings--nearly all of them occurred in the South and nearly all the victims were blacks. Indeed, sometimes lynchings were occasions for parades and picnics, as depicted in the film Rosewood, which takes place in Florida.

Churches
With emancipation, the wholesale withdrawal of blacks from biracial congregations redrew the religious map of the South.
The independent black churches emerged because

• whites refused blacks an equal place within the congregations (e.g., separate pews, no part of church government) and

• blacks engaged in a quest for self-determination.

In 1862, 42,000 black Methodists worshiped in biracial South Carolina churches; by 1877, only 600 blacks remained.

• Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1963-1877. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988.

• W.E.B. Du Bois, black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: Athenaeum, 1983 (originally published in 1935).

• Charles Joyner. Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984.

• Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name. Doubleday, 2008. Slavery did not end in the United States with the
  Emancipation Proclamation in 1862; it continued for another 80 years, in the form of  "neo-slavery."

Also read Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.