After Slavery

The ending of slavery did not automatically bestow full citizenship upon African Americans. Indeed, for nearly two years following the war, while President Andrew Johnson pursued a policy of leniency toward the white South, it appeared likely that ‘freedom’ could easily coexist with a whole range of laws and racial codes designed to uphold the color line and restrict blacks to menial labor. Even after the Radicals in the Republican Party managed to oust Johnson and uproot the state governments established under his administration, they faced an uphill battle in trying to inscribe into law the full equality that consistent friends of black freedom had long advocated. Some in the Republican ranks believed that the abolition of slavery concluded their obligation to the former slaves. Others worried that in pursuing full legal equality for freedpeople they might outrun northern white opinion and risk losing their electoral mandate. As a party, Republicans disagreed about the desirability and the timing of further measures aimed at securing racial equality.

There was another major obstacle to equality before the law, however. Even where Republicans could muster the unity of purpose and the resolve to follow through on legislative advances at the federal level, a substantial element of the southern white population was determined to block their implementation. Conservatives sometimes openly defied federal directives, but more often the contest between the old order and the new moved from the Senate floor or the Supreme Court in Washington to local courthouses, jails and polling stations, where the federal government’s ability to enforce the law was limited.

In both the Carolinas a kind of dual government existed at times, in which federal authorities—mainly Freedmen’s Bureau agents and military officials–governed with the formal support of the U. S. government, but where local conservatives did their best to hold on to key posts and to use these to uphold elite prerogatives and undermine black freedom. This antagonism within the ranks of state government reached an extreme in North Carolina, where Governor William W. Holden considered the state militia so deeply saturated by hostility toward blacks that he felt unable to send them out to suppress the Ku Klux Klan. General Daniel Sickles regarded the violence against blacks in interior South Carolina so pervasive, and so unlikely to be restrained by local authorities, that he replaced civilian courts with military proceedings and threatened planters that he would transport the entire black population of Barnwell and Edgefield counties out of the state unless violence against them ceased.

For freedpeople, of course, the contest over legal equality had never been a merely philosophical one. Its effects were often devastating, and personally felt–families could be forced to sacrifice a year’s crop at the whim of a local magistrate; discharged from employment and left homeless for exercising the right to vote; or compelled to languish in a filthy prison for an extended period on trivial charges. Thus they looked to the Republican governments to ensure that their rights were upheld and extended, and they organized, petitioned, and sometimes went on strike to claim their full rights as citizens of the United States. As had been the case during the war itself, throughout Reconstruction the link between grassroots activism and state and federal commitment to defending black citizenship was critical.

There was one further, and fundamental, complication that the Reconstruction state governments were themselves never prepared to face. Important as it was, the long and difficult struggle for formal legal equality could not overcome the vast disparities in wealth and education, landholding or economic and political power that marked southern society. Indeed late Reconstruction coincided with a period in American history where such basic inequalities seemed to be growing rather than abating, and we might question whether legal equality could make equal citizens of a population marked by glaring inequality in so many other respects.

Sources:
Document 1. N. C. Planter Denying Schoolchildren Use of the Public Roads
Document 2. Whites Reclaim an Edisto Church from Freedpeople
Document 3. Report on Conditions in a North Carolina Jail
Document 4. Charleston Protests against Streetcar Segregation
Document 5. Harassment of Freedpeople in the Vicinity of Wilmington
Document 6. Columbia Democrats Debate Black Suffrage
Document 7. Sawmill Operator Tries to Prevent Employees from Voting the Radical Ticket
Document 8. The Difficulty of Obtaining Justice from Local Authorities
Document 9. North Carolina Conservatives Attempt to Frame a Union League Official
Document 10. Freedpeople Petition for the Removal of a Trial Justice
Document 11. Black Workers Petition Governor Scott against Extortion