Things You Didnt Know About Reconstruction

A photo collected past W.Due east.B. DuBois shows shows African Americans in a woodworking shop at Claflin University, in Orangeburg, South.C, shortly after Reconstruction ended. (West.E. B. Dubois/Westward.Due east.B. Dubois/Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division)

The Us is entering the sesquicentennial of Reconstruction, that menses after the Ceremonious War when African Americans briefly enjoyed full civil and political rights. African Americans — 200,000 of them — had fought in that war, which made it hard to deny them equal rights. Unlike with the 150th anniversary of the Civil State of war, however, few historic places tell us what happened during Reconstruction. They could: Every plantation home had a Reconstruction history, often fascinating, but these manors remain frozen in time around 1859. They tell a tale of elegance and ability, and Reconstruction was the era when that power was challenged. Moreover, it is even so true, as W.Due east.B. Du Bois put information technology in "Blackness Reconstruction" 80 years ago, that "ane cannot study Reconstruction without beginning frankly facing the facts of universal lying." Here are v common fallacies that Americans still tell themselves nearly this formative period.

1. Reconstruction was a failure.

This view came to dominate public thinking from 1890 until about 1940, when world events and the Corking Migration began to reshape the state's perception of race and racism. During this period, known by historians every bit the nadir of race relations, white Americans became in­cred­ibly racist. Communities across the North became "sundown towns" that banned African Americans (and sometimes Jews and others) after dark. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, every Southern land instituted literacy tests and poll taxes to effectively remove African Americans from the citizenship they were supposed to have been guaranteed by the 14th Subpoena . Reconstruction was portrayed during this era equally a terrible time, peculiarly for whites but really for everyone, a failure of a government propped upwards only past federal bayonets. "No people were ever so cruelly subjected to the rule of ignorant, vicious and criminal classes as were the southern people in the awful days of reconstruction," the New Orleans Times-Picayune proclaimed in 1901.

Some people today fifty-fifty retrieve that Reconstruction was an attempt to physically rebuild the South, rather than to assist its political reentry into the Marriage. In 2013, for case, the Smithsonian American Art Museum mounted a huge exhibit, "The Civil State of war and American Fine art." "Reconstruction," the museum claimed, "began every bit a well-intended effort to repair the obvious damage across the South as each land reentered the Spousal relationship." The curator said that the rebuilding "shortly faltered, beset by corrupt politicians, well-meaning just inept administrations, speculators, and very little centralized management."

On the contrary, former Confederates saw Reconstruction as a problem precisely considering information technology was succeeding. New Republican country administrations passed popular measures such every bit homestead exemption laws that abated taxes on residences, making it harder for people to lose their homes. They also repaired roads and bridges and built new schools and hospitals. Soon, Republicans were drawing 20 pct and fifty-fifty 40 percent of the white vote and most all the blackness vote. Democrats grew desperate. After abortive attempts to win blackness votes, they resorted to intimidation and violence. These tactics were central to the restoration of white Democratic rule beyond the South by 1877. And thus Reconstruction ended, simply not because it failed.

2. African Americans took over the South during Reconstruction.

The official Mississippi history textbook used in the ninth course across the land in the 1960s flatly declared Reconstruction a period of "Carpetbag and Negro Rule." This propaganda was effective: When I asked a seminar of black freshmen at Tougaloo College almost Jackson, Miss., in 1969 what happened during Reconstruction, xvi of the 17 students said blacks took over the governments of the Southern states, merely because they were too before long out of slavery, they messed up, and whites had to take control again. In 1979, after I moved to Vermont, I was stunned to hear the minister of the largest Unitarian Church there repeat the aforementioned summary in a sermon.

This declared black authority supposedly made Reconstruction a time of terror and travail for white Southerners. The Mississippi history textbook put it baldly: "Reconstruction was a worse boxing than the war ever was. Slavery was gone, only the Negro trouble was not gone." Fear of "black domination" is still pervasive amid white supremacists ; annotation Dylann Roof's statement to black churchgoers in Charleston, South.C., every bit he shot them: "You lot are taking over our country."

But in fact, the terror and travail during Reconstruction happened by and large to African Americans and their white Republican allies. In Louisiana in the summer and fall of 1868, white Democrats killed 1,081 people, mostly African Americans and white Republicans. Effectually the same fourth dimension in Hinds County, Miss., whites killed an boilerplate of one African American a day, specially targeting servicemen. Whites mounted like attacks across the South.

Far from suffering nether blackness authorisation, all of the Southern states had white governors throughout Reconstruction. All just one (South Carolina) had white legislative majorities. Mississippi's Ramble Convention of 1868 is still called the "Black and Tan Convention," but only 16 of its 94 delegates were black. Of grade, a government that is 17 pct blackness looks "blackness" to people used to the all-white governments before and later on.

3. Northerners used Reconstruction to have advantage of the South and get rich.

Many Americans however learn this canard, epitomized by the term "carpetbaggers."

The story — as exemplified in the 2011 edition of the textbook "The American Journey" — is that fortune-hunters from the Northward "arrived with all their belongings in cheap suitcases made of carpet fabric." Penniless, they would and so make information technology rich off the prostrate South. John F. Kennedy said in his Pulitzer Prize-winning volume "Profiles in Courage," "No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi."

The first clue that this view might be far-fetched comes from the fact that the economies of about Southern states were in ruins. Fortune-seekers will go where the money is, and information technology was not in the postwar South. Instead, immigrants from the N were mostly of 4 types: missionaries bringing Christianity (and often literacy) to newly freed people; teachers eager to help black children and adults acquire to read, write and cipher; Union soldiers and seamen who were stationed in Mississippi and liked the identify or savage in love; and would-exist political leaders, black and white, determined to brand interracial government piece of work.

4. Republicans "waved the bloody shirt" to hide their lack of substantive policies.

"Waving the encarmine shirt" has come to mean trying to win votes through demagoguery — blaming opponents for things they didn't do or did long ago. Its outset use of this sort refers to Republicans blaming Democrats for the carnage of the Ceremonious State of war years afterward it ended. Kennedy made this claim in "Profiles in Courage," writing that "Republican leaders . . . believed that only by waving the bloody shirt could they maintain their back up in the N and East, specially among the Grand Army of the Republic." In his 2005 biography of Republican politician John A. Logan, Gary Ecelbarger accuses Logan of "waving the bloody shirt" offset in 1866 and "for decades to come."

Really, the bloody shirt was a real shirt, owned by a white Republican, A.P. Huggins. He was superintendent of the Monroe County Public Schools, a majority-blackness schoolhouse system in Aberdeen, Miss., and took his task seriously. White supremacist Democrats warned him to go out the state, but he refused. On a March evening in 1870, they went to his home, rousted him from bed in his nightshirt and whipped him almost to expiry. His encarmine shirt was taken to Washington every bit proof of Democratic terrorism against Republicans in the Southward.

The violence decried happened during Reconstruction, not the Civil War, so it was not anachronistic. Nor was information technology demagogic to use the phrase (or wave the shirt); violence at Southern polls posed a existent issue — indeed, the virtually important issue in the United States at the time.

5. Republicans gave upwards on black rights in 1877.

Every textbook says the Compromise of 1877 meant that "the federal authorities would no longer try to . . . assistance Southern African Americans," to quote "The American Journey." "Violence was averted past sacrificing the black freedmen in the South," according to some other textbook, "The American Pageant."

Republicans did eventually abandon civil rights, but non right after the Compromise of 1877 effectively ended Reconstruction. Until 1890, African Americans still voted across Dixie. In his inaugural address in 1881, Republican President James A. Garfield said: "The acme of the Negro race from slavery to the total rights of citizenship is the almost of import political change nosotros have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. No thoughtful homo can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our institutions and people. . . . And so far as my authority can lawfully extend they shall enjoy the full and equal protection of the Constitution and the laws."

As late as 1890, Republicans in Congress almost passed the Federal Elections Deed, which might have given some force to the 15th Amendment's voting rights provisions. President Benjamin Harrison had argued for such a measure the previous year . After the act failed to pass, Democrats, every bit was their custom, tarred Republicans every bit "a bunch of n----- lovers." In the by, Republicans replied that what white supremacists did to black voters in the S was an outrage, but now they were silent, choosing to move on to other issues.

After that, each succeeding Republican president was worse on ceremonious rights than his predecessor. With the nomination of Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, the GOP switched sides entirely, appealing now to conservative white Southerners. They accept been its core constituency e'er since.

Today, we have a black president, merely in some ways, we all the same have not surpassed the level of interracial cooperation we attained during Reconstruction. On Aug. 3, 1870, for example, A.T. Morgan, a white state senator from Yazoo City, Miss., married Carrie V. Highgate, a black teacher from New York, in Mississippi, and connected winning elections. In the N, non a unmarried suburb of Chicago kept out African Americans in 1870. Today, Kenilworth, Ill., its richest and most prestigious, has non a single black household, in keeping with its founder's decree dorsum in 1889. Today, Republicans go far harder for African Americans (and students and poor people) to vote, just as Democrats did after 1890, albeit on a smaller scale.

The tragedy of Reconstruction is not that information technology failed but that its successes were curtailed and then afterward reversed. Correcting the myths well-nigh this era will aid us as we try to build better race relations today.

Twitter: @JamesWLoewen

V myths is a weekly feature challenging everything you lot think you lot know. You lot tin check out previous myths, read more from Outlook or follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-reconstruction/2016/01/21/0719b324-bfc5-11e5-83d4-42e3bceea902_story.html

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