Reconstruction Era: Hostile Road to Recovery

The reconstruction era was the period that followed the American Civil War and during which attempts were made to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social, and economic legacy and to solve the problems arising from the readmission to the Union of the 11 states that had seceded at or before the outbreak of war. Reconstruction witnessed far-reaching changes in America’s political life. At the national level, new laws and constitutional amendments permanently altered the federal system and the definition of American citizenship. In the South, a politically mobilized Black community joined with white allies to bring the Republican Party to power, and with it a redefinition of the responsibilities of government.

     

    Reconstruction was a hostile era following the Civil War, it was the first attempt to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed people into the United States. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive “black codes” to control the labor and behavior of former enslaved people and other African Americans. Outrage in the North over these codes eroded support for the approach known as Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical wing of the Republican Party. During Radical Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, newly enfranchised Black people gained a voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces–including the Ku Klux Klan–would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South.

    

    Although the Civil War ended the official establishment of slavery, slavery still continued through the reconstruction era. Several newly freed slaves chose to stay on the plantation and continue to work, as these were places that they would be provided food and homes. This form of slavery ulimately evloved into what we know today as sharecropping. Sharecropping also became many people only as many states like South Carolina required large fees up to $100 if any African Americans had an occupation outside of farmer or servant.

   

     Under Johnson’s Reconstruction policies, nearly all the southern states would enacted their own black codes between 1865 and 1866. While the codes granted certain freedoms to African Americans,including the right to buy and own property, marry, make contracts and testify in court (only in cases involving people of their own race),their primary purpose was to restrict blacks’ labor and activity.

    

    Some states limited the type of property that blacks could own, while virtually all the former Confederate states passed strict vagrancy and labor contract laws, as well as so-called “anti-enticement” measures designed to punish anyone who offered higher wages to a black laborer already under contract.

Blacks who broke labor contracts were subject to arrest, beating and forced labor, and apprenticeship laws forced many minors (either orphans or those whose parents were deemed unable to support them by a judge) into unpaid labor for white planters.

Passed by a political system in which blacks effectively had no voice, the black codes were enforced by all-white police and state militia forces,often made up of Confederate veterans of the Civil War, across the South.