1.3 The Radical Experiment in the South, 1865–1872

The southern Republican Party was an uneasy coalition of three distinct groups. African Americans formed the largest group of the Republican rank and file. In five southern states blacks constituted a majority of registered voters in 1867; in three others they accounted for nearly half. The number of African Americans who held office during Reconstruction never reflected their share of the electorate. No state elected a black governor; only a few selected black judges. In only one state—South Carolina—did blacks have a majority in the legislature. But blacks did win a number of important political positions throughout the South. Over six hundred blacks, many of them former slaves, served in state legislatures during Republican rule, and sixteen African Americans served in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1870 Mississippi’s Hiram Revels became the first African American member of the U.S. Senate.

African Americans also found more informal ways to engage in politics and support the Republican Party. Churches and congregations, mixing spiritual and secular messages, served as places to discuss and debate political issues. In many parts of the South, African Americans joined the Union League to further the cause of Reconstruction. Founded in Ohio in 1862 to build support for the war, the Union League followed the federal army as it swept through the South, educating newly enfranchised blacks about the “duties of American citizenship.” Although only men could join the Union League, women often participated in public rallies and meetings.

A second group of Republicans included a diverse lot whom critics called “carpetbaggers,” Northerners who supposedly came South seeking political office and influence, with all their belongings packed into a single carpet-covered traveling bag. In fact, carpetbaggers included northern businessmen, former Freedmen Bureau agents who had invested money in the region, and Union army veterans who stayed in the South after the war. They made up only a sixth of the delegates to the state conventions, but carpetbaggers held more than half the Republican governorships in the South and almost half its seats in Congress.

The third group consisted of white southerners who resented the planter elite and believed that Republican policies would favor them over the wealthy landowners. They included southern Unionists, small-town merchants, and rural farmers. Democrats called them “scalawags,” an ancient Scots-Irish term for small, worthless animals. To Democrats, a scalawag was “the local leper of the community,” even more hated than the carpetbagger. “We can appreciate a man who lived north, and even fought against us,” declared a former North Carolina governor, “but a traitor to his own home cannot be trusted or respected.”

It was a fragile coalition. Class differences divided the business-minded carpetbaggers and poor scalawags. With a more limited vision of state power, scalawags opposed high taxes to fund the reformist social programs endorsed by carpetbaggers. But race remained the issue with the greatest potential for shattering the Republican coalition in the South. Black demands for political rights and economic independence clashed with the deeply held racial attitudes of most scalawags. “Our people are more radical against rebels than in favor of negroes,” declared a scalawag leader.

Although fragile, the coalition of southern Republicans had a profound impact on public life in the South. Under Republican rule, all the southern states rejoined the Union between 1868 and 1871. In states where the Republican coalition remained unified—South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida—Reconstruction governments remained in power for as many as nine years. In other states, such as Virginia, they ruled for only a few months.        

Republicans hoped to remake southern society in the free-labor image of the North. The new Republican regimes expanded democracy. They repealed Black Codes, modernized state constitutions, extended the right to vote, and made more offices elective. The “fundamental theme” of the South Carolina constitution was “a raceless and classless democracy.” Reconstruction administrations guaranteed the political and civil rights of African American men. They could now serve on juries and school boards, hold public office, and work as police officers. A South Carolina law levied a fine of $1,000 or a year’s imprisonment for owners of businesses that practiced discrimination.

Believing that education was the foundation for a democracy, many Republican governments established their states’ first public school systems. An 1869 Louisiana law prescribed universal free schooling “without distinction of race, color, or previous condition.” In practice, however, whites stayed away from schools that admitted blacks. When the Reconstruction government forced the University of South Carolina to admit African Americans in 1873, nearly all whites withdrew. Few African Americans objected to the segregation. For now, they agreed with the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who accepted that separate schools were “infinitely superior” to no schools at all.

African Americans eagerly embraced the expanded educational opportunities. Throughout the South, African Americans raised money to build schoolhouses and pay teachers. A Mississippi farmer vowed, “If I never does do nothing more, I shall give my children a chance to go to school, for I consider education next best thing to liberty.” By 1869 the Freedmen’s Bureau was supervising nearly three thousand schools serving over 150,000 students throughout the South. Over half the roughly 3,300 teachers in these schools were African Americans. Between 1865 and 1867 northern philanthropists founded Howard, Atlanta, Fisk, Morehouse, and other black universities in the South.

In most cases, however, the efforts to improve education were overwhelmed by crowded facilities and limited resources. Often African American and poor white children had to skip school so they could help their families by working in the fields. Between 1865 and 1870 only 5 percent of black children in Georgia attended school regularly; for whites, the figure was 20 percent.

The new Republican governments embarked on ambitious programs to rebuild and expand the South’s war-ravaged infrastructure. They paved new roads and subsidized manufacturing. Believing that transportation was the key to southern industrial development, Republicans poured enormous energy into rebuilding and expanding the region’s railroad system. Between 1868 and 1872 the South added over 3,000 new miles of track. State governments also spent more money than ever before on public institutions such as orphanages and asylums.

Paying for the rebuilding effort proved troublesome. Like their northern counterparts, southern states used general property taxes to pay for the expanded services. By levying taxes on personal property as well as real estate, the states hoped to force wealthy planters to bear much of the burden. But despite higher taxes, spending outpaced revenues, producing large deficits. Between 1868 and 1872 the deficits of Louisiana and South Carolina almost doubled, and between 1868 and 1874 that of Alabama tripled.

Corruption compounded the revenue problem. In South Carolina, for example, the state maintained a restaurant and barroom for the legislators at a cost of $125,000 for one session. White southerners pounced on the stories of corruption in Republican governments, claiming it proved that blacks were incapable of self-government. Southern black officials were no more corrupt than their white counterparts, and the Democratic urban machines in the North probably stole more public money than the Republican regimes in the South. Southern critics ignored the evidence because they were not really concerned with corruption. What they objected to was African Americans gaining and exercising political power.

A black Baptist minister, Henry M. Turner, stressed that freedom meant the enjoyment of “our rights in common with other men.” The newly freed slaves sought countless ways to challenge the authority whites had exercised over their lives. Freedmen acquired belongings—dogs, guns, and liquor—that had been forbidden under slavery, and they abandoned the old expressions of humility—tipping a hat, stepping aside, casting eyes low. They dressed as they pleased. As slaves, they often had no surnames. Freedom provided the opportunity to assume the last name of a prominent person. Free to travel for the first time, many former slaves packed their meager belongings and left the plantation.

For many, freedom provided the cherished opportunity to reunite with family members. “In their eyes,” wrote a Freedmen’s Bureau agent, “the work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited.” Parents reunited with each other and with children who had been taken in by planters and overseers. Thousands of African American couples who had lived together under slavery flocked to churches to have their relationships sanctioned by marriage. By 1870 the majority of African Americans lived in two-parent families.

Freedom changed gender relations within the black family. Slavery had imposed a rough equality on men and women: both were forced to work long hours in the fields. But freedom allowed them to define separate spheres. Initially, men continued to work in the fields, while many women wanted to stay home and attend to the family. Some wives, however, asserted their independence by opening individual bank accounts, refusing to pay off their husbands’ debts, and filing complaints of abuse. In most cases, though, economic necessity ended the hopes of independence or domesticity by forcing women back into the fields. According to Frances Harper, a free black woman from Baltimore, women “do double duty, a man’s share in the field, and a woman’s part at home. They do any kind of field work, even ploughing, and at home the cooking, washing, milking, and gardening.”

African Americans pooled their resources to buy land and build their own churches. During slavery, southern Protestant churches had relegated blacks to second-class status, forcing them to sit in the back rows and preventing them from participating in many church functions. By 1877 the great majority of black southerners had withdrawn from white-dominated congregations and founded, then filled, their own churches. The new churches, and the ministers who led them, played key roles in the social, political, and religious lives of the parishioners (see Figure 1.5).

For many African Americans, economic independence was the most powerful expression of freedom. “All I want is to get to own four or five acres of land, that I can build me a little house on and call my home,” a Mississippi black said. Without large-scale redistribution of land, however, few former slaves realized their dream of landownership. Instead, they were forced to hire out as farm laborers. At first, most freedmen signed contracts with white landowners and worked in gangs, laboring long hours under white supervisors much as they had in slavery (see Figure 1.6). The desire to gain a degree of autonomy led many freed people to abandon the contract labor system in favor of tenant farming. As a South Carolina freedman put it, “If a man got to go cross the river, and he can’t get a boat, he take a log. If I can’t own the land, I’ll hire or lease land, but I won’t contract.”

The most widely used form of tenant farming was known as sharecropping.  Under this scheme, former plantation owners subdivided their land into farms of 30 to 50 acres, which they leased to workers. The tenants were given seed, fertilizer, farm implements, and food and clothing to take care of their families and grow a cash crop, usually cotton. In return, the landlord took a share of the crop (hence “sharecropping”) at harvest time. While thousands of poor white farmers became sharecroppers, the vast majority were black. At first, freed people were enthusiastic about sharecropping. The system provided workers with a sense of freedom, and many saw it as a first step toward independence.

Rather than being a step toward independence, however, sharecropping trapped many African Americans in a new system of labor that was neither slave nor free. Because of a chronic shortage of capital and banking institutions, sharecroppers turned to local merchants, who developed the crop-lien system. Under this system, the merchants, who were often also the landowners, provided loans to sharecroppers and tenant farmers in exchange for liens, or claims, on the year’s cotton crop. As the only available creditors, merchants and planters could charge exorbitant interest rates and mark up prices. “It’s owed before it’s growed,” complained many tenant farmers. With half their crop owed to the landowner and half, or often more, owed to the merchant, sharecroppers fell into debt they could not escape. Those who sought better conditions elsewhere found few options. Migrating north was not feasible; most northern businessmen refused to hire black workers. Some southern blacks fled west, including thousands who migrated to Kansas in the 1860s to escape southern “oppression and bondage.” Most freedmen searching for better lives remained in the South, migrating to new cities or plantations, but rarely improving their lot.

A black laborer described his unenviable condition: “I signed a contract—that is, I made my mark for one year. The Captain was to give me $3.50 a week, and furnish me a little house on the plantation. . . .” A year later, he found himself in debt to the planter, so he signed another contract, this one for ten years. During this time, he was “compelled” to buy his food, clothing, and other supplies from the plantation store. At the end of his contract, he tried to leave the plantation but was told he owed $165 and consequently found himself reduced to a “lifetime slave.”