US Reconstruction Era
The United States spent twelve years after 1865 attempting to rebuild the South on the basis of Black citizenship and then abandoned it. The war had freed four million people with no land, no money and no legal standing, and the immediate southern response was the Black Codes of 1865 — vagrancy laws, apprenticeship laws and labour contracts designed to reproduce plantation labour without the word slavery. Congress took the policy away from President Johnson, who was obstructing it, and passed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments guaranteeing citizenship, equal protection and the vote, divided the South into military districts, and required new constitutions. What followed was remarkable and is largely absent from popular memory. Some 2,000 Black men held public office, including sixteen in Congress and two senators from Mississippi; the southern states got their first public school systems, hospitals and orphanages; and Black voters registered in large numbers. The response was organised violence. The Ku Klux Klan and its successors murdered officeholders, teachers and voters, and the Colfax massacre of 1873 killed perhaps 150 people. Federal enforcement worked when it was applied and was applied less each year, as northern opinion tired, the Supreme Court narrowed the amendments, and the depression of 1873 changed the subject. The disputed election of 1876 was settled by withdrawing the last troops. What replaced Reconstruction was disenfranchisement and segregation, and it lasted until the 1960s. Du Bois wrote that the slave was freed, stood in the sun, and moved back again towards slavery.
- Year: 1865 CE
- Category: Political
