DBQ Essay One
In the years following the Civil War, an undertaking to rebuild and reunite the South, known today as Reconstruction, was begun. It failed miserably, though there were short-lived successes. Among the few successes were the passing of the black right to vote, as well as the black right to citizenship. However, these uplifts were forced back down by a surge of racist and Confederate feeling and action. When Reconstruction ended, it left in its wake a feeling of utter failure.
When the Civil War ended, except for a proud few brigades in the West, the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps of the Confederate States of America disbanded. Released from their terms of service, the men of the South returned home to an image of destruction. In the Shenandoah Valley, General Phillip T Sheridan had done his best to burn, bash, and blow up everything within the reach of his corps. In Georgia, General William Tecumseh Sherman had marched his army to the sea in a wide column, sixty miles wide at the head, and had destroyed everything in his path. Vicksburg, ravaged by the siege guns of General Ulysses Grant himself, was not what it was. Fredericksburg, shelled to pieces by General Ambrose Burnside in an attempt to suppress the rebel riflemen who picked off and slaughtered his engineers, was in ruins. The forts under the control of the Confederacy in wartime were now held and occupied by Union forces, who, before wresting them from the defenders, had blasted them from afar with mortars and cannon. It was a sorry sight to meet the eyes of an already defeated and embarrassed fighting force. With they set eyes on their ruined homes, the seeds of rebellion were sown again.
But this was a new rebellion, one rooted not in open hostility and formal warfare, but a guerilla war fought against Union policy, not their troops. In July 1865, already this new mindset was visible. “They are meaning to get rid of this damned military despotism…They have a rope ready for this and that Union man when the Yankee bayonets are gone…They will deal largely in tar and feathers.” wrote one German American observer of the South. (A) He wrote also of the already beginning assassination spree of the retired Confederate soldiers, mentioning that “They have been in the country and visited this and that place where a fine business is done in the way of killing Negroes.” And in two Southern states, before midyear 1866, “Black” Codes were drafted, passed, and put into effect. In reality, these Black Codes were a continuity on the Slave Codes of prewar America. They affected such aspects of black life as voting, and labor, preventing them from voting through relatively high poll taxes, and keeping them under white masters by means of laws forcing them to remain in service through the end of their contracts, and adding on more time for days they took sick. (B) The Democratic Party, made up mostly of former Confederates and current racists, began reestablishing control over the South. It did not take much doing, as even before the war the Democrats had been against black rights and the abolition movement. Before the dawn of the 1870s, the state governments of both Virginia and Tennessee were both firmly under Democrat control. And in the two years following, 1870 and 1871, Georgia and North Carolina reentered the fold. (H) In the North, in the Legislative Branch, this new rebellion did not go unnoticed. Thaddeus Stevens, then a member of the House of Representatives, was outraged, and made a speech about conditions in the South, and spoke of a new Amendment, Number Fourteen. “Unless the Constitution should restrain them those States will all, I fear, keep up this discrimination and crush to death the hated freedmen…And I need hardly say that the first time that the South and their copperhead allies obtain the command of Congress it will be repealed.” (C) Stevens knew his was a fragile bill, one that if subjected to a Democratic power in Congress, would crumble and die.
The newspapers were not blind to the growing darkness in the South either. Political cartoonists, both Northern and Southern, seized on the opportunity to stab at the so-called “Reconstruction”. One Northern cartoonist, drawing an image of a family of blacks cringing beneath the shaking hands of an ex-Confederate White League member and a Ku Klux Klan ghost, elicited a horrifying image. Beneath the crossed hands were embossed the words “WORSE THAN SLAVERY”. (E) By this he meant that the blacks were worse off now, free and under the hawkeyed gaze of the racist South, than when they had been slaves. And in smaller letters, he wrote “THE UNION AS IT WAS, THE LOST CAUSE”. His depiction of the utter failure of Reconstruction was cutting in its blunt and brutal honesty. A Southern cartoonist, when presented with the idea of the Freedman's Bureau, must have laughed. It was too easy. He scratched with his iron pen a picture of a lazing, laughing black man, his clothes torn and loose, his face contorted, and his eyes gleaming up at the White House. At his feet, a white man chopped lumber for him. Above him, above the White House, a banner-style type described the proposed bill as a ruse to “keep the NEGRO in idleness at the EXPENSE of the white man. Twice vetoed by the PRESIDENT, and made a law by CONGRESS.” (D)
Feeble attempts to enforce Reconstruction were easily circumnavigated by crafty Southern lawmakers and blunt white average Joes. The “separate but equal” law was a joke. This law required facilities for both white and black users, and they had to be identical. But there was a loophole; the inspectors of the facilities were whites. Southern whites. This meant that despite all the legal drabble issued from Congress and the House, a simple job requirement (racism) made it all pointless. Soon, black facilities were in poor condition, kept in working condition and not much else. Black water fountains were simple affairs, a pipe running up a hollow tube that widened at the top and also had a drain. White watering fountains often had coolers attached, filters, and other useful additions. Laws requiring the right to vote be allowed to blacks were canceled out by literacy tests and poll taxes. Martial governments forbade discrimination of blacks, but by means of simple disguises, the Ku Klux Klan evaded punishment, and by mere assent of the masses, the identities of members of the White League were kept secret. When laws were passed requiring that blacks be given a normal trial, the whites gave in. They allowed blacks into their courts, and then straight into jail or worse. The juries were white.
When Reconstruction ended in 1877, all pretense of fairness vanished. The Klan roamed free, even parading on the streets of Washington DC. Blacks were trapped beneath the heel of the white South, and even in the North, they were often looked on with disdain. Reconstruction had tried to accomplish the impossible, and all too predictably, had failed.
