This wasn’t an isolated act of barbarity. And it didn’t happen in the antebellum South. Mr. and Mrs. Holbert were free American citizens who were tortured and murdered in 1904, four decades after the end of the Civil War and just a year before one of my grandfathers was born. Apart from the couple, nobody who participated was held accountable.
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The failures of Reconstruction, the period that immediately followed the Civil War, are legion, but our country’s profound issues around race reach much further back, to a time when the idea of race, and by extension racial division, was constructed in order to justify the enslavement and subjugation of Blacks. The postwar climate of leniency toward the treasonous leaders of the Confederacy, the lack of vigilance in protecting freed Black men and women, and the backsliding toward the ethos of the prewar South aren’t at all surprising, but the implications of these things continue to affect all of us to this day, and help to explain not only why we continue to be so divided but why we hate each other so much.
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Reconstruction started with great promise. The Union had been saved and more than four million people were granted their freedom via the Thirteenth Amendment, which was ratified in December 1865. Although the question of slavery in the South had been resolved, Southern society would need to rebuild without the institution that had been the foundation of its economy and culture for centuries. The questions of how North and South would resolve their still-intense differences and how the newly freed men and women would be integrated into a society that had exploited and excluded them for almost 250 years remained to be answered.
Although now free, millions of Blacks emerged from their bondage destitute and without any appreciable means of support. Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, issued eleven months after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, contained language that did not bode well for the promise of an integrated democracy. Although it required Southern states to abolish slavery, they were permitted to deal with Blacks in a way “consistent … with their present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class.” This paternalistic and degrading language implied not only that the enslaved were better off in the care of their “masters” and destined to be laborers (in this context, plantation workers), but more troublingly it suggested that the U.S. government viewed freedmen and freedwomen as having no rights to the wealth they had produced, which had enriched North and South alike.
Many Republicans, at the time the pro-abolition party, believed that the only way to ensure a smooth transition from slavery to freedom, and ensure freedmen and freedwomen’s rightful place in society as citizens, was targeted and sustained assistance. Toward this end, the Freedmen’s Bureau was established in March 1865. Its mandate included providing food, fuel, and other kinds of aid, establishing schools, moderating disputes between whites and Blacks, introducing a system of free labor, and ensuring equal justice. General William Tecumseh Sherman, in a letter to the Bureau’s commissioner, General Oliver Howard, wrote, “I fear you have Hercules’ task.” Giving Southern Blacks access to land was also seen as an essential part of its mandate. George Julian, a white congressman from Indiana and a fierce advocate of abolition, insisted that without land reform, speculators would reduce freedmen (as well as poor whites) to a situation “more galling than slavery itself.”
Early in 1865, General Sherman was encouraged by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to meet with twenty leaders of the Savannah, Georgia, Black community. When Garrison Frazer, one of those leaders, was asked at the meeting to define freedom and describe the manner in which he believed freedmen and freedwomen could sustain themselves, he said, “The freedom … is taking us from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, take care of ourselves and assist the Government in maintaining our freedom. The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor—that is, by the labor of the women and children and old men.”
Four days after this meeting, Sherman issued Special Field Order 15 and ordered that four hundred thousand acres of coastline from Charleston, South Carolina, south to Florida near Jacksonville be confiscated and divided into forty-acre plots. Brigadier General Rufus Saxton, the Bureau chief for South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, settled thousands of Black people on these lands, and the Bureau commissioner, General Howard, followed suit, issuing an order of his own in July that as many freedmen and freedwomen be settled on these lands as quickly as possible.
But the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, a mere four days after General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate army, surrendered to the Union army, threw the fate of Reconstruction into serious doubt before it had even begun. Radical Republicans—anti-slavery and pro-suffrage—were in control of Congress, but Democrat Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, was a former enslaver whose sympathies lay with the conquered South.
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Despite the hardships of destitution, dislocations, and hostility, Blacks in the South began the complex and difficult work of building communities and making strides in three major areas—education, religion, and politics. As much as 80 percent of the Black population was illiterate at war’s end because Black literacy had been considered a threat to white dominance by the planter class. Before the Civil War, learning how to read and write was almost universally prohibited by enslavers, and any attempts to do so were severely punished. Even plantation owners who sought to teach the enslaved were heavily fined. This hostility also enforced the condition of dependence. As John W. Fields, who had been enslaved since birth, said, “Our ignorance was the greatest hold the South had on us.”
General Howard shared Southern Blacks’ views on the importance of education for advancing their interests, and overseeing schools was an important mission for the overstretched agency. Congress, however, had been ambivalent about the necessity of the Bureau in the first place and conflicted about its mission, so although the Bureau could oversee schools, it was not provided with the funds necessary to establish them.
Before the war, there had barely been a system of public education in the South. The children of rich whites went to private schools and the rest had to fend for themselves. The push among freed Blacks for state-funded education benefited all children, and by the end of Reconstruction over six hundred thousand Black children were attending Black schools. Similarly, the membership of Black Baptist churches swelled to 1.3 million by the 1880s.
Freedmen and freedwomen knew, however, that the single most important task for sustaining and extending their gains as citizens was to secure suffrage for all Black males. With the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, the franchise was extended and a dynamic political culture was formed in Black communities. Very quickly, strides were made to get Black men elected at all levels of government, and as many as two thousand succeeded.
In 1870, Hiram Revels was chosen by the Mississippi state legislature to fill the Senate seat vacated by Albert Brown when the state seceded from the Union. Revels was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of 48–8 to serve the remaining year of the term. Upon his confirmation, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner said, “All men are created equal, says the great Declaration, and now a great act attests this verity. Today we make the Declaration a reality.… The Declaration was only half established by Independence. The greatest duty remained behind. In assuring the equal rights of all we complete the work.”
Four years later, Blanche Bruce, also from Mississippi, was elected and became in 1875 the first Black American senator to serve a full term. Although the momentousness of these achievements cannot be denied, neither can the fact that it would be another ninety-two years before another Black American served in the United States Senate, which shows just how fleeting the promise of Reconstruction really was. (To date, there have still been only eleven Black senators total in the more than 150 years since Hiram Revels’s election.)
One early problem in the
transition from war to Reconstruction was that Lincoln never put a plan in place. He was interested in maintaining party unity and public support, particularly on the issue of Black suffrage, but he was also concerned that he not be seen as dictating to the South. Without swift and decisive action, questions that had been plaguing the country since its inception remained unsettled and carried the risk of hardening attitudes on both sides. Many people despaired that the question—namely, “What shall we do with the Negro?”—could be resolved at all.
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And then there was the problem of the president who presided over the first years of Reconstruction. Before the war, Andrew Johnson had enslaved nine people, and before the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation went into effect he persuaded Lincoln to exempt Tennessee, his home state, from the provision to free its enslaved people.
Less than a month after taking office, Johnson began issuing pardons to white Southerners who “directly or indirectly participated in the existing rebellion.” Blacks were not invited to participate in the drafting of new Southern state constitutions. Instead of requiring the former Confederacy to grant even limited voting rights to Blacks, as Lincoln had been inclined to do, Johnson left the issue up to individual states. The move prompted Representative Thaddeus Stevens to say, “If we leave free Black people to the legislation of their late masters, we had better left them in bondage.” By 1866 the number of pardons Johnson had issued had increased to seven thousand.
Worse, he overturned the orders issued by General Sherman and the Freedmen’s Bureau that had distributed land to freedmen, effectively evicting Black families from land that had been explicitly set aside for them and returning it to the men who had committed treason for the purposes of enslaving the very people they were once again going to displace. Of the nearly five million Black Americans who lived in the South—90 percent of the entire Black population in the United States—in 1870 only thirty thousand, or 1 percent, owned land—a damning indictment of Johnson’s reversal.
It was in the context of these maneuvers that Congress, still missing representatives from the majority of Southern states, passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, granting Black Americans full citizenship. Johnson vetoed the bill, saying it discriminated “in favor of the Negro, to whom, after long years of bondage, the avenues to freedom and intelligence have just now been suddenly opened. He must of necessity, from his previous unfortunate condition of servitude, be less informed as to the nature and character of institutions” than even foreigners immigrating to the United States.
Congress overrode the veto with a two-thirds majority in both chambers, but this was a crucial moment, and Johnson’s rhetoric mattered. The North may have technically won the war, but the country was still at a crossroads and he had the power to sway opinion. He was making it increasingly clear which side he was on.
In the meantime, the Bureau’s ability to fulfill its mission was severely hampered at every turn. Not surprisingly, there was a pressing need for doctors to treat freedmen and freedwomen. A medical division was created under the auspices of the Bureau and forty hospitals were set up across the South, but only 120 doctors were assigned to staff them. After requests for additional equipment and personnel were ignored, all forty were closed.
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From the beginning, the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to Reconstruction included a failure to anticipate the enormity of the project of healing the rift between North and South, and integrating freedmen and freedwomen into a society that had so recently held them as chattel. Many, perhaps most, Northerners were not terribly concerned about the fate of Blacks beyond emancipation. As one Northern Republican put it, “[I have a] precious poor opinion of niggers … a still poorer one of slavery.” This attitude was not uncommon, which increasingly became evident as Reconstruction wore on. In a prescient statement, Charles Reason, a Black American educator, said, “The prejudice now felt against [freedmen] for bearing on their own persons the brand of slaves cannot die out immediately.”
Failure to gauge not only the scope of the social and economic task at hand but also how deeply entrenched such attitudes had been in the psyches of white people for generations explains why they prevailed. As historian Eric Foner notes, much policy at the time reflected this ambivalence and was also exemplified by the framing of two problems facing the Bureau by an army officer in July 1865: “Two evils against which the Bureau had to contend were cruelty on the part of the employer and shirking on the part of the Negroes.”
In the end, “shirking on the part of the Negro” was deemed to be the greater evil, an ugly stereotype of the “lazy Black” that failed to take into account that such “shirking,” if it even existed, was likely related to freed people’s resentment at being forced to work for their former captors. Yet the Bureau seemed to consider Black reluctance to labor the greater threat to its economic mission. To the very end of Reconstruction, Blacks would insist that those who freed them should protect that freedom.
Another major concern of white legislators was that assistance to Blacks would lead to dependence. As Sea Island teacher William C. Gannett put it, “Thrown upon themselves the speedier will be their salvation.” In keeping with a pseudoscientific trope that had been peddled for decades—that Blacks had weak lungs and needed to be forced to perform hard labor in order to strengthen them—work was deemed better medicine than medical care.
After the war, many white elected leaders on both sides worked to diminish Black political power. In his 1867 State of the Union address, President Andrew Johnson said:
If anything can be proved by known facts, if all reasoning upon evidence is not abandoned, it must be acknowledged that in the progress of nations Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism. In the Southern States, however, Congress has undertaken to confer upon them the privilege of the ballot. Just released from slavery, it may be doubted whether as a class they know more than their ancestors how to organize and regulate civil society.
Johnson came down squarely on the anti-suffrage side of the argument time and again. His comments in the 1868 State of the Union are even worse:
The attempt to place the white population under the domination of persons of color in the South has impaired, if not destroyed, the kindly relations that had previously existed between them: and mutual distrust has engendered a feeling of animosity which leading in some instances to collision and bloodshed, has prevented that cooperation between the two races so essential to the success of industrial enterprise in the Southern States.
This was an egregious misrepresentation of both history and the political moment, but coming from the president who was supposed to be overseeing Reconstruction and protecting the freed status of Black people, it was a terrible blow to the morale of those who favored giving Black men the vote. As Frederick Douglass wrote, “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.”
Johnson’s words also gave a boost to the Union’s former enemies, who seemed determined to reestablish the old labor order. Through words and deeds from 1865 on, Andrew Johnson seemed inclined not only to allow but to encourage the reestablishment of the South’s planter class and its adherence to white supremacy.
The North’s attitudes toward Reconstruction and Southern Blacks constituted a willful misreading of the division between Southern whites and Blacks, and failed to acknowledge the total culpability of former enslavers or defenders of slavery. This failure to lay blame squarely where it belonged and instead to pander to the perpetrators of the crimes rather than stand up for the victims was succeeded by the lack of will to compensate freedmen and freedwomen appropriately. It made possible a horrifying reversion to an antebellum system of exploitation of coerced labor and the continuance of white supremacy.
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How do you convey the horrors of something like the Middle Passage? Words fail, the imagination fails. No visual or pictorial rendering could possibly get across the inhumane conditions, the suffocating stench, the unbearable sounds of human agony, the limitless darkness, the loss of dignity and hope endured (or not) by the twelve million kidnapped Africans who were forced into the cramped, airless holds of slave ships and chained together for weeks, often months, at a time.
So extreme were the conditions that 16 percent—almost two million—of those who were forced to take the journey died on the way.
Twenty percent of the population of colonial America consisted of enslaved people. New York was the slave capital of the colonies for one hundred and fifty years. Over time the colonial economy, particularly in the South, became more and more dependent on the labor of the enslaved. This dependence created the need for more enslaved laborers, and with it the need to justify not only the barbaric practice but the savagery that was used to maintain it.
Slavery in the colonies started out as a form of indentured servitude, which, as a result of the increasing economic imperative, became a unique institution. As soon as survivors of the Middle Passage arrived in North America, the process of “seasoning” began, and they were stripped of their language, their culture, their religion, anything that tied them to their home and their sense of identity. The enslaved were marked out by their race, their status became permanent and heritable (a child born to an enslaved parent would also be enslaved, and so on through the generations), and they were deemed chattel—property to be traded, used as collateral, or disposed of at the owner’s will.
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