SEC. 5. That no person shall be a grand or petit juror in any court of the United States upon any inquiry, hearing, or trial of any suit, proceeding, or prosecution based upon or arising under the provisions of this act who shall, in the judgment of the court, be in complicity with any such combination or conspiracy; and every such juror shall, before entering upon any such inquiry, hearing, or trial, take and subscribe an oath in open court that he has never, directly or indirectly, counselled, advised, or voluntarily aided any such combination or conspiracy; and each and every person who shall take this oath, and shall therein swear falsely, shall be guilty of perjury, and shall be subject to the pains and penalties declared against that crime, and the first section of the act entitled “An act defining additional causes of challenge and prescribing an additional oath for grand and petit jurors in the United States courts,” approved June seventeenth, eighteen hundred and sixty-two, be, and the same is hereby, repealed.
SEC. 6. That any person or persons, having knowledge that any of the wrongs conspired to be done and mentioned in the second section of this act are about to be committed, and having power to prevent or aid in preventing the same, shall neglect or refuse so to do, and such wrongful act shall be committed, such person or persons shall be liable to the person injured, or his legal representatives, for all damages caused by any such wrongful act which such first-named person or persons by reasonable diligence could have prevented; and such damages may be recovered in an action on the case in the proper circuit court of the United States, and any number of persons guilty of such wrongful neglect or refusal may be joined as defendants in such action: Provided, That such action shall be commenced within one year after such cause of action shall have accrued; and if the death of any person shall be caused by any such wrongful act and neglect, the legal representatives of such deceased person shall have such action therefor, and may recover not exceeding five thousand dollars damages therein, for the benefit of the widow of such deceased person, if any there be, or if there be no widow, for the benefit of the next of kin of such deceased person.
SEC. 7. That nothing herein contained shall be construed to supersede or repeal any former act or law except so far as the same may be repugnant thereto; and any offences heretofore committed against the tenor of any former act shall be prosecuted, and any proceeding already commenced for the prosecution thereof shall be continued and completed, the same as if this act had not been passed, except so far as the provisions of this act may go to sustain and validate such proceedings.
PART IV
RECONSTRUCTION’S END AND LEGACY
Historians usually identify 1877, the year when the last federal troops left the South, as the official end of Reconstruction. However, interest in Reconstruction, especially concern for and a commitment to black freedom, began to wane for most Northerners even before the mid-1870s. Journalist Nicholas Lemann states correctly that even though the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 had made ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment a precondition for readmission to the Union, “it required the presence of the U.S. Army in the South to give the Fourteenth Amendment the force of law. As soon as the federal government stopped using troops as enforcers, in the mid-eighteen-seventies, the Southern states ignored the Fourteenth Amendment, and continued to do so for nearly a century.”36
In May 1872, Congress passed the General Amnesty Act, removing political disabilities imposed by section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. A month later, it abolished the Freedmen’s Bureau. In July 1874, the Freedman’s Savings Bank, established to provide the freedpeople with basic banking facilities and to promote saving money, shut its doors. The Panic of 1873 and local concerns, not the rights of African-American Southerners, preoccupied most Northerners. To a significant degree, by the early 1870s, Americans had lost interest in Reconstruction. They tried to put the Civil War behind them and look forward.
The burning embers of sectionalism and race hatred, however, remained dimly lit during Reconstruction. Racial violence ran through the Reconstruction era like a leitmotif, peaking during the 1870s when race riots at Meridian, Mississippi (1871), Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Vicksburg, Mississippi (1874), New Orleans and Coushatta, Louisiana (1874), Yazoo City and Clinton, Mississippi (1875), and Hamburg and Ellenton, South Carolina (1876), marred the Southern landscape. The Enforcement Acts had proven insufficient to protect the freedpeople from whites determined to retain racial control over them.
For years Radical Republican senator Charles Sumner had attempted to push through Congress a federal statute protecting the civil rights of blacks, specifically the granting of equal access to public facilities to persons of all races. Following Sumner’s death in March 1874, his bill found champions in Senator Frederick T. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey and Massachusetts representative Benjamin F. Butler. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 finally came to pass in February of that year. This last major piece of Reconstruction era legislation aimed to protect the freedpeople in public venues. It mandated nondiscriminatory accommodations in inns, public conveyances, and theaters, prohibited jury discrimination based on race, and declared all racial discrimination cases the purview of the federal courts. The bill was one of the most controversial Congressional bills of its day because, its critics asserted, it legislated social equality. After less than a decade, in 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the equal-accommodations sections of the 1875 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional. In its decision in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the court held that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments regulated state, not private, actions and further denied that discrimination in public settings stemmed from slavery. Congress, the court insisted, held power to correct instances of state discrimination after they had occurred, but had no mandate to prevent such actions from occurring. In his famous lone dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan (1833–1911) argued that the freedpeople continued to suffer from the “badges of slavery and servitude” and that Congress had fashioned the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to eradicate discrimination in private and public contexts.
With all branches of the federal government increasingly uninterested in the plight of the freedpeople, white Southerners in the 1870s and afterward looked for ways to construct an economic modus operandi with Northern capitalists, all the while retaining racial control at home. Though blacks acquired capital, formed communities, continued to vote, and held seats in state and local governments until late in the century, whites contrived to fashion new forms of controlling them.37 These included, according to Foner, “exclusion from juries, severe punishment for trifling crimes, the continued apprenticeship of their children against parental wishes, and a general inability to obtain justice.”38 In spite of the Fifteenth Amendment, white Southerners found ways to discourage blacks from voting by implementing residency requirements, discriminatory poll taxes, literacy tests, and so-called Grandfather clauses. When these tactics fell short, whites employed brute force.
The economic collapse of 1873, the loss of Republican interest in and support for remaking the South, the continued racial violence in the South, the systematic overthrow of Radical governments in the South after 1869, and the landslide victory of Democrats in the 1874 Congressional elections (“the greatest reversal of partisan alignments in the entire nineteenth century,” Foner writes) marked the beginning of the end for America’s Reconstruction experiment.39 By the summer of 1876, only three states—Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina—remained under Radical control. The results of the controversial presidential election of 1876 signaled Reconstruction’s end.
That famous campaign, pitting the Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes against the New York Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, ended inconclusively with Hayes twenty electoral votes shy of the 185 necessary for election and election returns in four states contested between the two parties. To resolve the dilemma, Congress appointed a bipartisan Electoral Commission that declared Hayes the victor. An informal arrangement between Southern Democrats and Hayes�
�s supporters resolved the deadlock. The so-called Compromise of 1877 smoothed the way for Hayes to assume the presidency in exchange for economic and political concessions to the South, including the removal of the remaining federal troops from the region, the appointment of a Southerner to Hayes’s cabinet, and the general awarding of “Home Rule” to the former Confederate states. White Southerners’ much-anticipated period of “Redemption” had arrived. Reconstruction was over, a circumstance, according to historian Steven Hahn, that “ushered in a new era of state-organized violence in defense of private property and respectable property holders at all levels of government.”40
Unquestionably, Reconstruction marked one of the great turning points in American history. “Never as radical as has been charged,” explains historian Hans L. Trefousse, “it nevertheless represented a real effort to enforce equal rights by federal legislation.”41 Over a century ago, another historian, William Garrott Brown, wrote that the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877 occasioned “a turning of the current of affairs into a new channel, as clearly marked as any to be found in our history since the revolution.” Whereas General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox had signified the Confederacy’s death and slavery’s end, in 1877 the nation “reached the end of the entire prior period during which American political history was mainly an affair of North and South.”42 As Trefousse observed, Reconstruction’s demise also signaled a shift from the diminution of power of the Executive branch in the years following Lincoln’s assassination to the assertion of the power of the presidency in the early twentieth century.43
The saga of Reconstruction included many causes won and lost. Had Lincoln’s quest for “a just, and a lasting peace” been attained? Absolutely not. The South’s post-1870s “Redemption” by so-called Bourbon Democrats led to the era of Jim Crow, what Hahn terms “a post-emancipation regime of domination and subordination.”44 Recently historian Stephen Kantrowitz observed that among Reconstruction’s “most important political developments were the virtual revolution in Southern life, the consolidation of national citizenship, and the forces that arose to limit those projects.”45 To be sure, by 1877, the nation had reunited, but serious questions pertaining to free labor, civil and states’ rights, and racial inequality remained unanswered. These became Reconstruction’s complex legacy. Issues of liberty and equal rights continued to plague the U.S. until the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s.
CHARLES STEARNS, THE BLACK MAN OF THE SOUTH, AND THE REBELS; OR, THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FORMER, AND THE RECENT OUTRAGES OF THE LATTER
(1872)
Before the Civil War, the Massachusetts-born abolitionist and journalist Charles B. Stearns (1818–1899) served as a reporter for two antislavery newspapers, the Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Stearns was committed to nonresistance prior to the mid-1850s, but his experiences in “Bleeding Kansas” changed him. “When I deal with men made in God’s image, I will never shoot them,” he explained, “but these pro-slavery Missourians are demons from the bottomless pit and may be shot with impunity.” During Reconstruction, Stearns settled on a fifteen-hundred-acre Georgia plantation, intending both to uplift the freedpeople and to share his profits with his African-American employees. In The Black Man of the South, and the Rebels, Stearns blamed slavery for what he considered the exasperating backwardness and immorality of the ex-slaves, but he made clear his outrage with the atrocities committed against blacks by native whites. As a result, Stearns welcomed President Grant’s use of the army against Klansmen who understood “no power on earth except the military power of the United States.”
While this dark cloud was overhanging my own abode, events were transpiring in other places foreboding still more evil to all the friends of the Union in the state of Georgia. I allude to the expulsion from our House of Representatives of twenty-five “persons of color” simply on account of their being “guilty of a skin not colored like our own”; and the admission of an equal number of democrats to fill their places, thus lessening the republican majority by fifty votes. Of course all legislation after this was carried on in the interests of the democratic party, as the republican majority at the outset had been quite small, the republican candidate for speaker having been elected by a majority of only one vote. But the majority in the Senate was greater, so that on joint ballot the republicans had a respectable majority.
It was some draw back to the nefarious schemes of these insane disorganizers, that none of their corrupt legislation could receive the sanction of the governor, as he remained true to the party that had elected him, amid this, and all the other changes that came over the “body politic,” in our state. If it had not been for this well known fact, our situation would have been fearful indeed. The protection of the military had been withdrawn, and our representatives had been admitted to Congress, thus creating the impression that Georgia was a loyal state in the Union. But the triumph of these wretched men was short, for by the action of Congress, the entire admission of Georgia was delayed, and the seats of its senators declared vacated, until the rights of these ejected ones could be fully ascertained.
Far be it from me to criticise in a captious manner the action of Congress in this respect, but I cannot help feeling that it did wrong in afterwards admitting to their seats, the senators elected before the proper organization of the Legislature; in accordance with the provisions of the Reconstruction act, under which they were elected. This act declared that no “person prohibited from holding office under the United States, or under any state, by section third of the proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States, known as article fourteen, shall be deemed eligible to any office in either of said states, unless relieved from disability, as provided by said amendment.” This section is as follows:
No person shall be a senator or representative in Congress, or elector of President or Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State Legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid and comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two thirds of each House remove such disability.
A supplementary act passed by Congress July 19, 1867, declared that “the words executive or judicial office in any State, shall be construed to include all civil offices created by law, for the administration of any general law, or the administration of justice.”
In accordance with these provisions, and with his duty as military commander of the district, four days after the organization of the Legislature, General Meade sent a letter to Governor Bullock, calling his attention to the matter, and declaring that he could not recognize the Legislature, until satisfied that these Reconstruction acts had been complied with. Gov. Bullock forwarded these documents to the Legislature, endorsing the position of Gen. Meade, and recommending to the Legislature an appointment of a committee, to ascertain the eligibility of its members. This committee was duly appointed, after various propositions to modify its powers, and an attempt on the part of Mr. Tumlin, of Randolph, to defy the power of Congress in reference to the matter, by introducing a resolution declaring that Congress had no right to “define the terms upon which the members of the Legislature might hold their office.” The names of the committee appointed were as follows: “O’Neal, of Lowndes, Shumate, of Whitfield, Harper, of Tirrell, Lee, of Newton, and Bryant, of Richmond,” three of whom were republicans, and two democrats.
The chairman of the committee reported that two of the members were ineligible, a minority of republicans reported that one person was ineligible, and a minority of democrats that none were ineligible. The house by a vote of 95 to 53, adopted the minority report of the democrats, and declared that all the members were eligible.
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bsp; But behind all this, legislative scenes were enacted, which, to say the least, failed to do credit to the logical acumen or straightforward character of those concerned in this examination. It was a matter of common notoriety, that quite a large number of the members of the Legislature had participated in the rebellion, and by the wording of the Reconstruction acts, which asserted the ineligibility of all engaged in the rebellion, after having sworn to support the Const. of the United States, they were not entitled to their seats. Doubtless the members of Congress who voted for the Reconstruction acts, were aware of the omission of the word voluntary, in reference to those who rendered “aid and comfort” to the rebellion. But even if they did not intend to omit that word, the strict letter of the law must be complied with; and it was not proper for the Georgia Legislature to apply an interpretation of its own, to these acts, unless the language was susceptible of a variety of interpretations.
A Just and Lasting Peace: A Documentary History of Reconstruction Page 47