Primary Source’s Making Freedom: African Americans in United States History, was originally published in 2004, and was composed of five teacher sourcebooks. The forward and context essays, written by scholars of that time, were designed to provide background information necessary to understanding the primary sources and activities in each unit. In the spirit of consistency, we have opted to include the original context essays, as additional “further resources” that educators may opt to review in order to deepen their context knowledge further. It is important to note however, that unless otherwise noted, these context essays are presented here in their original form and have not been edited since their original publication. As a result, these essays may no longer reflect the most up to date historical information and/or may not reflect the instructional, pedagogical or culturally responsive approaches and linguistic expectations of today.* 

Who Freed the Slaves? The Civil War and Reconstruction, An introductory essay 

Patrick Rael

Book 4: Our New Day Begun: 1861–1877, Context Essay 1

2004, *Linguistic Revision 2023*

Preface

On March 4, 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln became the sixteenth president of the United States of America. Between the November election and Lincoln’s March inauguration, the seven states of the Deep South had seceded from the Union. Eight more slaveholding states had threatened to secede. With the crucial exceptions of Fort Pickens in Pensacola, Florida and Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, federal property throughout the seceded South was in the process of being transferred to Confederate hands. Popular feeling in the North was running high.  While New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley argued that the Confederate states should be free to “leave in peace,” for others secession confirmed the need to take arms against the “slave power,” which they believed sought to impose its tyrannical will on free white men.

In the midst of this crisis Lincoln took the oath of office, and issued what was undoubtedly the most important inaugural speech in American history. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists,” he stated, echoing a claim he had made many times before. Despite the pervasive discussion of slavery throughout the sectional crisis of the 1850s, secession itself did not pose an immediate threat to the institution of slavery. The same held true into the war. In July of 1861, Congress passed two resolutions which proclaimed that the war would not be one to abolish slavery. The resolutions did not mention slavery by name, merely stating that the Union would not prosecute the war with the “purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States.”

Yet a few years later, by time the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December of 1865, the four million African Americans who had been held in chattel bondage before the war were freed. In 1868, their status as citizens would be affirmed by the Fourteenth Amendment, and in 1870 male African Americans would be universally enfranchised by the Fifteenth. Thus concluded one of the most remarkable transformations in modern times, an event singular throughout the experience of slavery’s demise in the New World – in the United States, all slaves became legally entitled to all the rights of citizens.

The transformation of the Civil War, from a struggle to retain or sunder the union to one to destroy or maintain slavery, did not proceed as the product of a conscious design on the part of those who effected it. Rather, it happened haltingly, with hesitation and paradox, through the acts of hundreds of politicians and generals, many of whom worked at complete cross-purposes. Most importantly, though, it happened through the will and behavior of thousands upon thousands of African Americans themselves.

Emancipation from the Bottom Up

The process of emancipation began during the war, as a consequence of the Union’s inexorable creep toward victory. Since their earliest arrival in America, Africans had registered their dissent toward enslavement. The conditions of war, however, lent new significance to the enslaved’s act of defiance. Old patterns of day-to-day resistance, designed to withhold work from masters, dealt innumerable small blows to the war effort. Open acts of insubordination, for example, diverted Confederate energies to the home front. Of particular importance was the practice of escape. Especially as the conflict stalemated into a war of attrition between Union and Confederate economies, Confederate leaders considered the enslaved a vital source of labor, and hence crucial to the war effort. When enslaved African Americans fled southern farms and plantations, they not only sought to free themselves and their families, they also struck a blow for the Union by depriving the Confederacy of labor.

Union leaders quickly divined the value of slave labor to the Confederate war cause. In the field, as Union lines slowly encroached into Confederate territory in Virginia, the Carolina low country, and Louisiana, army officers encountered fugitive slaves from nearby plantations. They reacted in various ways. Some, perhaps responding from the racial prejudice which beset many white Northerners, heeded the requests of slaveowners and returned the fugitives to those who claimed to own them. Others, however, declared the slaves “contraband of war,” withholding their labor from the Confederates in the same way they withheld captured arms and ammunition. Most notable in this regard was General Benjamin F. Butler, commander of Fortress Monroe in Virginia. Butler pioneered the government’s policy for dealing with slaves who had escaped to Union lines. He refused to return them to their masters, instead putting them to work for the Union war effort.

Emancipation from the Top Down

Enslaved African Americans themselves, by escaping to Union lines, took the initiative in leading the U.S. government toward emancipation. Later, the enslaved posed the same challenges to Union policy by simply staying put as U.S. Army troops steadily began to sweep over lands left behind when planters fled. What should be done with these people? Union leaders believed that if freed, perhaps the former slaves would feel no compunction to work the cotton that fueled the South’s economy. Yet if they were kept in a state of servitude, what message would this send to the world about Union war aims?

Once again, the answers were initially eked out in the field, on a case-by-case basis, largely by the generals who controlled Union-held territory in the slave states. In 1861 and ’62, Union generals John C. Frémont and David Hunter declared martial law in the areas they controlled and freed slaves owned by Confederate sympathizers. While Lincoln revoked both moves as untimely, he did permit the army to “take possession” of slaves behind Union lines. The use of such phrases suggested the depth of the Union dilemma in dealing with enslaved African Americans. Should the Union declare escaped slaves free, it might risk the fragile loyalty of the border states and alienate political dissidents in the North. Yet if it retained such people as property, it risked participating in the very system of chattel slavery against which it warred.

The slow progress of the war increasingly lent such questions great import. In July 1861, Confederate victory at the first battle of Bull Run demonstrated that the seceded states would not quickly yield to the pressure of Northern numbers and industry. Bloody Union defeats at battles such as Fredericksburg, and costly Union victories like those at Shiloh and Antietam, demonstrated that technological advances in weaponry had made the battlefield a very dangerous place indeed. By increasing the range and accuracy of fire, the rifled barrels of the new muskets gave a large advantage to defenders, making decisive victories difficult, expensive, and rare. As the conflict on the battlefield approached stalemate, and as the war steadily became a protracted struggle of societies and economies, Union commanders and the President himself sought alternative avenues to victory.

Congress pioneered the first such path through a series of Confiscation Acts, which were designed to enshrine in law what the enslaved themselves were already effecting in practice. These authorized seizure of all Confederate property, including slaves, used in the rebellion and eventually declared all slaves behind Union lines free. They also prohibited army officers from returning fugitive slaves to their masters, and provided for the compensated abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. The Confiscation Acts marked a turning point in Union perceptions of the purposes of the war. More than Sherman’s March to the Sea through Georgia in 1864, this breaking of the unspoken consensus on the sanctity of private property signaled an important shift in the war.  As the conflict turned into what scholars have termed a “total war,” Union war aims came to include the abolition of property in slaves.

The second path to victory the Union pursued was still more profound. In July of 1862, as the Union war machine ground to a halt against well-led Confederates in Virginia, at the Mississippi, and in Tennessee, Lincoln began to imagine changing Union war aims. Abolitionists such as

Horace Greeley and African American activists such as Frederick Douglass had from the start called for the inclusion of universal emancipation of the slaves as a primary war aim. But Lincoln feared that such a move would alienate the wavering slave states still in the Union (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware) and energize Democratic political opponents in the North who sympathized with the Confederacy. In the summer of 1862, however, Lincoln decided that widespread emancipation had become “a military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union.”

In September of 1862 Lincoln thus issued a preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that on January 1,1863 “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” While the Proclamation applied primarily to slave property still under Confederate control, and thus immediately affected few African Americans, it had an enormous impact on the nature of the conflict. It instantly transformed the war for union into a war against slavery.

The Proclamation had three major effects. First, issuing it guaranteed that the Union’s worst fear would not come to pass.  Great Britain’s “Lords of the Loom” sympathized heavily with southern “Lords of the Lash” who supplied the booming British industry with cotton. Union leaders feared that Britain, the strongest naval power on the planet, would recognize the legitimacy of the Confederacy in order to protect its own trade interests, and perhaps even enter the war on the Confederacy’s side. The Emancipation Proclamation, however, tapped into popular feeling in England – the same abolitionist sentiment which had propelled that nation to abolish slavery in its empire (in 1831) and to champion the destruction of the international slave trade.  Once the Proclamation was promulgated, virtually no chance remained that Great Britain would recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate independent nation.

Perhaps more importantly, the Emancipation Proclamation set a precedent for action on slavery which would not easily be countermanded. Having made the momentous decision to begin emancipating African Americans en masse, Lincoln could hardly go back. When asked if he would consider revoking the Proclamation in order to bring the war to a speedy, victorious conclusion, Lincoln replied: “I should be damned in time and in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will.” With only slight wavering, Lincoln from 1863 on steadfastly retained universal emancipation as one of the two key prerequisites for the cessation of hostilities. (The other was the recognition of U.S. sovereignty and consequent dismantling of the Confederate government and armed forces.)

Thirdly, the Proclamation expedited the process through which former slaves became Union soldiers. The Proclamation contained a clause which declared that those freed by the Proclamation “will be received into the armed service of the United States.” From the beginning of the war, African American activists had called for the enlistment of African American troops, and the battlefield stalemates which led to the war’s protraction did nothing to quell their voices. Editorialized Frederick Douglass: “One black regiment in such a war as this is . . . would be worth to the Government more than two of any other. . . . While the Government continues to refuse the aid of colored men, thus alienating them from the national cause, and giving the rebels the advantage of them, it will not deserve better fortunes than it has thus far experienced.” As the war deepened, others – particularly white abolitionists and antislavery moderates – began seeing the utility, and indeed the necessity, of enlisting African American troops.

The Proclamation put behind such voices the weight of White House authority, and the recruitment of African American soldiers proceeded steadily after its promulgation. Some joined northern regiments composed primarily of antebellum free African Americans, such as the exemplary 54th

Massachusetts, the famous “Glory” regiment led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Most African American soldiers, however, were recruited from the ranks of former slaves into southern regiments such as the 1st South Carolina Volunteers. By the end of the war, 189,000 African Americans had served

in the Union army and navy, many in key battles which demonstrated time and again African Americans’ willingness to sacrifice their lives, if necessary, for the cause of freedom.

African American soldiers, who suffered disproportionately high casualty rates, helped turn the tide for the Union. Army life was not without its own hardships and experiences of prejudice, and many African American soldiers faced nearly as much privation and racism as they had on the plantations. Yet, in a way few Union generals appreciated, military service unwittingly served as an important mechanism for socializing former bondsmen to a new life in freedom, and for preparing many for the rigors of post-war leadership.

The Reconstruction of African American Labor

It is notable that the evolution of Union war aims – from mere preservation of the Union to the abolition of slavery – resulted from military exigency rather than from liberalized racial sentiments in the North. Slavery may have been dead, but prejudice certainly had not perished. When the war ended in April of 1865, the first priority of many in the nation was not to secure a meaningful freedom and equality for the freedpeople, but to restore the integrity of the union as quickly and as painlessly as possible.

This certainly seemed to have been Lincoln’s top priority. Though his assassination in April of 1865 confounds any attempt to fully divine his plans for Reconstruction, his “10% plan” of December 1863 offered some hints. Under this “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction,” former Confederate states would be permitted back in the Union under lenient terms (just ten percent of the population had to swear an oath of loyalty to the Union). As for the freedpeople, the new state governments had to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, but could otherwise institute any measures found to be “consistent . . .with their present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class.”

As this vague language underscored, the fate of the freepeople remained very much in question as the war ended. Deeply imbued with centuries of prejudice, most whites both north and south feared the specter of four million landless African Americans, lacking formal education and employment. Many whites claimed that African Americans would work only under compulsion. Few understood that the freedpeople themselves desired not freedom from work, but freedom from oppression. As one freedman reflected:  “We thought we was going to be richer than the white folks, cause we was strong and knowed how to work, and the whites didn’t, and they didn’t have us to work for them any more.” Unfortunately, it did not work out that way. As this man continued, “We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud, but it didn’t make ’em rich.”

Even abolitionist allies misunderstood the freedpeople’s goals in freedom. Early in the war, as the Union Army came to occupy the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia in 1861, free labor advocates from the North went south to begin what became known as the “Port Royal

Experiment.” Abolitionists such as James Miller McKim and Edward S. Phillsbrick hoped to vindicate arguments they had been making for many years – that freedpeople would respond to a competitive capitalist economy with free labor markets. Unfortunately, the Port Royal reformers had too little faith in their own ideology. Rather than loose the freedpeople into the economy as true equals, they treated them as apprentices, limiting their participation in the market economy in an effort that set important precedents for the post-war years.

For their part, the freedpeople did not wish to work the abolitionists’ plantations on terms little better than enslavement. Rather than grow cotton, which they could not consume themselves and which was the hated master’s crop, they wanted to grow food for themselves and local

exchange. Rather than work for the paltry wages offered by the abolitionists, they preferred to work for a share of what they grew. And rather than work in gangs, they preferred to work in families.

The Port Royal experiment foreshadowed the deeply qualified nature of the freedom that resulted from the destruction of slavery and Union victory in the Civil War. Throughout the South, wherever the reconstruction of southern agriculture began, experience echoed that of the failed Port Royal experiment. Union officials and white southerners sought to establish the freedpeople as an immobile, exploitable agricultural workforce. The freedpeople themselves sought to work in families, for their own subsistence, and for a share of the crop. With the oversight of the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands (a.k.a. the Freedmen’s Bureau), an agency of the Federal Government established in 1865 to help negotiate the reestablishment of southern agriculture, freedpeople entered into thousands upon thousands of individual negotiations with white landowners. In these negotiations, African Americans faced opponents with far more power than they had. Sometimes prejudiced agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau even worked against the interests of those they were charged to protect.

Yet African Americans were not utterly without leverage. Southern planters, devastated by the war, depended on the speedy cultivation of their cotton crops for their very survival. Under such circumstances, African Americans threatened to withhold their labor until they received terms for work more favorable to themselves. They often refused to work for former masters, and sometimes refused to work at all, unless planters made important concessions to their desires. They never received the “forty acres and a mule” frequently rumored to be in the works, but they did influence the terms of their labor. Rather than working for wages, they chose to work for a share of the crop they raised. And rather than work in gangs, they chose to live and work in family units. Though it was not without its own contests and tensions, the reconstitution of African American family and community life permitted by this system of sharecropping was perhaps the greatest triumph of the African Americans who lived through the war.

Despite freedpeoples’ success in putting their agency to work, the deck was stacked against them. Persistent efforts by southern whites to exploit African American labor went beyond merely negotiating the terms of labor contracts. Though sharecropping initially reflected the freedpeople’s success in bargaining for favorable labor terms, hostile whites turned their control of law and the economy against the freedpeople. They established local credit monopolies which artificially raised the cost of necessary goods and credit, rendering African Americans’ meager profits still more marginal. And white planters’ frequent collusion with local white officials defrauded the freedpeople, reducing sharecropping to little more than a system of debt peonage.

The Rise of the Radicals

With the end of the war in 1865, the new governments of the former Confederate states took the lead in continuing to deny equality to the freedpeople. Under the lenient hand of Andrew Johnson, who had succeeded Lincoln to the Presidency, the former Confederate states had been brought back into the Union on terms favorable to the old slaveholding elite. Widespread political amnesty insured that many of the prime instigators of southern secession became important political figures in the first Reconstruction governments. The legislatures of these Reconstructed states quickly passed a series of laws which codified the opprobrious labor terms planters sought to enforce in individual contracts. These “Black Codes” frequently forced the freedpeople into unfavorable contracts, controlled the hours and terms of their labor, restricted freedpeople’s freedom of movement, and imposed strict penalties for vagrancy. The freedpeople were to be reduced to a state of semi-free peonage, steeply at variance with the free labor ideology propounded by antebellum antislavers. More than this, by failing to extend full civil rights to the freedpeople, the codes excluded African Americans not simply from the benefits of full participation in the market economy, but from the promises of democratic civil society. In unmistakable language, the codes signaled that even in “freedom” African American people still had no rights the white man was bound to respect. As if to emphasize the point, whites in Memphis, Tennessee and New Orleans, Louisiana engaged in vicious racial massacres against African Americans in the summer of 1866.

These denials of African American civil rights did not go uncontested. A powerful group of Republicans in Congress – “Radicals” such as Thaddeus Stevens, who had been a pre-war abolitionist – rejected what they viewed as efforts by former Confederates to secure in defeat what they could not win on the battlefield. Having defeated the Confederate “Slave Power” at the cost of 620,000 American lives, the Radicals were not about to permit the re-institution of slavery in all but name. The Radicals often expressed a paternalistic attitude toward the freedpeople that heavily qualified their approach to African American rights, and their proposals often suggested that they were constitutional conservatives rather than revolutionary jacobins. Nonetheless, their fierce political battles with former Confederates and with Johnson, who they finally reduced to lame duck status through impeachment in 1868, pushed them ever closer to supporting the civil rights of freedpeople.

It was in this context that Congress enacted sweeping legislation to put its own plan for Reconstruction into effect. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 removed all the former Confederate states (except Tennessee) from the Union, and placed them under temporary military rule. It then established requirements for the readmission of these states into the Union. The states had to call new state constitutional conventions, the delegates to which were to be elected through universal male suffrage. These constitutional conventions were to draft new state constitutions, permitting African American men to vote and hold office. Finally, the conventions had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed African Americans the rights of citizenship.

Because of its shaky constitutional foundation, military reconstruction was a move distasteful to many Americans, including the Radicals who spearheaded it. After all, the imposition of British military rule on the American colonies had been one of the root causes of the American Revolution. The risk to the liberties of southern whites was made necessary, the Radicals argued, by the dire imperative of securing the rights of defenseless freedpeople from the incursions of hostile southern whites bent on returning African Americans to slavery. By permitting African Americans the vote, Congress hoped to give the freedpeople (or at least African American men) the means to protect themselves. It would thus minimize the need for continued federal intervention into state affairs, and avoid the risks to individual liberties federal intervention implied. Frederick Douglass explained the case for African American enfranchisement with characteristic cogence: “The arm of the Federal government is long, but it is far too short to protect the rights of individuals in the interior of distant States. They must have the power to protect themselves, or they will go unprotected, in spite of all the laws the Federal government can put upon the national statute-book.”

Local Politics and the Unraveling of Reconstruction

The Radicals’ efforts failed. The new state governments produced by the Reconstruction Acts at first looked promising. Dominated by Republicans, they were comprised of an unprecedented mixture of African Americans and whites. These governments achieved many successes, providing free public schooling, establishing a host of beneficial social institutions, and fostering economic development. Yet none of the Reconstructed state governments lasted for more than a decade. In the long run, Republican Reconstruction failed.

Some of the Reconstruction state governments foundered on internal divisions between northern “carpetbaggers” and southern “scalawags,” and perhaps even among African Americans themselves.  In addition, among the southern white populations which would ultimately determine their success or failure, the new governments faced a tough sell. The social costs of the Old South had been borne primarily by the wealthy, paternalistic elites of southern society. Under the Republican governments, social expenses were spread more equally throughout society. They had also risen considerably. Four million formerly enslaved African Americans, all entitled to services as free people, had been added to the citizenry. Throughout the South, however, the crucial southern white “swing” vote saw not a more egalitarian social order, but increasingly greater burdens of taxation, with few benefits in return. A storm of Democratic propaganda declaring the Reconstruction governments corrupt took root, and the southern whites who had initially supported the Reconstruction governments turned against them.

Neither of these factors alone would necessarily have spelled defeat for the Republicans. Together, though, they weakened them, creating vulnerabilities easily exploited by a widespread and persistent southern commitment to white supremacy. Underlying whatever problems the

Reconstruction governments faced was the overwhelming desire on the part of many in the South to return African Americans to a position in which they would be socially subordinate and economically exploited. From the first efforts to secure meaningful rights for African Americans, white supremacy fought back through terrorist vigilante organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, White League, and Knights of the White Camilla. In carrying out their dual roles of imposing on African Americans political intimidation and controlling their labor, such groups acted not on their own, but as grass-roots manifestations of racial attitudes widely held throughout the South. Often they served as the military wings of the Republicans’ political rivals, the southern Democrats.

The federal government tried persistently to halt the lawlessness perpetrated by the Klan and similar groups. Despite the good faith of these efforts, however, they were limited by restraints on the acceptable bounds of federal activity. Contrary to the view that the Civil War represented a victory for forces of centralization, even Radical Republicans in Congress during Reconstruction viewed federal intervention in local affairs as a violation of the spirit of American democracy. African American activists like Frederick Douglass feared “a despotic central government, with power to control even the municipal regulations of States, and to make them conform to its own despotic will.” The use of federal troops in the South was greeted with particular dismay.

Rather than manifesting a firm intention to subject local government to national control, the great pieces of Reconstruction legislation resulted from cautionary sentiments. They were all alternatives to the unthinkable option of a continued federal presence in the South. The

Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed the national citizenship of all African Americans; the Fifteenth, which secured the franchise for all African American men; and the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited racial discrimination in public places all stemmed from Congress’s desire to arm the freedpeople themselves with the tools necessary to protect themselves.

Efforts to resolve the crisis of racial democracy in the South through purely constitutional mechanisms failed. Emboldened by the federal government’s reluctance to enforce African American rights, the spirit of the Klan lived on to win the day. In 1876, the last of the Reconstruction state governments fell to a campaign of voting fraud, political terror, and outright violence. In many instances African Americans fought valiantly for their rights, sometimes engaging in armed conflict. With the continued support of the federal government, their actions may have sufficed to secure a meaningful equality. In the contested Presidential election of 1876, however, the Republicans traded a promise to leave the South to its own devices for an electoral victory for their candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes. The Party had sacrificed its commitment to racial democracy on the altar of political expediency. Never again could it sell itself as a “friend to the Negro.” Left as a disempowered minority in the South, the freedpeople lost their champion, and fell under the power of the class which had formerly claimed to own them.

Conclusion

In recent years historians have debated the question of “who freed the slaves?” Lincoln, say some, was the crucial factor without which freedom could not have happened. Perhaps it is true that Lincoln was a necessary factor in the abolition of slavery. He certainly was a remarkable figure who played an immensely important role. He was not, however, a sufficient cause in the destruction of slavery. When searching for the sine qua non of the “who freed the slaves?” question, it is important to remember that no one could have freed slaves who did not yearn to be free. Since their enslavement began, Africans in America registered their yearning for freedom through daily acts of resistance. Before the Civil War, such acts reminded the nation that African American people were neither brutes nor pets, but human beings. During the war, African Americans’ acts of resistance collided with the Union war effort, challenging the government to craft policies which translated African Americans’ yearning for freedom into Union victory.

In the long run, African Americans’ loyalty to the Union went largely unrewarded. Freedom, though unquestionably a benefit, foundered on the rocky shoals of labor control, white supremacy, conservative constitutional thinking, and northern indifference. Yet for a decade the issue hung in the balance. The Union, having achieved victory at such cost, was loathe to lose the peace.  Radical Republicans in Congress sought time and again to arm African Americans with the tools necessary to protect themselves. While in the end popular understandings of the limits of government interference in local affairs prohibited a more strident defense of African American rights, African Americans did their best to avail themselves of the means at their disposal. Throughout, African Americans themselves created their own realities, by reconstituting families, negotiating the terms of their labor, and participating in the political process. Their efforts signaled that, regardless of the shifting contexts of power around them, African Americans would never relinquish the struggle to assert their humanity. Just as their resistance to slavery had served as a constant, crucial source of pressure before and during the Civil War, their resistance to prejudice, segregation, and disenfranchisement served as the steady refrain for their activities after it.

The gains of Reconstruction were soon lost in a campaign of lynching, race riots, and disenfranchisement – a period which historian Rayford Logan has termed “the Nadir.” Once the ally of African Americans, the federal government became a neutral or hostile force, reneging on its promise to secure the blessings of liberty for all Americans, and leaving African Americans to the will of the capricious mob. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, federal courts overturned much of the Reconstruction legislation as unconstitutional, or chose to interpret it in ways which did little to benefit African Americans. Such actions suggested that it would take far more than the letter of the law to produce meaningful equality for African Americans – it would take a revolution in popular sentiment. The story of Reconstruction and its horrific aftermath should remind us that history, even American history, does not inevitably move forward toward a greater justice. However, it is not the product of inevitable forces beyond the control of individual actors. As we have seen and shall see again, even the most oppressed may still craft much of their own reality.

Finally, in assessing the legacy of Reconstruction, we must consider how the motives behind the great changes it entailed influenced their outcomes. Neither emancipation nor the enfranchisement of African American men happened as the result of a revolution in national sentiments. Emancipation had stemmed from military necessity, while enfranchisement had resulted from the perceived need to minimize federal incursions into states’ rights by permitting African Americans to protect themselves through participation in the political process. Undoubtedly the travails of the Civil War and Reconstruction had altered popular sentiment on issues of race, and many Radical Republicans supported civil rights for African Americans as much from a fervently held belief in African Americans’ humanity as from a desire to minimize the federal presence in the South.

Yet it would be a great mistake to assume that African American liberation and enfranchisement had resulted from an America which had become more racially tolerant. Racial prejudice sturdily withstood the forces which destroyed slavery, emerging triumphant in the post-Reconstruction years. A new generation of race-baiting southern leaders could look back on the failure of Reconstruction, using it as “evidence” of African Americans’ incapacity for self-government. African Americans, however, could look to Reconstruction as a failure, but, as W.E.B. DuBois qualified it, a “splendid failure.” For the activists of the twentieth century, Reconstruction would always serve as a reminder that there had been a moment in American history when African Americans had participated fully and importantly in the political system, and one when the federal government had spearheaded efforts to realize the dream of a true biracial democracy. Nearly a century after the first Reconstruction ended, a second Reconstruction would begin.