Reconstruction: Crash Course Black American History #19

Hi, I’m Clint Smith, and this is Crash Course
Black American History.

At the start of the Reconstruction era, the
country had been at war for 4 years and over

700,000 people had lost their lives.

In 1865, 700,000 lives was roughly 2% of the
entire population of the country.

2% of the current US population, is over 6
million people.

It’s a staggering amount of death.

And after all of that death and destruction,
the US had to figure out a way to put itself

back together.

It had to grapple with what it meant for the
United States to be a country in which Black

people were not enslaved, something the country
had quite literally never encountered before.

This was new territory.

After generations upon generations upon generations
of chattel slavery, Black folks were free.

But what would that freedom look like?

Would they be given the tools, the skills,
the education, and the resources to turn this

freedom into something, or would this freedom
have an asterisk by it?

Let’s find out.

INTRO
In short, Reconstruction was a period following

the Civil War that lasted from 1865 to 1877
(though some scholars argue it began in 1863

with the Emancipation Proclamation).

During this time the country was attempting
to remake itself through a series of provisions,

programs, and amendments that were, ostensibly,
meant to ensure that Black people had civil

rights.

But this was easier said than done.

You have to remember that just because the
Confederates lost the war on the battlefield,

doesn’t mean that their opinions changed
about who Black people were and where they

belonged in the social hierarchy.

W.E.B Du Bois, described this period as a
moment where "...the slave went free; stood

a brief moment in the sun; then moved back
again toward slavery."

Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War,
there was a glimmer of hope for what a new,

more egalitarian society might look like.

Black people in the South had the Federal
Government on their side.

And the idea was that the federal government
would intervene to ensure that Black Americans

could transition into life as citizens as
safely and efficiently as possible.

The thing is, emancipation fundamentally restructured
Southern life for both freed people and white

Southerners.

The former planters and enslavers lost their
source of labor and sometimes even their land.

During the Civil War, Union General William
T. Sherman’s March to the Sea, a 285-mile

trek through Georgia from Atlanta to Savannah,
left a large portion of the state burned to

the ground and devastated by his scorched
earth, total war approach.

Planters and confederate soldiers fled during
the rampage, leaving a lot of land empty and

untended.

Sherman intended to parcel out this land to
formerly enslaved people in Sherman’s Field

Order No. 15.

This is where the famous 40 acres and a mule
idea came from (though mules weren’t initially

part of it).

Sherman believed that redistributing the land
was important because it both punished Confederate

land-owners for their role in starting and
sustaining the Civil War while also providing

newly freed Black people with the land and
resources they needed to begin a new life

in this post-emancipation South.

Thanks Thought Bubble.

Five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered
to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, effectively

ending the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was
assassinated.

Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s vice-president,
a Democrat, and a former enslaver, became

the new president.

Johnson believed the opposite of what General
Sherman proposed, instead of taking land from

former Confederates and giving it to the freedman,
Johnson believed in pardoning Confederates,

letting them back into the union and into
government without asking them for basically...anything.

Johnson’s views were at odds with Congress,
which following the election of 1866, was

controlled by the Republicans, who were at
that time the party of the left, and who had

a large enough majority to pass legislation
and even override Johnson’s veto.

These “Radical Republicans” as they were
known, led by Thaddeus Stevens, even impeached

Johnson, though he avoided conviction by a
single vote in the Senate.

The Reconstruction Amendments (the 13th, 14th,
and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution)

were passed to establish Black Americans'
legal protections.

The 13th Amendment of 1865 formally abolished
slavery across the whole of the United States.

Many people get that confused with the Emancipation
Proclamation, but the proclamation, if you

remember, only freed enslaved people in the
rebelling states.

HOWEVER, it's super important to note a particular
clause in the 13th Amendment.

The legislation reads: "Neither slavery nor
involuntary servitude, EXCEPT as a punishment

for crime...shall exist within the United
States."

And in fact, unpaid and underpaid labor remains
a frequently criticized aspect of mass incarceration

today.

The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, and
addressed citizenship.

It reads, "All persons born or naturalized
in the United States, ... are citizens of

the United States."

It also says, "No state shall make or enforce
any law which shall abridge the [rights] of

citizens of the United States ...nor deny
to any person within its jurisdiction the

equal protection of the laws.”

Seems pretty straightforward on paper, but
this amendment has not always been equally

enforced, to say the least.

Black people’s rights were definitely abridged
over time, and in many places these rights

were completely, and violently, subverted.

Last but not least: The 15th Amendment, passed
in 1870.

This one gave Black men, though not women,
the right to vote.

It reads: "The right of citizens of the United
States to vote shall not be denied or abridged

by the United States or by any State on account
of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

In order to enforce the three Amendments and
protect Black people's rights, the Freedmen's

Bureau, a coalition of northern officials
and Union Soldiers, was set up throughout

the South.

Many southern states hated the idea of formerly
enslaved people having these rights, and having

federal troops down there seemed like the
only way to make sure these rights were protected.

The Freedmen's Bureau was tasked with helping
newly freed Black people make a life for themselves.

And they had a few ways of doing this:
They legally recognized marriages between

formerly enslaved people.

Before, many enslaved people would have unofficial
ceremonies, so actions like “jumping the

broom” would be the only signifiers of lifelong
commitment.

Now, as citizens, states would recognize their
marriage.

Additionally, the Bureau helped to reunite
families who had been separated during slavery.

Which over the course of 250 years had split
apart millions of people.

So, post emancipation, the Bureau took testimonies
of enslaved people and checked records of

relocated individuals to bring families back
together.

But in one of its main roles, securing work
contracts, the Bureau proved to be… not

so great.

Many Black Americans were forced into contracts
to become sharecroppers or tenant farmers,

which is to say they would grow crops for
a landowner in exchange for room and board.

So while they were allowed to keep some of
their crops for themselves, technically, they

weren’t paid a wage or salary for their
work, and many of them were pushed right back

into the clutches of the enslavers they had
seemingly just escaped.

Additionally, the Freedman’s Savings Bank,
which was ostensibly created to help the formerly

enslaved after emancipation, shut down within
less than a decade and the money of tens of

thousands of depositors equaling nearly 3
million dollars essentially disappeared.

More than half of the accumulated black wealth
by 1874 disappeared through the mismanagement

of the Freedmen’s Savings Bank.

Just gone.

Still, the Bureau did a pretty good job in
assisting Black Americans in their pursuit

of formal education, something that Black
people had been advocating as central to the

possibility of upward mobility.

Historian James D. Anderson argues that the
freed slaves were the first Southerners "to

campaign for universal, state-supported public
education."

The Freedman’s Bureau helped set up schools
for Black people of all ages.

According to historian James McPherson, by
1870, there were more than 1,000 schools for

freedmen in the South.

Bureau initiatives also allowed African Americans
to gain political power.

An important outgrowth of the 15th Amendment
was an influential Black voting bloc that

translated into real political power.

In the years following the Civil War leading
to the turn of the century, twenty-two Black

people were elected to Congress, two of which
were Senators: Hiram Revels and Blanche Kelso

Bruce from Mississippi.

And it wasn’t just nationally.

Black people were voted into office in state
legislatures across the South.

According to McPherson, at the beginning of
1867, no African American in the South held

political office, but within just a few years
"about 15 percent of the officeholders in

the South were Black—a larger proportion
than in 1990".

Many of these newly elected politicians had
been soldiers in the Union army.

According to historian Eric Foner, "for black
soldiers, military service meant more than

the opportunity to help save the Union, more
even than their freedom and the destruction

of slavery as an institution.

For men of talent and ambition, the army flung
open the door to advancement and respectability.”

One of the main subjects of conversation among
new Black politicians surrounded the 14th

and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution
and whether there was room for women in politics.

According to Historian Martha Jones, "Black
women moved in from the margins during this

debate...They insisted that an intersectional
analysis, one that simultaneously took up

race and gender, was required if organizations
such as the Equal Rights Association expected

to move forward in the postemancipation era."

It was clear that Black women existing at,
in Jones’s words, "the nexus of sex and

color" had a unique perspective and set of
experiences, that were making clear that Black

freedom should include freedom for all, Black
people, not just the men.

As Black education and political power flourished
in the late 1860s and early 1870s, African

Americans faced white supremacist opposition.

Much of this violence was tied to the formation
of the Ku Klux Klan, led by former Confederate

general Nathan Bedford Forrest who served
as the first Grand Wizard of the organization

from 1867 to 1869, before Ulysses S. Grant
led an effort that largely wiped them out

by 1872… at least temporarily.

And even though the organization of the Klan
was gone, for the moment, violence against

Black people was still growing.

The presidential election of 1876 was tenuous.

Democrat Samuel Tilden of New York earned
184 electoral votes, which was one less than

required.

Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio got
165.

However, election results in Louisiana, Florida,
and South Carolina were disputed.

Alongside an elector issue in Oregon, these
20 Electoral Votes would decide the election.

In what became known as the Compromise of
1877, Hayes was elected president on the condition

that the remaining Union soldiers would be
withdrawn from the South.

This meant that there was no more federal
protection for Black Americans in the South.

Millions of Black people now felt completely
and thoroughly abandoned.

By the end of the 19th century, 2,500 Black
people would be lynched throughout the South,

more than a hundred Black men and women per
year.

Sometimes people say that Reconstruction failed,
but it would be more accurate to say that

it was violently overthrown.

It did not fail to succeed because Black people
were incapable of governance, as some 20th

century historians and famous films like The
Birth of a Nation seemed to suggest, it failed

to succeed because white southerners did everything
they could to thwart Black mobility and opportunity.

The US could have gone in a different direction,
it could have provided land, resources, and

opportunity to millions of Black people to
begin to build a life for themselves after

250 years of bondage, some resources that
would have at least attempted to account for

the generations of exploitation that Black
people suffered in this country.

But a different choice was made, and we’re
still feeling the impact of that today.

Thanks for watching, I’ll see you next time.

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