Radical Reconstruction
- Also called:
- Congressional Reconstruction
- Location:
- United States
Radical Reconstruction, process and period of Reconstruction during which the Radical Republicans in the U.S. Congress seized control of Reconstruction from Pres. Andrew Johnson and passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867–68, which sent federal troops to the South to oversee the establishment of state governments that were more democratic. Congress also enacted legislation and amended the Constitution to guarantee the civil rights of freedmen and African Americans in general.
In the 1866 mid-term congressional elections, voters in the North resoundingly rejected Johnson’s Presidential Reconstruction policies, and Congress, dominated by Radical Republicans, decided to restart Reconstruction. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 split the states of the former Confederacy into five military districts and specified how new governments—based on manhood suffrage without regard to race—were to be constituted. Thus began Radical Reconstruction, which lasted until the demise of the last Republican-led Southern governments in 1877.
All of the former Confederate states had been readmitted to the Union by 1870. The Republican Party controlled the governments of almost all of them. Southern Republicanism was made up of three groups: (1) so-called carpetbaggers, recent arrivals from the North who generally were Freedmen’s Bureau agents, former Union soldiers, businessmen, or teachers; so-called (2) scalawags, native-born white Republicans, who predominantly were non-slaveholding small farmers from the Southern up-country who had been loyal to the Union during the Civil War; and (3) African Americans, who formed the overwhelming majority of voters in every Southern state.
African American political leaders (including individuals who had been free before the Civil War, artisans, Civil War veterans, and formerly enslaved ministers) advocated for the elimination of the racial caste system and the economic uplift of the formerly enslaved individuals. Throughout the South, more than 600 African Americans served in state legislatures, and hundreds more held local offices from sheriff to justice of the peace. Moreover, 16 African Americans served in Congress during Reconstruction, including two U.S. senators, Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce. Although the ascension of African Americans to positions of political power marked a dramatic break with the country’s traditions and aroused deep-seated hostility from the opponents of Reconstruction, so-called “black supremacy” never existed.
Reconstruction governments served the expanding citizenry by establishing the South’s first state-funded public school systems, seeking to strengthen the bargaining power of plantation labourers, making taxation more equitable, and outlawing racial discrimination in public transportation and accommodations. In the hope of creating a “New South” whose economic growth would benefit both blacks and whites, the governments also made available considerable funding for railroads and other enterprises. However, those economic programs spawned corruption and rising taxes, which alienated more and more white voters.
In the meantime, the South underwent a period of significant social and economic transformation. Free from white control, African Americans were able to solidify their family ties and to create independent religious institutions that would become centres of community life that survived long after the end of Reconstruction. The formerly enslaved individuals also demanded economic independence. However, in summer 1865 President Johnson had dashed African Americans’ hopes that the federal government would provide them with land when he ordered that land in federal hands be returned to its former owners. Johnson’s dictate invalidated Gen. William T. Sherman’s Field Order No. 15 of January 1865, which had set aside land along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia for the exclusive settlement of black families. Without land, most former slaves were left with little economic alternative but to resume working on white-owned plantations. Some worked for wages, while others became sharecroppers and divided their harvest with the owner at the end of the year. Because neither pursuit offered much hope for economic mobility, for decades, most African Americans in the South remained propertyless and poor.
Nonetheless, violent opposition to Reconstruction by white Southerners increased. White supremacist organizations that committed terrorist acts, such as the Ku Klux Klan, targeted local Republican leaders for beatings or assassination. African Americans who asserted their rights in dealings with whites also became targets. In 1873, scores of black militiamen were killed in Colfax, Louisiana, after surrendering to armed whites intent on seizing control of the local government. Increasingly, the new Southern governments looked to Washington, D.C., for assistance.
With Republican Ulysses S. Grant having been elected president in fall 1868, by the next year the Republican Party was firmly in control of all three branches of the federal government. Congress approved the Fifteenth Amendment, prohibiting states from restricting the right to vote because of race, and then enacted a series of Force Acts authorizing national action to suppress political violence. In 1871 the Grant administration launched a legal and military offensive that destroyed the Klan. Grant was reelected in 1872, but Republican support for Reconstruction began to wane as the older Radical leaders such as Benjamin F. Wade and Thaddeus Stevens retired or died and were replaced by technicians such as Roscoe Conkling and James G. Blaine who were devoid of the idealistic fervour that had marked their predecessors. The disputed presidential election of 1876 was resolved with a deal that resulted in Rutherford B. Hayes’s assumption of the presidency and the removal of the last federal troops from the South, thus ending Reconstruction.