Reconstruction

The Economic, Cultural, and Religious Re-creation of the Vanquished

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Reconstruction is commonly seen as the period of time from the end of the war to the late 1870’s when the Federal government withdrew troops from the South and the Carpetbagger state governments were removed from power. In reality, reconstruction started during the war as Union forces recaptured large areas of the confederacy during the war and the policies that evolved out of the reconstruction period redefined the region for decades after the war. Until fairly recently the major take away concepts from reconstruction were the abuses of the radical Republicans and carpetbaggers but, thanks to postmodern revisionism, the period is now cast in racial terms only. According to this sort of thinking the victims deserved their fate and if the federal government had kept their boot heel on the neck of the South a bit longer, maybe real racial equality would have been achieved. Yet the oppressive poverty that engulfed the South affected all races and lingered for 100 years while the racial animus that is characteristically associated with the South was largely directly and indirectly created by reconstruction.

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​The starting point in understanding reconstruction is to fully grasp the destruction of the war in the South. Approximately 300,000 Southern white males in the prime of adulthood died during the war, and perhaps 200,000 more were incapacitated, which translated to about 18 percent of the region’s approximately 2.75 million white males in all age groups in 1860. It was about 36 percent of those over age nineteen.  Although the total losses to the war and post war period can’t be definitively calculated due to lack of (or destruction of) data, a good estimate is that over a million black and white Southerners died and this sort of depopulation by itself would bring about economic ruin. The war destroyed two-thirds of Southern railroads and two-thirds of the region’s livestock. One hundred million dollars in insurance investments and twice that amount in bank assets had vanished(1 p. 32). Southern farms were reclaimed by nature. Protective levees were destroyed, thousands of square miles of Mississippi delta cotton lands were overrun. Returning Confederate soldiers often found their families existing in conditions of near, if not actual, starvation (1 p. 32). A month following Lee’s surrender, Grant wrote in a letter to his wife:

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“The suffering that must exist in the South the next year . . . will be beyond conception. People who talk of further retaliation and punishment . . . do not conceive of the suffering endured already, or they are heartless.” The mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, said “hundreds of people lived on loose grain picked up where army horses were fed”. A federal official wrote, “It is common . . . [to see] women and children, most of whom were formerly in good circumstances, begging for bread from door to door. . . . They must have immediate help or perish. . . . Some are without homes of any description”(1 p. 32)

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The death toll for African-Americans alone was staggering although difficult to pin down exactly. Some estimates from the time are shocking. Quoting from “Punished with Poverty, “In the winter of 1863-4 the Governor of Louisiana, Henry Watkins Allen, issued a report stating that more blacks had died in Louisiana due to the effects of invasion in the previous year than the total of white deaths in both armies!  A Mississippi Unionist stated during Reconstruction that 50% of blacks in Mississippi died during the war.” These and other accounts that could support these numbers are arguable but they aren’t entirely unreasonable nor unsupportable. (2)

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Moving forward to the 1930’s, the South was the nation’s poorest sector with an annual per capita income of $314 compared to $614 for the rest of the country. Tens of millions were leaving to go west or north in search of economic opportunity taking elements of their culture with them. Poverty led to bad health. Pellagra, which is a generally rare disease associated with diet not found in the rest of the country, was common amongst Southern farmers and agricultural workers (1 pp. 182-83).  These outcomes were by no means unavoidable and fell in place through systematic decisions that pillaged Southern wealth and resources and distributed them elsewhere.

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Reconstruction began in some areas as early as 1863.  The restrictions for a former rebel to re-enter the union as a full citizen with voting rights were fairly loose under Lincoln’s administration excluding only officers above the rank of colonel and Confederate civil authorities.  Under the Radical Republicans after Lincoln’s death, stricter requirements were imposed that prohibited many former confederates from voting. Lincoln’s actions and statement suggest that his goals were rapid reunification and ending slavery but not full and immediate racial equality. In what could be seen as a precursor to his reconstruction policies, one week after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln wrote Union major general John McClernand suggesting that the rebel states could have their rights restored by adopting “systems of apprenticeship for the colored people, conforming substantially to the most approved plans of gradual emancipation.” Six months later, he told his Arkansas military commander that apprenticeship could be an acceptable form of emancipation to qualify the state for readmission (1 p. 44). His goals for Southern Whites seemed to be to attract enough of them into the Republican Party to remain in power based in part on bringing in former Southern Whigs. He realized the vulnerability of the Republicans at the polls if they couldn’t attract a full national base. (1 pp. 29-30)

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There was a pseudo religious aspect of the oath acting as a test of faith where only the saved were to be justified and readmitted into the fellowship of the Union and was reminiscent of Cromwell’s “righteous tenth capable of redeeming a nation”. In the current context this sort of thing would seem harmless enough but up until that time the idea of declaring an unconditional spiritual devotion to a nation state was a relatively new concept (3 p. 73).

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In 1864, two states that Lincoln had already readmitted, Arkansas and Louisiana, were determined by joint congressional resolution to be ineligible for inclusion in the Electoral College. After Lincoln’s assignation, the radical Republicans were very aware that their party would rapidly lose power if they didn’t control readmission requirements and manage voting populations.  Some were motivated by vengeance, some by quest for further pillage, and some simply by power but actually attracting willing converts to their party ceased to be a strategy.

In puritan pulpits comparison between Israel’s liberation from bondage in Egypt and the emancipation of Southern slaves was an obvious theme. Tales of Lincoln being greeted by grateful ex-slaves in Richmond were compared to Jesus entering Jerusalem before his crucifixion.  Both were killed on Good Friday. Finally, as Moses couldn’t enter the Promised Land, so Lincoln was not allowed to see the outcome of the new country he created but as Moses had Joshua to enter the Promised Land so Lincoln left behind Andrew Johnson. (1 p. 37)

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The truth about Lincoln’s relations with the abolitionists and other radicals was a bit different.  They didn’t like what appeared to be his path to reconstruction and really never saw him as one of their flock in the first place. “Joshua” (Andrew Johnson) seemed to them to be far more likely to bring about the sort of resolution they had desired based on his background. The motivations of the radicals were not strictly philosophical or religious but this was the narrative and the moral justification. One radical Republican Senator Benjamin Wade who placed high hopes in Johnson once expressed hope that slaves “would rise up in insurrection to slay on half the Southern Whites.”  Congregational minister, Dr. Bacon, speaking at Lincoln’s memorial said this which was fairly representative of the Northern pulpit at the time:

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“I would call for two millions of volunteers. I would form them four deep, their right upon the Alleghenies, and the left upon the margin of the sea, with bayonets fixed I would order them to march and drive every man who would not shoulder his musket and join this advancing host to the Gulf of Mexico – for it will take all the waters of that deep gulf to soak out all the treason and the blood of this rebellion”(3 p. 67)

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This sort of rhetoric that consistently came out of Northern Puritan Evangelicalism before, during, and after the war made any sort of rational political dialogue very difficult even if most ordinary people readily dismissed it.  Johnson, although from Tennessee, would have seemed like a likely candidate to take up the cause based on his disdain for Southern aristocracy.  He was born into poverty and eventually became a tradesman where aristocratic clients treated him disrespectfully. Johnson, however, was true to Lincoln’s initial plans describing him as “the greatest American that has ever lived” which shortly caused him to oppose the radicals and led to his baseless impeachment. (1 p. 38)

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Immediately after the war the South was swarmed by Northern Missionaries, mainly Methodist and Baptists followed by Presbyterians roughly in that order. Episcopalians, who were a very small group, were the only exception (4 p. 64).  According to George Matton, a Methodist minister from New York the aims were to, “provide support and succor to those Southerners loyal to the national Methodist Episcopal Church and the federal government, restore social order, instill the habits of cleanliness, industry, economy, purity, and morality on both white and black Southerners". Note that the breadth of these objectives amounts to reshaping culture and assumes a great deal about Southern culture in the first place. These were in fact cultural missionaries. Presbyterian, Lydia Schofield contended the role of the Northern churches was to change the hearts and minds of Southerners.  Quoting from Historian John Devanney, “she hoped to divert Southern preachers from their emphasis upon sin and salvation (read Christian orthodoxy), and to purge from the land the “idol of slavery,” which in her view continued to blind Southern ministers.  Doing so would bring white Southerners out of their prejudices and uplift the freedman from their “semi-barbaric state.” (5)

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As early as November 1863, Secretary of War Stanton instructed Bishop Ames of the Northern Methodist Church to take over the Southern churches and install ministers. When Congress prolonged the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1866, its Commissioner O.O. Howard cooperated with private benevolent associations which funded church schools and effectively made clergy and church workers federal employees in many instances. Clayton Fisk of the Methodist Church North directed the Freedmen’s Bureau in Tennessee and Kentucky and other clergy held state superintendent of education positions under the Freedmen’s Bureau in Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, and Alabama. (4 pp. 62-64)

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After the war African-Americans began to leave mixed Baptists and Methodist congregations and set up their own churches. Southern whites were frequently saddened or disappointed at this.  One Southern minister said for this, “Disguise it as we may, our colored brethren are disposed to independent action—they want preachers and churches of their own.” The Northern missionaries initially opposed this but later concluded that African-American congregations, if separated, would be easier to mold and transform. Some southerners also saw this as a way to allow for ordination of Blacks without putting them in charge of white congregations (5). In the end the efforts of the Northern churches to reshape Southern religion and culture failed but another form of Puritanism, the new fundamentalism, would be far more effective over the course of the coming decades.

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Reconstruction ended when it did not due to lack of perseverance on the part of the reformers but because it was bad for Northern business. Carpetbagger regimes were corrupt and incompetent and recognized as creating a drag on the overall American economy. Cotton production and exports had not recovered and were not moving towards recovery causing large trade deficits. Southern markets for Northern manufactured goods were weak and not progressing. There was also an initiative at that time to purge the Republican Party of corruption and vindictiveness that was supported by the likes of Horace Greeley and the Tribune. The redeemer governments that came to power were not a re-establishment of the former Southern agricultural aristocracy but many were former Whigs and a far lower percentage were agricultural.  In Georgia only 40% were planters or farmers.(1 pp. 132-36)

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The new Southern economy benefited a few at the top of the food chain to the detriment of everyone else. Absentee ownership, which existed before the war but wasn’t common, became far more prevalent taking Southern wealth and income North. Former Virginia senator and author Jim Webb wrote in Born Fighting, when the Yankees left, “they did so with their ownership of the Southern economy firmly in place so that their businesses could be controlled from outside the region thereby sucking generations of profits out of the South and into their own communities.”(1 p. 136) Sharecropping, which can rightfully be seen as a form of pseudo slavery, was driven by a regional capital shortage and was the only alternative to starvation. It disassociated the farmer from the land and encouraged practices that led to soil erosion. Historians Thomas Clark and Albert Kirwan concluded, “Erosion and soil wastage were high crimes, which robbed the region of more wealth than half a dozen Yankee armies marching to the sea.”(1 p. 124)

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Sharecropping and the hardships of Southern agricultural workers tend to be seen as a condition that largely fell upon African-Americans but in 1940 whites made up 2/3 of this group. According to a 1938 presidential economic report, about half of Southern white farmers were sharecroppers “living under economic conditions almost identical to those of Negro sharecroppers.”(1 p. xiii) (2)

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Tariff policies, that were to some extent a contributing factor to the war in the first place, grew higher which further damaged any sort of Southern economic recovery but there was a more direct form of war reparations that, through taxation and direct payments, transferred wealth and income from the South to the North. Union pensions grew for more than 50 years and became a bribe to solidify loyal Republican constituencies amongst Union veterans. This was critical in the Midwestern states where other Republican policies were otherwise contrary to the region’s interests. Commissioner of pension, James Baker, predicted that pension expenditures would peak by 1872 but that’s not at all what happened. From 1880 to 1910 Union pensions averaged 25% of the federal budget and peaked at 40% in 1893. The total payout by 1917 was over $5 billion which was twice what was spent by the combined Northern federal and state governments to fight the war. Part of this growth was expanding the benefit qualifications to include an ever widening list of family members including siblings. (1 p. 100)

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To summarize Reconstruction, the notion that the war was “brother against brother” is fundamentally false although there were cases of split family loyalties especially in Border States and in sections of Midwestern Union states.[1] It is more accurately seen as the conquest of one culture and political body by another that was followed by military occupation and establishment of loyal puppet governments by the victor. As time passed the level and methods of control became less obvious but the South was effectively made into an agricultural colony. The path of reconstruction was very similar to the post war history of any other modern conquest.

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The Klan and the Union League

Almost everyone has some superficial knowledge of the Klan but generally only those who have objectively studied this period are aware of the Union League which the Klan and other paramilitary groups were intended to counter.  To begin with, the Klan has had three distinct incarnations.  The first Klan existed from shortly after the war until 1872.  The second Klan was a vastly larger progressive activist organization far bigger in the North and West than in the South and really similar in name only while the modern Klan is an extremely small irrelevant group that blends contradictory beliefs but, if anything, would be more similar to the second Klan then the first.

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The story actually starts with the US Sanitary Commissions. Unitarian Minister Henry Whitney Bellows (All Souls Unitarian Church in New York) sought to organize and centralize a number of church, social, and fraternal organizations under the “Women’s Central Association of Relief”. He eventually sold the idea to Lincoln’s cabinet despite Lincoln initially referring to it as being as useful as a “fifth wheel on a coach”, thanks largely to Dr. Clement Furley, head of the Medical Bureau. This eventually evolved into the modern Red Cross. (6 pp. 1-9)

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Bellows designated radical republican activist Fredrick Law Olmstead as Secretary General of the organization which led to the creation of a political offshoot called the Union League. In 1862 after the Democratic Party with an anti-war platform won victories in many Northern States, Bellows and Olmstead saw the need for the Union League to become a centralized national organization to stamp out treason and this soon became a reality.  Bellows captured these concepts in a sermon titled Unconditional Loyalty which was widely distributed to the Army through the Sanitary Commission (6 pp. 1-9).  According to historian Christopher Phillips, the league lodges “demanded undiluted loyalty to the wartime policies of Abraham Lincoln.” (1 p. 166)  For the remainder of the war, the League focused on suppressing Northern opposition to the war. In one incident, the league tarred and feathered seven Ohio women one of whom was a recent widow of a Union soldier (1 p. 166). This sort of thing would repeat itself in World War I.

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At the conclusion of the war, chapters were opened in the South targeted at whites who were Union loyalists who opposed the Confederacy.  When blacks were allowed to vote in the state constitutional conventions whites generally dropped out as the League chapters became dominated by Blacks. Those that remained were generally “scalawags” in leadership positions who joined the carpetbaggers. (1 p. 166)

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League chapters used cult-like secrecy and offered exaggerated promises of material rewards to attract members. Black members were taught that their interests were inherently opposite of Southern Whites who were falsely accused of trying to put them back into slavery. One North Carolina chapter was falsely told that if Republican Ulysses S. Grant won the 1868 presidential election, lodge members would be given public offices, farms, and mules (1 p. 167). Lodges organized military units and lodge leaders were employees of the federally funded Freedmen’s Bureau. (1 p. 167)

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As the Union occupation troops dwindled, the Carpetbagger governments abolished the white militias and effectively replaced them with almost entirely Black Union League members which were funded with state tax revenue. These militias became private armies for carpetbagger governors which in numerous cases led to Black militias fighting each other as the result of Republican Party splits.

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The Klan originated in Tennessee in 1865 as a secret fraternity and had no political agenda but by 1865 became a tool to resist radical Republican reconstruction. Other similar paramilitary groups developed like the Pale Faces, Knights of the White Rose, White Brotherhood, Knights of the White Camellia, and Constitutional Union Guard but the Klan became a sort of umbrella organization. In 1867 The Tennessee legislature passed universal Black suffrage and tightened requirements for white voters requiring that they can certify with at least two witnesses that they were Union loyal during the war which complied with the first National Reconstruction Act (1 p. 170). The Klan had maintained a low profile through the 1867 Election hoping that Black voters might support conservative Democrats but that didn’t happen largely due to the efforts of the Union League. Whites feared that they would be forced to forfeit their properties due to tax deficiencies making the land available at drastically discounted prices and the Union and Loyal League militias were promoting this and ready to enforce it. The Klan’s preference was to attack radical white agitators but increasingly engaged in acts of violence against blacks including threats, whippings, and even murder to suppress blacks and whites from voting for carpetbagger governments (1 p. 172).  Scenarios like this were repeated across other states.  There were also incidents where Union League militias committed acts and made them appear to have been done by the Klan. (6 p. 51)

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Former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest has been widely seen as being the head of the Klan in 1867 although he never admitted this and a credible case can be made against this position. Forrest stated in a newspaper interview that some Klan violence had gone too far and was being restrained but the organization’s decentralization and secrecy made this difficult.  Anti-Klan enforcement acts in 1869 and 1871, after Republican midterm election losses, resulted in hundreds of arrests with many serving prison terms. Martial law was declared in nine South Carolina counties causing thousands to flee to avoid arrest. By 1872 the Klan was broken and, as the Carpetbagger governments fell, the reason the Klan existed in the first place disappeared. (1 pp. 173-74)

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Footnotes

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[1] McWhitney, Grady, Cracker Culture as cited by Kennedy, James Ronald, Punished with Poverty: The Suffering South - Prosperity to Poverty & the Continuing Struggle . Shotwell Publishing LLC. Kindle Edition

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Bibliography

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1. Leigh, Phillip. Southern Reconstruction. Yardley, Pennsylvania : Westholme Publishing, 2017.

2. Kennedy, James Ronald and Kennedy, Wlater Donald. Punished with Poverty The Suffering South. Columbia, South Carolina : Shotwell Publishing, 2016.

3. White, D. Jonathan. Northern Opposition to Mr. Lincoln's War. Waynesboro, Virginia : Abbevuille Institute Press, 2014.

4. Chodes, John. Segregation Federal Policy or Racism. Colombia, South Carolina : Shotwell Publishing, 2017.

5. Devanny, John. Abbeville Institute. [Online] August 14, 2019. [Cited: August 30, 2019.] https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/where-the-grapes-of-wrath-are-stored/.

6. Chodes, John. Washington's KKK The Union League During Southern Reconstruction. Columbia, South Carolina : Shotwell Publishing, 2016.