Group+Two

Group Two: Martha, Lucy, Elliot

“A Southern Victory in Reconstruction” Throughout Reconstruction the North and South were caught in a political tug-of-war. Despite the differences between radical and moderate Republicans, all Northern Republicans agreed that they wanted to eventually re-admit the South and thus restore the Union and to abolish slavery and give right to the freedmen. The Southern Democrats on the other hand wanted to preserve the Old South as much as possible which meant redeeming democratic control and maintain white supremacy and suppression of blacks. The Republicans initially appeared to be winning the struggle by passing several measures to increase and protect black right. However, continued Southern resistance coupled with waning Northern commitment caused the North to give up on Reconstruction and withdraw from the South. __The South won Reconstruction because it achieved political autonomy by redeeming white Democratic control of state governments, preserved white supremacy by taking away the rights of freedmen and introducing an elaborate system of segregation laws, and retained an economic system remarkably similar to slavery by suppressing freedmen into a system of constant debt and economic dependence on land-owning whites.__ The key catalyst for the Southern victory in Reconstruction was the diminishing Northern commitment to its cause in the early 1870s which paved the way for Southern redemption of Democratic power. It wasn’t long during Reconstruction until the North had grown tired and apathetic to their cause in the South due to Southern relentless to comply with Northern demands. Then, in 1873, the North experienced one of its worst economic depressions. The crisis spurred Northerners to search for an explanation for the problem, and they turned to the theory of Social Darwinism. The theory argues that failures fail as a result of their own ineptitude and that government should not intervene in social and economic life. People influenced by this theory would not support Reconstruction because to them, freedmen and Southerners should be left to their own devices. The extensive corruption in Grant’s administration, the Panic of 1873, and Social Darwinism’s influence all worked to turn the North’s focus away from the South and towards its own political and economic problems, allowing the South to redeem Democratic power. The determining factor in the struggle of Reconstruction was the Compromise of 1877. Under the Compromise, the South agreed to let Republican presidential candidate Rutherford Hayes’ take office only under the conditions that he would withdraw the last federal troops from the South—thus permitting the overthrow of the last Republican governments there—appoint at least one Southerner to his cabinet, and provide federal aid and internal improvements. By the end of 1877, every Southern state government had been “redeemed” by white Democrats. Northern withdrawal resulting in Southern autonomy marked the official end of Reconstruction. One could argue that although Southern Democrats redeemed control of state governments, the South ultimately lost Reconstruction because blacks were given freedom and were thus much better off than they were before the Civil War. The freedmen gained privacy within their families, a black middle class emerged and internal improvements such as black churches, school and colleges developed. However, these advancements are minimal at best in comparison to the disadvantages of life as a freedman in the post-Reconstruction South. The freedmen were still at the complete mercy of the whites. Whatever rights they had won during Reconstruction were revoked, and they were subject to an elaborate system of segregation which spurred a massive increase in white violence against blacks, particularly through lynching. After federal troops were withdrawn from the South and the North gave up on Reconstruction, there was no one left in the South to enforce the relatively new rights for freedmen that the South hadn’t even wanted to begin with. It was inevitable that the South would find a way out of enforcing these laws. Almost immediately after the end of Reconstruction, the democrats began working for black disfranchisement. The Supreme Court passed several laws that managed to evade the 15th Amendment and yet effectively disfranchise blacks. There was the poll tax which most blacks could not afford and literacy tests about the Constitution which most blacks and even most whites could not pass. The Court also passed the grandfather laws which protected the franchise for those men whose ancestors had voted in 1860. This clause was used to ensure that poor white men who could not afford the poll tax or pass the literacy test had the right to vote while freedmen did not. The Court further violated black rights in the civil rights cases of 1883. In these cases, the Court ruled that organizations and individuals could legally practice segregation because the 14th Amendment only prohibited state government from violating civil rights. Furthermore, in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, the court ruled in favor of whites by validating state legislation institutionalizing segregation. These laws introduced the idea of “separate but equal” accommodations for blacks and led to the segregation of schools. Black disenfranchisement and segregation laws were only part of a more elaborate system of segregation laws known as the Jim Crow laws. These laws imposed segregation on almost every aspect of Southern life and were the cause of a huge increase in white violence against blacks. Lynching of blacks by white mobs rose to astonishing new heights. The KKK, although slightly diminished due to the Enforcement Acts, still continued acts of severe racial discrimination. After Reconstruction, the freedmen were stripped of almost all of their rights and subject to incredible amounts of violence. The South ultimately achieved its goal of preserving white supremacy. All that the freedmen had left was their freedom, and even that was debatable. The freedmen were forced into an agricultural system of quasi-slavery conspicuously similar to pre-antellebum slavery in which the blacks were once again economically dependent on the whites. Although the South’s already small industrial economy was all but destroyed during the civil war, and their infinite supply of labor was set free, they still managed to retain many of the same practices they held before the war. Even though Southern blacks were technically free, the white Southerners still had an overwhelming amount of power over them by establishing a relentless cycle of debt for the freedmen. The systems of tenant farming, sharecropping, and crop-liens were all designed in a way that made it next to impossible for the freemen to succeed in becoming economically independent. These systems were supposedly created to help freedmen with limited funds get on the path to owning their own land, and in theory these systems would have been beneficial to the freedmen, but in reality, they just threw the free blacks further and further into debt, eventually transforming their economic situation into slavery in all but name. In addition to these faulty economic opportunities for freedmen was the even less moral system known as convict leasing. As the name implies, Southern prisons leased black convicts out as a cheap labor supply, and the leasing fees went directly to the state’s coffers. Because blacks could be wrongly thrown in jail for any reason whatsoever, this system proved very affective for achieving a slave-like work force in the South. Using these systems to work around the abolition of slavery, the South’s predominantly agrarian economy was able to remain very similar to what it had been before the war. White Southerners maintained white supremacy and a cheap black labor supply The North lost the battle of Reconstruction when it signed the Compromise of 1877 officially withdrawing the North from the South and ending Reconstruction. The South won political autonomy and then continued to revert to the ways of the Old South as much as possible. The South achieved its goal of preserving white supremacy by taking away the rights of freedmen and by introducing an elaborate system of segregation laws which resulted in dramatic increases of violence towards blacks. Freedmen were forced into an economic system which suppressed them by a relentless system of debt and economic dependence on land-owning whites. The fact that blacks won their freedom through Reconstruction was practically made null-and-void after blacks were forced into a system of quasi-slavery. The South won Reconstruction because it got just what it wanted: Democratic redemption, preservation of white supremacy and suppression of black civil rights.