Chapter 11 - The Ordeal of Reconstruction PDF

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE ORDEAL OF RECONSTRUCTION THE REUNION OF THE NATION PRESENTED NUMEROUS challenges, and some of them were overwhelming in scope. First and foremost, there was the massive economic devastation that total war had wrought in the southern states, with the destruction of its citi...

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE ORDEAL OF RECONSTRUCTION THE REUNION OF THE NATION PRESENTED NUMEROUS challenges, and some of them were overwhelming in scope. First and foremost, there was the massive economic devastation that total war had wrought in the southern states, with the destruction of its cities, its railroads, and much of the rest of its physical infrastructure. Cities like Richmond and Columbia and Charleston had been reduced to barren wastelands, with rotting wharves and empty, unkempt streets lined with bombed-out, vacant buildings. Economic activity had ground to a halt. Factories had been destroyed or idled, while once-productive farmlands lay fallow and unattended. Property values had collapsed, Confederate bonds and other paper assets had been rendered worthless, and there was no investment capital flowing into the region to fuel a restart of business enterprise. Nor were there any means to restart the southern agricultural machine, since the system of slave labor upon which the South had relied for much of its agricultural production was gone, and the wealth of planters and others who had counted their captive labor force as a capital asset was diminished overnight by a staggering $4 billion or more with the freeing of more than four million slaves. Cotton, tobacco, sugar, rice, hemp – the once-thriving businesses built around the production and sale of these commodities all were but shadows of their former status and would require decades to recover, if they recovered at all. Most poignant of all was the displaced and disoriented state of emancipated slaves who found themselves wandering in a strange and unfriendly new world without familiar signposts, without capital, without land, without literacy or most other tools for participating in a free economy – possessing a freedom in name that fell very far short of being freedom in fact. Their prior condition had been, as Lincoln had said, one of the principal causes of the war. But now it was as if their present plight was forgotten, even by the abolitionists. “He was free from the old plantation,” wrote Frederick Douglass of the liberated slave, “but he had nothing but the dusty road under his feet.” The Freedmen’s Bureau, established in March 1865, just before the war’s conclusion, was a well-intentioned but inadequate attempt to use the War Department, in cooperation with private organizations like the American Missionary Association, to address some of these massive problems. By contrast to the humiliated South, the North had prospered from the war in many respects. With the troublesome planters taken out of the political picture entirely for four years, the business community had been able to dominate Congress and promote the passage of legislation far more favorable to their interests than would have been the case in the past. The platform objectives of the Republican Party, such as protective tariffs (the Morrill Tariff) and free land for western settlers (the Homestead Act), were easily realized. The National Banking Act created a uniform system of banking and currency, and naturalization requirements for immigrants were eased. In addition, the much-controverted subject of the location for the first transcontinental railroad was easily settled in the North’s favor; the north-central line would run from Omaha, Nebraska, to Oakland, California, with the golden “last spike” driven with a silver hammer at Promontory Summit, Utah, in May 1869. The gaping inequality of the two sections, which proved a persistent problem well into the twentieth century, helped give rise to a view, classically expressed in 1927 by the historian Charles A. Beard, that the war had actually been a “second American Revolution,” a social upheaval in which “the capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the South.” There was surely much truth in this, and it moreover is a view that accurately captures the fact that the America of the post–Civil War era was dramatically changed in many respects. But many of those changes have to do with political, social, and cultural issues that cannot be explained by economics alone. There were, after all, numerous practical and moral issues to which to attend in thinking through the reunification of the nation. What would a just settlement look like? How should the Southern rebels be punished, for example? Should the leaders be imprisoned, charged with treason, put to death? What about their followers, including the Confederate officers whom Grant had allowed to return home after Appomattox with their sidearms and horses, or the infantry who had fought for them? And what about the demolished southern economy? Given the fact that the southern economy had depended so heavily upon slavery, the economy of the South would have to be restructured; but how? Who would do it? Who would pay for it? How could the freed slaves be equipped for life as free individuals, with the ability to participate in this economy? Would they be given their own land? Would they be treated as full equals in every respect? To speak in broad generalities, there were two opposite dispositions among victorious northerners about how to proceed with the reunification of the fractured American nation. Some wanted to reincorporate the South with few complications and recriminations, maintaining as much of the former geographical, social, political, and economic structure as possible. Others felt that anything less than the administration of a severe punishment to the South, accompanied by a thorough transformation of the South into a completely different social and political order, would not be enough and would represent a betrayal of the war effort. It was a fairly stark alternative, both as a philosophical issue and as a practical matter. Were the Southerners to be treated as returning states or as conquered provinces? Here is where Lincoln’s absence from the scene may have made a crucial difference, for he had a firm and well-considered position on the subject. Even during some of the most turbulent parts of the war, with the uncertain outcome of the 1864 election facing him, Lincoln had been thinking deeply about the form that an effective reunification should take. He had concluded that, since secession was illegal, the states had never actually left the Union; and since they had never left the Union, it would be appropriate to demand only a very minimal standard of loyalty be met, as a condition for restoration to full membership in the Union. As early as December 1863, he had formulated a plan whereby pardons would be offered to those who agreed to swear an oath of loyalty to the Union and Constitution and who pledged to accept the abolition of slavery; then, under the Lincoln plan, states would be readmitted if 10 percent of the voters in that state had taken that loyalty oath. High officials and ranking military officers would be excluded from the pardon, but otherwise the offer was quite sweeping. A very generous plan, indeed, and much too lenient in the eyes of many of his fellow Republicans in Congress, who feared that such a plan would do nothing to prevent the new states’ governments from falling under the sway of disloyal secessionists and neo- Confederates. They were convinced of the need for a thoroughgoing reformation of southern society, one that would take apart the old southern class system and substitute something radically new in its place. Moreover, they were convinced that they, Congress, and not the president, had principal authority over such decisions in the first place. To these ends, they proposed and passed in 1864 the Wade– Davis Bill, which required not 10 percent but a majority of voters to swear loyalty and which required that only those who had never been loyal to the Confederacy would be able to vote for the new state constitutions. Lincoln pocket-vetoed the bill, meaning that he refused to sign it and allowed it to expire unapproved. The Radical Republicans who supported the measure were outraged and accused Lincoln of usurping his presidential authority. In fact, the question of which branch of government was authorized to preside over the reincorporation of states was not easily answered from the text of the Constitution. But there was more going on here than a mere question of constitutional ambiguity. There were more fundamental questions about the very terms by which the national reunion would be effected.  Lincoln’s final statement on the subject came in his last public address, on April 11, just two days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. The subject at hand was whether Louisiana should be accepted back as a reconstructed state, based on a new constitution that abolished slavery and otherwise was sufficient to meet his standards, though not enough to please the Radical Republicans. A letter writer had complained to him that Lincoln was unclear about whether the seceding states were in or out of the Union; Lincoln waved the question away as a “pernicious abstraction” and then went on to explain his view in what can only be called a masterpiece of constructive evasion: We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper relation with the Union; and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe it is not only possible, but in fact, easier to do this, without deciding, or even considering, whether these States have ever been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these States and the Union; and each forever after, innocently indulge his own opinion whether, in doing the acts, he brought the States from without, into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it. And so matters stood three days later, April 14, the fateful day of Lincoln’s assassination. That morning, during a meeting with his cabinet, Lincoln spoke, hauntingly: “I hope there will be no persecution, no bloody work, after the war is over…. Enough lives have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our resentment if we expect harmony and union. There has been too much of a desire on the part of some of our very good friends to be masters, to interfere with and dictate to those states, to treat the people not as fellow citizens; there is too little respect for their rights. I do not sympathize in these feelings.” That night at around ten o’clock, at Ford’s Theatre during a performance of Our American Cousin, his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, a pro-Confederacy Maryland-born actor, entered the president’s box with a derringer in his hand. After firing a fatal shot into Lincoln’s head at close range, he leaped onto the stage and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis,” a Latin motto which means “Thus always to tyrants.” Lincoln himself would become the first victim of the bloody work whose coming he had so greatly feared. Never in history has a true-believing fanatic committed a heinous act that proved more injurious to his own cause. The South could not have had a better friend than Lincoln in enduring the arduous postwar years that lay ahead. True, the man from Illinois might or might not have been able to prevail in implementing his plans for a generous, mild peace between North and South. He was already facing stiff opposition to his 10 percent plan from his own party, and that might have intensified. But he also was experiencing a surge of popularity in the wake of the Union’s final victory, and it is possible that he could have summoned the political support to overcome such opposition. It is also possible that his plan would have proved unworkable, even with him implementing it. We shall never know. As it was, however, the national mood toward the South turned darker, harder, more angry, and more vengeful in the wake of Lincoln’s brutal murder. It did not help matters that, in Andrew Johnson, who now rose to the presidential office, the country would be saddled with a president possessing little of Lincoln’s political skill and even less of his eloquence and generosity. Johnson had been added to the ticket in 1864 as a unity candidate from the border state of Tennessee, a War Democrat who opposed secession but had none of Lincoln’s enthusiasm for a “new birth of freedom.” Although he had been a congressman, governor, and senator from Tennessee, his origins were just as humble as Lincoln’s. He grew up among the poor whites and yeoman farmers of North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, and he closely identified with them, while deeply resenting the planter oligarchs whom he held responsible for the calamity that had enveloped the South. These things were the driving force in his political career. He rose politically in Tennessee by championing the cause of poor whites in their conflicts with the wealthy planters. Republicans embraced him for that reason and anticipated being able to work well with him, perhaps more easily than with their own Lincoln. Surely he would want to punish the South, especially after the events at Ford’s Theatre. Surely he would embrace the cause of social transformation in the South. But they deceived themselves. They heard him inveigh against secession and wealth and assumed that meant he was one of them. They failed to see that Johnson’s antagonism toward southern aristocrats was a reflection not of his generous disposition toward the marginalized but of his resentment of condescending and pretentious elites, who regarded themselves as his social superiors. He fully shared all of his white constituents’ deepest prejudices against black people and had little or no objection to the institution of slavery. That was not what the Civil War was about, not for him. And he most emphatically did not share his Republican colleagues’ desire to see the entire South humiliated. Only rich aristocratic planters. Johnson was the wrong man for the job in other ways. The times called for a leader who was sufficiently self-confident and visionary to take the long view and not let the slings and arrows of everyday political debates upset him. But that was not Andrew Johnson. He was a mass of insecurities and hatreds, with a provincial, grudge- holding, narrow, and petty mind, emanating from a wounded and fearful soul. Historian Eric McKitrick described him as a quintessential outsider and “maverick” who was deeply convinced that “all the organized forces of society” were against him. If Lincoln provided a living illustration of the fact that a common man of unpromising background can rise to the heights of American politics, Johnson became a living illustration of the fact that not all common men can manage that rise successfully, no matter how ambitious they may be. Johnson’s problems began almost at the very beginning. In May 1865, he put forward a Reconstruction plan that was only slightly more demanding than Lincoln’s, excluding from the general pardon property owners with more than $20,000 in taxable assets – an addition reflecting Johnson’s prejudice against the wealthy. (Although there was also a provision for members of excluded groups to apply for pardons directly to Johnson, an avenue used by thirteen thousand individuals that year alone.) But these additions did not slow down the process of reorganizing the states, and by the time Congress reconvened in December, all eleven of the ex-Confederate states had met the criteria to be incorporated as functioning states of the Union. They had organized governments, ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution (abolishing slavery), and elected senators and representatives. All that remained was for Congress to accept and seat them. This was not going to happen. Radical Republicans in Congress recoiled at the prospect. For one thing, none of the southern states had extended voting rights to blacks as part of their new constitutions. And for another thing, there were former Confederate leaders, including generals, colonels, and cabinet members, among the new congressional delegations. Alexander Stephens, who had been vice president of the Confederacy, was elected U.S. senator from Georgia, even though he was still in prison, awaiting trial for treason! Furthermore, many legislatures were adopting “black codes” that regulated and restricted the rights and behavior of former slaves, in order to confine their movements and their ability to earn income off the plantation. Such codes varied from place to place but could include prohibitions on landownership and the widespread use of long-term labor contracts that were hardly distinguishable from slavery. The Republicans might have been seriously divided among themselves between moderates and radicals, but their divisions did not extend to any willingness to tolerate such retrograde developments, which seemed to bespeak an attitude of southern defiance. Indeed, such defiance, along with still-fresh memories of Lincoln’s assassination, tended to unite Republicans behind the Radical position. The Republicans in Congress rejected Johnson’s approach to the read-mission of states, refused to seat the new crop of senators and congressmen, and instead created a Joint Committee on Reconstruction to study the question.  The committee held public hearings that graphically highlighted evidence of the mistreatment of blacks under the new state regimes. It also examined the contested question of whether the Confederate states had ceased to be states but instead should be treated as conquered provinces, or, as the committee finally concluded, the states were entities that had continued to exist all along but, in seceding, had forfeited their civil and political rights under the Constitution. And most important of all, the committee concluded that Congress, not the president, was the appropriate authority to determine whether and when and how those forfeited rights could be restored. Up to this point, the process of reconstruction had been guided by the president; the committee was mapping out a future in which Congress would take the reins. In the meantime, in early 1866, Johnson made things much worse for himself with two inflammatory vetoes. First, he vetoed a bill to extend the life of the Freedman’s Bureau, arguing that it had been a wartime measure, but that since the war was over, the extension of the bureau into peacetime would be unconstitutional. His veto was sustained. Then he vetoed a Civil Rights Act that was designed precisely to counter the black codes and other forms of grossly unequal treatment being reinstitutionalized in the postwar South and that featured language establishing that “all persons born in the United States” were entitled to “full and equal benefit of all laws” (a tacit repudiation of one of the conclusions in the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision). Johnson justified his veto by saying that the act went beyond the proper scope of federal powers and would lead to racial disharmony and conflict. But this time, his veto was overridden – the first time in American history that a major piece of legislation had been enacted into law over the veto of a president. Shortly thereafter, a new Freedman’s Bureau bill was also passed over Johnson’s veto. It marked the beginning of a new era, both for Reconstruction and for presidential–congressional relations – and it marked the beginning of the end for Johnson’s effectiveness as president. To underscore the intentions behind the Civil Rights Act, and remove any doubt about its constitutionality, the Joint Committee recommended the creation of a new constitutional amendment, the Fourteenth, which was passed in June 1866 and declared ratified by the states by July 1868. The amendment was much more far- reaching than the Civil Rights Act, however, and more complex. It represented the first attempt to give greater constitutional definition and breadth to the concept of citizenship. It did several different things. First of all, it declared that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and legally subject to its jurisdiction were citizens. It obligated the states to respect and uphold the rights of citizens, assured citizens they could not be denied “equal protection of the laws,” and assured them that their rights could not be taken away without “due process of law.” That portion of the amendment was significant because it extended to the individual states the requirement that they respect the rights of citizens, in just the way that the federal government was required to do within its own sphere. Thus the Fourteenth Amendment began a process, culminating in the 1920s, called incorporation, which refers to the extension of the protections of the Bill of Rights to the state constitutions and governments. These provisions, all coming from the first section of the five- section amendment, had more long-term significance than other parts of the amendment. But those other parts had great, even explosive, significance in the immediate term. In particular, the second section was aimed directly at the southern states’ refusal to grant voting rights to its black citizens. By the terms of the amendment, if a state kept any eligible person from voting, it would be penalized by having its representation in Congress and the Electoral College reduced accordingly. As the fall elections of 1866 drew near, an angry and frustrated President Andrew Johnson decided to go for broke. He decided to make a “swing around the circle” of northeastern and midwestern cities, denouncing his Radical opponents as traitors and making opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment and support for his lenient approach to Reconstruction his central theme, along with support for his preferred candidates, most of them Democrats, in the upcoming congressional elections. This was risky, even under the best of circumstances, because presidents did not do political campaigning in those days, and there were concerns that his doing so would seem undignified. At first the tour went extremely well, as Johnson stuck to his script and resisted the temptation to be spontaneous. In Cleveland, however, he lost his composure, had a shouting contest with a heckler, and made other injudicious remarks that were printed in the newspapers. In subsequent cities, matters only got worse, and by the end, in many places, spectators drowned out his efforts to speak. Thus the swing around the circle ended up being a noose around Johnson’s neck. Johnson himself later acknowledged that it did him much more harm than good. In the congressional elections that fall, the Republicans swept to landslide victories, leaving both houses of Congress with huge, veto-proof Republican majorities. Johnson would never again have any control over the agenda moving forward. The wresting of control over Reconstruction from the presidency by Congress was now mostly complete, and a new stage of Reconstruction was about to begin. With this change came a major shift in the structure of constitutional governance, since almost everything to come next would be imposed by Congress over the strenuous objections of the president and the Supreme Court. Never before had Congress reigned so fully over both; never before had any one branch of the federal government so completely dominated over the other two. In early 1867, Congress passed three Reconstruction Acts, over Johnson’s now-impotent vetoes, which in effect treated the South as a conquered province, abolishing the state governments for the time being, dividing the territory into five military districts, and placing it under military occupation. The requirements for readmission to the Union were also made much more stringent; the ex-Confederate states now had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and incorporate into their state constitutions measures that would ensure that all adult males, irrespective of race, would have the right to vote. In addition, Congress passed in 1867 something called the Tenure of Office Act, which prohibited the president from removing a federal official from office without the consent of the Senate. The measure was probably unconstitutional, but its purpose was completely understandable in political terms: the Radicals wanted to ensure that Johnson could not fire the Radicals in his cabinet, such as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who oversaw the administration of the military governments in the South. The ever-stubborn and volatile Johnson took the bait, however, and went ahead and fired Stanton anyway. The House of Representatives responded to that act by impeaching Johnson on February 24, 1868, and seeking to remove him from office. The stage was set for one of the great dramas of congressional history. Under Article I, section 3 of the Constitution, impeached presidents undergo trial in the Senate with the chief justice of the Supreme Court presiding and with a two-thirds vote of that body required for conviction. Johnson’s trial lasted for three months of high drama and intrigue, playing to a packed gallery of onlookers. In the end, when the vote was taken, the margin was razor thin, owing to the defection of Republicans who feared the precedent established by Johnson’s removal. The result came down dramatically to a single, unexpected vote against impeachment from Republican senator Edmund Ross of Kansas. Johnson survived, but only by the barest margin, and his effectiveness as president was now at an end. He would be passed over for the Democratic nomination for president in 1868, and, as if to add to the repudiation, Edmund Ross would lose his bid for reelection to the Senate two years later. Bitter to the end, Johnson made his last act as president one that would sting his enemies: he issued a pardon to former Confederacy president Jefferson Davis. But that ineffectual gesture changed nothing. The Radical tide continued to sweep in and swamp all before it. At their own 1868 convention, the Republicans chose General Ulysses S. Grant, a certified war hero who had no political experience. He was viewed as a sure vote-getter, in the way that Whig military heroes like Zachary Taylor had been. But Grant won the presidency by a surprisingly modest margin in the popular vote (3 million to 2.7 million), a fact that gave added impetus to the swift passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which explicitly protected ex- slaves’ right to vote. The 1868 electoral results showed the Republicans how important it would be to protect the votes of newly enfranchised African Americans, if they were to continue to prevail. With the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, the Radicals had succeeded in getting their way in the South. Or had they? All the southern states were under Republican governments and had not only enfranchised blacks but, in some cases, actually elected blacks to public office, hence the rather misleading term “Black Republican” Reconstruction that is sometimes applied to this period. But in fact the actual government of those states was nearly always in the hands of whites, many of whom were northerners who had come to the region out of a wide variety of motives, ranging from simon-pure idealism to naked opportunism, and who were unaffectionately labeled “carpetbaggers” by white southerners who resented their intrusion. White southerners who had chosen to cooperate with Republican governments earned the even more disdainful epithet of “scalawags.” The widespread use of such disparaging names gives a good sense of how ruled-over many white southerners felt themselves to be in the new era. Leaving aside the names, though, how effective were such governments? More generally, how effective was the Reconstruction program being implemented by the Radical Republicans? The record is mixed, as are the opinions of historians. But it is fair to say, first, that there were many accomplishments, in areas such as civil rights, internal improvements, hospital building, and the creation of public school systems. There also were failures, evidenced both in the spread of corrupt practices in the awarding of state contracts and in the paucity of good and efficient political leadership – a problem that, arguably, afflicted the whole nation at the time, particularly the big cities of the North, just as much as it did the South. Under the circumstances, spectacular successes were too much to hope for; even a minor success was a major achievement. What were conditions like for the freed slaves? They had not received the “forty acres and a mule” that they had hoped for at the war’s end, which meant that for the foreseeable future, they would not have their own land and would still have to work for white landowners. And since the landowners needed the ex-slaves’ labor, eventually systems of land tenancy, such as sharecropping and the crop-lien system, emerged that made this possible. In both systems, farmers received seed, tools, and necessities from their landlords in exchange for which the farmers would agree in advance to turn over a percentage (usually one-third to one-half) of what they produced. On the plus side for the freedman, share-cropping removed him and family members from the rigors of gang labor so characteristic of antebellum plantations. But because they were required to turn over so much of their crop to the landowner, and the rest of the crop was often committed to debt service, the resulting system often became a form of peonage that resembled slavery in a great many ways. There was no escape from the web of obligations, no way to accumulate capital and work toward independence. In addition, although much progress was made in establishing the freedmen’s community life – marital and family stability, schools, and independent churches for the newly emancipated ex-slaves, along with unprecedented access to the mainstream political system – there was also palpable and rising hostility toward them. By the time Grant had assumed the presidency, instances of antiblack sentiment and activity in the South were increasing, including the founding in 1867 of the Ku Klux Klan and other similar organizations whose members roamed the countryside, hidden behind masks and robes, issuing threats, scattering rumors, and occasionally perpetrating acts of savage violence and terrifying destruction, all measures designed to intimidate and suppress the black population and also any white Republicans who took the “wrong” side of things. At Grant’s insistence, Congress passed three Enforcement Acts in 1870–71, designed to combat these groups and their attacks and protect the suffrage rights of blacks in the South. But the acts suffered from weak and inconsistent enforcement, and the groups they were designed to inhibit did not stay inhibited; in fact, they only seemed to gather strength. Under this growing pressure, blacks began to stay home on election days; little by little, their political influence in their respective southern states waned away, and Democrats resumed control. The difference can be illustrated in a single stark example. In overwhelmingly black Yazoo County, Mississippi, in 1873, Republicans cast 2,449 votes, and Democrats cast 638; only two years later, Democrats received 4,049 votes, and the Republicans received 7. The terror campaign had succeeded. In state after state, white southern counterrevolutionaries, who became known as “redeemers,” were taking control, a process that was complete by 1877. It was an astonishingly fast reversal of what had seemed a profound change. Where was the North in all of this? It seems that the great reformist tide that had begun decades before with the antislavery movement, which had carried the cause of emancipation to its completion and then washed Andrew Johnson out of power, was now rapidly ebbing. Zeal was out; weariness and distraction seemed to be setting in. Weariness, in that after four years of horrifying war and nearly a decade of anxious and conflict-ridden “peace,” and before that, decades of agitation and consternation over the slavery question, the problems of the South seemed intractable. Distraction, in that other matters were now occupying their attention: the distractions of settling a new continent and absorbing and exploiting the massive assets of a greatly enlarged American nation. This included such concerns as westward exploration and expansion, railroad construction, industrial development, Indian wars, and above all the eager pursuit of prosperity in the postwar economy, which often could involve corrupt bargains between business and the newly expanded government. Grant’s administration proved to be riddled with corruption, as Grant himself showed a surprising weakness for employing and trusting thoroughly dishonest and unscrupulous men. Finally, a business panic in 1873, at the beginning of Grant’s second term, produced a deep economic depression in which thousands of businesses went bankrupt, millions of people lost their jobs, and further blame was cast in Grant’s direction. The condition of the South was the least of their worries. Other additional and subtler forces were at work. As memories of the war itself began to fade, older loyalties began to reassert themselves. Yes, Virginia had been the North’s enemy of late. But had it not been the case that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were Virginians and national heroes of the highest order? That Andrew Jackson was a southerner? That Lincoln himself was a southerner by birth? The mystic chords of memory of which Lincoln spoke in his First Inaugural, the chords whose sounding would express the harmony of a reunited country, had not been silenced forever by war. With the growth of nationalism in Europe, a related desire for a greater measure of national reunification welled up, a desire that was hard to deny – even if it meant closing one’s eyes to the lamentably incomplete social revolution of the South. The final blow to Reconstruction came with the presidential election of 1876, which turned out to be one of the most corrupt and most controverted presidential elections in American history. The Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio, a former congressman and a wounded Civil War veteran. The Democrats nominated Samuel J. Tilden, a wealthy corporate lawyer and reform-minded governor of New York who had actively opposed corrupt government in New York City and Albany. The campaign itself made it obvious how thoroughly the tide of reform zeal had exhausted itself. Neither candidate supported the Radical agenda; both favored a more lenient approach to the South. Indeed, they disagreed on very few substantive issues, which meant that the campaign was mainly devoted to slurs and irrelevancies, with Democrats mocking the Republicans for their corruption and Republicans “waving the bloody shirt” at Democrats, taunting them with the charge that the Democrats had been the party of secession and the cause of the Civil War. The electoral results were inconclusive. While Tilden won the popular vote by 250,000 votes, he was one vote short of a majority in the Electoral College, with several southern states still contested. There was a blizzard of claims and counterclaims by the two parties, and in the end, Congress, which was itself divided, set up an electoral commission to decide the outcome. Through various machinations, Hayes was able to carry the committee vote 8 to 7, along party lines. Democrats were outraged at this result and threatened to filibuster the results or to march on Washington to force the inauguration of Tilden. But that was not to be, as cooler heads prevailed. An agreement, which became known as the Compromise of 1877, was worked out between the Republicans and a group of southern Democrats who were willing to defect, for a price. The deal was relatively simple. The Republicans would promise that Hayes, if designated as president, would withdraw the last federal troops from the South, allow the last two Republican state governments (Louisiana and South Carolina) to collapse, and commit to the construction of a southern transcontinental railroad. In return, the Democrats would drop their opposition to Hayes and agree to accept the three Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth). It was a bargain all parties were willing to accept. With the Compromise of 1877, the era of Reconstruction came to an end. It is hard not to see it as having been an abject failure. Consider these words of a former slave named Henry Adams, who became a soldier in the U.S. Army and a landowner and community leader in Shreveport, Louisiana, but who reacted with undisguised dismay to the Compromise: In 1877 we lost all hopes…. We found ourselves in such condition that we looked around and we seed [sic] that there was no way on earth, it seemed, that we could better our condition there, and we discussed that thoroughly in our organization along in May. We said that the whole South – every State in the South – had got into the hands of the very men that held us slaves – from one thing to another and we thought that the men that held us slaves was holding the reins of government over our heads in every respect almost, even the constable up to the governor. We felt we had almost as well be slaves under these men. Adams’s anguished words reflected a bitter reality. There had indeed been a moment, a glimmer of hope for a better, different future. Over the next three decades, though, the protection of black civil rights in the South was crushed by the white “redeemer” governments’ rise to power. The progress that had been made was soon forgotten. It gave way to a deep bitterness whose provenance seemed to stretch back to time immemorial, as if things had always been this way and should never have been disturbed.  And in a strange way, the earliest (and generally pro-Southern) chroniclers of Reconstruction, such as the followers of Columbia historian William A. Dunning, who saw Reconstruction as an unmitigated disaster, were of a similar disposition – even if they came to that disposition from an entirely different posture, one that was critical of Radical Reconstruction for attempting too much, rather than achieving too little. In their eyes, too, Reconstruction had been a failure. Might these bleak testimonies, though, have understated the difficulty of the task, and the worthiness of the positive achievements brought about in those turbulent years – even if only as essential groundwork laid for better and more enduring solutions in a day yet to come? That is surely possible too. It is hard to reckon the balance in such matters, and each generation is likely to reckon the balance differently. The transformation of a culture is extremely long and difficult work, and even the best intentions can lead to unexpected and unwanted consequences. Hence the wisdom in Lincoln’s poignant comments at his last cabinet meeting. He would not have approved Johnson’s callousness or postwar southern defiance; but he also understood, better than the Radicals of his own party, that the humiliation of the white South was not going to produce the results he had sought, indeed, that it might produce entirely opposite results. But amid all the arguments and counterarguments, one should not lose sight of the concrete benchmarks of achievement, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteen Amendments to the Constitution, changes in the structure of the nation’s fundamental laws that ensured that, the next time around, the language of the law would be on freedom’s side, just as Lincoln had wanted it to be. One thing is certain. The deeply unsatisfying episode of Reconstruction left too much undone and a great many wounds unhealed. That work, and those wounds, would remain compelling tasks for other generations.