Reconstructing the Nation After Our Deadliest Man-Made Disaster—The Civil War: The Story of America Series [Ep. 33]

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Speaker 1: And we returned to our American Stories, and with another installment of our series about Us: The Story of America series with Hillsdale College professor and author of Land of Hope, Bill McClay. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln had profound implications for the country outside of the sheer shock and terror it caused. How was the South to be rebuilt, the nation reconstructed? How would those who sided with the Confederacy be treated? Let’s get into the story. Take it away, Bill.

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Speaker 2: The year eighteen sixty-six would prove to be an important one regarding the advancement of civil rights. The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed in June of that year.

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Speaker 3: This historic amendment was far broader and

00:01:05
Speaker 2: impactful than the Civil Rights Act and much more complicated.

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Speaker 3: It would be

00:01:13
Speaker 2: the first time that Americans would lay down a definition of what it meant to be a citizen. More important, it stated quite clearly that all persons born or naturalized in the United States were citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment also guaranteed citizens their rights could not be taken away without equal protection

00:01:33
Speaker 3: of the laws.

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Speaker 2: What made those words in the amendment so important? Those words, “equal protection of the laws,” was this: those words extended to each of the states in the very same manner that the federal government was required to do so. This would be the beginning of a process developed in our courts, extending through the nineteen-twenties, of a concept called incorporation, which would extend the guarantees and protections of the Bill of Rights to the states. See, before incorporation, the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government, making the Fourteenth Amendment a significant contribution to the rights of all Americans with great long-term and lasting impact. But that was just Section One of five sections. Section Two was directed at the refusal of those Southern states to grant voting rights to their Black citizens. The terms of this section were strong, punishing states that kept any eligible persons

00:02:37
Speaker 3: from voting, and the punishment was harsh.

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Speaker 2: The guilty states would have their representation in Congress and the Electoral College reduced for violations. To say the least, President Andrew Johnson was not pleased.

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Speaker 3: As the eighteen-sixties’

00:03:00
Speaker 2: midterm election approached, he decided to go on national campaign tour, something presidents didn’t do, putting the Fourteenth Amendment itself on trial. The tactic had some success at first, but then things began to unravel. In Cleveland, he got entangled with a spectator and exchanged that bordered on a shouting match with a heckler. Those irredvised and intemperate remarks of his were picked up by the media of

00:03:28
Speaker 3: the day: newspapers and broadsides.

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Speaker 2: By the end of his campaign tour, things only got worse for Johnson as he was met with jeering crowds who made every effort to drown out his effort to address them. The elections that fall were a huge repudiation of Johnson’s efforts, as the Republicans garnered unprecedented landslide victories, leaving the party in control of the House of Representatives and the Senate

00:03:56
Speaker 3: with veto-proof majorities.

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Speaker 2: It would effectively end Johnson’s presidency. Never before in our history had one branch of government had such control and power over the other two. And in early eighteen sixty-seven, the all-powerful Congress passed not one, not two, but three Reconstruction Acts that all but treated the states of the South as a congregnation, even abolishing the state governments, dividing the Southern territory into five distinct military districts and placing the entire region under what was in essence a military occupation. But Congress wasn’t finished. It also passed something called the Tenure of Office Act, which prohibited the President of the United States from removing any federal official from any office without Congress’s consent. This was a measure that was clearly unconstitutional, but understandable given the nature of the politics of the day. Republicans didn’t want Johnson to be able to remove officials by his whim, one of whom was the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who had the job of overseeing the military governments in the South. Johnson was undeterred, stepping right into the trap that Congress had baited for him by firing Stanton. The House of Representatives took quick action, exercising its constitutional authority to impeach Johnson. This set the stage for one hack of a quasi courtroom drama, one with huge political states. As instructed by Article One, Section Three of the Constitution, impeached presidents are tried in the Senate with the two-thirds vote needed for conviction, a wise choice by our Founders picking such a large majority.

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Speaker 3: This trial went on for what seemed like an eternity. Three months! Three months! And

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Speaker 2: the trial was filled with twists and turns, palace intrigues, courtroom theatrics, and packed galleries. When the vote was finally taken, Johnson survived by the narrowest of margins: one vote, one unexpected vote against conviction by Republican

00:06:34
Speaker 3: Senator from Kansas named Edmund Ross.

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Speaker 2: Johnson had survived, but his presidency had come to an end.

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Speaker 3: Angry

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Speaker 2: right up until the bitter end of his presidency, Johnson’s last act as President was designed to infuriate his opponents and enemies. He pardoned Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederate.

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Speaker 3: Well,

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Speaker 2: the Republicans turned the page, choosing Ulysses S. Grant as their candidate in the eighteen sixty-eight election. He was a hero, a man with great war experience and absolutely no political experience, but he was viewed by the Republicans as a candidate that people would respond to, would be attracted to, in much the same way that generals like George Washington and Andrew Jackson had been. Despite his military honorifics, though, Grant won by a very slim margin, the fact that gave impetus to a quick passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, designed to protect

00:07:44
Speaker 3: the right to vote for former slaves.

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Speaker 2: Okay, so let’s step back for a moment and ask a bigger question. Had the radicals succeeded or failed as it related to the reconstruction

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Speaker 3: of the South?

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Speaker 2: The states of the Confederacy were under the control of Republican governance, and they not only secured the right to vote of freed slaves, but in a few instances elected Black officials. There were real and profound improvements on infrastructure: the building of a public school system, building of hospitals.

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Speaker 3: These were not small things, but the facts on the ground were more stark.

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Speaker 2: The government of the Southern States was still controlled by whites, and Northerners who came to the South did so for any number of reasons, some idealistic and some opportunistic. The White Southerners labeled such outsiders with the derogatory term “carpetbaggers.” Those Northerners were undeterred. As for the free slaves, though they didn’t get the forty acres and a mule they’d hoped and prayed for, a deferred dream that meant, for all practical purposes, that most freed Blacks would still be working for White landowners, which would lead to the development of contractual arrangements like sharecroppers. The farmers would receive their tools, seeds, and other supplies that they needed to do their work, and for those advances, the farmers agreed to give a percentage of their crops, generally in the range of one-half to one-third. Add to that the fact that the remaining portion of the crop was often dedicated to paying off other debts and encumbrances, the result didn’t feel very much different from slavery itself. And though progress was evident in many areas of the freed slaves’ lives, by the time Grant was in office, anti-Black hostility began to swell in the South, which manifested itself in the founding of the Ku Klux Klan and organizations like it.

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Speaker 1: When we come back, you’ll hear more about this story: what happens when Grant becomes President. This story continues here on our American Stories. And we returned to our American Stories and our latest installment of our Story of America series with Doctor Bill McLay, author of the terrific book Land of Hope. When we last left off, despite best intentions, Reconstruction was running into very serious problems, and African Americans in the South were starting to move back to a place where they were before. Let’s get back to the story.

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Speaker 2: General Grant, a man with a soldier’s heart and mindset, went about putting an end to these attacks, and at his urging, Congress went ahead and passed three Enforcement Acts in eighteen seventy and eighteen seventy-one. Though the acts were created to deter such violence and protect Black voting rights, enforcement proved very difficult. The very groups it was designed to control proved uncontrollable. In reality, those hateful and violent groups only seemed to get stronger. It didn’t take long for the threats of violence to achieve the political ends these groups were seeking. The story of one Mississippi county, Yazoo County, tells us the tale. In eighteen seventy-three, Republicans cast nearly twenty-five hundred votes, while Democrats cast a bit over six hundred, a bit more than a four-to-one advantage. In eighteen seventy-six, two years later, Democrats received slightly over four thousand votes, where Republicans received an astonishingly

00:11:51
Speaker 3: low number of seven. Yeah, you heard that right. Seven.

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Speaker 2: The campaign of terror waged by the Ku Klux Klan and other groups like it was a success. They’d lost the Civil War, but now were continuing it with a different kind of war, and it raged on. You may be wondering what were the Northern States doing and thinking as all of this was happening. Well, it turns out that much of the idealistic zeal that drove the Great Abolition Movement and the reforms that Northerners

00:12:27
Speaker 3: hoped would follow the war had withered away by then.

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Speaker 2: The North had issues of its own—problems to solve, a new continent to grow and expand, expansion of the railroads, a modern industrial economy to build, and an immigrant population to build that industrial economy. So opportunity beckoned, prosperity beckoned, reform took a back seat. There were other factors that played, too; there were nuanced factors. As the war and memories of it began to fade, loyalties of old began to re-emerge. While Virginia had definitely been an enemy of the North in the Civil War, it was also true that native sons of Virginia, like George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson, were great national heroes.

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Speaker 3: The nation could not have become what it is without them.

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Speaker 2: Abraham Lincoln was himself a Southerner by birth. The mystic courts of memory that he so beautifully wrote about—a deep urge for the

00:13:42
Speaker 3: nation to move ahead together—was not lost entirely.

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Speaker 2: Indeed, a well of support for a national reconciliation emerged, even when it entailed looking past the seemingly entrenched social and racial problems of the South. The knockout blow to the Reconstruction effort would come with the eighteen seventy-six presidential election, which pitted Rutherford B.

00:14:09
Speaker 3: Hayes against Samuel Tilden.

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Speaker 2: Both of the candidates favored a more hands-off approach in the South, whereas the candidates disagreed on very few big issues, which meant that the campaign would rely less on policy debates than on personal character attacks and personal slurs. Democrats attacked Republicans for being corrupt. Republicans accused Democrats of being the party of secession, the cause of the Civil War itself.

00:14:39
Speaker 3: It was a very close election.

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Speaker 2: Tilden won the popular vote by a tiny majority, but was a single vote

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Speaker 3: shy of a win in the Electoral College. There

00:14:48
Speaker 2: were flurries of claims and counterclaims by the two parties, and Congress weighed in with an election commission to decide the outcome. In the end, it was not pretty, but Hayes was able to win the day with one vote on a strict party line. Democrats, to put it mildly, they were not pleased at the outcome, and of course, why should they have been? And they threatened to use every weapon at their disposal to thwart the Republicans. They even threatened a march on Washington to force the inauguration of Filden. In the end, an agreement was cobbled together to save the day. It would become known as the Compromise of eighteen seventy-seven. It was a steep price to be paid for this compromise. The Republicans promised that if Hayes was made President, they would withdraw the remaining troops in the South and also allow the final two Republican state governments in Louisiana and South Carolina to end. For that promise, the Democrats agreed to end their fight against Hayes and agreed to fully accept and acknowledge the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. With that agreement, the Reconstruction era finally met its end. Looking back as difficult not to see the Grand Plan as mostly a failed project. One man, a former slave named Henry Adams, may have singularly expressed what many thought:

00:16:32
Speaker 3: “In eighteen seventy-seven. We lost all hopes.

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Speaker 2: We found ourselves in such condition that we looked around and we saw 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 had got into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves. And we thought that the men that held us slaves were holding the reins of government over our heads in every respect, the constable up to the governor.

00:17:07
Speaker 3: We felt we had almost as well be slaves under these men.”

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Speaker 2: What utterly tragic words, those final words bear repeating: “We felt we’d almost as well be slaves under these men.” Whatever life there may have been for a better future for Blacks in the South, whatever hope they had had had been—in Adams’s view of things—extinguished. Hope itself, for Blacks, had been killed. The fact is, the reformers on all sides underestimated the difficulties of this task of reformation during the Reconstruction era. The fact is, changing a culture is not a small task, takes generations. If anyone understood these matters, it was able to him Lincoln.

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Speaker 3: But in reflecting upon the era,

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Speaker 2: and sadly the fact that Lincoln was not alive to lead us into that era, one must not lose sight of some of the major accomplishments, which included the passage of those three great amendments to the U.S. Constitution: the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.

00:18:23
Speaker 3: These were not small things.

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Speaker 2: These were fundamental changes in our Constitution, improvements of our Constitution. But there were still deep wounds to heal, and much important work that had been left undone. That work, that healing, real reconciliation, would await the labors of future generations.

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Speaker 1: Had a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery, and a special thanks to Hillsdale College professor Doctor Bill McLay. His book Land of Hope and the Young Readers are important reads. Pick up one for your family. Heck, pick up two. Give them to the kids, lead them to the kids, better still, and the grandkids. The Story of America series. Here on our American Stories.