White And Black Violence During Reconstruction
Introduction
In March 1867, nearly two years after the confederate armies had begun to surrender and more than a year after Congress had refused to seat representatives from the former Confederate states, the mark of Radicalism was indelibly inscribed into the cornerstone of the reconstructed American republic. It did not herald the draconian policies imprisonments and executions, massive disfranchisement or confiscation of landed estates that some Republicans had advocated, and many rebels had initially feared, and it required a combination of white southern arrogance and vindictiveness, presidential intransigence and mounting African American agitation before it could be set. But with the Military reconstruction acts, Congress gave the federal government unprecedented power to reorganize the ex-Confederate South politically, imposed political disabilities on leaders of the rebellion and most stunning of all, extended the elective on leaders of the rebellion and most stunning of all, extended the elective franchise to southern black males, the great majority of whom had been slaves. Never in history and nowhere during the Age of Revolution had so large a group of legally dependent people been enfranchised. Critical analysisWith the provision for a black franchise and voter registration encoded in the Reconstruction Acts, League organizers quickly fanned out from these urban areas inti the smaller towns and surrounding countryside and partially into the plantation belt.
The formation of the union League council officially required the presence of at least nine loyal men each twenty-one year of age or older, who were upon initiation, to elect a president and other officers from among those regarded as “prudent, vigilant, energetic and loyal” and as “Possess the confidence of their fellow citizens”. They were expected to hold meeting weekly to follow the ceremony and to “enlist all loyal talent in their neighborhood”. The union league sprang to life through the plantation districts because its goal of mobilizing black support for the national government and the Republican party fed on and nourished the sensibilities and customs that organizers found in many African American communities. League councils served as crucial political schools, educating newly enfranchised blacks in the ways of the official political culture. New members not only were instructed in the league’s history in the “Duties of American citizenship”. And in the role of the Republican party in advancing their freedom but also learned about “Parliamentary law and debating” about courts, juries and militia service, about the conduct of the elections.
During the Reconstruction, black men held political office in every state of the former Confederacy. More than one hundred won elections or appointment to posts having jurisdiction over entire states, ranging from superintendent of education, assistant commissioner of agriculture, superintendent of the deaf and dumb asylum and member of the state land commission to treasurer, secretary of state, state supreme court justice and lieutenant governor. Union league and Republican party activists therefore had to prepare carefully for the election day lest their efforts be nullified. The Paramilitary politics of the Reconstruction south had previously produced dual state governments in Louisiana (1872), Taxes (1873), and Arkansas (1874), but in 1876-1877 they also provoked a national crisis of overmine. The withdrawal of federal troops from the statehouses of South Carolina and Louisiana in April of 1877 did not therefore mark the end of their role in protecting the rights and property of American citizens; it only marked the end of their role at least for nearly another century, in protecting the rights and property of African Americans and other working people.
Summary
Americans faced an overwhelming task after the civil War and emancipation: How to understand the tangled relationship between two profound ideas healing and justice. On some level, both had to occur; but given the potency of racial assumptions and power in nineteenth century America these two aims never developed in historical balance. One might conclude that this imbalance between outcomes of sectional healing and racial justice was simply America’s inevitability historical conditions and celebrate the remarkable swiftness of the reunion, as Paul Buck did in his influential book, The Road to Reunion (1937). But theories of inevitability of irrepressible conflicts or irrepressible reconciliations and rarely satisfying. The sectional reunion after so horrible a civil war was a political triumph by the late nineteenth century, but it could not have been achieved without the subjugation of many of those people worn the war had freed from centuries of bondage.
Conclusion
Reconstruction was one long referendum on the meaning and memory of the verdict at Appomattox. The great challenge of Reconstruction was to determine how a national blood feud could be reconciled at the same time a new nation emerged out of war and social revolution. The survivors on the both sides, Winners and loser in the fullest sense, would still inhabit the same land and eventually the same government. The task was harrowing; How to make the logic of sectional reconciliation compatible with the logic of emancipation, how to square black freedom and the stirring of racial equality with a cause that had lost almost everything except its broken belief in white supremacy. During Reconstruction, many Americans increasingly realized that remembering the war, even the hatred and deaths on a hundred battlefields facing all those graves on Memorial Day became, with time, easier than struggling over the enduring ideas for which those battles had been fought.
