The demoralizing brutalities of the Civil War brought the United States into a state of division. The Reconstruction Era occurred in the United States between 1865 – 1877, in an effort to bring the nation back together after the Civil War. Reconstruction brought an end to the remnants of the Confederation, and gave hope for a unified United States. Guided by Andrew Johnson’s perception of the plan created by Abraham Lincoln, the initial intentions were misinterpreted. The plan got lost in translation and turned deeply racist and rashly thought out. The Reconstruction Era did succeed literally in re-unifying the Union in a simplistic process, and it brought into light the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. Beyond these ratifications, not much went well. Reconstruction was a failure due to the false promises made by a racist government. For African American people, the Reconstruction Era was a terrible failure due to the fact that the Freedmen’s Bureau was severely cut short, black codes limited African-Americans’ freedom, and the south was left in poverty leading to forced labor and sharecropping.
The Freedmen’s Bureau bill on March 3rd, 1865 was initiated by President Abraham Lincoln. It was an organization formed one year before the civil war ended, that aimed to aid and protect emancipated slaves during their evolution from a life of slavery to freedom. During the time when the Bureau was operating, they fed millions of people, built hospitals and provided aid, negotiated contracts for emancipated slaves, and helped solve labor disputes. Despite all this, one of the more paramount services that the Bureau created was opening up thousands of African American schools and the first historical black colleges in America. In theory, these programs could have been a great opportunity for the ex-slaves, as it was an organization meant to help recreate a unified society. However, shortly after Andrew Johnson became president, the Bureau was underappreciated. Andrew Johnson led an extremely racist and unfair presidency. Johnson came from poverty in North Carolina, one of the biggest slave states at the time, working as a tailor’s apprentice. He got into politics at the local level and worked his way up to the U.S. congress, and for two terms was the governor of Tennessee. He lacked the qualities necessary for the responsibilities he assumed after Lincoln’s death. He had no compromising skills and was extremely intolerable of criticism (Give Me Liberty, Foner, 561). Pardoning nearly all the white southerners who took an oath of allegiance, this brought prominent confederates and members of the old elite to power. The majority of the North started rallying against the president. (Give Me Liberty, Foner, 562). He held deeply racist views believing, “African-Americans had no role to play in Reconstruction.”(Give Me Liberty, Foner, 561). Without the support of the new president Andrew Johnson the Bureau had no chance of succeeding from the beginning. The Bureau shut down under the scrutiny of the ex-confederates and the flustered congress. On June 28th, 1872 the Freedmen’s Bureau was officially shut down and delegated all actions of the Bureau to the general of the U.S. army. Lasting only 7 seven years, this was a program designed to aid emancipated slaves, an institution they have been apart of in colonial America since 1670. A bill was proposed by congress to extend the expiration of the Freedmen’s Bureau but was shockingly denied by President Andrew Johnson. The racism tied to slavery became apart of American culture and wasn’t going to be stopped by a simple agency that lasted almost 30 times shorter than slavery. Without proper funds and support from a racist government who didn’t want to see the African-Americans succeed, the Bureau had no chance of success. This left African-Americans uneducated and unable to protect themselves in disputes throughout the country.
As mentioned before, the systematic racism that blanketed the United States proved a huge problem for the millions of African-Americans that reconstruction tried to incorporate back into society. In 1865, when slavery was abolished, the white population still believed that African-Americans were an inferior race. It was an issue that kept the emancipated slaves from being able to really move up in society. The emancipation of slavery looked good on paper but really gave Africans-Americans these false sense of freedoms. The Black Codes were one of the many ways the whites attempted to restrict the freedoms of African-Americans. The Black Codes were essentially a replacement for the Slave Codes, limiting African-American’s right to testify against whites, to serve on juries, or to vote. They also declared that they who do not sign yearly labor contracts could be arrested and/or hired out to white landowners (Give Me Liberty, Foner, 562). Reconstruction was all about incorporating all the African-Americans back into the American society but with the black codes starting right after the Civil War, there wasn’t an ability to do that. An example of this is in the Mississippi Black Codes, which stated that no white’s and black’s shall be married without punishment of life in prison (Blackpast.org, Mississippi Black Codes). Now does that sound very equal to you? In addition to the Black Codes being enforced by southern states, the passing of the Jim Crow laws further enforced a racist system in America. These laws were deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court and allowed racial segregation against African-Americans, completely undermining the entire point of Reconstruction. This created a separate society between blacks and whites. Jim Crow laws allowed separate schools for each race, railroad cars, and even small things like separate drinking fountains (Blackpast.org, Jim Crow Laws: Tennessee). In the document, African Americans Seek Protection, a speech given by Thaddeus Stevens attacking Presidential Reconstruction states, “loyalty is only ‘lip deep’ and that their professions of loyalty are used as a cover to the cherished design of getting restored to their former relation with the Federal Government, and then, by all sorts of ‘unfriendly legislation’ to render the freedom you have given us more intolerable then the slavery they intended for us.” (Thaddeus Stevens Attacks Presidential Reconstruction). This speech shows that the legislations included in Reconstruction were even worse for African-Americans than actual slavery. He said the only way to truly give them freedom was to amend the constitution to prohibit states from making distinctions between race or color. Also that African-Americans only salvation is the possession of the ballot. Both of these things aren’t given to African-Americans until much after the end of Reconstruction.
The Civil War was one of the brutalist wars in American History. With over 620,000 casualties the war left the South in ruins. Towards the ending of the war, the Union raged into the South and destroyed everything in its path. The South was left with major debt and thousands of destroyed farms. Land reform was required as newly emancipated slaves had the opportunity to now own land. However, the land reform in America was another terrible failure. The freedmen refused to sign the forced labor contracts put in place by the Black Codes so another method of distribution came about, sharecropping. This method had land owners, usually former slave masters, divide their property into 20-50 acre plots that would be suitable for a single family. In exchange for this land and shelter, the sharecroppers had to agree to give a certain percentage of their cash crop to the landlord. They would require interest rates as high as 70 percent which didn’t allow for any economic accumulation and these families became dependent on this farmland, forcing them to come back year after year (Lehrman, Sharecropping Contract, 1867). This shows failure because it forced a lot of the emancipated slaves to go right back to the fields that they were working before when they were slaves. They didn’t own the land, the tools, or the harvest. The only real difference of sharecropping and slavery was the fact that they had written contracts.
The Reconstruction era lasted only 12 short years, a timeframe not nearly long enough to combat the institution of slavery that lasted almost 200 years. The racism that plagued the government never gave reconstruction a real chance, as they cut the Freedmen’s Bureau short, enforced unequal laws to restrict black freedom, and left the south in poverty with no opportunity for socio-economic improvement for emancipated slaves. For these reasons, nearly the next 100 years following Reconstruction, African-Americans had no political power and the Southern customs did not improve.