Emancipation and Reconstruction
Freedom and Upheaval
When war broke out in 1861, African Americans were ready. Free
African Americans flocked to join the Union army, but were
rejected at first for fear of alienating pro-slavery sympathizers
in the North and the Border States. With time, though, this
position weakened, and African Americans, both free Northerners
and escaped Southerners, were allowed to enlist. By the end
of the war four years later, more than 186,000 African American
soldiers had served, including several officers, making up
10 percent of the Union army. More than 38,000 lost their lives,
and 21 were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, including
Sergeant Major Christian Fleetwood. Years later, Fleetwood
would write:
After each war, of 1776, of 1812,
and of 1861, history repeats itself in the absolute effacement
of remembrance of the gallant deeds done for the country by its
brave black defenders and in their relegation to outer darkness.
History further repeats itself in the fact that in every war
so far known to this country, the first blood, and, in some cases,
the last also, has been shed by the faithful Negro, and this
in spite of all the years of bondage and oppression, and of wrongs
unspeakable.
The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 marked
the official beginning of freedom for enslaved African Americans
in the Confederacy, although many did not hear of it for several
months. However, much of the slave population of the South had
been finding its way to freedom for some time, as African Americans
walked off their plantations and farms in vast numbers, many
making their way to the Union lines for food and clothing. This
slow-spreading freedom eventually brought the Confederate economy
to a near-standstill and helped guarantee its defeat at the hands
of the Union.
Promising Beginnings
With the end of the war, the ratification of the 13th Amendment
to the Constitution provided freedom for all African Americans
in the United States. This freedom came, however, during a
time of great national disruption, during which African Americans
faced hard times and an uncertain future. Most had been left
penniless by the war, and some had to avoid attacks by returning
Confederates. Many tens of thousands began traveling throughout
the South in search of long-lost family members, searches that
often took years. Most important, the structure of the nation
had been reordered dramatically, and it would take decades
for the aftershocks of this transformation to fully work themselves
out. African Americans were on the fault lines of that process.
The chaos of the postwar years was met, however,
by a tremendous wave of African American organization. Education,
long denied African Americans in the South, became an especially
impassioned cause. African American teachers helped found new
schools operated by the federal Freedmen's Bureau, and brought
free public education to African Americans in the South for the
first time. By 1870, there were more than 240,000 pupils in more
than 4,000 schools. Howard University, Fisk University, and Hampton
Institute were also founded during this period.
The change with perhaps the greatest transformative
potential, however, was African Americans' new participation
in electoral politics. In 1870 the 15th Amendment was ratified,
which guaranteed all males the right to vote, regardless of "race,
color, or previous condition of servitude." Within a few years,
every Southern state legislature had African American members,
and 11 African Americans had been elected to the U.S. Congress
by 1875. In this regard, at least, the nation's political identity
appeared to have changed for good.
Freedom Curtailed
Many of the victories of the postwar years were quickly withdrawn,
however, and many of the worst aspects of the slave system
returned to the former Confederacy. Federal troops left the
region in 1877, and with them went much of the North's interest
in the well-being of the freed slaves. Former Confederates
soon returned to power and enacted grandfather clauses and
other statutes that rescinded African American voting rights,
along with many others.
Soon, African Americans in many Southern states
were forbidden to vote, to testify in court against a European
American, to enroll in school, to travel freely, to disobey an
order, or to leave a job without permission. In many states,
any African American traveling alone could be arrested, sentenced
to forced labor, and even rented out to private employers by
local or state authorities. Even African Americans who remained
free of the law quickly became prisoners of debt, as landowners
implemented a sharecropping system that guaranteed that workers
would never turn a profit on their land.
New codes of social segregation also came into
being, as European and African Americans were forced into separate
accommodations to an extent even greater than during slavery.
This harsh social order, sometimes known as "Jim Crow", was enforced
by new vigilante organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan, which
terrorized African Americans and tortured and killed those who
violated the new codes. Lynching skyrocketed, peaking in 1892,
when 161 African Americans were murdered by mobs.
For all the tyranny and hardship of the postwar
years, however, they laid the foundation for tremendous changes
to come. In the next century, African Americans would seize the
national agenda as they had never done before.
For more information on the postwar years,
visit African
American Odyssey: Reconstruction and Its Aftermath. |