There was one final recourse for Southerners, and that was violence.
Thus with such techniques did whites manage to return the South to a system of cheap, forced labor done by disempowered blacks.Īnd still, with all that, blacks tried to make better lives for themselves, to run for office, to protest conditions, and improve their education. Black men once free soon found themselves imprisoned for minor offenses – often the hapless victims of false accusations – and on chain gangs. These attitudes on the part of blacks were translated for public consumption as “lazy.”Īdditionally, laws were enacted in the South such as Mississippi’s infamous “pig law” defining the theft of a farm animal as grand larceny. Black men also did not want their women working in white houses, given the history of white sexual exploitation of black women. Naturally they had more interest in working on the latter than the former.
Only after this labor could they work their own little plot of land to feed their families. Freed slaves were denied their own land as they had been promised (“40 acres and a mule”) and were forced to sign punitive contracts that obligated them and their families to work from sun-up to sunset for whites who might or might not pay them. It was widely believed that blacks were lazy and would not work, and prone to committing crimes.
Most school children come to understand Reconstruction as a period of scalawags, carpetbaggers, and ignorant, easily-manipulated freed blacks. Largely obliterated is the service of some 200,000 African Americans in the Union army and navy the vast exodus of southern slaves to northern lines as the Union came through the excitement over freedom by African Americans their desire to work, own land, engage in civic activities, vote, and above all, to get educated and the violent suppression of those aspirations. This characterization dominates the history, memorialization and discussion of the Civil War and post-Civil War period. Eric Foner begins this excellent short elaboration of his earlier book ( Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877) with the observation that, in spite of the biblical proportions of the transformation of four million slaves from bondage to citizenship, “this critical moment in our nation’s history has failed to establish itself in the national memory, at least with any accuracy or full depth of understanding.” Because of this omission, he charges, problems with race remain that have never been fully addressed.įoner observes that the legacy of the Civil War developed into “a fascination with the valor of combat,” a war of “noble tragedy pitting brother against brother.” Black Americans are relegated to a minor role.
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