CHAPTER XII: THE WAR FOR RECONSTRUCTION
The Southern Reaction
The Southern Reaction
The effects of Sherman’s Holy War were longstanding, and southern states had to deal with the reality of Reconstruction and the re-appropriation of land to freed Blacks. With many of the southern states, now, readmitted into the Union, with full political rights granted back to them, those more sternly in the pocket of the Old Confederacy and a vengeful Democratic Party sought to extract revenge for the war, Reconstruction, and Sherman’s enactment of Reconstruction policies. One of the great misnomers of the Southern reaction was that it was instantaneous and occurring in rapid succession. In reality, the Southern reaction was a slow war of attrition that came about over the course of decades; slow moving in the 1860s and 1870s as “Yankee” soldiers still dotted the southern countryside and picking up steam in the late 1870s through the 1890s, slowing down in the early 1900s when holdout states like Texas were the last to pass some of the most infamous of “Jim Crow” laws.
One of the most famous Jim Crow laws was the Poll Tax. In particular, states like Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and South Carolina were among the earliest to pass such laws, followed by the rest of the southern and former Confederate states by the early 1900s – again, Texas being the last to do so. While one sees the Poll Tax as designed to cut off the freed Black vote, the poll tax was not uncommon in the United States. Northern states had poll taxes as well. While it is true that southern states deliberately passed such laws to circumvent Reconstruction policies, seeing that most former slaves, now freed, were poor, the policies equally harmed poor whites as well. In New England, where the poll tax was prominent in states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maine, the main target was poor Irish Catholic immigrants to ensure the continued cultural and political dominance of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant aristocracy; thus the creation of political machines and labor unions in the north was, in part, a reaction against the poll tax wherein Irish Catholics, in particular, could exert political muscle. But the southern poll taxes, while harming poor whites, simply entrenched the new aristocracy, which was the same as the old aristocracy, while circumventing the Reconstruction amendments and keeping upwards of 98% of Afro-Americans from voting in elections.
Other laws, like the “Grandfather Clauses,” were passed with equal intent to legally maneuver around Reconstruction. The Grandfather clauses were deliberately targeting freed Blacks, but the importance of “Grandfather” rather than “Father” was the reality that Father Clauses would be insufficient to circumvent Reconstruction policies. By attempting to establish a lineage of rights back to one’s grandfather, the various Grandfather clauses that propped up across the south ensured the destruction of Afro-American rights that were won in Reconstruction and, more importantly, the means by which southerners and their aristocratic backers were able to re-seize what land had been re-apportioned to Afro-Americans during the episode of Sherman’s Holy War.
Once federal forces began withdrawing from the south, southern states pushed Grandfather clauses to deal with the “Black Aristocracy” which had formed in some regions of South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee, the states which saw the most – though still minimal – land reparations between 1865-1867. The Grandfather clauses swept into action saw the re-seizure of lands that were once owned by prominent white families from the Afro-American families and communes that had arisen in their replacement for a decade and a half. While a few mansions and land plots managed to escape the wrath of the Grandfather clauses by timing of births and some northern lawyers and Reconstruction advocates transferring inheritance and ownership right to grandparents – which were, in turn, counteracted by southern legislatures – the Grandfather clauses devastated what changes had occurred during Reconstruction. Some 25,000 of 30,000 Afro-American families and communes which sprung up from the enactment of land reparations were suddenly harmed and evicted from the land paid to them as restitution for slavery and Union victory.
Mansions such as this one were the target of White land seizures. This mansion and its land had been handed over to Afro-Americans during Reconstruction, only to be seized by white southerners during the southern reaction against Reconstruction.
The changing dynamic of land politics in the south did not lead to a mass exodus of Afro-Americans north. While some packed up and sought refuge north of the Mason Dixon Line and the Ohio River, what many found were an equally prejudiced northern white community that sought de facto and de jure segregation of the races just like in the south. The many Afro-Americans who remained in the south, that is, the majority of them, and unable to sojourn elsewhere, simply remained attached to the land that they were once owners of and forced to work for the incoming whites who retook the land and turned the Afro-American populations into, essentially, indentured servants. As many historians have argued, it was slavery by any other name.
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Where southern policies were ineffective, a few plots of land become thriving Afro-American communes. But the communes were not some Marxist-inspired utopia; they were harsh, rough, and isolated. The work was difficult. Helped by Reconstruction lawyers, southerners worked to isolate, subvert, and undermine these few communes which dotted the rural landscapes. The emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, for instance, was among the most utilized weapons against these communes.
KKK members were known to torch these communes and put to flight the Afro-American families and laborers who, in their plight, had to enter indentured servitude on white plantations all over again. With the force of law and political protection behind the KKK, the crimes went “unsolved” with “insufficient evidence.” The courts mocked what evidence and testimony the Afro-Americans presented. “There are no such thing as ghosts or apparitions.” Donned in white hoods, dress, and regalia, such evidentiary testimony was mocked as rank superstition – which fed into the younger white generation’s consciousness of Afro-Americans being “stupid.”
By 1890, less than 100 small communes remained. Growing isolationism meant that these communes were unable to sustain themselves and, without the help of neighboring white communities, had to sell off what land was left and migrate. Knowing the stories of indentured servitude, by the late 1890s a migration north of around 20,000 Afro-Americans occurred in what began a sporadic but continual migration of Afro-Americans out of the south to the north – at least those who had the ability to do so.
Above, A photo of an Afro-American commune in the American South, ca. 1880. A few such communes survived the Grandfather Clauses and KKK raids. But before one sings praise and gives thanks, the lives on such communes were just as rough as during the age of legal slavery. Land ownership changed the concrete reality very little.
Thus, by the turn of the century, the gains of Reconstruction were all but overturned in the Reconstruction Wars. The withdrawal of federal military power harmed the gains that had been made and ensured easy counteraction by southern legislatures. Federal laws, which were still “on the books” in the southern states, had been otherwise neutered by the many Jim Crow laws. Slavery may have ended, but the “new slavery” was every bit as harsh as the old. New animosities arose which brought forth de jure segregation on the principle of “separate but equal” which was upheld in the famous Supreme Court case Plessy vs. Ferguson. But, as already mentioned, the material reality was not separate but equal but separate and unequal.
But the wounds of the Civil War and Reconstruction ran deep. By 1880, the Democratic Party had all but erased the temporary Republican Party from the south – hence forming the so-called “Solid South” which backed the Democratic Party under any and all circumstances. Southern rights were restored and the Confederacy existed in all but name by 1890. Any astute and honest reader would have to ask the question: Who really won the Civil War?