Reconstruction Era

Reconstruction encompasses the years 1865-1877, from the end of the Civil War to the end of the Grant administration and the election of 1876, which required a compromise to determine the next President. Reconstruction refers to official federal policies enacted to reintegrate the Union. The Reconstruction era includes all of American history in those years, and not just the policy directed toward the ex-Confederate states.

Five years after the Civil War, the United States seemed to be united once again, and the horrible ravages and unimaginable sacrifice of life on both sides seemed almost to have been a bad dream. An editorial in the Spirit of Jefferson, of January 24, 1871, had this to say:

“The superficial observer in Virginia, beholding the apparent devotion to material progress of the people who have so often been thought chivalric, is led to believe that, in the South, as well as in the North, the great war of the sections is nearly forgotten, or is only remembered as an historical fact … have developed a spirit of practicalism hitherto unknown to our people…”

The newspapers were full of the events of the day, both in the US and in Europe and, occasionally, in other parts of the world. There were still references to the recent struggle, and soldiers’ memoirs were the pop literature of the day. Decoration Days — one day a year, usually in late spring, set aside in different communities on different days, to clean up and beautify the graves of the glorious dead, days that would eventually coalesce into Memorial Day — had become a fixture in many cemeteries. Decoration Days were initiated and led by those ‘Winchester women,’ like many women in the South, who simply refused to let the Civil War die. These southern women led the charge to have statues erected in memory of Southern generals and other men prominent in the rebellion, a movement that reached its full expression in the early 1900s at the height of the Jim Crow era. Immediately after the war, Edward A. Pollard created the myth of the Lost Cause and the defeated South became the heroic martyred. The rebellion was broken, but, despite Lincoln’s 1865 plea of ‘malice toward none, with charity for all’ and Grant’s uninspired ‘Let us have Peace’ three years later, the South still seethed, and the cloying sentimentality of the Lost Cause fermented in the southern heat, boiling up into scalding, vengeful violence against the recently freed and now Constitutionally-protected blacks. The KKK meted out its hydra-headed terror.

As after any tragedy, one coping mechanism is to keep busy, and the US got busy in the years after the war. Railroad building became almost an obsession — the distance between any two points on the map seemed to demand its own line or at least a spur off a main road. The transcontinental railroad was already in place, but that was just the beginning of railroading in the West. Manufacturing of all kinds boomed, pulling young men and women from family farms to cities, adding to urban populations already bloated from an influx of European immigrants. Inventors got busy filing for patents for every conceivable device. Counterfeiters got busy challenging the new national currency and the new agency, the Secret Service, established to protect it. One scandal after another provided a distraction from the effects of the war: the Whiskey Ring, the Star Route Postal Ring, Custom House frauds, sugar frauds, cadetships for sale. The nation was worn out with political malfeasance, industrial greed, and the constant stream of stories, statements, and rumors rising from the South, each more horrific than the last, of white brutality against the freed slaves. There was no shock left in the American psyche. The business of the nation and the future beckoned, and the South could come along if she wished but the North, the Federal government, and the economy were no longer willing to drag her dead weight to the inevitable conclusions. You can lead a horse to water, but . . . In 1877 Reconstruction was sacrificed to the political aspirations of the Republican Party — support from Southern Congressional Representatives for the electoral college decision in favor of a Republican president was exchanged for the withdrawal of federal troops (notably in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana where Republican state governments depended on a military presence), ending Reconstruction.

In short, things were changing and there was no going back. The war was won, but the South remained defiant and unrepentant; the slaves were freed but once the federal government abandoned Reconstruction, they found themselves out of the frying pan and in the fire; the industrial revolution was in full swing, which was both a blessing and a curse; railroads stitched the nation’s economy together in the most efficient manner yet devised, allowing anyone with a few dollars access to almost any commodity, as well as a chance to travel; greed and corruption were rampant, and openly so; life was moving faster and faster and was more and more dependent on the regulation of time; women began clamoring loudly for rights, the same rights just recently given to black men.