THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION - 1865-1890
THE POSTWAR SOUTHERN ECONOMY
6.4: ORIGINS OF SHARECROPPING
This whole question of whether facilities should be separate or not was murky and
debated in Reconstruction, state by state, community by community. The early
Presidential Reconstruction governments had begun to build facilities for whites. They
said, forget about blacks. The federal government freed them, they got to take care of
them. But they began to build hospitals, or asylums, or even schools, like in North
Carolina, they actually began building a public school system for whites immediately
after the Civil War. Then the Freedmen's Bureau ordered them to allow blacks into the
school system, even if it meant setting up schools, separate schools, for blacks. So if
you're going to have public schools, they've got to have them for both. Whereupon
(this is 1866) North Carolina abolished its public school system. They would rather
leave white people uneducated than pay taxpayers' money to set up schools for
blacks. This shows you the mentality coming out of slavery. But generally speaking,
these public institutions were separated in some way during Reconstruction. And even
in jails, the inmates tended to be separated. Even in the South Carolina Institute for
the Blind, where people could not see race, [laughter] they were still separated from
each other into different wings of the building. So as I say, the reason for this, as I
say, is simply most African Americans felt that it was -- what they were getting was
public facilities for the first time. They were being recognized as part of the body
politic, the citizenry, which they hadn't been. So the issue of segregation or
integration was really not nearly as important in 1867, '68 as it would become, you
know, later on and in the 20th century. In terms of teaching at schools, another factor
is that black parents wanted black teachers for their children. And they knew that
whites would never send their kids to school to be taught by a black teacher. And so if
you wanted black teachers, you had to have separate schools; that was the only way
they would ever survive. I should say that all this relates to a kind of larger question,
also murky, which -- a sort of difference in emphasis, you might say, between my
work on this and another very, very important book, which came out about ten years
ago, on Reconstruction, by Steven Hahn, called "A Nation Under Our Feet," which won
the Pulitzer Prize back in 2003 or '04. The title of Hahn's book, "A Nation Under Our
Feet," gives you the argument, in a certain sense. His argument is African Americans
thought of themselves as a separate nationality. They did not think of themselves as
purely American citizens. Even thought they talked about equal rights, it was sort of
group self-determination that was more important to them. And he sets himself up
(he's a good friend of mine and a very good scholar) he sets himself up against my
book, which emphases more the desire for inclusion in the body politic, even though,
with separate institutions like churches, but that in political issues I saw more of this
emphasis on inclusion. Who's right, who's wrong? Well, I'm right, of course. [laughter]
They're both important books, and Hahn's book is very important. But you know, in all
these issues you have these currents floating around of how much separation, how
much integration. There's no single answer to that. But these issues are debated. And
the Reconstruction governments are trying to deal with them and satisfy black
constituents, without totally alienating the white population of the South, which is the
majority in most Southern states. Now another area, of course, these governments
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had to deal with, maybe the basic area, was the economic plight of the South. Now,
there was a lot of destruction in the Civil War, as we all know. Sherman, all this stuff.
But an agricultural society can rebound quickly from destruction. The land is not
destroyed, you know. It's not like factories you have to rebuild. The land is still there.
You need to maybe build new fences. A lot of animals, livestock, etc., were killed in
the war or taken by the army. There's a lot of rebuilding to be done, but it's possible
to get going again. But the question is how to do that. Now, African Americans still
wanted land. That 40 acres and a mule was still out there as a political issue. But no
state -- Congress had made it clear they were not distributing land. But states can
have all sorts of policies about land. But very few of them addressed this question
directly. The one exception was, actually, South Carolina, which set up a state land
commission, which would purchase land on the open market. And the value, the price
of land had fallen enormously, so it was possible to purchase land if you had money in
significant amounts. The state would acquire land for the state, not give it away but
sell it to, well, anybody who wanted it, but mostly black families in South Carolina. Sell
it on very long-term bases with very low interest rates, easy payments, in other
words, try to encourage -- use the power of the government to gather up land and
then settle black families on it. And by the end of Reconstruction, something like 10%
of the African American families had land (in South Carolina) land of their own, thanks
to the South Carolina Land Commission. Whether 10% is a lot or a little, you can
figure out for yourself, but it's certainly more than zero, although it's not everybody,
by any means. As I mentioned last time, there were other measures to try to assist,
you might say, or stand behind these agricultural laborers, but also these small
farmers. There were these "stay" measures, that is, measures suspending the
collection of debts. This tended to benefit more people who owned land, rather than -most blacks didn't have debts; they had nothing, you know. But no one's going to loan
them money. So this benefited small farmers, maybe even planters, in some states.
There were these homestead provisions I mentioned last time, whereby a certain
amount of your property was exempt from seizure for debt. So even if you sort of
went bankrupt, you could still hang on to your home and some small amount of land.
How did these affect the mass of African Americans? It's not 100% clear. We know
that land distribution failed. And what takes its place is the rise of a system that we
call sharecropping, right? Sharecropping. As the name suggests -- there are all sorts
of variations within it, but sharecropping is basically that the employee works the land
certain portion of land, for the year, and at the end of the year, the crop is gathered
and they share the crop with the owner. The owner has land but needs labor. The
laborers want land but can't get it and need to work. Sharecropping is a compromise.
By the way, sharecropping is a system that exists all over the world in one form or
another. Some places it works in a perfectly rational way, or successful way,
sometimes it doesn't. It didn't work very well in the South in the long period after the
Civil War, not just a few years, for reasons we will explain in a second. Sharecropping
was a compromise between the white need for labor and the black desire for as much
economic autonomy as you could get under the circumstance. For example, it's not
like slavery in that, putting aside that you're not a slave, there's no overseer telling
you what to do, you're not working in a gang with other people. They're working in
family units. Each family has a plot of land, which they rent from the owner. They
basically farm it as they see fit. There's nobody there day-to-day, telling them what to
do, as under slavery. So there's more day-to-day autonomy. How they allocate their
labor becomes a question for the family to decide. Nobody's telling you, go out in the
fields at six in the morning, whether you want to or not. Nobody's telling you, your
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child has to go to work in the fields rather than go to the school down the road. So it
does, despite the economic inequality of it, it does give these laborers more autonomy
than certainly they had under slavery. Moreover, it's a reflection of the fact that
there's no money in the South. You can't really pay wages to people for working,
because there's no money. The Southern economy is bust, basically. The financial
system is bust. The planters didn't have enough money to pay wages to people. That's
why you share the crop. The valuable thing is the crop at the end of the year. Now
there were many different variations in this. How they divide the crop depends on
things like who provides the seed and the fertilizer. The more the landowner provides
to the sharecropper, the more of the crop he gets at the end of the year. In the
Gienapp book, there's a sharecropping contract, which sort of explains a little bit how
this works. And one important fact, though, is that there is this serious legal
distinction, which may not seem like much at the beginning, as to whether the
sharecropper (the farmer, the farm family) are wage earners or renters. Are they
working as employees of the owner? Or are they working as renters? Because then the
question is, it basically boils down to: who gets the first crack at the crop when the
year is over? Because both of them may be in debt. They have creditors. If you're a
wage earner, the crop belongs to the planter and the planter gives you your share out
of that. If you're a renter, the crop belongs to you, and you give the planter his share
as rent. What difference does that make? Well, what if the planter owes money to
other people? What if he borrowed money from a bank? What if he borrowed money
from a, you know, a merchant? There's a lot of people who he's beholden to at the end
of the year, and the tenant may not be first in line. In other words, if it belongs to the
planter, the merchant may take their part first, the bank may take their part first.
There may not be anything left for the sharecropper when the planter's debts are
satisfied. So that's a not good situation. On the other hand if you're a renter, you
have the crop, and it doesn't matter what the planter's debts are. You pay the planter
out of your crops. So this may be obscure, but it's very important. Under
Reconstruction, the law basically described the sharecropper as a renter. It shifted the
balance of power. Even though it's an unequal situation, they try to shift the balance
of power toward the sharecropper to protect his right to that part of the crop at the
end of the year. Again, as soon as Reconstruction ends, the so-called redeemers
change the law and they define the sharecropper as a wage earner with no claim to
the crop at all until the planter gives you his share, and he may not have a share when
the whole thing is over. So it's a very important, somewhat obscure but very
important legal point as to how people actually experience this.
6.5: THE CROP LIEN AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Now, the rise of sharecropping led to real radical changes in Southern life in the rural
areas, in some ways. This is in my book, but it's a, a very famous image of the Barrow
Plantation in Georgia before and after the Civil War. Okay, on the left, Barrow
Plantation before the Civil War, on the right, 1880 or something like that. Before the
Civil War, the slaves are all living in one little community at the center. There's the
sort of big house up here, and then there's the slave community. They're all living in
slave cabins in one little centralized place of the plantation. Look at what it looks like
in 1880. They are scattered, these families are now scattered over the length and
breadth of the plantation. Each family has its own little plot of land, which it is tilling.
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The slave community has been broken up into these family farms. They were all pretty
close to each other, they're not totally isolated. But they are separate, they're more
separated out than they were during the slavery days. And you can't see it on here,
but there is a school there now on the plantation, which you wouldn't have had, and
there's a church. They've also built their own church. If you look in the book, you'll
see they're on there with a little label. So this is, this shows you how just the physical
setup of community has changed because of the rise of sharecropping here. Now by
the way, sharecropping, on the face of it, is not an unreasonable arrangement, given
the existence of a large group of landless laborers, and a group of people owning the
land, but without much cash and needing labor. But what makes it pernicious is its
connection to the credit system of the South, what we call the crop lien, L-I-E-N. Crop
lien. Not "lean in," like what's-her-name. Lien, the crop lien. What is a lien? The lien is
a debt, or that is to say, is a claim. Someone puts a lien, if you owe someone money,
they can put a lien on your property in order to make sure they get paid, right? So if
you own a house, but your credit card bills are going too high and you can't pay them,
the bank may put a lien on your house to... Oh, by the way, the government does this.
The IRS is always putting liens on people's property to get their money. So farmers
always need credit, right? By definition -- they don't get their money until the end of
the year, right? Their crop is harvested, they sell it, they get their money. But how
are they going to live through the year? They have to borrow money. Farmers are
always borrowing money. You need collateral, right? What are you promising the guy
you're borrowing this money from? In the North and the West, the basic collateral is
the land, right? A mortgage. A farmer takes out a loan from the bank, with his land
as the collateral. And if he can't pay, as sometimes happens, the bank will seize his
land. But in the South, land has dropped in value enormously. And moreover, there
are no banks. They're all bust from the war. The people with money are merchants,
local merchants. They're the ones who you borrow money from. What do they want?
They don't want your land, they want the crop, they want that cotton crop, that's the
most valuable thing in the South, is cotton, after the war, because the price is still
pretty high. So this is what they call the crop lien. In order to get money, in order to
borrow money, you've got to pledge a share of your future crop. That's why this
business of who gets it first is -- the planter is borrowing money with the crop as his
collateral. The farmer, the sharecropper, is going to a merchant, borrowing money.
He needs equipment, he needs food for his family, he needs seed or whatever it is,
clothing. What is he pledging? His share of the crop. It's these country stores where
the credit system is centered. Here's a very rare photo of a country store in the South.
This is a rural area, there's a bridge going over a stream, and this is a country store
out in the left. The South is full of these little stores, scattered around the
countryside, run by merchants who are loaning money to planters and sharecroppers.
They're getting their money from the North. That's where the money is. They're
getting credit from the North and they're distributing it around. And they're pledged a
share of the crop as collateral. So, what is the result of this? First of all, it means
you've got to grow cotton, right? You've got to grow cotton. You go to the merchant
and say, hey, I'd like to borrow some money, I'm growing some food for my family,
they say, no, we're not interested in that. We're not giving you any money on the
basis of some cabbage or something. No. You grow cotton, I'll loan you the money.
You grow anything else, forget it. This means that, unlike other places that abolish
slavery, cotton production in the South by the 1870s is back to its pre-war level. Back
to its pre-war level. In the West Indies, sugar production fell dramatically after the end
of slavery. Coffee production fell after the end of slavery. But in the U.S., cotton
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revives, partly because there's a high price in the market, and mostly, though,
because of this crop lien. The credit system is pushing people to grow cotton, whether
they want to or not. So, as I say, more cotton, more cotton. Well, what's the result of
that? What happens if there's more and more cotton being grown? The price of cotton
keeps falling. For 30 years after the Civil War, the price of cotton descends.
Overproduction of cotton, not only in the South, but around the world. So it becomes
harder and harder to make ends meet if you're growing cotton, right? By the 1930s,
in the Great Depression, the New Deal will devise a plan to pay people not to grow
cotton. The only way to bolster up the price is to reduce the amount grown. But no
single person can do that. If I'm a small farmer, I say, well, I'm not growing cotton,
that's going to push up the price. No, there's no effect. You got to get everyone to do
that. You got to get everyone to stop growing cotton, or to reduce cotton, if you want
to affect the price. Only the government can do that; individual choice is not going to
affect the price of cotton. So, the crop lien system pushes the South even further into
this one-crop mold, which is a disaster for economic growth, long, long after the end
of Reconstruction. Here's an important point therefore: land is not the only scarce
resource. If African Americans had been given 40 acres and a mule, they would have
been better off, but they still would have been entrapped by this credit system. Credit
is just as important to a farmer as land. And the credit system which existed was
terribly deleterious to white farmers as well as black.
6.6: ECONOMIC RECONSTRUCTION, BLACK AND WHITE
An important thing to mention about sharecropping is it was not a racial system. It was
for both white and black farmers. In fact, every census from 1880 to 1940 showed there
were more white than black sharecroppers in the South. Now, the percentage among
blacks was much higher than among whites, but there was still -- this is a system which
is spreading throughout the South, and one of the major changes in Southern life after
the war is that whites start growing cotton, because that's the only way they can get
credit. Before the war, white people didn't grow cotton, except in a few upcountry parts
of South Carolina. It was the plantations that grew cotton. White farmers grew food for
themselves, raised hogs, that kind of thing. Now, the white farmer is trapped into this
system just like -- but they're coming from different directions. The blacks are moving
up from slavery into sharecropping. More and more white farmers are falling down from
owning their own land. When they're in debt, they lose their land, they fall into this
position of tenant farmers beholden to merchants. Eventually, by the 1890s, as we will
see in a week or so, you get this agricultural uprising in the South, the populist
movement among small farmers who are desperate to change the credit system so that
they can try to get back on their feet. And this system is also compounded by fraud, by
cheating, by very high interest rates. You see in the Gienapp book a little bit about, you
know, at the end of the year when they settle up with the merchant or the planter,
there's all these charges against the sharecropper. Some of them are legitimate, some of
them aren't This was another reason you better be literate, because they're going to
present you with a list. Yeah, look here in March, you borrowed this much and in May,
you borrowed this much and here it all adds up, and by the way, you still owe me
money. I'm taking your whole crop, it's worth this much. You're still in debt. So next
year, you got to keep the cycle of borrowing money to grow cotton. You'll never get out
of debt. Sharecropping is not a ladder to prosperity or independence, it is a trap, which
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people fall further and further into because of the way the credit system operates, the
way the world market for cotton operates, etc. And the sharecropping and crop lien
system, as I say, lasts all the way to the 1930s when it is destroyed, basically, by the
Great Depression, by the AAA, Agricultural Adjustment Act, which I just mentioned, by
massive African-American migration off the land, and eventually by the mechanization of
cotton picking, which is something that comes quite late, and then they don't need so
much labor. Is there anything Reconstruction governments could have done to alleviate
this situation? Difficult to say. Short of massive land distribution, probably not. Just
maybe short of setting up a state-organized credit system where the government will -eventually, that's what the populists say: the government should loan us money, get out
of this whole system of merchants. But that doesn't come and it only comes well into the
20th century, by which time small farmers have been mostly wiped out anyway. But in
other ways, they do try to at least alleviate some of the problems of these small
farmers, both white and black. One of the ways is, again, going back to the lien laws,
lien laws. As I say, the planter owes money to a lot of people. Who gets the first crack?
Laws tell you who gets the first crack, who has the first lien, the second lien, the third
lien. These governments passed laws, what they call "laborer's lien," in other words, that
the first person to get paid will be the worker, will be the sharecropper. The merchant
has to wait. The banker, if there is one, has to wait. The first person who gets paid, the
laborer's lien, at least to try to protect the sharecropper from having everything lost at
the end of the year. Again, when Reconstruction ends, those laws are changed, the
merchant gets the first lien. The laborer is pushed way down the list and so often doesn't
get anything. So in a sense, what's happening in Reconstruction, you know, one
historian wrote that in Reconstruction, "Republicans undertook to promote political
equality in a society characterized by equality in...nothing else," which is probably fair
enough. Political equality. Civil equality. But economically, nothing remotely resembling
equality. Reconstruction didn't fundamentally alter the balance of power on the land. But
it did allow blacks to use political power to try to, in some ways, combat their economic
weakness through these lien laws and laws about tenancy and everything. And a kind of,
almost a kind of class stalemate develops in Reconstruction, where the whites have the
land, but the blacks have political power in a lot of areas and try to use that to balance
off. The stalemate is broken by the end of Reconstruction, and after that, the whole
power balance swings almost completely to the planter and merchant, with the
sharecropper just completely out in the cold. So certainly, the economic revolution does
not go forward nearly as strongly as the political revolution of Reconstruction.
6.7: THE PROBLEM OF CORRUPTION
Now, there's one other aspect of the Reconstruction governments that, of course, got a
lot of attention at the time, and among historians, and that is political corruption. This
was the main argument against Reconstruction, eventually, that these governments
were corrupt, they spent too much money. And the reason was black suffrage. In other
words, black suffrage created governments that were utterly irresponsible and, you
know, travesties, etc., of good government. What is corruption? See, that's an
interesting question. How do you define corruption? Corruption is taking a bribe to do
something, a government official taking a bribe. That's pretty clearly corrupt. What
about taking money from some rich person for your campaign and promising to do
something in office? Is that corruption? That's the way things work now, right? I mean,
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the Supreme Court has actually been greatly encouraging this by taking away all the
limits on individual, you know, campaign donations. Just a few weeks ago, a whole
bunch of aspiring presidential candidates went out to Las Vegas. Why did they go to Las
Vegas? They like a good show, you know, floor show, gambling. No. That's not why they
went. They went to literally sit at the feet of Sheldon Adelman or Adelson, right,
Adelson, who is a wealthy donor. He's just a rich guy who donates a lot of money to
campaigns and he's got one issue. His issue is, he runs casinos, and his issue is stopping
online gambling. So all these political figures like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a
pretty upstanding fellow, and others, trekked out there to assure Adelson that they
were, suddenly, they realized how terrible online gambling was. He had never said a
word about it in his life (I mean Graham). And I'm not picking him out. People do this in
all areas of politics. And in order to get that guy's money, they have to promise him
they're going to take care of the issue that's so important to him. And he puts a lot of
money into campaigns. Now is that corruption? Yeah, I think that's corruption, but it's
not really seen that way. Sometimes people see corruption as a kind of Robin Hood
operation. In other words, that's the way these political machines operated in the 19th
century, the Tweed ring in New York and everything. They kind of skimmed off money
from businesses. They kept a lot for themselves. You know, Robin Hood didn't put most
of it in his pocket; these guys did. But some of it they distributed to poor constituents,
people who needed a job. Kind of a miniature welfare system created by the political
machine, paid for by money skimmed off from, you know, building contracts and things
like that. So you know, that's another kind of corruption. Sometimes corruption plays a
positive role in getting government to do things. Generally, reformers tend to be middle
class who are just outraged by the spectacle of corruption, or business -- it's generally
businesses who -- because they're paying, you know. They're the ones who are paying
for this. If you wanted to import something into New York's harbor, a great harbor in the
19th century, you had to pay the customs collector something, because there were so
many regulations, so many rules, you could always be caught out on some little
violation, you know, and have to pay a fine. It's much easier to just put some money in
the guy's pocket and not be bothered by them. But business doesn't like that. So every
once in a while, they reform, enterprise kicks up to try to get rid of the machines. They
do kick out the machines. And then people get fed up with the reformers, and the
machines always come back in, because the reformers aren't giving out turkeys at
Christmas, you know, so why vote for them? So what about the Reconstruction regimes?
What is corrupt about them? Well, the main complaint was actually expenditure. They
were spending a lot more money than the previous governments, for obvious reasons.
The size of the citizenry had doubled, basically. The government was doing far more
than it had. Schools, for example, cost a lot of money to build. If you're not going to
have any schools, government can be pretty cheap. How do you pay for these things?
Well, through taxation, obviously. So taxes rose. Taxes in Reconstruction were much
higher than they had been. And moreover, their incidence fell in different ways. Now
taxes were based on property (that's the way it was in the North), landed property.
Remember, I had said before the Civil War, the main tax in the South was not on land, it
was on slaves, and on kind of licenses and professions. Small farmers didn't pay much
tax at all, even if they owned their own land. Planters didn't pay much on their land,
either. They paid for their slaves, but they could engross large amounts of land without
paying any tax on it. Now you get this general property tax on land, which means a
considerable increase for both large and small, mostly white, obviously, land owners.
Blacks who don't own property are not paying the property tax. In Presidential
Reconstruction, these governments had tried to finance themselves through poll taxes.
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What is a poll tax? Poll tax has nothing to do with voting, necessarily, (eventually it will)
but a poll tax is a tax on you as an individual. Every person has to pay the poll tax -and the same, the rich guy, the poor guy. It's a way of taxing people who don't have any
money. Tax the individual. Right? It's totally regressive. The millionaire and the pauper
pay the same poll tax. They're very unpopular. It was the poll tax that actually
undermined the government of Margaret Thatcher in England in the late 1980s. She was
very popular and then she decided to introduce this poll tax in England, where every
person in England would pay the same individual tax, and people just thought that was
wrong. So that's how they try to finance it in Presidential Reconstruction. When Radical
Reconstruction comes in, they get rid of these poll taxes and put in the general property
tax. And that is seen as a terrible thing, even though the money was needed by these
governments. Well, they also had to borrow money. They went in to state debt, and
that's also seen as profligacy. But the main source of corruption involved railroad
building. When these governments decided they could not just redistribute property,
they took the path that, what we've got to do is promote economic growth. If we can
promote economic growth and economic diversification, then everybody will benefit. And
poorer people will benefit. They'll have more job opportunities, more choice in what they
do. So the way to do that is to get railroad construction to open up areas, promote
factory development. The government starts giving out aid to railroad promoters,
factory... But this is done nowadays. I mean, I sit there trying to watch the Yankees, and
every other inning, there's an ad with Governor Cuomo saying, come to New York, set
up your business, you don't have to pay any taxes. That's good. But who's paying the
taxes then, you know? We are. I'm sure those guys, if a fire develops, expect a fire
company to come and put it out. Right? But they're not paying taxes for that. But
anyway, you give tax breaks to encourage economic development. So that's what
they're doing in Reconstruction, or they give direct aid to businesses. And a lot of these
businesses turn out to be corrupt, particularly with railroads. Railroad development is
particularly rife with this, because you generally only need one railroad between two
places. You don't need to build two railroad lines between Columbia and Charleston, for
example. So you need one railroad line, and so it's very lucrative. So these railroad
promoters start bribing members of the legislature, bribing members of the government,
to get the right, to get the charter, so to speak, to build railroads. Many of them are sort
of fly-by-night operators because, as I said last time, the real upstanding, you know,
prominent, businesspeople in the North are investing in railroads in the West. They're
investing in mining in the West. They're investing in factories in the West. They're not
investing in the South at this period. So it's speculators and marginal people who are
coming in, taking advantage of some of these governments, etc. Now the worst (I hate
to say this, for those who are from this state) but the worst corruption was in Louisiana,
which has a long reputation -- it has a reputation for being corrupt, let me just put it
that way. I think more of their governors have ended up in jail than any other state. Joe
Gray Taylor, a Louisianan, born and bred, native of Louisiana, professor at McNeese
State in Louisiana, passed away a while ago, in his history of Reconstruction in
Louisiana, he says, "Louisiana state government was corrupt before Reconstruction. It
was corrupt afterwards. It was corrupt when Republicans were in power. It was corrupt
when Democrats were in power. It is always corrupt." I'm sorry, that's a Louisianan, so
don't blame me. And there was plenty of corruption in Louisiana Reconstruction, in terms
of skimming off money from public projects and that sort of thing. But it was hardly new.
And by the way, many Democrats filled their pockets, just like Republicans did. One of
the reasons for this, well, there were two basic reasons. One was, a lot of money was
flowing through the government for the first time, far more than before the war, right?
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There's a lot of money coming in, and a lot of money going out, and there's a tendency
for some of that to stick to the fingers of people in power. But maybe even more
important, most of the Reconstruction officials, apart from the very top, were very poor
people, or of modest income, and they needed to make a living out of being in office.
Once they got out, they did not have business connections. They often suffered
ostracism. For example, Jefferson Long, the first black congressman from Georgia, was a
freeman, a master tailor, before the Civil War, and he was making clothing for a lot of
white patrons. When he got involved in Reconstruction politics, they all completely
stopped patronizing him. His business was destroyed. Black people couldn't support his
fancy tailoring business. So he had to make a living in politics. He had to make a living
from the salary as a politician, member of congress, and also gather up as much money
as he could, because he knew: when you're out of office, you're going to be in big
trouble if you have been in Reconstruction. So all these things -- The main point,
though, is not to say, as some historians, well, there wasn't that much corruption. There
was. But corruption was endemic in this period. We will see next time, the Grant
administration in Washington was rife with corruption. The Tweed ring in New York. I'm
a New York patriot. We are superior. We have better and more corruption. The Tweed
ring was stealing a lot more money than anything in the South. We were number one.
[laughter] So my main point is, it was not black suffrage that was the cause of
corruption. It is not to say there was no corruption. But the explanation that you had to
get rid of Reconstruction in order to stop corruption was not a logical argument. But let
me just finish with one little episode of corruption that I noticed when I was doing my
research a long time ago. This was a letter by John Bryant, a carpetbagger from the
North who became superintendent of education in Georgia. And he writes, he says in this
letter to someone in the North, you know, "Republican leaders," he said, "are not
situated in the South as they are in the North. In the North a Republican leader may
successfully engage in any business. It does not injure the business of the lawyer, the
merchant, the manufacturer, or the laborer to take an active part in the Republican
Party. In the South it is the opposite. Therefore, the men who do the most for the
Republican Party must be assisted by the government." Now Bryant showed initiative in
doing this. As his papers revealed, in 1868 he took a $3,000 bribe, basically, from
Harper & Row Publishers here in New York City. Why? Why did they give him 3,000?
Well, he writes to them, "We shall labor especially to establish a system of common
schools in the state. I will labor to that end. And the advantage to your house must be
very great." In other words, we're going to use your textbooks, Harper, in our new
public school system. So, you know, give me a little bit of money here, and we will...
Now, why do I mention this? Harper & Row is the publisher of my book on
Reconstruction. [laughter] Now, it's a long time ago, but I put it in there just to see if
anyone would complain. They didn't. In fact, the week after I turned in the manuscript
for this book, the publishing house was bought by a famous newspaper magnate, Rupert
Murdoch, and I think he kind of liked this aspect of my history, given the way he's
operated elsewhere. [laughter] So anyway, but the biggest problem facing these
governments, as it will turn out, is violence, the necessity to deal with what can only be
called terrorism, homegrown American terrorism. Next time we will look at what
happened with that, how they did or didn't, and how Reconstruction begins to fade. So
see you then.
INTERVIEW: INTERRACIAL POLITICS
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It does seem that between the sort of, the turn against Reconstruction in the South and
the ascent of liberal Republicans in the North (which we talked about in class) that
there's almost this, like, nationwide turn against democracy in the United States in the
1870s. >> Well, a lot of it is posed that way, that democracy, you know, the people ->> It's good government versus these unruly... >> Right. Good government needs a
limitation of the suffrage, North and South, not just among blacks in the South -immigrants, poor people in the North. >> Your former student Sven Beckert has this
amazing part of his book, "The Monied Metropolis," it's also an article in "Past and
Present," about this campaign to restrict suffrage in New York City in the 1880s? >>
Right. 1870s, they tried to have a new charter, a new city charter. Samuel J. Tilden, who
runs in '76 -- >> Yeah, this close to being our president. >> Yeah, and he was the
architect of this. And it basically was to put back a property qualification for voting, you
know? So that poor people just couldn't vote, because the idea was the city should be
run like a business. You know, it should be run on efficiency grounds and, you know,
kind of without spending a lot of money. So, you hear this around today, of course. Well,
if it's a business, then the shareholders should determine what the policies are, and the
shareholders are property owners. And the Irish immigrant, or the German, or the poor
laborer is not really a shareholder in the city, and therefore... Now, of course, what
happens? The people vote down this. People generally don't vote -- >> Don't want their
vote taken away. >> They don't vote to disenfranchise themselves. So, the charter fails.
That's why, from some people's perspective, you get then in the 1880s, the emphasis is
civil service reform. It's not limiting the right to vote, it's limiting who can hold office.
>> I think it was in that Nancy Cohen in "The Reconstruction of American Liberalism,"
right? She's extending that story into the Gilded Age. >> Right. Yeah, exactly. So, you
need to be able to pass an exam to, you know, you have to be sort of a college-educated
guy to hold public office. And very few people are college educated at that time. So, you
attack the bad government that way, by purifying -- You can't purify the electorate. They
do in the South, from the point of view of the redeemers, but you can't really do that in
the North. So you purify the officeholders, right? And you know, those impulses go all
the way down into the progressive era. This is beyond our -- >> Yeah, so that's what's
really remarkable to me. It seems like there are lots of ways in which the legacies of this
Reconstruction moment are stronger for much of American history than the Civil War,
but the Civil War's the thing that everyone knows about and cares about. But it's this
stuff afterwards, so many crucial moves are made. >> Yeah, it's true. And in the
progressive era, you get the same debate. Who should vote? And who should hold
office? And what do you do about bad government? Now, they've eliminated blacks in
the South, but bad urban government, and the same thing of trying to purify the
electorate in one way or another, you know? And even the progressives who want good
government are often willing to have laws like residency requirements, and others, to
kind of limit who really should be voting. >> Well, and this is like segregation, right, as
a quintessentially progressive measure, like, not an aberration. >> Absolutely. It fits in.
One might almost say that black disenfranchisement is a progressive measure, at least
that's how it was presented in the South: as a good-government measure. To eliminate
all the violence and all the fraud in Southern elections, you get rid of the black vote, and
then white people won't have to be fraudulent anymore, you know? >> Which also
makes what's going on in the South in toward the end of the 1860s just one of the most
extraordinary moments, I think, in the history of American democracy, where you see
this forging at this interracial coalition in this region, of course, that had been, like,
enslaved until, like, just yesterday. >> Yeah. >> And that just, seeing this period as this
sort of, like, tension, between this KKK and other, like, drive to create like, basically, a
Page 10 of 11
white coalition versus African Americans. The durability of this interracial coalition,
really, is remarkable, even if it fades. >> It is very remarkable, and quite unique in the
long, you know, road, the long story of American history. Even if you look at politics
today in the Southern states, you have virtually no interracial -- In the North, yes. The
North and the West -- >> Yeah, there's just that Times article you mention in class. It's,
like, more divided than ever in the South. >> Right, and 90% of white Southerners are
voting Republican, and 95% of black Southerners are voting Democrat. So, what kind of
interracial politics can you have under those circumstances? That is not true in the rest
of the country. The Republican party does tend to be pretty white in most places now,
but there are still black and Hispanic Republicans. And the Democratic party is much
more racially diverse. But in the old Southern, in the old slave states, interracial politics
is still, and always has been, a very, very difficult sell, so to speak. You had it after the
Voting Rights Act for a while, in 1965. You had blacks now being able to vote again for
the first time since the end of, you know, the disenfranchisement. And you got people
like Jimmy Carter. You got that generation, Dale Bumpers in Arkansas, I guess -- >>
Even, like, Bill Clinton... >> Bill Clinton, Carter, some of the others, who did pull in both
black and white votes as Democrats. I think from the election of Reagan, really, that
begins to really fall apart, as the Republican party identifies itself -- Of course, Nixon
started it, but even much more so with what they call the, you know, "the southern
strategy," the backlash strategy. And blacks are voting almost entirely Democratic, so
the space -- Now, it's coming back again in places like, in the fringes of the South:
Virginia, North Carolina (to some degree, although not necessarily right now), Florida.
>> So it's like with suburbanization. >> Suburbanization, people moving in from other
parts of the country. But other Southern states have not yet experienced that, although
may down the road.
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