THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION - 1865-1890
LECTURE 04 – THE LAND AND LABOR QUESTIONS IN
RECONSTRUCTION
2.5: THE "LABOR QUESTION"
One more quote that I want to read you, related to this, from a planter in Mississippi in
1865, talking about his former slaves, he says (this is in his diary), he says, "I do not
know what their plans are for another year, but I think they want to farm on their
own. They have an idea that a hireling [that is someone working for wages] is not a
free man. Our Negroes have not been disposed to entertain the idea of hiring at all.
They want to rent land. Our Negroes have a fall, a tall fall, ahead of them. They will
learn that freedom and independence are different things. A man may be free and yet
not independent. The Negroes think that if they are hirelings they will still be slaves."
This is an amazing little document. They think that the person who works for wages is
not truly free. What's going on here is a fundamental redefinition of what freedom is
in American life. That's part of the crisis of Reconstruction. Who else had we heard,
some weeks ago, saying the man who works for wages his entire life is not free?
[student speaks - inaudible] No. Well, maybe so, but I'm talking about another person
who we've spent a lot of time talking about. The man who works for wages... The
North offers people the opportunity to get out of the wage system. But if you work for
wages your whole life, you're not truly free. That's Abraham Lincoln. That's Abraham
Lincoln. The slaves are repeating a very common idea before the Civil War, that
freedom -- it goes back to Jefferson -- freedom means economic independence.
Working for wages is fine as a temporary condition, but not as a permanent life
sentence, so to speak. But Reverend Agnew said, the planter says, no, a man may be
free and yet not independent. That's the planter idea. They may be free, but that
doesn't give them any other rights. It certainly doesn't give them the right to
economic autonomy. They have to go back to work on the plantations, and that does
not interfere with their freedom. So again, this whole question of who will control the
labor of these former slaves is a -- it's really part of a fundamental debate about what
freedom is in the aftermath of the Civil War. Now, here's a cartoon from Harper's
Weekly. "The great labor question from a Southern point of view." A planter is sitting
on his veranda, reading the newspaper, he's got his wife and child next to him. Some
black people are working out in the fields and there's one guy with a hoe and a pickax
or something. The great labor question. The planter is saying, "You've got to work."
You've got to work. The planter sitting there doing nothing is saying to this guy who
has the implements of work, "You've got to work." This is a...what is this cartoon?
This is a kind of ironic or sarcastic comment on what Sidney Andrews points out in the
document in the Gienapp book, the ubiquitous complaint in the white South in 1865
that blacks will no longer work. The free Negro will not work. As one person wrote,
"There is no power to make the Negroes work, and without that, they will not work."
How to make them go back to work? Now, of course, this is absurd. They're doing all
the work to begin with. The guy sitting in his rocking chair is worrying about whether
someone out in the fields is willing to work. But this was ubiquitous in the Southern
press in 1865 and for many years after the end of slavery. What's interesting about
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this, in a way, is there's a racial element in this, and you'll find it all over, they're just
inherently lazy, they don't want to work. But if you step back for a minute, you'll find
the English said the same thing about the Irish. Every colonial power said the same
thing about colonial peoples, whether it's Africans, people in India, people in China.
They don't want to work. You hear echoes of this today, that people just basically don't
want to work. And some people take from that the...for example, the debate that's
been, it's still going on, about extending unemployment insurance, which ran out for
the long-term unemployed a few months ago. And Senator Paul of Kentucky, I quote
Senator Paul, not because I have any animus toward him more than anyone else, but
I give him credit because he says what a lot of people think, but don't want to say.
Paul says, people are lazy. That's why they're unemployed. If you give them
unemployment benefits, they just won't work. So the way to make people work is to
starve them, basically. Force them to go to work. Now, of course, in the North, the
free labor ideology had a different idea. Lincoln's idea and all these others was, no,
you give people positive incentives. The reason people work is to improve their
condition in life, to acquire goods, to improve the condition of their family. You give
them benefits from work and they'll all go and work. You don't have to whip them; you
don't have to force them; you don't have to starve them. You create opportunities for
them, which they can gain through labor. That's the free labor idea. But of course,
Southerners said, it doesn't apply to blacks. Blacks are so inherently lazy that they will
not -- In fact, the argument then went therefore you've got to pay them very low
wages. Don't pay them high -- In the North, you say, give them good wages and
they'll work. No, give them low wages, because if you give them too much they'll stop
working as soon as they can eat, you see? So you keep wages low to force people to
work. But then the other question is: what do you mean by work? What is work
anyway? You might say that's pretty easy to define. But it's not. Here's a a memorial
from the Cotton Planters Convention of Macon, Georgia, okay? "The Negro in freedom
is -- Negro labor in freedom is 30 percent inferior to what it was in a condition of
servitude. All plans have have failed to overcome the characteristic indolence
[laziness] of the Negro. The history of Negro communities proves they will not work
as laborers, and will be satisfied to subsist [that is to survive] and will add nothing to
those products which the world especially needs." In other words, what they're really
getting at is that blacks will not work in a market orientation. That is to say, they will
subsist: they will grow food for themselves (which actually involves work), but they
will not produce the products the world especially needs, i.e. cotton. This is a cotton
planter. Buried in this argument is the fear that blacks will not act as market-oriented
individuals. You know, our economists, neoclassical economists, classical economists
in the 19th century, basically see mankind as composed of what they call "rational
profit-maximizing individuals." The economy functions because people want to
maximize their income and their consumption. So therefore, if you make more money
growing cotton, you'll grow cotton, and you'll buy your food. That makes more sense
than growing food, where you don't gain any income and you can't buy, you can't be
part of the market. But the argument is blacks are not rational profit-maximizing
individuals. They're lazy, but laziness also involves just a lack of desire to participate
in the market. They value non-economic things, like family stability, like freedom of
movement, like freedom from gang labor or control by overseers, to monetary
incentives. Now this is not true in many ways. There are plenty of blacks who went on
strike in this period for higher wages and responded to market incentives. But people
who worked for themselves were not considered working. See, the underlying
assumption here is that work means work for a white employer. So here's a North
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Carolina planter: "Want of ambition will be the devil of the race [these blacks]. Some
of my most sensible men say they have no other desire than to cultivate their own land
in grain and raise bacon." That's laziness. It actually takes work to cultivate your land
in grain and raise bacon, i.e. pigs. But that's not working for a white person, that's
working for yourself, and that is not work. So this whole question of will blacks work
has to be retranslated: will they work on a plantation under white supervision? And the
argument is no, they don't want to do that.
CONVERSATION: FREEDOM TO WORK FOR WAGES
Does free labor ever really gain the same traction in the South, though, that it had in
the North? It seems like there's some tension around that subject in your book. >>
Well, that depends on what you think, you know... Maybe I should begin by saying,
historians disagree on that. But I guess you could say that about almost any question,
right? Is sharecropping a form of free labor? There's a lot of debate. My good
colleague, Professor Barbara Fields, says, absolutely. You had a transition from slave
labor to free labor. This is the form free labor took in the South. It is not slavery. It's
capitalist free labor. Others say, no, no, no. Sharecroppers are in a very unusual
situation. They don't have the mobility that normal free laborers have. They're often
burdened with debt, etc. So free labor takes different forms in the South. Personally, I
think sharecropping is a form of free labor. In other words, is free labor only one
thing? Is there only one mode of free labor that we could identify as such? And I think
probably not. Depends what you're comparing it with. If you're comparing it with
slavery, it's certainly not slavery. If you're comparing it with a kind of idealized notion
of the Northern laborer who can move from job to job and move up the social scale,
it's not that either. >> This raises a question which, you mentioned this general
subject in class, about this recent turn in historiography among scholars who are
trying to move beyond freedom. Their line would be that this is a paradigm that was
useful in its time, but we're running into limitations and we need to bring up new ways
of orienting our scholarship around equality, maybe around just a struggle for survival,
all sorts of different candidates. So maybe as a way of getting into that subject, I'd
just like to hear from you: what difference did emancipation make for, like, let's say
the life of a recent -- how is life for an African-American person, former slave in the
South in 1865, different than, say, in 1885? >> From 1865 to 1885? >> Or 1863 to...
>> Yeah, okay, so you're not... I mean, it's much easier to say how is it different
from slavery. >> Okay, let's take that 1855 to 1885. >> Right. And obviously there
are many, many, many aspects of life of slavery, which no longer exist after the Civil
War. People cannot be bought and sold. They have far more autonomy -- not total
autonomy -- far more autonomy in allocating their own labor, the labor of their own
families. They do have physical mobility, contrary to what a lot of scholars write. They
are not tied to the land, in the way a serf might be in Russia, after emancipation. They
have all sorts of aspirations and community institutions that couldn't have existed. So
in other words, alright, nobody who was a slave ever said, it's too bad we got rid of
slavery, despite all the disappointments which came later. But I think given the
tremendous hopes and aspirations that were put into the notion of freedom, certainly
by the 1880s, there's a severe sense of disappointment. And then by the 1890s, even
greater sense of disappointment. And if you go to the WPA slave narratives down in
the 1930s, which of course are very elderly people being interviewed, but they often
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say, we were promised a lot, we didn't get. The promises the government made to us
were broken, whether it was land or political equality or citizenship rights. So there is
a deep sense of betrayal, which lasts as long as that generation lasts, which is into the
late 1930s or so. I think, you know, freedom again has been something very central
to my writing and I'm not claiming it is the only ideal that one should elaborate in this.
Equality certainly will take you down certain other directions. Self-determination maybe
is another aspect of this. If you read Steven Hahn's work, emphasizes that a great
deal. But my feeling is this: in the United States, "freedom" is so central to our
political vocabulary over the course of our history, from the Declaration of
Independence on down, that all -- well, many of these other ideals get absorbed into
people's concepts of freedom. In this country, when people are talking about freedom,
they're often talking about something else, actually. But it gets absorbed into the
notion. So freedom is a very capacious ideal, which can encompass many of these
other categories that people are talking about. You know, you know very well Sir
Isaiah Berlin wrote this famous essay, "Two Concepts of [Liberty]," positive and
negative. And then there was criticism of it by philosophers and others saying, you
know, his privileging of negative freedom as the freedom from restraint, you know, it
kind of is a very thin notion of freedom and it doesn't encompass any struggles, group
struggles for greater rights. >> Well, the lines always get blurry and sometimes it
seems like there's more. Sometimes they collapse into each other. It's very hard to
draw those lines. >> Right. But in a subsequent (this is only a real scholar...) you
know, in a subsequent edition, in a footnote, Berlin tried to answer these critics, and
he said, you know, freedom is not the only ideal. I believe in all these other things that
people are complaining about, but they're not freedom. They are if you're talking
about equality, talk about equality. You're not talking about freedom. I mean,
because he said freedom is negative: it's lack of outside restraint. But that's not
equality. So let's talk about equality. And that may even require some limitation on
people's freedoms, but at least we should be explicit about that. So he said let's not
expand "freedom" to be such a broad term that it encompasses everything. I'm going
away from your subject, but I think, you know, I think the more -- what can I say?
The more lights, the more laser beam lights, that people shine into this period, the
better. But since freedom is achieved, even though limited, that gives you a slightly
different take on the period then, let us say, if you emphasize equality, which will
certainly lead you to a sense of deep disappointment. >> Something that's often
paired with freedom in these discussions, as you have -- there's a focus on freedom
and that comes with a focus on citizenship and inclusion in the American polity. And
as a way getting to that subject, I wonder if you were writing history of black
nationalism in this period, what evidence do you think you would find from the
Reconstruction [inaudible]. >> Well, you would read Steven Hahn's book, "A Nation
Under Our Feet." He uses the very word "nation" in the title to emphasize this idea
that African Americans thought of themselves not simply as individual citizens
(although certainly they demanded those rights), but as members of a people or a
nation with group aspirations and demanding group rights, etc., and group selfdetermination. So that's where you would go. I mean, I don't 100% agree with Hahn,
although -- >> Yeah, it seems like there's some tension. He certainly seems to think
that he's arguing with you on this subject. >> Well, he is to the extent that the
emphasis of my book is on inclusion, the struggle for inclusion in the polity, in the
nation. And his emphasis -- we're not talking about 100% one way or the other.
We're talking about where the emphasis lies, and in his book the emphasis is more on
self-determination, not so much inclusion. I think, you know, I think that's how the
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writing of history moves forward, with people coming up with different perspectives
and looking at, you know, and examining them and seeing where they go. He's very
interested in emigration movements, both within the United States, such as after
Reconstruction to Kansas and other places, and maybe even to Africa or other such
places. I'm impressed by the weakness of such movements during the Reconstruction
period, although they emerge again radically, you know, in strength after the
Reconstruction period. Hahn's book's a very important book. If there's a slight
difference of emphasis in our books, that's fine. That's how you learn about history.
My feeling, though, is in high Reconstruction, in the period of what we call "Radical
Reconstruction," the emphasis of most African Americans is on gaining rights as
citizens of the United States, and not a national separatist kind of self-determination,
which will emerge, I think, more powerfully after the end of Reconstruction, when the
avenue of inclusion seems to be more and more closed off.
2.6: LAND, LABOR, AND THE BLACK CODES
Then there's another question related to this, which is, yeah, here's a freed family in
the fields picking cotton, okay? This is the ideal for white planters. They'll go back to
work, they'll pick cotton, just as it... Now, of course, they're free. You got to pay them
something. You can't whip them anymore. But basically, they're working pretty much
the same as in the old days. But then there were others who said, you know, maybe
they're not going to grow cotton. And here a community of interest begins to arise
between these Southern plantation owners and certain very important parts of
Northern, of the Northern economic structure, because cotton, despite -- or maybe
even because of -- the disruptions of the war, cotton was still the most valuable
product produced by the American economy. It was certainly the most important
export crop of the United States. What would happen... Let us imagine that African
Americans did get land and stopped growing cotton. They started growing food for
themselves. Not an irrational thing to want to do. Well, what would happen today? I
don't know if they could do this in the desert, let's say the people of Saudi Arabia
decided they weren't going to pump oil anymore, they were going to grow food for
their families and forget about oil. This would have a very disruptive effect on the
world economy. So would the end of cotton production in the United States. Even
though other sources had developed in the war, in India, Egypt, you still needed a lot
of cotton from the United States. And history was, let us say, not totally reassuring on
this matter. You know, every society that abolished slavery in the Western
Hemisphere, starting with Haiti in the great revolution of the 1790s and then became
independent in 1804, and then the British Caribbean where slavery had been
abolished, and then the French Caribbean where slavery had been abolished -- every
one of them had this same fight over control of labor. And in every one of those, even
in Haiti, the government tried to force the former slaves back on the plantations, and
to resume the production of sugar, mostly, or coffee in some cases, in those areas.
And in every case, where they could, the former slaves resisted this, tried to get land
of their own. In some places where there was a lot of free land or open land, they
could, in some places they couldn't. And the plantation system survives, but only by
bringing in new labor, as I said, bringing in workers from China, from India,
thousands of miles away, to now work, to take the place of African Americans on these
plantations. In Haiti, it all falls apart, and the plantations fall apart; export crops
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decline enormously; and you get a society of very small plots of land, tilled by former
slaves and their descendants, growing a little bit of sugar and coffee, but mostly food
for themselves. Jamaica, the West Indies... In fact, that's why plantation owners in the
United States kept saying, emancipation in the West Indies is a failure. It was a
failure. Why was it a failure? Because sugar production declined after the end of
slavery. Now sugar production elsewhere rose. The sugar production that declined in
Jamaica and these places was, you know, recouped by the tremendous expansion of
slavery in Cuba in the 19th century. And so that's where the sugar is coming from
now. But they still have slavery in Cuba, until well after the United States abolishes
slavery. But in a few places, plantation agriculture survives. For example, Barbados. I
don't know if everyone's been down there. Nice place, I'm sure. I've never there. But
Barbados, the plantations continue and sugar production continues. Why? Barbados is
very small. There is no unoccupied land. All the land was owned by the planters, and
therefore, the blacks, the former slaves in Barbados had no alternative but to go back
-- or leave. Some of them went to other islands. But if you're staying there, you've
got no choice but to go to work. Whereas in Jamaica, which is a large island where
there was a lot of what they call "Crown Land," land owned by the king (or the queen,
I guess back then, Queen Victoria) or land that's just uncultivated, many, many
former slaves just go and squat, as they say, or take over this land, and therefore,
the plantations begin to fall apart. Same thing happens in British Guiana. This is what
scholars talk about, the difference between "open and closed resources." Open and
closed resources. If there's available land, people are not going to go to work on a
plantation. Now the South had open resources, geographically. The South is a big
place. It's not like Barbados. It's a very big place. And a lot of that land is not
cultivated at this point. So the question is, can the open resources be closed,
politically? Because it's not just a question of geography, it's a question of political
power. We will see this, but one of the first things that the Southern -- when Andrew
Johnson sets up Southern governments under the control of whites (blacks have no
say whatsoever), one of the first thing these governments do is to pass a set of laws
known as the Black Codes. These are enacted in late 1865, early 1866, and in the
way I've been discussing it, the Black Codes are an attempt to use political power to
close the resources of the South, as far as blacks are concerned. We'll talk about the
politics of this nationally next time. The Black Codes recognize certain elements of
freedom: they legalize black marriages; they say African Americans can own property
with some restrictions; they can go to court and testify against other blacks, not
against white people. But the key to these Black Codes is what they call the vagrancy
laws. Vagrancy laws. Now, there'd been Vagrancy Laws in the North. If a guy comes
into town and can't make a living, they could sometimes kick them out. But that's not
an effort to impose a new labor system. These vagrancy laws basically said any black
person, adult, must sign a labor contract at the beginning of the year to work for a
white employer for the entire year. If you do not sign... (By the way, this did not apply
to poor whites. They could do whatever they want.) If you did not sign such a
contract, you were a vagrant. If you were working for yourself, you were a vagrant,
right? You could have a nice farm supporting your family, you're a vagrant, because
you're not signing a contract to work for a white employer. If you are a vagrant and
convicted of that, then you're fined. And if you can't pay the fine, you are then
auctioned off, just like in slavery, to a white bidder who will agree to pay your fine,
and then you have to work that off in working for him for the year. Let us, here's a
cartoon, it's called, "Selling a freedman to pay his fine." This is from Harper's Weekly.
An auction is taking place of a black man standing there, with a chain on his hands,
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just like in slavery, and a man is auctioning him off. Not as under slavery, not for
lifetime servitude, but just for the year. He's been auctioned off for the year to pay his
fine. There were other provisions of Black Codes. It made it illegal for one owner,
sorry, planter, to hire away the laborer from another place. This is actually, I was just
reading, it's great, we're back to this now: Google and Apple are now being sued
because they made such an agreement. They would not hire employees from each
other, and that's against the law folks, I'm sorry, even for multibillion dollar
companies, you cannot just suppress the labor market by saying I'm not going to hire
anyone from this other company. That's antitrust, etc. But anyway, you weren't
allowed criminally, it was a criminal offense to hire someone who was under contract
to some other planter. Mississippi made it illegal for blacks to even own land outside of
cities. They want to make absolutely sure they had no alternative in the countryside
than to go to work for white employers. Now, these laws were overturned very fast.
The Freedmen's Bureau invalidated many of them. And then, very quickly, Congress
(as we'll see next week) will pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which invalidates all
these Black Codes. The point is not their effectiveness, but this is the white Southern
planter definition of black freedom embodied in law. Very, very, very narrow. Very
narrow. They're not slaves, but they're certainly not what most people would consider
free. They are obligated by the law to go to work for a year at a time for white
employers. They can't leave, if they leave their job, they forfeit their wages up to that
point, etc., etc.
2.7: THE FREEDMAN'S BUREAU
Now, Litwack talks about this, but Litwack represents a -- excellent book, but there's
a certain undercurrent of it, of this post-revisionism, where he seems to feel that sort
of everybody is against these poor former slaves, and the Freedmen's Bureau is
representing the interests of the planters, basically. They're hand in glove with the
planters. My view is that actually, as I said, there's a three-way conflict here. The
Freedmen's Bureau is not the agent of the former slaves, nor is it the agent of the
planters. It is the agent of the free labor ideology of the North. The job of the
Freedmen's Bureau was to impose a free labor system on the ashes of slavery. To the
extent that this means putting blacks back to work on the plantations, it does mean
they have a community of interest with owners. But on the other hand, they're trying
to defend the free labor rights of the former slaves, i.e., reasonable wages, mobility,
the right to leave your job, what labor -- Nobody puts you in jail in the North if you
leave your job. You can go get another job. Nobody sues you if you leave your job.
That's what should be, there should be a labor market, a free labor market. And with a
shortage of labor, if there really is a free labor market, blacks should be able to benefit
from it. The demand is greater than the supply. The Southern laws are attempting to
regulate this labor market to avoid that kind of situation. Now, the Freedmen's Bureau,
as I've mentioned briefly, was established at the very end of the Civil War to oversee
the transition from slavery to freedom. It had enormous obligations. It dealt with
labor. It dealt with violence. It dealt with poverty. It dealt with welfare. It dealt with
legal problems. It set up its own courts. It set up schools. All this was done by, at a
maximum, 900 Freedmen's Bureau agents scattered around the South. It was a
remarkable institution given 19th century concepts of governmental action. But it was
never remotely large enough to really accomplish all the things that it had been asked
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to do. Nonetheless, they did do a lot of things by the end. The Freedmen's Bureau
ends in 1870. By that time, there were well over a quarter of a million students in
Freedmen's Bureau schools in the South. There were hospitals having been set up.
They had arbitrated numerous disputes between employer and employee. They had
given out food to starving people, tried to protect blacks against violence (very hard
to do that). And, as I say, they were the agent of this free labor idea in a situation
where free labor was very difficult to actually put into effect, at least in the way it
operated in the North. So the Freedmen's Bureau really reflects this Lincolnian idea
that the way to make people work is to give them positive incentives. So they tried
to make these contracts as fair as possible under the situation. As I had mentioned
weeks ago, this was the Northern economic critique of slavery, which dates all the way
back to Adam Smith, that slave labor is inherently inefficient because the worker has
no incentive to work effectively. The worker does not benefit from his or her labor and
therefore has no incentive. Give them an incentive. Free labor gives you the incentive.
Therefore, they will work better. Therefore, free labor is more effective than slavery.
This is not a economic, I mean, this is not a statistical argument, it's an ideological
argument that free labor should be, and always must be, better than slavery. But it
may not be true. There's tremendous economies of scale on plantations, which
benefit slave labor. The ability to force people to work is, can also lead to pretty good
productivity. But the notion that you could actually get people to work without
compulsion was unknown. I mean, one planter, when the Freedmen's Bureau told -there's an encounter in there of an exchange with a planter about contracts, which the
Freedmen's Bureau was invalidating because they were unfair -- and the agent said,
you know, in the North, workers are not required to sign yearly labor contracts, and
they are not subject to vagrancy laws if they don't sign, you know, have a job. And
the planter was incredulous. He said, well, how can you get work out of a man unless
you compel him? How can you get work out of a man unless you compel him? That's
the plantation concept. And then, one other point here, and we'll get to this also, is
that this period of 1865, '66 is also a period of the beginnings of black politics in the
South -- conventions, meetings, statewide, local -- in which people are putting
forward demands for equal rights -- civil rights, political rights, economic rights. Many
of those conventions pass resolutions praising the Freedmen's Bureau, requesting the
Freedmen's Bureau stay. Blacks did not see the bureau as an oppressive agent in
general. Some of the local officials were. They saw it as an alternative source of
authority, of power, in the South, given that the planters still controlled most of the
land. So as I said, African Americans, they wanted land. Throughout this whole period,
this question of 40 acres and a mule was on the agenda, but never achieved, we know
that. I don't believe that 40 acres of land would have been an economic panacea. This
would not have solved all the problems of either the former slaves or the South as a
whole. Many historians think this is it, this is the key, this is the crux. If only they had
distributed land, Reconstruction would have succeeded. Obviously, it's a lot better to
own land than not to own land, in an agricultural society. But you know, in the 30 years
after the Civil War, the small farmer faced a dire situation in the United States and
everywhere else in the world. The terms of trade were shifting globally more and
more toward industry and against agriculture. There was an overproduction of cotton.
Land is not the only scarce resource in an agricultural society. The credit system,
access to tools and machinery and other things. In other words, white farmers (and we
will see this down the road), white farmers who mostly owned their own land before
the war, are losing their land in large numbers in the 30 years after the Civil War. This
will eventually culminate in the populist uprising of the 1890s, where farmers are
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demanding major changes in the economic system to get themselves out of the
tenancy and poverty that they've been thrust into. So small farming was an
increasingly difficult mode of life, and African-American farmers would have faced
similar challenges to everybody else. We can go into this in the future. I'm not saying
it wouldn't have been a good idea to distribute land, but this was not the whole
problem. My point is: the struggle was both economic and political at the same time,
which is actually why -- a lot of Southern planters were actually more alarmed by the
prospect of blacks voting than getting a little piece of land. It was the right to vote
that they most vigorously opposed because, as I say, this struggle between the planter
and the former slave, the struggle that the petitioners said, this is our "all-time
enemies," is fought out on the ground. It's also fought out in the realm of politics. The
refusal of the white South in 1865 to accept the reality of emancipation. Given a free
hand by Andrew Johnson, the leaders of the white South prove that they cannot
accept the reality of the end of slavery. But that refusal triggers two big reactions.
One is a wave of self -- of political organization among blacks, and then an outrage in
the North and a determination to intervene directly to make sure that the results of
the Civil War are not being overridden, you know, or reversed by the actions of these
Southern governments. It seems that the Civil War is being reversed and whatever
your political view in the North, you're not going to stand around and let the South
reinstitute a form of slavery. So the Black Codes, which later on most Southern
leaders would say that was a tremendous mistake, a tremendous mistake to try to use
the power of the state to re-impose a kind of unfree labor, triggers one of the most
titanic political battles in American history. And it's a battle that rewrites the
Constitution, rewrites our laws, and leads to one of the most remarkable experiments
in democracy in American history. And next week, we will turn from this to Washington
to see that titanic battle over Reconstruction. So that's where we will pick up next
week.
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