Dear fellow students, I thank you and your professor, Dr. Fernandez, for this brief opportunity to share some time with you as you study what, I think, was the pivotal point in time for the United States: Reconstruction. Most of us spend little time, but perhaps less thought on this period for — let’s face it, it’s ancient history, right? I can hear the rolling of eyes, the sucking sounds of mouths, the closing of minds snapping shut, and the whispered thought, “What does this have to do with me? All this stuff from the 1870s, 1880s?” But Reconstruction is more than a word historians attach to an era. It was, for the first time in American life, a real attempt to change America’s trajectory from a slave nation to a truly free nation, and that brave, noble, attempt ended in failure and betrayal.
Reconstruction formally refers to the years 1866 to 1876. Other historians and authors differ on these dates. These dates are bookmarks in time for when Congress began passing what were called the “Reconstruction” Acts, which became the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution and supportive legislation; and the congressional presidential deal that made Rutherford B. Hayes President, on the condition that the U.S. Army be removed from Southern territory, exposing African Americans to a deluge of white terrorism, most often organized by an army of the Democratic Party known as the Ku Klux Klan.
Some will argue, in protest, that the South was defeated by the military power of the North. And while true, it doesn’t tell all of the story. For what the military wins in the field, politicians can deal away at the table of negotiations. That’s what happened in the Hayes Tilden Compromise of 1876. When the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, seemed to land more votes than Hayes, a congressional committee was established and the Electoral College gave Hayes one more vote than Tilden. Hayes took the presidency and fulfilled a campaign promise to pull out the U.S. Army, actually tens of thousands of Black troops, and Reconstruction came to a dirty, brutal end.
In the recent book The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction, by Charles Lane, we see clearly how all levels of government turned their faces from African Americans and left them to the cruel, tender mercies of their former tormentors and enslavers of the white South. Lane writes, “Instead of a new civil war, there had been a new compromise, a grand bargain between the white Republicans of the North and the white Democrats of the South.” The latter had traded the presidency to the former in return for control over their own states, and that meant control of their colored population, because the Supreme Court had decreed that the Negroes must look first to the states for protection against violence and fraud; they must look to the likes of Wade Hampton and Francis Nichols. These were notorious racists.
The compromise of 1877 was less formal than the Missouri Compromise, or the Compromise of 1850, but its basic logic was similar. The union was to be preserved at the risk of the rights of 4 million Americans of African descent. The Negro, the nation opined, will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth, the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him. Reconstruction was over. Charles Lane then adds a final observation, “The South pushed on Republican fault lines until they cracked. The Confederate States of America lost the Civil War militarily and economically, but in the ways that mattered most to white Southerners, socially, politically and ideologically, the South did not.”
Ulysses S Grant, then President of the United States, died on July 23 1885, having tried but failed, to secure the new birth of freedom for which he had fought the Civil War. Because the U.S. government ceded the issue of states rights, or local power and control for all intents and purposes, the South won the war to treat Black people as slaves in everything but name.
When a civil rights bill was passed in 1875, it would take less than 10 years for the Supreme Court to strike it down. Black people were free according to the Constitution, but in reality, their lives were virtually indistinguishable from that of their captive ancestors or even themselves. They could not vote. They could not hold office. They could not take certain jobs or professions. They were denied the right to travel from what used to be plantations. They were betrayed, and it would take a century to rebuild movements of the 1960s for voting rights, for so called “freedom.” For the South had won the war politically, which they lost on the fields of Gettysburg. Thank you. For In prison nation. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
