Economic Reconstruction

The South After the War

While politicians in Washington, D.C., were busy passing Reconstruction legislation in the late 1860s, the South remained in upheaval, as the ruined economy tried to accommodate newly emancipated blacks and political power struggles ensued. As freed slaves tried to establish livelihoods for themselves and take advantage of their new rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, politicians and vigilantes used insidious legislation and intimidation to try to maintain the prewar status quo.

Newly Emancipated Former Slaves

The Union Army’s advance deep into southern territory in the final months of the Civil War freed thousands and thousands of slaves. Although some of these slaves were emancipated officially in the final days of the conflict, most freed themselves, simply refusing to work or walking away from the fields to follow the Union Army.

The end of the war meant that thousands of blacks could search freely for family members from whom they had been separated when they were sold or auctioned. Many black couples took the opportunity to get married after being freed, knowing that they could never again be lawfully separated. The number of black marriages skyrocketed.

Education - Black Schools and Churches

Many freed blacks, previously forbidden to learn to read or write, wanted their children to receive the education that they themselves had been denied. The Congress-created Freedmen’s Bureau, assisted by former abolitionist organizations in the North, succeeded in establishing schools for thousands of blacks during the late 1860s.

In addition, many former slaves established their own churches. White southern clergymen had often defended slavery in their sermons in the period before the Civil War. As a result, blacks distrusted their white congregations, so they created their own as soon as they had the opportunity.

Freedmen's Bureau

The president and Congress disagreed not only about the best way to readmit southern states to the Union but also about the best way to redistribute southern land. Lincoln, for his part, authorized several of his wartime generals to resettle former slaves on confiscated lands. General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 set aside land in South Carolina and islands off the coast of Georgia for roughly 40,000 former slaves. Congress, meanwhile, created the Freedmen’s Bureau in early 1865 to distribute food and supplies, establish schools, and redistribute additional confiscated land to former slaves and poor whites. Anyone who pledged loyalty to the Union could lease forty acres of land from the bureau and then have the option to purchase them several years later.

Early in 1866, Congress voted to renew the charter that had created the Freedmen’s Bureau, in retaliation for the fact that Johnson had stripped the bureau of its power. Congress also revised the charter to include special legal courts that would override southern courts. Johnson, however, vetoed the renewed Freedmen’s Bureau, once again using the states’ rights argument that the federal government should not deprive the states of their judicial powers. Johnson also claimed that it was not the federal government’s responsibility to provide special protection for blacks. Although Congress’s first attempt to override the veto failed, a second attempt succeeded in preserving the bureau. The bureau was weakened, however, and Congress finally terminated it in 1872.

Carpetbaggers and Scalawags

Meanwhile, some northerners jumped at the opportunity to move to the South in the wake of the Confederacy’s defeat. Commonly known as carpetbaggers because of their tendency to carry their possessions in large carpetbags, some moved from the North to promote education, others to modernize the South, and others to seek their fortune. White southern Unionists, or scalawags, attempted to achieve similar aims. Carpetbaggers and scalawags served in state legislatures in every southern state during Reconstruction.

Sharecropping

Despite efforts by white landowners to force blacks back into wage labor on large plantations, emancipation enabled southern blacks to rent their own plots of land, farm them, and provide for their families. A system of sharecropping emerged in which many former plantation owners divided their lands and rented out each plot, or share, to a black family. The family farmed their own crops and rented their plot of land in exchange for a percentage of their crop’s yield. Some poor, landless whites also became sharecroppers, farming lands owned by wealthy planter elites. By 1880, the vast majority of farmers in the South were sharecroppers.

Unfortunately, the economic prospects for blacks under the sharecropping system were usually poor. Many former slaves ended up sharecropping on land owned by their former masters, and the system kept blacks tied to their shares—their rented plots of land—and thereby indebted to white landowners. Moreover, because cotton prices dropped steadily from about fifty cents per pound in 1864 to a little over ten cents per pound by the end of Reconstruction, sharecroppers’ incomes were meager. Most black farmers were able to purchase items only on credit at local shops—almost always owned by their landlords—and thus went deep into debt.