1.4 The Collapse of Reconstruction
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Explain the reasons for the collapse of Reconstruction
- Describe the efforts of White Southern “redeemers” to roll back the gains of Reconstruction
The effort to remake the South generated a brutal reaction among Southern White people, who were committed to keeping Black people in a subservient position. To prevent Black people from gaining economic ground and to maintain cheap labor for the agricultural economy, an exploitative system of sharecropping spread throughout the South. Domestic terror organizations, most notably the Ku Klux Klan, employed various methods (arson, whipping, murder) to keep freed people from voting and achieving political, social, or economic equality with their White neighbors.
BUILDING BLACK COMMUNITIES
The degraded status of Black men and women had placed them outside the limits of what antebellum Southern White people considered appropriate gender roles and familial hierarchies. Slave marriages did not enjoy legal recognition. Enslaved men were humiliated and deprived of authority and of the ability to protect enslaved women, who were frequently exposed to the brutality and sexual domination of White enslavers and vigilantes alike. Enslaved parents could not protect their children, who could be bought, sold, put to work, brutally disciplined, and abused without their consent; parents, too, could be sold away from their children (Figure 1.12). Moreover, the division of labor idealized in White Southern society, in which men worked the land and women performed the role of domestic caretaker, did not apply to the enslaved. Both enslaved men and women were made to perform hard labor in the fields.
In the Reconstruction era, African Americans embraced the right to enjoy the family bonds and the expression of gender norms they had been systematically denied. Many thousands of freed Black men who had been separated from their families while enslaved took to the road to find their long-lost spouses and children and renew their bonds. In one instance, a journalist reported having interviewed a freed person who traveled over six hundred miles on foot in search of the family that was taken from him while in bondage. Couples that had been spared separation quickly set out to legalize their marriages, often by way of the Freedmen’s Bureau, now that this option was available. Those who had no families would sometimes relocate to southern towns and cities, so as to be part of the larger Black community where churches and other mutual aid societies offered help and camaraderie.
SHARECROPPING
Most freed people stayed in the South on the lands where their families and loved ones had worked for generations while enslaved. They hungered to own and farm their own lands instead of the lands of White plantation owners. In one case, formerly enslaved people on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina initially had hopes of ownin