Source: William A. Dunning, Reconstruction and the Constitution (1902), W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (1965), Joel Williamson, After Slavery (1965), Eric Foner, Reconstruction (1988), Susan Eva O'Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (2007).
Racist depictions of Reconstruction were common. This one by Thomas Nast was entitled "Colored Rule in a Reconstructed (?) State"and appeared in Harper's Weekly (1874). In 1902 Columbia historian William A. Dunning similarly declared that free slaves were mere children, incapable of holding office. Under Reconstruction, the South was plunged into chaos and corruption. This view of Reconstruction prevailed in the public mind largely as a consequence of film director D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915),a triumph of cinematic art and racist caricature. In 1910 W. E. B. Du Bois, an African American scholar, was the first to applaud Reconstruction for broadening educational opportunities and democratizing gov-ernment, but few historians concurred. In the 1960s, as the civil rights movement was gaining momentum, more scholars came out in support of Reconstruction. In 1965 Kenneth Stampp emphasized the Reconstruction governments' attempts to protect freedmen; that same year, Joel Williamson turned Dunning's thesis on its head and endorsed nearly all aspects of Reconstruction. More recent scholars have generally
Taken a moderate position: Reconstruction may have failed, but its accomplishments under difficult circumstances of white opposition were substantial; see, for example, Eric Foner (1988). In recent decades, scholars have shifted from these larger assessments to more focused work on particular regions and on issues of class and gender. Susan Eva O'Donovan (2007), for example, shows how slaves themselves developed survival strategies, including women's prominent role in devising a "free-labor"system for sharecropping. Certain facts are beyond argument. Black officeholders during Reconstruction were neither numerous nor inordinately influential. None was ever elected governor of a state;fewer than a dozen and a half during the entire period served in Congress.
The Reconstruction acts and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment achieved the purpose of enabling black Southerners to vote. The Radicals, however, were not satisfied; despite the unpopularity of the idea in the North, they wished to guarantee the right of blacks to vote in every state. Another amendment seemed the only way to accomplish this objective, but passage of such an amendment appeared impossible. The Republican platform in the 1868 election had smugly distinguished between blacks voting in the South (“demanded by every consideration of public safety, of gratitude, and of justice”) and in the North (where the question “properly belongs to the people”).
However, after the election had demonstrated how important the black vote could be, Republican strategy shifted. Grant had carried Indiana by fewer than 10,000 votes and lost New York by a similar number. If blacks in these and other closely divided states had voted, Republican strength would have been greatly enhanced.
Suddenly Congress blossomed with suffrage amendments. After considerable bickering over details, the Fifteenth Amendment was sent to the states for ratification in February 1869. It forbade all the states to deny the vote to anyone “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Once again nothing was said about denial of the vote on the basis of sex, which caused feminists, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to be even more outraged than they had been by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Most southern states, still under federal pressure, ratified the amendment swiftly. The same was true in most of New England and in some western states. Bitter battles were waged in Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and the states immediately north of the Ohio River, but by March 1870 most of them had ratified the amendment and it became part of the Constitution.
The debates occasioned by these conventions show that partisan advantage was not the only reason why voters approved black suffrage at last. The unfairness of a double standard of voting in North and South, the contribution of black soldiers during the war, and the hope that by passing the amendment the strife of Reconstruction could finally be ended all played a part.
When the Fifteenth Amendment went into effect, President Grant called it “the greatest civil change and. . . the most important event that has occurred since the nation came to life.” The American Anti-Slavery Society formally dissolved itself, its work apparently completed. “The Fifteenth Amendment confers upon the African race the care of its own destiny,” Radical Congressman James A. Garfield wrote proudly after the amendment was ratified. “It places their fortunes in their own hands.” Many of the celebrants lived to see the amendment subverted in the South. That it could be evaded by literacy tests and other restrictions was apparent at the time and may even have influenced some persons who voted for it. But a stronger amendment—one, for instance, that positively granted the right to vote to all men and put the supervision of elections under national control— could not have been ratified.
World History
