Answer:
During the Reconstruction period of 1865–1877, federal law provided civil rights protection in the U.S. South for freedmen, the African Americans who had formerly been slaves. In the 1870s, Democrats gradually returned to power in the Southern states, sometimes as a result of elections in which paramilitary groups intimidated opponents, attacking blacks or preventing them from voting. Gubernatorial elections were close and disputed in Louisiana for years, with extreme violence being unleashed during the campaigns. In 1877, a national compromise to gain Southern support in the presidential election resulted in the last of the federal troops being withdrawn from the South. White Democrats had regained political power in every Southern state. These conservative, white, Democratic Redeemer governments legislated Jim Crow laws, which segregated black people from the white population, and upheld them constitutionally as “separate but equal” rights.
Federal Aid
The federal government adopted a policy of providing arable land to former black slaves during the last stages of the American Civil War in 1865. They were freed as a result of the advance of the Union armies into the territory previously controlled by the Confederacy, particularly after Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea. General Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15, issued on January 16, 1865, provided for the land, while some of its beneficiaries also received mules from the army for plowing. The policy became known as “forty acres and a mule.”
The Special Field Orders issued by Sherman were never intended to represent an official policy of the U.S. government with regard to all former slaves. Andrew Johnson, who succeeded President Lincoln after the assassination, revoked Sherman’s orders and returned the land to its previous white owners. Because of this, the phrase “forty acres and a mule” has come to represent the failure of Reconstruction policies in restoring to African Americans the fruits of their labor.
During this time, the federal government also attempted to provide aid to black Southerners through the Freedmen’s Bureau. The bureau was created through the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, which was initiated by President Abraham Lincoln, and was intended to last for one year after the end of the Civil War. On March 3, 1865, Congress passed the bill to aid former slaves through legal food and housing, oversight, education, health care, and employment contracts with private landowners.
At the end of the war, the Freemen’s Bureau’s main role was providing emergency food, housing, and medical aid to refugees; it also helped reunite families. Later, it focused its work on helping the freedmen adjust to their condition of freedom by setting up work opportunities and supervising labor contracts. It soon became, in effect, a military court that handled legal issues. The bureau distributed 15 million rations of food to African Americans, and set up a system in which planters could borrow rations in order to feed freedmen they employed.
The most widely recognized of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s achievements is its accomplishments in the field of education. Prior to the Civil War, no Southern state had a system of universal state-supported public education. Freedmen had a strong desire to learn to read and write. They had worked hard to establish schools in their communities prior to the advent of the Freedmen’s Bureau. By 1866, missionary and aid societies worked in conjunction with the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide education for former slaves.
The bureau faced many challenges despite its good intentions, efforts, and limited successes. By 1866, it was attacked by Southern whites for organizing blacks against their former masters. That same year President Andrew Johnson, supported by Radical Republicans, vetoed a bill for an increase of power for the bureau. Many local bureau agents were hindered in carrying out their duties by the opposition of former Confederates, and lacked a military presence to enforce their authority.
Black Disfranchisement
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Slave children: Two children who were likely emancipated during the Civil War, circa 1870.