At the end of the American Civil War, the devastation and disruption in the state of Georgia were dramatic. Wartime damage, the inability to maintain a labor force without slavery, and miserable weather had a disastrous effect on agricultural production. The state's chief cash crop, cotton, fell from a high of more than 700,000 bales in 1860 to less than 50,000 in 1865, while harvests of corn and wheat were also meager.[1] The state government subsidized construction of numerous new railroad lines. White farmers turned to cotton as a cash crop, often using commercial fertilizers to make up for the poor soils they owned. The coastal rice plantations never recovered from the war.
Bartow County was representative of the postwar difficulties. Property destruction and the deaths of a third of the soldiers caused financial and social crises; recovery was delayed by repeated crop failures. The Freedmen's Bureau agents were unable to give blacks the help they needed.[2]
At the beginning of Reconstruction, Georgia had over 460,000 freedmen.[1] In January 1865, in Savannah, William T. Sherman issued Special Field Orders, No. 15, authorizing federal authorities to confiscate abandoned plantation lands in the Sea Islands, whose owners had fled with the advance of his army, and redistribute them to former slaves. Redistributing 400,000 acres (1,600km2) in coastal Georgia and South Carolina to 40,000 freed slaves in forty-acre plots, this order was intended to provide for the thousands of escaped slaves who had been following his army during his March to the Sea.[3] Shortly after Sherman issued his order, Congressional leaders convinced President Lincoln to establish the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March 1865. The Freedmen's Bureau, as it came to be called, was authorized to give legal title for 40-acre (160,000m2) plots of land to freedmen and white Southern Unionists. Rev. Tunis Campbell, a free Northern black missionary, was appointed to supervise land claims and resettlement in Georgia. Over the objections of Freedmen's Bureau chief General Oliver O. Howard, President Andrew Johnson revoked Sherman's directive in the fall of 1865, after the war had ended, returning these lands to the planters who had previously owned them, and expelling their new Black farmers.
Presidential Reconstruction
On Georgia's farms and plantations, wartime destruction, the inability to maintain a labor force without slavery, and miserable weather had a disastrous effect on agricultural production and the regional economy. The state's chief money crop, cotton, fell from a high of more than 700,000 bales in 1860 to less than 50,000 in 1865, while harvests of corn and wheat were also meager.[1] After the war, new railroad lines and commercial fertilizers created conditions that spurred increased cotton production in Georgia's upcountry, but coastal rice plantations never recovered.
Many emancipated slaves flocked to towns, where they encountered overcrowding and food shortages, with significant numbers dying from epidemic diseases. The Freedmens Bureau returned much of the prewar black labor back to the field, mediating a contract-labor system between white landowners and their black workers, who often consisted of the landowners' former slaves. Taking advantage of educational opportunities available for the first time, within a year, at least 8,000 former slaves were attending schools in Georgia, established with northern philanthropy.[4]
In mid-June 1865, Andrew Johnson appointed as provisional governor his friend and fellow Unionist, James Johnson, a Columbus lawyer who sat out the war. Delegates to a constitutional convention, meeting in Milledgeville in October, abolished slavery, repealed the Ordinance of Secession, and repudiated the Confederacy debt. The General Assembly, while alone among ex-Confederate states in refraining from enacting a harsh Black Code, assumed newly freed slaves would enjoy only the limited freedom of the prewar period's 'free persons of color,' and enacted a constitutional amendment outlawing interracial marriage.[1] On November 15, 1865, Georgia elected a new governor, congressmen, and state legislators. Voters repudiated most Unionist candidates, electing to office many ex-Confederates, although several of these – including the new governor, former WhigCharles J. Jenkins – initially opposed secession. The new state legislature created a political firestorm in Washington by electing to the SenateAlexander Stephens and Herschel Johnson, who had been the Vice-President and a Senator of the Confederacy, respectively. Neither Stephens or Johnson, nor any of Georgia's newly-selected U.S. House delegation, were inaugurated or allowed to take their seats, as the federal government, at the time, refused to accept into the congregation persons implicated so heavily with the Confederacy's secession and rebellion, or to enable them to wield federal-level political influence.[citation needed]
Thomas Nast political cartoon, "Worse than Slavery", depicting the subjugation of Blacks by the Ku Klux Klan and the White League. Note the lynching victim in upper left of shield.
As directed by Congress, General John Pope registered Georgia's eligible white and black voters, 95,214 and 93,457 respectively.[1] From October 29 through November 2, 1867, elections were held for delegates to a new constitutional convention, held in Atlanta rather than the state capital of Milledgeville, to prevent the interference of the ex-Confederates. In January 1868, after Georgia's first elected governor after the end of the war, Charles Jenkins, refused to authorize state funds for the racially integrated state constitutional convention, his government was dissolved by Pope's successor General George Meade and replaced by a military governor. This counter-coup galvanized white resistance to the Reconstruction, fueling the growth of the Ku Klux Klan. Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest visited Atlanta several times in early 1868 to help set up the organization. In Georgia, the Klan was led by John Brown Gordon, a charismatic General in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Freedmen's Bureau agents reported 336 cases of murder or assault with intent to kill against freedmen across the state from January 1 through November 15 of 1868.[5]
In July 1868, Georgia was readmitted to the Union, the newly elected General Assembly ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, and a Republican governor, New York native Rufus Bullock, was inaugurated. The state's Democrats—including former Confederate leaders Robert Toombs and Howell Cobb—denounced the policies of the Reconstruction in a mass rally in Atlanta, described by contemporary Issac Wheeler Avery as "the largest political mass meeting ever held in Georgia."[6] The principal target of the rally, Joseph E. Brown, Georgia's Governor under the Confederacy, who became a Republican and a delegate to the Chicago convention that had nominated Union general Ulysses S. Grant for president, declared that although the state, reluctantly, had given Blacks the vote, as they were not citizens the state's constitution did not allow them to hold office. In September, white Republicans joined with the Democrats in expelling the Black senators and Black representatives in the lower house from the General Assembly. While Governor Bullock gave the figure of 28,[7]:94 the monument Expelled Because of Their Color, on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta, identifies 33.[7]
A week later, in the southwest Georgia town of Camilla, white residents attacked a black Republican rally, killing twelve people in the Camilla massacre.[1]
These developments led to calls for Georgia's return to military rule, which increased after Georgia was one of only two ex-Confederate states to vote against Grant in the election of 1868.[1] (Louisiana was the other; Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia did not vote because they had not yet been readmitted to the Union.) The expelled black legislators, led by Rev. Tunis Campbell and Henry McNeill Turner, lobbied in Washington for federal intervention. In March 1869 Governor Bullock, hoping to prolong Reconstruction, "engineered" Georgia's refusal to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,[1] which gave Black American men the right to vote. The same month the U.S. Congress once again barred Georgia's representatives from their seats, resulting in the reinstatement of military rule in December 1869.[1] In January 1870, Gen. Alfred H. Terry, the final commanding general of the Third District, both reinstated the previously expelled Black legislators and replaced ex-Confederates within the General Assembly with the Republican runners-up. Known colloquially "Terry's Purge," these events ensured a Republican majority in the legislature, and On February 2, 1870, Georgia ratified the Fifteenth Amendment.[1]
Amos T. Akerman
As U.S. Attorney General Amos T. Akerman set up a justice system that vigorously prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan.
During the tenure of Amos T. Akerman (1821–1880) as Attorney General of the United States from 1870 to 1871, thousands of indictments were brought against Klansmen in an effort to enforce the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871. Akerman, though born in the North, moved to Georgia after college and owned slaves; he fought for the Confederacy and became a scalawag during Reconstruction, speaking out for civil rights for Blacks. As U.S. Attorney General under President Grant, he became the first ex-Confederate to reach the cabinet. Akerman was unafraid of the Klan and committed to protecting the lives and civil rights of Blacks. To bolster Akerman's investigation, President Grant sent in Secret Service agents from the Justice Department to infiltrate the Klan to gather evidence for prosecution. The investigations revealed that many whites actively participated in Klan activities. With this evidence, Grant issued a Presidential proclamation to disarm and remove the Klan's notorious white robe and hood disguises. When the Klan ignored the proclamation, Grant sent Federal troops to nine South Carolina counties to put down the violent activities of the Klan. Grant teamed Akerman up with another reformer in 1870, a native Kentuckian, the first Solicitor General Benjamin Bristow, and the duo went on to prosecute thousands of Klan members and brought a brief quiet period of two years (1870–1872) in the turbulent Reconstruction era.[8]
End of Reconstruction
Georgia Democrats despised the 'Carpetbagger' administration of Rufus Bullock, accusing two of his friends, Foster Blodgett, superintendent of the state's Western and Atlantic Railroad, and Hannibal I. Kimball, owner of the Atlanta opera house where the state legislature met, of embezzling state funds. His efforts to prolong military rule caused considerable divisions in the states party, while black politicians complained that they did not receive an adequate share of patronage. In February 1870 the newly constituted legislature ratified the Fifteenth Amendment and chose new Senators to send to Washington. On July 15, Georgia became the last former Confederate state readmitted into the Union. The Democrats subsequently won commanding majorities in both houses of the General Assembly. Governor Rufus Bullock fled the state in order to avoid impeachment. With the voting restrictions against former Confederates removed, Democrat and ex-Confederate Colonel James Milton Smith was elected to complete Bullock's term. By January 1872 Georgia was fully under the control of the Redeemers, the state's resurgent white conservative Democrats.[citation needed]
The so-called Redeemers used terrorism to strengthen their rule. The expelled African American legislators were particular targets for their violence. African American legislator Abram Colby was pulled out of his home by a mob and given 100 lashes with a whip. His colleague Abram Turner was murdered. Other African American lawmakers were threatened and attacked.[9]
↑ Keith S. Hébert, "The Bitter Trial of Defeat and Emancipation: Reconstruction in Bartow County, Georgia, 1865-1872," Georgia Historical Quarterly (2008) 92#1 pp 65-92
↑ See Drago p. 146 (in sources below) for details.
Georgia was re-admitted to the Union twice
Further reading
Cimbala, Paul A. Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen's Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865-1870 (1998)
Smith, John David. "'The Work it Did Not Do Because it Could Not': Georgia and the 'New' Freedmen's Bureau Historiography," Georgia Historical Quarterly (1998) 82#2 pp 331–349; review essay of Cimbala (1998)
Farmer-Kaiser, Mary. "'Are they not in some sorts vagrants?': Gender and the Efforts of the Freedmen's Bureau to Combat Vagrancy in the Reconstruction South," Georgia Historical Quarterly (2004) 88#1 pp 25–49.
Hahn Steven. The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890. Oxford University Press, 1983.
Hamilton, Peter Joseph. The Reconstruction Period] (1906), full length history of era; Dunning School approach; 570 pp; ch 12 on Georgia online
Hébert, Keith S. "The Bitter Trial of Defeat and Emancipation: Reconstruction in Bartow County, Georgia, 1865-1872," Georgia Historical Quarterly (2008) 92#1 pp 65–92.
Hogan, Richard. "Resisting Redemption," Social Science History (2011) 35#2 133-166. statistical analysis of votes in 1876
Nathans, Elizabeth Studley. Losing the Peace: Georgia Republicans and Reconstruction, 1865-1871 (1969)
Reidy; Joseph P. From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800–1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 1992) online
Rogers Jr., William Warren. A Scalawag in Georgia: Richard Whiteley and the Politics of Reconstruction (2008)
Schott, Thomas E. Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography. LSU Press, 1988.
Wallenstein; Peter. From Slave South to New South: Public Policy in Nineteenth-Century Georgia (University of North Carolina Press, 1987) online edition
Wetherington, Mark V. Plain Folk's Fight: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Piney Woods Georgia (University of North Carolina Press, 2005) 383 pp. online review by Frank Byrne
Davis, Robert Scott. "New Ideas from New Sources: Modern Research in Reconstruction, 1865-1876," Georgia Historical Quarterly (2009) 93#3 pp 291–306.
Smith, John David. "'The Work it Did Not Do Because it Could Not': Georgia and the 'New' Freedmen's Bureau Historiography," Georgia Historical Quarterly (1998) 82#2 pp 331–349; review essay of Cimbala
The Reconstruction era was a period in United States history following the American Civil War, dominated by the legal, social, and political challenges of abolishing slavery and reintegrating the former Confederate States of America into the United States. During this period, three amendments were added to the United States Constitution to grant equal civil rights to the newly freed slaves. Despite this, former Confederate states often used poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation to control people of color.
James Lusk Alcorn was a governor, and U.S. senator during the Reconstruction era in Mississippi. A Moderate Republican and Whiggish "scalawag", he engaged in a bitter rivalry with Radical Republican Adelbert Ames, who defeated him in the 1873 gubernatorial race. Alcorn was the first elected Republican governor of Mississippi.
Amos Tappan Akerman was an American politician who served as United States Attorney General under President Ulysses S. Grant from 1870 to 1871. A native of New Hampshire, Akerman graduated from Dartmouth College in 1842 and moved South, where he spent most of his career. He first worked as headmaster of a school in North Carolina and as a tutor in Georgia. Having become interested in law, Akerman studied and passed the bar in Georgia in 1850; where he and an associate set up a law practice. He also owned a farm and enslaved eleven people. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Akerman joined the Confederate Army, where he achieved the rank of colonel.
The Radical Republicans were a faction within the Republican Party originating from the party's founding in 1854—some six years before the Civil War—until the Compromise of 1877, which effectively ended Reconstruction. They called themselves "Radicals" because of their goal of immediate, complete, and permanent eradication of slavery in the United States. They were opposed during the war by the Moderate Republicans, and by the Democratic Party. Radicals led efforts after the war to establish civil rights for former slaves and fully implement emancipation. After unsuccessful measures in 1866 resulted in violence against former slaves in the rebel states, Radicals pushed the Fourteenth Amendment for statutory protections through Congress. They opposed allowing ex-Confederate officers to retake political power in the Southern U.S., and emphasized equality, civil rights and voting rights for the "freedmen", i.e., former slaves who had been freed during or after the Civil War by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, usually referred to as simply the Freedmen's Bureau, was a U.S. government agency of early post American Civil War Reconstruction, assisting freedmen in the South. It was established on March 3, 1865, and operated briefly as a federal agency after the War, from 1865 to 1872, to direct "provisions, clothing, and fuel...for the immediate and temporary shelter and supply of destitute and suffering refugees and freedmen and their wives and children".
In United States history, the pejorative scalawag referred to white Southerners who supported Reconstruction policies and efforts after the conclusion of the American Civil War.
In the history of the United States, carpetbagger is a largely historical pejorative used by Southerners to describe allegedly opportunistic or disruptive Northerners who came to the Southern states after the American Civil War, and were perceived to be exploiting the local populace for their own financial, political, and/or social gain. The term broadly included both individuals who sought to promote Republican politics, and individuals who saw business and political opportunities because of the chaotic state of the local economies following the war. In practice, the term carpetbagger often was applied to any Northerners who were present in the South during the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877). The word is closely associated with scalawag, a similarly pejorative word used to describe native white Southerners who supported the Republican Party-led Reconstruction.
The Colfax massacre, sometimes referred to as the Colfax riot, occurred on Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana, the parish seat of Grant Parish. An estimated 62–153 Black militia men were murdered while surrendering to a mob of former Confederate soldiers and members of the Ku Klux Klan. Three white men also died during the confrontation.
The history of Georgia in the United States of America spans pre-Columbian time to the present-day U.S. state of Georgia. The area was inhabited by Native American tribes for thousands of years. A modest Spanish presence was established in the late 16th century, mostly centered on Catholic missions. The Spanish had largely withdrawn from the territory by the early 18th century, although they had settlements in nearby Florida. They had little influence historically in what would become Georgia.
John Brown Gordon was an attorney, a slaveholding planter, general in the Confederate States Army, and a politician in the postwar years. By the end of the Civil War, he had become "one of Robert E. Lee's most trusted generals."
The Redeemers were a political coalition in the Southern United States during the Reconstruction Era that followed the American Civil War. Redeemers were the Southern wing of the Democratic Party. They sought to regain their political power and enforce White supremacy. Their policy of Redemption was intended to oust the Radical Republicans, a coalition of freedmen, "carpetbaggers", and "scalawags". They were typically led by White yeomen and dominated Southern politics in most areas from the 1870s to 1910.
James M. Hinds was the first U.S. Congressman assassinated in office. He served as member of the United States House of Representatives for Arkansas from June 24, 1868 until his assassination by the Ku Klux Klan. Hinds, who was white, was an advocate of civil rights for black former slaves during the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War.
Rufus Brown Bullock was a Republican Party politician and businessman in Georgia. During the Reconstruction Era he served as the state's governor and called for equal economic opportunity and political rights for blacks and whites in Georgia. He also promoted public education for both, and encouraged railroads, banks, and industrial development. During his governorship he requested federal military help to ensure the rights of freedmen; this made him "the most hated man in the state", and he had to flee the state without completing his term. After returning to Georgia and being found "not guilty" of corruption charges, for three decades afterwards he was an esteemed private citizen.
James Madison Wells was elected Lieutenant Governor and became the 20th Governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction.
This is a selected bibliography of the main scholarly books and articles of Reconstruction, the period after the American Civil War, 1863–1877.
The civil rights movement (1865–1896) aimed to eliminate racial discrimination against African Americans, improve their educational and employment opportunities, and establish their electoral power, just after the abolition of slavery in the United States. The period from 1865 to 1895 saw a tremendous change in the fortunes of the Black community following the elimination of slavery in the South.
George W. Ashburn was a Radical Republican US Senate candidate and judge assassinated by the Ku Klux Klan in Columbus, Georgia, for his pro-African-American actions. He was the first murder victim of the Klan in the state.
The 1874 Alabama gubernatorial election took place on November 3, 1874, in order to elect the governor of Alabama. Incumbent Republican David P. Lewis unsuccessfully ran for reelection, losing to Democratic former U.S. Representative George S. Houston. This election would end an era of serious competition between the local Democratic and Republican parties, and start a 112-year win streak for Democrats in the gubernatorial level.
The "Original 33" were the first 33 African-American members of the Georgia General Assembly. They were elected to office in 1868, during the Reconstruction era. They were among the first African-American state legislators in the United States. Twenty-four of the members were ministers. Upon taking office, white Democrats, then a minority in the Assembly, conspired with enough white Republicans to expel the African-American legislators from the Assembly in September 1868. The next year, the Supreme Court of Georgia ruled that African Americans had the right to hold office in Georgia. The expelled legislators were reinstated and took office in January 1870.
Brigadier-General John Randolph Lewis was an American dentist, soldier, administrator, and postmaster, known for his work with the Freedmen's Bureau.
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