Reconstruction, Expansion, and the Triumph of Industrial Capitalism 5Democratic Party. The Klan and other racist terrorist groups attacked meet-
ings of free men, intimidated Blacks from voting and taking part in civic
activities, and lynched countless African-Americans. In 1871, in a small town
in Mississippi, the Klan had arranged for the arrest of three Black leaders for
giving “incendiary speeches.” As the trial began, White men in the courtroom
shot and killed two of the defendants and the judge, and that set off a riot in
which 30 free people were murdered by the racists. The U.S. government did
pass laws against groups like the Klan, but the federal presence in the South
was declining by the early 1870s, so the overall levels of violence continued
and the Democrats assumed, correctly, that Washington D.C. would not act
decisively to stop it.
But the biggest failure of Reconstruction was the rejection of property
rights for ex-slaves. As noted, Radicals believed that land ownership was the
key to successful emancipation. If a man owned land, he could be indepen-
dent. As originally developed, the Freedmen’s Bureau could provide property
–“ 40 acres and a mule”– to ex-slaves, but that effort was short-lived. Only
about 30,000-40,000 Blacks gained land from that program. Obviously,
southerners hated the idea of having their land taken and given to ex-slaves.
Even northerners and moderate Republicans opposed the idea. As The
Nation magazine, a liberal publication, put it, the government had no right to
redistribute property: “No man in America has any right to anything which
he has not honestly earned, or which the lawful owner has not thought
proper to give him.” Northern merchants also feared that land reform, by
providing small plots to many Blacks, would destroy the old plantation system
and thus badly damage the production of cotton and other important crops
that were produced and traded in huge numbers. Northern farmers and
workers, many of whom had fought in the Union Army and wanted slavery
ended, did not support land reform either. Land ownership was difficult to
come by for white men, and so they resented the idea of giving Blacks prop-
erty when the government was not providing land to them, especially after
their military service. And without land, Black progress would be minimal, if
at all. The government program for Reconstruction had not provided jobs,
land, or welfare for ex-slaves; as H.C. Bruce, a freed man in Kansas, put it,
they were "set free without a dollar, without a foot of land, and without the
wherewithal to get even the next meal.” Blacks were given, as one ex-slave
poignantly said, “nothing but freedom.”