Reconstruction, Expansion, and the Triumph of Industrial Capitalism 9programs, and, most critically, the removal of all remaining Union troops from
the South. The Confederacy, as southerners boasted, had been “redeemed.”
Reconstruction was finished.
The legacy of Reconstruction was not a pretty one. The 13th-15th
amendments provided vital constitutional rights for Blacks, but otherwise, the
South did not change dramatically, and the daily lives of Blacks remained far
too similar to the days of slavery. Speaking some years later, the ex-slave
turned abolitionist and brilliant orator Frederick Douglass provided an
insightful overview of the Reconstruction era. While slavery had been abol-
ished, violence and Black Codes [laws passed to keep Blacks segregated and
poor] meant that “to-day, in most of the Southern States, the fourteenth and
fifteenth amendments are virtually nullified... The citizenship granted in
the fourteenth amendment is practically a mockery, and the right to vote,
provided for in the fifteenth amendment, is literally stamped out in face of
government. The old master class is to-day triumphant, and the newly-
enfranchised class in a condition but little above that in which they were
found before the rebellion.”
Reconstruction was “radically defective” and the former slaves were left
completely in the power of the old masters, as Douglass explained it. The
“loyal citizen” fell victim to the “disloyal rebel.” Attacking sharecropping,
Douglass found the old masters still had “the power of life and death” over
African-Americans, which had been “the soul of the relation of master and
slave.” They could not own or sell Blacks, but “could starve them to death..
.. He who can say to his fellow-man, ‘You shall serve me or starve,’ is a mas-
ter and his subject is a slave.” Sharecroppers and other Black workers were
“compelled to work for whatever his employer is pleased to pay him, swindled
out of his hard earnings by money orders redeemed in stores, compelled to
pay the price of an acre of ground for its use during a single year, to pay four
times more than a fair price for a pound of bacon and to be kept upon the
narrowest margin between life and starvation.”
By way of historical comparison, Douglass noted that the serfs of Russia,
among the most oppressed groups in the world, had been emancipated and
given three acres of land to make a living. But when U.S. slaves were freed,
“they were sent away empty-handed, without money, without friends and
without a foot of land upon which to stand.” Offering advice for the future,
he concluded, “greatness does not come on flowery beds of ease to any