An American History

RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION IN THE SOUTH ★^591

those they replaced. The constitutions
greatly expanded public responsibili-
ties. They established the region’s first
state- funded systems of free public
education, and they created new peni-
tentiaries, orphan asylums, and homes
for the insane. The constitutions guar-
anteed equality of civil and political
rights and abolished practices of the
antebellum era such as whipping as a
punishment for crime, property quali-
fications for officeholding, and impris-
onment for debt. A few states initially
barred former Confederates from vot-
ing, but this policy was quickly aban-
doned by the new state governments.

The Black Officeholder

Throughout Reconstruction, black vot-
ers provided the bulk of the Republican
Party’s support. But African- Americans
did not control Reconstruction politics,
as their opponents frequently charged.
The highest offices remained almost
entirely in white hands, and only in
South Carolina, where blacks made
up 60 percent of the population, did
they form a majority of the legislature.
Nonetheless, the fact that some 2,000
African- Americans occupied public offices during Reconstruction represented
a fundamental shift of power in the South and a radical departure in American
government.
African- Americans were represented at every level of government. Four-
teen were elected to the national House of Representatives. Two blacks served
in the U.S. Senate during Reconstruction, both representing Mississippi. Hiram
Revels, who had been born free in North Carolina, was educated in Illinois, and
served as a chaplain in the wartime Union army, in 1870 became the first black
senator in American history. The second, Blanche K. Bruce, a former slave,
was elected in 1875. The next African- American elected to the Senate was
Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, who served 1967–1978.

From the Plantation to the Senate, an 1883 litho-

graph celebrating African- American progress

during Reconstruction. Among the black leaders

pictured at the top are Reconstruction congress-

men Benjamin S. Turner, Josiah T. Walls, and

Joseph H. Rainey; Hiram Revels of Mississippi,

the first African- American senator; religious

leader Richard Allen; and abolitionists Frederick

Douglass and William Wells Brown. At the center

emancipated slaves work in the cotton fields,

and below children attend school and a black

family stands outside its home.

What were the social and political effects of Radical Reconstruction in the South?