4 ChaPter^1
The Backlash
Though the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments had great significance, other
aspects of Reconstruction were failures, and southerners also took measures
to lessen the impact of the constitutional changes that had taken place. In the
states of the Confederacy, the pre-war leaders reemerged, with their same
notions of power, class and racism. President Johnson had offered amnesty,
a promise not to take legal action against the southern elites, and pardoned
13,000 of them who had been charged for seceding from the Union and wag-
ing war, and thus gave them their confiscated lands back. Southern states also
established Black Codes, laws that prohibited intermarriage between races,
denied certain property rights [like alcohol and arms], and made many other
political rights nonexistent, while imposing curfews and residential and insti-
tutional segregation on Blacks. Most oppressively, the codes allowed public
officials to arrest and imprison Blacks who did not have “lawful employment,”
or jobs, so they could retain control of them as they had in the days of slavery.
In essence, the south had created an apartheid system, where political and
social rights would be based on race [much like modern South Africa until
the 1990s].
Even though seen as the “liberators” of the slaves, many northerners
exploited the ex-slaves as well. Martin Delany, a Black abolitionist and Union
Army officer, warned in 1865 that “Yankees from the North [will] come
down here to drive you as much as ever. It’s slavery all over again: northern,
universal, U.S. slavery.... They don’t pay you enough... Those yankees talk
smooth to you, oh, yes!... But it’s slavery over again as much as ever it was.”
While the role of carpetbaggers, northerners who moved to the South to set up
business and take advantage of the economic calamity there for their own
benefit, has probably been exaggerated, it was clear that the ex-slaves would
not gain economic independence, that northern businessmen would play a
major role in redeveloping the South, and that the region itself would not
have the level of economic power it had before. Much worse for southern
Blacks was the emergence of a violent counterattack against them by white
southerners.
Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, established in Tennessee in 1866, and
many others, carried out a campaign of terror against Blacks throughout the
Reconstruction period and served as an important constituency of the