Testing and
Contesting
Freedom

Nine months after the Civil War ended in April 1865, twenty-seven states ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery throughout the United States. Freedom, however, did not guarantee equal rights or the absence of racial discrimination. Immediately following the North’s victory, white southern leaders enacted black codes, which aimed to prevent the former slaves from improving their social and economic status. Although Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, himself a Southerner, did not support the codes, he did nothing to overturn them. An advocate of limited government, Johnson clashed repeatedly with Congress over Reconstruction, vetoing renewal of the Freedmen’s Bureau bill and opposing ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1867 the Republican majority in Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Acts, which placed the South under military rule and forced it to extend equal political and civil rights to African Americans.

The Military Reconstruction Acts, followed by the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, extended suffrage to black men. In alliance with white Republicans, blacks won election to a variety of public offices, including seats on local and state governmental bodies. When these interracial legislatures provided funds for public education of blacks—for the first time in the South—and for black hospitals and other social services, their opponents attacked them for fraud, corruption, wasteful spending, and imposing “Black Rule.” Opponents also created vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan to intimidate black and white Republicans through scare tactics backed up by violence and bloodshed. By 1877 the attempt of white southern Democrats, or Redeemers, had succeeded, leaving African Americans struggling to retain the freedom they had enjoyed during Reconstruction.

As you read the following documents, consider these general questions: How did blacks and whites view freedom? How essential was it for the federal government to supervise the movement from slavery to freedom? Why didn’t southern whites accept the extension of civil rights for blacks, if only in a limited way? How did views about Reconstruction change over time?