Reconstruction's Promise and the Freedmen Who Built Schools, Churches and Towns

Ask most Americans what they remember about Reconstruction and you will get a shrug, a vague word about carpetbaggers and a sense that it was an unhappy chapter best skipped. That is a double failure, and the textbooks that rush past it in one paragraph deserve a late fee. It skips the story of a people who were forbidden by law in most Southern states to read in 1860 and were building their own colleges by 1866. And it skips the story of a constitutional revolution, three amendments in five years, that is the legal foundation of every civil rights claim made in this country since.

Here is the thesis. The first years of freedom were not a story of passive victims waiting for rescue. They were a story of people building, with astonishing speed, the institutions that free societies rest on: schools, churches, families, businesses and local government. The betrayal that ended the era was real, and it was a failure of the nation's will and not of the freed people's effort. Both halves of that sentence have to be told, or the history is a lie.

Freedom Without a Plan

When the war ended in the spring of 1865, some four million people had been freed from slavery, in the South and in the border regions. They were free in law as the Union armies advanced and, finally, by the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

The freed people owned almost nothing. They had no land, little cash and, in most cases, no legal right to the education they wanted. The Southern economy was in ruins, the old system of labor was dead and nobody had written the rules of the new one. The question of what a free society owes to people newly out of bondage had no precedent in American law.

Congress's first big answer was the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, created by statute on March 3, 1865, a little more than a month before Appomattox. The Freedmen's Bureau sat inside the War Department and was headed by General Oliver Otis Howard. It was a stopgap that grew into a sprawling organization: it issued rations, ran hospitals, settled disputes, supervised labor contracts and helped to open schools. It was also, from the first, an experiment in federal power on a scale nobody in 1865 had tried, and its limits, in staff, funds and political support, were severe.

I will give the skeptics of big government their due, because they deserve it. (An agency with a mission this large, a staff this small and a budget set by Congress was going to disappoint someone. Some things never change in Washington.) The Bureau was a federal agency with sweeping powers over private contracts and relief, and the conservative suspicion of such a body is a sound instinct. It makes the lesson sharper. The Bureau did its best work where it supported what the freed people were already doing for themselves, and its worst failures came where it was too weak to enforce the law against those who would deny them their rights.

The Rush to Learn

Start with the schools. Under slavery, teaching enslaved people to read was a crime in most Southern states. A people who had been legally denied literacy turned, on the first day they could, to the one thing they wanted most: the ability to read the Bible, a contract and a newspaper.

Freed people organized schools themselves, in churches, cabins and abandoned buildings, often before any outside teacher arrived. They pooled their own money and paid teachers. Northern aid societies, many of them church-backed, and the Bureau helped, and thousands of teachers, white and Black, went south. The evidence from the era shows a hunger for schooling that astonished the observers who saw it, including Northerners who had expected apathy.

The colleges followed fast. Fisk University opened in Nashville in 1866, in a former army barracks, and became one of the best-known Black institutions in the country. Howard University was chartered by Congress in 1867 in Washington and named for the Bureau's commissioner. Other schools that rose in those years include Atlanta University in 1865, Morehouse's precursor in Augusta in 1867 and Hampton Institute in Virginia in 1868. Many of the historically Black colleges and universities that still operate today trace their roots to this window.

What does that tell a conservative? It tells us that education, in its best form, is a project of families and communities that value it. The freed people did not wait for a bureaucracy to deliver learning. They built it. They treated it as a prize to be earned and a responsibility to be carried. That is the same instinct behind the homeschool movement, the church school and the parents who organize a microschool in a living room. The impulse to educate your own children is older than any department of education, and the freedmen proved it. For the national story of public education and its Founding-era roots, see Lincoln, Justin Morrill and the Land Grant That Built the State University.

The Churches

The second pillar was the church. Black Christians had formed their own congregations long before the war. Richard Allen had founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1816, and Black Baptist congregations existed across the South, many of them meeting in secret or under white supervision. After emancipation the movement exploded. Freed people left white-controlled congregations and built their own, and the Black church became the central institution of Black community life: the school, the meeting hall, the bank of mutual aid and the training ground for leadership.

The church mattered in ways a purely political story misses. It was independent of any government. It was funded by its members' own contributions. It taught literacy, thrift and responsibility, and it gave its members practice at what free people do, which is to organize, elect their own officers, keep accounts and govern themselves. A great many of the Black leaders of Reconstruction, and the civil rights leaders of the century after, came out of its pulpits.

A people's faith carried them through the horror of slavery, and it armed them for the work of freedom. That is a fact worth saying plainly in a century that often treats religion as a private hobby. The record is that the church was the engine of the freedmen's community. It is evidence that faith in public life is not a threat to a free society but one of its foundations.

Families, Land and Work

Marriage was the third foundation. Slave marriages had no standing in law, and families could be and often were separated by sale. After emancipation, couples rushed to formalize their unions and to find the children and relatives who had been sold away. Newspaper notices and Bureau records from the period show people searching for lost relatives for years. The family, which every conservative regards as the basic unit of a free society, was rebuilt by the people it had been denied to.

The question of land was where the promise broke first. In January 1865 General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15, setting aside coastal land in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida for settlement by freed families in plots of up to forty acres. Thousands of families were settled on it. After Lincoln's death, President Andrew Johnson, who pardoned former Confederates in large numbers, returned most of the land to its previous owners. The "forty acres" became a promise and then a broken one, a fact that continues to shape the conversation.

I will say something that may surprise some readers. A conservative's reading of that history is not that the government should have handed out the land of the defeated. It is that the property rights of the freed people, in what they had worked, in their wages and in their own persons, were rights the government was bound to protect, and it did not protect them. What the freed people wanted was a chance to own land, to farm for themselves and to build something to leave their children. They wanted, in a phrase of the time, to be their own masters.

What they got was mostly the labor contract. The Freedmen's Bureau supervised thousands of agreements between freed people and landowners, and the contracts often tied workers to their employers in ways that fell short of free labor. In many places the arrangement hardened into sharecropping, in which a family farmed a landowner's plot for a share of the crop and, because of high-priced credit and manipulated accounts, often ended the year in debt. Some freed people did succeed in buying land, and Black landownership grew, and then fell as the century turned. It was a story of real achievement, built on a foundation that was always under attack.

Notice what the story shows about economic freedom. The freed people wanted the full set of rights that make a worker free: to choose an employer, to quit, to bargain, to keep the fruits of his labor, to own property and to be paid what the contract said. Those are the rights of a free market, and the system that arose in the South undercut them with debt, with law and with violence. A real free-market order depends on a legal system that enforces contracts for the weak as well as the strong. For a related look at how markets succeed when the law is neutral, see six myths about robber barons, sweatshops and the age of capitalism.

The Constitutional Revolution

The legal work was done in Washington. Three amendments, ratified within five years, rewrote the Constitution.

1. The Thirteenth Amendment (December 1865) abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime.
2. The Fourteenth Amendment (ratified July 1868) defined citizenship and guaranteed rights against the states. Its first section opens by declaring that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens, and goes on: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
3. The Fifteenth Amendment (ratified February 1870) protected the right to vote: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

Each of the three carries a clause giving Congress power to enforce it by appropriate legislation. That was a deliberate answer to what had gone before. The Founders had left the question of slavery to the states and the states had failed. The Reconstruction generation corrected the Constitution's original flaw by writing the Declaration's promise into its text.

I would argue that these amendments are the most conservative revolution in American history, in the best sense. They did not invent new principles. They enforced old ones. "Equal protection of the laws" is the Declaration's "all men are created equal" translated into a legal command, and "due process of law" goes back to Magna Carta. The Reconstruction Congress did not tear down the constitutional order; it finished it. The Civil Rights Act of 1866, passed over Johnson's veto, was the first attempt to define citizens' rights in statute, and the Fourteenth Amendment was written in part to put it beyond repeal.

Meanwhile, Black men voted and held office. Hiram Revels of Mississippi took a Senate seat in 1870, the first Black member of the Senate, and Joseph Rainey of South Carolina entered the House the same year. Black officials served in state legislatures across the South, and the new state constitutions, written in this period with Black participation, created public school systems in states that had never had them. These were self-governing communities in the full sense: the freed people used the ballot to build the institutions they needed.

The Betrayal

So what went wrong? The honest answer has several parts, and none of them lets the nation off.

The first is violence. The Ku Klux Klan and similar groups arose in the late 1860s and used murder and intimidation to suppress Black voting and the Republican governments that depended on it. Congress responded with the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, which gave the federal government tools to prosecute these crimes, and for a time they worked. The Colfax massacre in Louisiana on April 13, 1873, in which a large number of Black men were killed, showed how far the violence went.

The second is that the courts blunted the amendments. In the Slaughter-House Cases of 1873 the Supreme Court read the Fourteenth Amendment's privileges or immunities clause so narrowly that it became nearly a dead letter, as The Slaughter-House Cases Gutted the 14th Amendment's Best Clause in 1873 explains. In United States v. Cruikshank in 1876 it threw out the convictions of men tied to the Colfax killings, holding that the indictments were defective and that the Fourteenth Amendment limited what states could do, not what private individuals did to one another, a ruling covered in Cruikshank, Colfax and how the Court left freedmen disarmed in 1876. And the Black Codes that preceded the amendments, laws passed in 1865 and 1866 that restricted the freedmen's work, movement and weapons, are examined in Black Codes, the freedmen and the Fourteenth Amendment's right to bear arms.

The third is the withdrawal of will. After the disputed presidential election of 1876, the political settlement known as the Compromise of 1877 ended the remaining federal military presence in the South. Without federal enforcement, the states moved back toward systems that stripped Black citizens of the vote and the protection of the law, a process that took until the end of the century to complete.

Here is the most important lesson, and it is a lesson about limited government. A constitutional right has two parts: the promise on paper and the machinery to enforce it. Reconstruction wrote the promise and then, within a decade, let the machinery rust. A principle that is not defended is not a principle, only a hope. The conservative instinct that governments exist to secure rights, including the rights of the weakest, was the one thing the Reconstruction Congress got right and the later Congresses and courts got wrong.

The Objection From Both Sides

Let me answer the strongest objections, one from each direction.

From the left comes the claim that Reconstruction failed because it was not radical enough, and that only a massive redistribution of land and a long federal occupation could have secured the freed people's rights. There is something to this, in that the land promises were broken. But the proposal rests on the premise that a free society can be built by decree, and the evidence of the freedmen's own work cuts against it. What the freed people built was a product of their own effort, supported by laws that protected their persons and property. What they needed from government was protection, not management.

From the right, or at least from some on it, comes the claim that Reconstruction was a federal overreach that trampled the states and handed power to corrupt governments. It is true that some Reconstruction governments were corrupt, as many governments of that era were, North and South. But the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified through the constitutional process, by three-fourths of the states, and its guarantees are in the text of the Constitution. A conservative who takes the text seriously has to take that text seriously, all of it, including the sections that limit what states may do to their own citizens.

The right answer is the one the freed people lived: self-government, supported by the rule of law. Neither the paternalism of an overbearing bureau nor the abandonment of an indifferent nation. For the war whose end made it all possible, see Appomattox and the Generous Surrender Terms That Began to Heal a Nation, and for a soldier's-eye view of why the freed men's claim to citizenship was already earned, see The 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner and the Soldiers Who Proved Doubters Wrong.

What the Record Asks of Us

Why does it matter, now? Because the story of Reconstruction is usually told as a story about the government, and the freed people are the supporting cast. The better history reverses that. The freed people built schools, churches and towns because they believed in learning, faith and families, and the government's job was to protect them while they did it. When it did, they flourished. When it stopped, they were left to face the violence alone.

The Case in Brief

1. After 1865 some four million freed people built schools, churches, families and businesses at remarkable speed, with the Freedmen's Bureau (created March 3, 1865) and Northern aid in support and often only in the background.
2. Colleges such as Fisk (1866) and Howard (1867) and the independent Black churches show that education and faith were built from the bottom up by people who valued them.
3. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments wrote the Declaration's equality into the Constitution, a conservative revolution that completed the Founding instead of overthrowing it.
4. Violence, narrowing court decisions and the withdrawal of federal enforcement after 1877 undid much of the promise, which shows that a right without a defender is only a hope.
5. The lesson is the oldest one in the American creed: free people protected in their rights build free societies, and a government's first duty is that protection.

What you can do: read the Fourteenth Amendment's first section on the Constitution page, then look up a historically Black college near you and learn the year and the people who founded it.