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We come now to the sort of final...
final acts or
events of Reconstruction. One of the terms that's
often been used for the end of Reconstruction
is redemption and, as a term,
redemption, which implies redeeming,
means to restore. But,
in a sense, this
use of the term redemption suggests
a sort of positive event and it comes from that larger southern
dominated mythology about what Reconstruction was.
If Reconstruction was corrupt, if those
involved in Reconstruction were corrupt, then ultimately
redemption or the restoration of former Confederates to their positions of
authority,
restoration of state governments across the south to
their authority to run the state,
if that's what redemption meant
then for many southerners,
freedmen, Republicans,
redemption probably wasn't the right label.
Rather, it might be more fair to say
that Reconstruction had... had diminished in importance
for many Americans to the point that
it had ground to a sort of end. And yet,
even as I say that, I'm standing here thinking to myself
you can't really say that either because
Reconstruction historians, especially in the last few decades,
have recognized that the repercussions of Reconstruction, like most
major historical events,
the repercussions, the sort of waves that spread out from
where the pebble drops in a calm pond and you get the ripple effect,
those repercussions would continue
to influence the United States for decades and decades and I've
even made several allusions to parallels between
Reconstruction in the 1860s and what happens with the Civil Rights
Movement
in the 1960s. I think part of the reason
that Reconstruction resonates has to do with
how central the issues of Reconstruction were to what it means to be
an American,
what it means to have civil rights, to have voting rights,
what the Constitution means and also I think
how truly integral issues of race have been to the history of this nation,
and to the ongoing debate about what it means to be an American. Well,
in 1876, the United States faced yet another presidential
election. Ulysses Grant,
of course, was not going
to run in '76, so the Republicans
nominate a figure by the name of
Rutherford Hayes, Rutherford B. Hayes we often say,
a Republican from Ohio.
Hayes, a veteran with a fine war record,
will run against Democrat Samuel Tilden
of New York. What
really makes this election,
I think, important, worth talking about briefly,
is that part of it is
the repercussions of Grant's scandal and
the very choice of Hayes, someone who never really stood out among Republicans,
but he did have that war record and I think more importantly
there really hadn't been any touch of scandal
about Rutherford B. Hayes. His White House, for instance, would be a White House
free of liquor and alcoholic beverages. He was very much
about sort of social norms being maintained and...
and proper decorum, but he wasn't a sort of a political heavy
in some respect. Tilden
had been governor of New York and in fact
it looked in 1876 is if
Samuel J Tilden would be the next president of the United States and
that perhaps suggests one,
the fracturing that had occurred in the Republican party, its...
its inability to seem to win this election outright
just a decade after the end of a civil war
Also, you know, I think it may speak to the return of the conservatives, the
return of the
Democrats who are so connected both with
the peace movement during the war in the north
and also with secession in the south.
Ultimately, the election is disputed. The results
are disputed. And
it was dad-gum close.
Tilden just was on the edge, on the cusp in terms of electoral votes. These
are
the votes of the Electoral College which
really in the U.S. system determine who will be president.
There were disputed votes in South Carolina, Florida,
Louisiana, and even
a technicality that had occurred in Oregon.
Washington... Washington State... had sent
two sets of electoral returns
when the votes were counted. In essence,
it's a mess, and
under the circumstances, because there was no constitutional structure for
dealing with a political mess,
an election mess of this sort, the question was thrown to Congress.
A 15 member commission was established, pretty much balanced with
one more Republican than there were Democrats on the commission,
and the threat, I think, was somewhat real
that ten years after the Civil War you could have a sort of
political civil war erupt again
because what was at stake really was the question of whether Reconstruction,
and specifically the maintenance of United States troops
in these former Confederate States, whether that
was going to continue.
Whether Rutherford B. Hayes had anything to do with it, or whether
specifically, you know, a hard
hammered-out deal was made, and Hayes
I think denied this, he denied that he had cut a deal to
to win the presidency. Nonetheless,
the commission decides for Rutherford B. Hayes
and under Hayes' administration the last
federal or United States troops will be removed from the south.
And that's happened by 1877.
For many Republicans,
it's clear that the Republican Party
will be sorely challenged to maintain
a presence in the American south
after those troops are gone. But I think more important is what the removal of those
troops and the so-called
end of Reconstruction means for African Americans, for freedmen.
The protections that had been offered, as
minimal as they may have been, were lost.
The Republican Party, to which many
freedmen had committed themselves politically,
understood by 1877
that any future they might have in the south
was no longer to be a future that depended
or could depend on the African American vote.
What I mean by that is, or to use a term perhaps,
the Republican Party in the south would be
struggling to survive
and race
was not a factor that would help in its survival.
So southern Republicans with the approval of northern Republicans
made the cynical choice
to shift the Republican Party
to a very lily-white party a party
predominated with
predominant whites in positions of power and
often voting. That's not to say the African Americans
didn't have the chance to vote. Often African Americans did
vote, places like Memphis provide a good example of the way
the African American vote could shape events.
But in terms of political power, what we see is the removal
of those officials, those African American officials who, during
Reconstruction had served
in high office in Congress and in state governments,
as gradually redemption comes to mean
the restoration of that old
power in the south
that had led to secession in the first place, and with it
came a reminder again about race,
and ultimately, the issue of race lies at the heart of
Reconstruction. And
it struck me before, and I think it's worth mentioning now,
that when it came to race, even during the higher points of Reconstruction,
when the radical spirit, so to speak, was was at its height,
while African Americans, while freedmen were able to vote
in the south freely and openly before
disfranchisement laws were passed in the late 19th Century and
other means were found to get around the 15th Amendment to deny them the vote,
that even while, during this period of Reconstruction
African Americans could vote in
much of the south,
blacks remained unable to vote
prior to the 15th Amendment, remain unable to vote
in much of the north.
Even in the north, the issue of race was central,
and the idea of race, in an expansive sense
could include and should include not just race but race and ethnicity,
Something that had long been a part of American political culture and culture generally,
of
American Society. What's to be done for instance
with the Irish? Where do the Italian's
fit? Eastern and
southern European immigrants, where do they fit? What about
Asians? What about
Latino-Hispanic folks who...
some of whom had lived in the United States for generations, their families had?
What about Native Americans?
It's an ongoing debate in American history and I guess
the sort of sad thing about Reconstruction and what was sad for so
many
supporters of Reconstruction policies was that in
the 10-year intermim between the
end of the Civil War and what we might call the end of Reconstruction,
the issue at the core, the key problem
had been so tough a nut to crack, so difficult
to resolve, that it hadn't been resolved.
Race continued
to function in the United States in ways that
meant tremendous pain for a lot of people.
And so when you think about Reconstruction I think one of the best ways we
historians have managed to do it is in terms of
sort of that unfinished campaign, that unfinished experiment,
or as one historian has put it, the unfinished journey
and something that we ought
probably to reflect on as it pertains even
now in the United States to questions
that we face.