The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution by Eric Foner

Author:Eric Foner [Foner, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-09-17T06:00:00+00:00

THE RATIFICATION OF the Fifteenth Amendment marked the completion of the second founding. But constitutional provisions are not self-enforcing, nor do they automatically command universal acquiescence. It quickly became clear that for a significant number of white southerners, slavery might be dead but a commitment to white supremacy decidedly was not. From the outset of Reconstruction, violence had been endemic in the former slave states. The advent of biracial governments and the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments exacerbated the situation. In many parts of the South, the freedpeople’s newly won rights, and the governments that sought to implement and protect them, came under sustained assault. The main perpetrator of the cascade of violence in the late 1860s and early 1870s was the Ku Klux Klan, which spread throughout the region after being founded in Tennessee soon after the end of the Civil War. Its campaign of assault, arson, and murder targeted a broad array of enemies, including local Republican officials and organizers, blacks who engaged in disputes with white employers, schoolteachers, interracial couples, and “scalawags,” as Democrats called white southerners who allied themselves with the Republican party. Even as Klansmen claimed to be motivated by the need to protect white womanhood from black men, sexual assaults against black women became a widespread feature of their violent campaign. Especially in counties where the black and white populations were more or less equal and the balance of political power uncertain, the Klan’s actions metastasized into extreme violence against anyone accused of flouting the conventions of white supremacy.40

Blacks understood the widespread violence as an effort to limit their freedom and deprive them of newly won rights. “What is the use of talking about equality before the law,” wrote one former slave. “There is none.” The public testimony by black men and women about outrages they had suffered expanded the concepts of freedom and citizenship to include a right to bodily integrity and protection against bodily harm. Victims of violence risked further retaliation by reporting such actions to officials and seeking redress in court. Letters and petitions demanding protection poured into the offices of southern governors, and when they proved unwilling or unable to act, to Congress and the president. “Life, liberty and property are unprotected among the colored race of this state,” wrote a group of Kentucky blacks in 1871, requesting the passage of a national law “that will enable us to exercise the rights of citizens.” That same year a black convention in Tennessee, whose state government had reverted to Democratic control, published local reports detailing the ways their rights were violated in various parts of the state, including by lack of action against perpetrators of violence. “We were pleased to have the Fifteenth Amendment passed,” declared the report from Montgomery County, “but are grieved to know that there is no justice for us under it.” Tennessee’s government, the convention resolved, was “in violation of the Civil Rights Bill, and the amended Constitution of the United States.” But even in

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