What were the long-term effects of Reconstruction in the South?

Question

After the American Civil War, the South was in ruins and there was doubt about how the Southern states would treat newly freed slaves. So the US government instituted a 15-year policy known as Reconstruction, in which the military was stationed in the South in order to maintain law and order now that the Confederate government was gone, help rebuild the infrastructure after the devastation of the war, and ensure the equal treatment of whites and blacks, for instance concerning the ability to vote. Reconstruction is widely viewed as a failure; the South suffered from a lot of exploitative Northern entrepreneurs known as "carpetbaggers", and in the end the South reverted to unequal treatment of blacks through Jim Crow laws.

But my question is, what were the long-term effects of Reconstruction, particularly on Southern whites? The reason I ask is this lyric from Brad Paisley's widely criticized song "Accidental Racist":

They called it Reconstruction,

fixed the buildings, dried some tears.

We're still sifting through the rubble,

after 150 years.

Is there any truth to what Paisley is saying? Presumably he's not referring to literal rubble, but is the South still suffering from some negative consequences of Reconstruction?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You in Advance

EDIT: You can listen to "Accidental Racist" here: http://youtu.be/KSurzeGvPrQ

Answer 1

Reconstruction was dead in some states almost as soon as it started, and it was completely undone nationwide by the compromise that led to the election of Rutherford B. Hayes as President in 1876. The lasting social damage that the song talks about should more accurately be associated with the demise of Reconstruction.

Here are some legacies of the time period:

• A lot of famous "firsts" which we might associate with the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s actually took place in the late 1860s. For example, the first black Senator was Hiram Rhodes Revels, who took office in 1870. Another good example I think of the changing mores and how they changed back quickly and semi-permanently is baseball, which, granted, is a Northern sport but which is still indicative of the times. Many people think that Jackie Robinson was the first black baseball player; in fact, that honor goes to a man named Moses Fleetwood Walker, who played briefly for the American Association in 1883 and then for several other minor league teams throughout the 1880s.

• The KKK first arose... but was also put down. In the wake of the Civil War, the original Klu Klux Klan arose, nominally led by Nathan Bedford Forrest, the general who presided over the Fort Pillow massacre. Eventually President Grant cracked down on this group and Forrest even disassociated himself with them, but the memory of white people dressing up as ghosts and harassing blacks and antiracists lived on for 50 years until D.W. Griffith revived the meme with the early feature film Birth of a Nation.

• We came the closest to removing a sitting President from office. If you'll recall the Lewinsky affair during the Clinton administration in the 90s, you'll remember that the President was impeached but not convicted of two separate crimes. Andrew Johnson faced a similar issue, only Johnson's impeachment was arguably even more politically motivated than Clinton's, and he came within a single vote of being removed from office (Nixon resigned before Congress could remove him).

• It gave rise to a fair bit of slang which you may not be aware originated then. The term "carpetbagger", for instance, which is now generally used to talk about a politician who runs for office in a district he has only lived in for a short time, originally referred to Northern Republicans who traveled down South in search of money or a higher cause, often arriving with no more personal possessions than whatever they could stow in a carpet-bag which they slung over their shoulder.

  Likewise, the term "scalawag", now used (when it is used) as a general pejorative, referred specifically at the time to Southerners who betrayed "Southern values" by stumping for civil rights and the like.

• While slavery was gone in name, it was replaced by a system called sharecropping which was nearly as bad and which ensnared poor whites as well as recently freed slaves and poor blacks. There is a folk song called 16 Tons that is actually about coal mining but which may as well be about sharecropping. Its lyrics include:

  You load sixteen tons, what do you get
  Another day older and deeper in debt
  Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
  I owe my soul to the company store

  No, these farmers weren't literally slaves anymore. They could marry whoever they pleased, more or less (so long as the person they were marrying was of the same race — and some states such as Virginia had some very strict definitions as to what was a black person and what was white), and they weren't exactly subject to being sold to another plantation at the whim of a plantation owner (although if they were behind on their rent, and sharecroppers were always behind on their rent, they could be kicked off of their land on a moment's notice). But in many ways — the "I owe my soul to the company store" line from the song — they were still indebted to the people who owned the land and were unfree.

• It began a long exodus of African Americans from the South and into large Northern cities, where they were employed at factory labor. Lest I make it sound as though race relations are entirely an issue with the South, I feel compelled to point this out. Slavery sent hundreds of thousands of black men and women north to work on the stockyards in Chicago, the garment factories in New York City, and many other places. Harlem, for instance, was a Dutch settlement and only began to have a sizeable African American contingent after the 1870s or so. Racism followed them there, as well; as any native of any large Northeastern American city will tell you, none of those places are exactly "post-racial". At the same time, the ability of blacks to congregate with other blacks without a plantation owner looking over their shoulder led to new innovations in African-American culture from the syncretism between 20th century classical music and African rhythm that is jazz to the poetry of Langston Hughes.

• Its failure has caused a lot of people over the years to overestimate the level of equality that African Americans have had. There is a general idea regarding history that it always moves forward, in technology but also in social issues such as tolerance and understanding. I guess this happens to be true right now on a gestalt level — there is no question that we're nicer to minorities right now than the ancient Romans were — but it glosses over the fact that history is filled with as much in the way of setbacks as progresses.

  If you remain unaware that the Reconstruction in the South was a colossal failure, kind of gloss over and/or forget the Plessy v Ferguson "separate but equal" decision in the 1890s, and take up black history with the 1950s and 60s the way we used to, you wind up asking yourself, "we gave these people freedom and they just, like, sat around for a hundred years. What did they do during this time?". The answer is, they fought for many of the rights which they had briefly but which were taken away from them. The right for black people to marry whites was not recognized by this nation until 1967, for example. It wasn't that black people cared about this and other issues and then suddenly didn't care, it's that their cause was pushed down to the point that it was arguably worse to be a black person living in the USA in 1900 than it was in 1870.

  I don't want to overstate how bad things were when Martin Luther King got started — he, too, stood on the shoulders of giants such as WEB Dubois and Marcus Garvey — but he was by and large attempting to imbue a society with a sense of anti-racism that its grandfathers had decided was not something worth fighting over. In that sense, the death and the failure of the Reconstruction, not the rise of it, is the important thing to remember.

Answer 2

The poster wanted to know about the negative effects of Reconstruction, so I am answering that question. The only direct long term negative effect of Reconstruction era policy I know of is that the South still pays exploitative railway fees to ship goods to other sections of the nation. Following the Civil War, the US was divided into 5 freight rate territories. As this book explains, the Southern territory was forced to pay the highest rate of 87% while the North paid the lowest. Many Southern railroads were purchased by Northern railroad tycoons consolidating their holdings and giving them monopolistic power to negotiate fees following the war. The railroad in Atlanta destroyed by Sherman went bankrupt 5 times in its attempts to rebuild before being purchased by the Southern Railroad, which owns much of the railroads in the South for example to this day. (These would be an example of the unpopular carpetbaggers in the question.) Although the rates were found unconstitutional in 1952, they are still in effect for the most part, since the ruling allows them to be "voluntary."

Before the war, the South was the wealthiest section of the nation and had the highest number of college graduates. The economy did not recover until the 1880s and then grew more slowly than the rest of the nation after that. The South is now the poorest section of the nation. Separating the effects of the war and Reconstruction policy to this unfortunate outcome is hotly debated, but it should be noted. My opinion is that while the war destroyed much of the wealth and status of the planter class who had invested large amounts in slaves, Reconstruction failed to improve the wealth of the lower classes very much.

Production of cotton was encouraged during Reconstruction, since cotton was vital to the Northern economy as well, while industrialization of the South may have been more helpful for it in the long-term. Here's a great paper on the topic. The share-cropping system was used to grow large amounts of cotton cheaply, but was less efficient than slave labor or if more freedmen and poor whites had owned their own land. The system eventually collapsed as mechanized farming and the Great Depression reduced the need for large numbers of farm workers leaving these workers in a very precarious position. wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping Arguably much of the poverty became generational and the South still struggles with it today.

Paisley's song can be interpreted to be a little bit about the fact that the South still has not regained its economic or social status, even after 150 years, but I don't think so. I think its more about "Southern identity" in a post Civil Rights era, given that the title is "Accidental Racist," so I think the song is about race relations and the failures of the South to accept the positive elements of Reconstruction policy.

Answer 3

In my humble opinion,the southern economy was devastated by centuries of political domination by big plantation owners. For centuries the southern economy was dominated by people who didn't pay for the labor of their workers. In the rest of the country poor young farmers could earn money by working as farmhands for other farmers and eventually have enough money saved to buy farmland either in their home area or in the west.

But the rich plantation owners and the successful farmers in the south had slave labor and didn't need to pay for the labor of farm hands. And their higher profits enabled them to pay more for farmland. Since the rural poor were poorer and the rural rich were richer in the south than in other sections, the rich acquired more and more farmland and tended to push the rural poor into farming poor quality marginal land. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer much faster in the South than in the other sections.

Since only the slave owning rich and the slave owning upper middle classes cold afford education, they dominated politics and made sure that legislation benefited the rich minority and not the poor majority.

There was very little manufacturing or mining the South and the so there were only enough banks to supply the loans needed by the plantation owners. There was little money and little incentive to invest in mining or industry.

In sort, the South had always been poorer than the north or the west. The seeming wealth of the southern economy had always been greatly exaggerated by the nominal value of slaves (who had zero average wealth themselves) belonging to the upper middle class and the wealthy, whose business was sometimes as much raising slaves for sale as it was using slaves to grow crops for sale.

All the nominal slave wealth vanished when the slaves were freed. And of course the war was mostly fought in the South which was devastated in many regions.

So I would say that the comparatively poverty of the South today is much more a legacy from centuries of low (or nonexistent) pay for labor and lack of opportunities for the lower class to get ahead than from the devastation of the Civil War, and much more from the devastation of the Civil War than from Reconstruction.

Answer 4

The first thing about Reconstruction was the tragic assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He was the President whose Second Inaugural Address preached: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds..." When he died, the best chance of a peaceful Reconstruction died with him. Lesser men were unable to finish the job that he started.

It is important to remember that the Civil War was fought first, to preserve the Union, and only second, to free the slaves. So the South undertook to "lose the war and win the peace." That is, they refrained from further rebellion, and in exchange, sought, and got the "right" to treat blacks almost like slaves. That was the unspoken "compromise" that followed the Civil War and attended Reconstruction, resulting in the so-called Jim Crow Laws.

According to Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe, it may not be an accident that the Civil Rights movement started in the 1960s. That was the time when the last parties to Reconstruction (born before 1880) finished dying, no one in American society had more than a second-hand memory of the Reconstruction, and Baby Boomers didn't even have memories of second hand memories, from their grandparents. But even people like Brad Paisley (a Gen-Xer who observed the tail end of the Civil Rights movement growing up), was enough of a realist to understand that some things that happened in his lifetime, had roots going back about 100 (not 150) years before he was born.

Answer 5

A point that might be lost if added just as a comment:

When (possibly inappropriate) privilege is lost (possibly due to mandated fairness toward others), it is definitely a loss! No doubt!

... not to mention the psychological loss to poor whites in the South of no longer being in a supposedly significantly higher status than the former slaves. Yikes.

In contemporary U.S. society, a similar pseudo-conundrum does occur, namely, the popular riff of claiming that "diversity, equity, and inclusivity" benefits everyone. Well, yes, of course, it does, at least morally!!! But, no, it does also require loss of "traditional, inappropriate privilege". Loss of privilege (whatever the details) is a loss, and if that loss is given a large "weight" in measuring things, it's definitely not worth a social/moral improvement. (In particular, this is why, in promoting DEI currently, I do not adapt the "it'll help everyone in every way" style, because at the very least people can subliminally see that this is not true... and it is definitely not true!)

I was reminded of this sort of dynamic while recently reading of Tillman and some other southern big-shots of the late 19th century, who unabashedly declared that, while they didn't necessarily want to lynch lotta black people, they definitely would do whatever it took to not have black people rule over white people. In a county where there were 150,000 black people and only 90,000 white people, etc, ...

Btw, in those peoples' remarks in those days, they weren't complaining so much about railroad inequities and tariffs, but, apparently, far more about keeping black people down. Of course, very often people fail to recognize their own economic interests, but those documents suggest that white supremacy was a bigger popular issue than tariffs.

Answer 6

I think that the song lyrics "They called it Reconstruction, fixed the buildings, dried some tears. We're still sifting the rubble, after 150 years." mean that the suffering and the discrimination can still be felt after 150 years.

Answer 7

I think that this was a terrible time in the US but we learn from our mistakes so maybe this was a blessing in disguise so it would not happen in the future when it would make big impacts.

Answer 8

The south is still benefiting today from the effects of Reconstruction.

When you consider what Reconstruction is a rebuilding effort, it is odd to ask if people are still suffering from it:

a 15-year policy known as Reconstruction, in which the military was stationed in the South in order to maintain law and order now that the Confederate government was gone, help rebuild the infrastructure after the devastation of the war, and ensure the equal treatment of whites and blacks.

The souths infrastructure has been rebuilt, with 3 of the 5 top states for infrastructure and transportation being former confederate states. Half of the Confederate states placing in the top half of all states. Blacks and whites are ensured equal treatment under the 14th Amendment, and law and order is maintained with the Confederate government gone. Four of the top 10 most dangerous states are former confederate states, which is slightly more than average, but to suggest that law and order isn't being maintained in the south is laughable when you consider that Washington D.C.'s state ranks high on the list.

Every one of the objectives of the Reconstruction has been completed, so the long-term goals of Reconstruction have been accomplished.