Why Reconstruction Failed

1877 proved to be the culmination of one of the most depressing and melancholic processes in all of American history: The dissolution of Reconstruction. No longer would northern and Union forces exist to monitor the south and prevent it from abusing black Americans. Institutions chartered a decade prior and which had served as the torch-bearer for the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights - two documents black Americans had been fighting to obtain the benefits of ever since the end of the 18th century - were now defunct. In lieu of these great enforcers of human rights, tyranny and segregation plugged the power vacuum. The segregation virus first struck railroads and trains, then spread to the rest of southern society. States like Texas, Florida, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Mississippi were plunged into 9 decades of darkness, where every liberty was obscured by a massive sheet of spiteful despotism. Like practically everything else in history, though, this massive shift was not sudden. Reconstruction did not enjoy a peaceful existence prior to this point and the year 1877 was not a random knife launched into its person without warning. Instead, it was the final phase of rot that had been slowly corroding the Reconstruction project for years.

Reconstruction - a campaign aimed both at rebuilding the south from the wake of the war and extending new economic, political, social, and financial rights to ex-slaves - was officially launched by Abraham Lincoln back in 1863, but since the civil war was ongoing, there was no time to focus on it. Fortunately, Confederate forces surrendered on April 9, 1865, ending the war and letting Lincoln dedicate his time, energy, and resources toward Reconstruction. However, just 5 days later, John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's Theater on April 14, 1865, in retaliation against the president's support for black voting rights. Lincoln died the following day, and Andrew Johnson became president. During the 1864 election, Lincoln replaced Hannibal Hamlin, his original vice president, with Johnson because, while Johnson did oppose secession, he was a southern slaveowner and so Lincoln hoped his presence on the reelection ticket would calm the south. Unfortunately, Johnson and Lincoln harshly diverged on most issues connected to race relations.

Johnson joined Lincoln in supporting the abolition of slavery, but while Lincoln held that view for mostly ethical reasons, Johnson was merely concerned with preventing any future sectional crises. Once the 13th Amendment was ratified, formally prohibiting slavery in the United States, Johnson ceased any progressive policies regarding the lives of ex-slaves. Anytime Republicans in Congress drafted and approved a bill aimed at expanding or protecting black rights, Johnson angrily vetoed it. He also ignored a massive wave of violence against black Americans. Because of this, Johnson became an extremely unpopular president, particularly in the north. In order to reverse this effect and ensure a victory for the Democrats - the party Johnson belonged to - in the 1866 Congressional election, Johnson went on a tour he called "the Swing Around the Circle", basing the moniker off of the fact that each city he visited formed a circle when the dots were linked together. The Swing Around the Circle only damaged Johnson's reputation more, as he humiliated himself during its brief span. Johnson routinely compared himself to Jesus Christ, called for the hanging of Republican Congressmen, and had his voice drowned out by the crowd, among other things.

The Swing Around the Circle, originally meant to promote the Democrats, only targeted them with additional damage. In November, the Republican Party secured a massive supermajority in Congress, with the new delegates being inaugurated on March 4, 1867. Soon after, the legislative branch passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867 over Johnson's veto. Under this law, the south was split into 5 new military districts, all of which were to be occupied by federal troops tasked with enforcing the new legal and Constitutional rights of black Americans. After enacting this law, the Congressional Republicans went about writing, passing, and nullifying vetoes on a massive collection of similar bills that expanded, protected, and preserved the freedoms enjoyed by black Americans. 1867 and 1868 saw enormous, drastic improvements in the quality of life for the United States' black residents. In retaliation, irate southerners set up the Ku Klux Klan to assault black people and even white people that supported Reconstruction. This left people too afraid to admit that they endorsed the federal occupation or expansion of black rights, contributing to Reconstruction's eventual decline. Alone, though, the rise of the KKK wouldn't be enough to bring the project to an end.

In 1868, Republican Ulysses S. Grant defeated Democrat Horatio Seymour, replacing Johnson as president on March 4, 1869. Grant, being a Union general who led the north to some of its most important victories in the civil war, was appalled by Johnson's opposition to civil rights and so during his stay in the White House, began supporting Republican efforts to increase the rights and liberties of black Americans. This was an amazing development that left a majority of Americans, especially ex-slaves and black people, hopeful for the future. However, the Grant Administration was burdened by a number of issues and drawbacks which inflicted further harm on Reconstruction. Of these, corruption was certainly the most severe. It got to the point where, up until the 1990s and 2000s, Grant was generally considered a bottom 3 president by most historians. Fortunately, modern historians tend to agree that Grant doesn't deserve such an abysmal rating. A major reason for this fact is that Grant himself was never involved in these scandals. Rather, he proved to be naive and gullible, never worrying that potential cabinet officials may possess baggage or ill intent.

During Grant's presidency, the country suffered through 3 major scandals. The first was the Gold Scandal, which came to light before 1869 was even over. During the civil war, Lincoln suspended the gold standard so that the federal mint could produce as much money as it needed to fund the war. Once the Confederacy surrendered and collapsed, Lincoln restored the gold standard. From there, he and Johnson instituted a policy of giving Americans gold in exchange for returning any greenbacks (the name of the money produced during the civil war and which wasn't backed up by my precious metal) they may have owned. This angered Jay Gould and James Fisk, two notorious Wall Street speculators who were enjoying massive profits from selling their private gold collections. Because of the gold-for-greenbacks policy, there was more gold present on the market, rendering the individual gold nuggets owned by Fisk and Gould less valuable. As a result, Fisk and Gould hired a lawyer named Abel Corin to convince Grant to appoint a man named Daniel Butterfield to the Department of the Treasury. Grant was persuaded, and Butterfield joined his cabinet.

Butterfield was then instructed to have the treasury repeal the gold-for-greenbacks policy, ending the flow of gold into the private market and preserving the value of Fisk and Gould's personal collections. On September 24, 1869, the actual director of the treasury realized what was going on and how Butterfield was involved. To disrupt Fisk and Gould's plot, about $4,000,000 worth of government gold was sold into the economy, catalyzing a massive decline in gold prices and nearly plunging the economy into a recession. When it was revealed that Grant was friends with Fisk and Gould, the country became absolutely furious with him. Grant himself had no idea what his friends were up to, but these connections still damaged his reputation and, by extension, that of Reconstruction as a whole.

A few years later, in September 1872, the second major scandal of the Grant Era was revealed to the public: The Credit-Mobilier Affair. A decade before this, Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act. This law chartered two new companies, the Union Pacific Railroad Company and the Central Pacific Railroad Company. These two companies were then instructed to build a railroad across the whole western US, with the former beginning at the Missouri River and continuing east and the latter beginning at Sacramento, California, and continuing west. Officials at the Union Pacific Railroad Company then held an auction for a series of contracts and royalties that would give the winner control over the responsibilities, alongside the profits, of physically constructing the railway network. The board of the company created a company called Credit-Mobilier, and one of its officials, Herbert Hoxie, submitted an absurdly high bid to make sure Credit-Mobilier won those assets. From there, the Union Pacific Railroad Company, operating under the pseudonym of "Credit-Mobilier", engaged in a series of corrupt and illegal activities that halted the completion of the railroad all to boost their income. They even gave politicians stocks in Credit-Mobilier in exchange for their silence, possibly including future-President James A. Garfield and certainly including several Grant Administration officials.

Like the Gold Scandal, the Credit-Mobilier Affair decimated the reputation both of Grant himself and his Reconstruction policies. Grant, who was running for reelection at the time of the Credit-Mobilier Affair being discovered by the public, even had to replace his vice president Schuyler Colfax with Henry Wilson on the Republican ticket. Colfax was one of the politicians implicated in the scandal. Grant's opponent was Horace Greeley, a libertarian socialist who supported women's suffrage and full-on racial equality, progressive views that rendered him unable to defeat Grant regardless of what happened with Credit-Mobilier. As a result, on March 4, 1873, Grant began his second term. Soon after, Grant followed the example of other countries, which had been inspired by Germany to abandon the silver standard and instead adopt the gold standard. The massive withdrawal of gold from the economy as a whole and its entry into bank vaults rendered gold prices unreasonably high, while the flood of silver out from banks and into the broader market made silver prices unreasonably low.

Not only did the switch in monetary policy damage price stability, but it also made money a lot rarer since gold is harder to come by than silver. This made it nearly impossible for companies to fund their activities, causing a series of corporations to fail, starting with Jay Cooke & Co. on September 13, 1873. These factors tossed the economy into a state of prolonged chaos and melancholy known as the Panic of 1873, which ended up being one of the longest recessions in recorded history. The outbreak of this enormous financial crisis redirected people's attention from protecting the gains made by Reconstruction and toward restoring economic health. And since the Panic of 1873 was so infamously long and drawn out, the focus on race relations wasn't brought back until it was already too late.

1873 saw another massive failure for Reconstruction in the form of an awful Supreme Court ruling. For years, New Orleans was the butcher's capital of America. Eventually, the fact became so prevalent that the city's sewage system was stuffed with animal guts, bringing on a horrid cholera epidemic. Once the epidemic subsided, the citizens of New Orleans demanded Louisiana take action. The state of Louisiana responded by giving a monopoly to the Crescent City Livestock Landing and Slaughter Company, arguing that if there was only one butcher's corporation, it would be easier to enforce regulations on that industry. The 14th Amendment, a provision of the Constitution passed during Reconstruction and which established equal protection under the law, required that states follow the Bill of Rights just as much as the federal government did. Other butchers in Louisiana then argued that the creation of this monopoly was unconstitutional since it confiscated their property and stripped them of control over their butcher's shop. They got together and sued Louisiana in a series of cases that eventually came to the Supreme Court. On April 14, 1873, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in the Slaughterhouse Cases, siding with Louisiana and arguing that since the 14th Amendment was originally enacted to help ex-slaves, it had no other purpose than instituting racial equality. This ruling humiliated the 14th Amendment, its authors, and Reconstruction as a whole, further contributing to the project's collapse.

Two years later, in 1875, the third and final major scandal of the Grant Administration became public knowledge: The Whiskey Ring, a collection of members of Grant's cabinet and moguls in the alcohol industry who had colluded to steal taxpayer money and give it to alcohol manufacturers and Grant's reelection campaign. The Whiskey Ring proved to be especially harmful to the reputation of Reconstruction, being seen as even more infuriating and outrageous than either the Gold Scandal or Credit-Mobilier Affair. By this point, it was obvious that Reconstruction was fizzling out and that it wasn't long for the Earth. Anything, minor or major, could result in its final collapse. Scandals, racist violence, and unsubstantiated judicial ramblings had clawed away at America's faith in and support for the program, while one of the worst recessions that the nation had or will ever endure chipped away at any concern Americans had for the people Reconstruction existed to protect. In 1876, a presidential election was held pitting Democrat Samuel Tilden against Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. The election proved to be extremely close, and the states that could decide it - Oregon, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida - all sent in multiple, conflicting ballots about who they supported.

In order to settle the dispute, Congress established a 15-member committee tasked with deciding whether Tilden or Hayes would win. The board contained 5 Senators, 5 members of the Supreme Court, and 5 delegates to the House of Representatives. Of them, 7 were Democrats, 7 were Republicans, and 1 was an independent who didn't belong to any political party. The independent soon resigned, though, and was replaced by a Republican. Thus, Hayes was chosen and made president-elect. The south, of course, was furious, and so a group of politicians met at Wormley Hotel in Washington DC to negotiate an agreement whereby Hayes would become president without angering people in states like North Carolina and Virginia. The deal became known as the Compromise of 1877. The south agreed to let Hayes become president. In exchange, though, President Hayes would have to appoint at least one southerner to his cabinet, support the construction of a transcontinental railroad through the southern half of the country, and, most impactfully, end Reconstruction. Hayes was then inaugurated on March 4, 1877, and ended Reconstruction on March 31, 1877.

With Reconstruction hastily and prematurely concluded, experiencing an end that resembled not a mature choice to complete a project that had finished its goal but rather the violent destruction of a newborn child, the Jim Crow Era took hold. Black Americans, who had spent the past decade joyfully anticipating a more perfect union where everyone realized their rights mattered as much as the rights of white people, now saw those hopes torn apart. With their hopes ripped to shreds, so were the Declaration of Independence and the newly-remade Constitution. The entire south would quickly become a miserable realm where the rivers were composed of blood, the trees possessed sap made from blood, and each soul beneath the ruling class was suffocated by oppression and sadness. This awful state would continue for another 90 years, with segregation failing to exit America's economic and social life until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Even then, black people still faced police brutality, harmful stereotypes, and even employment discrimination to an extent. And arguably, these wretched systems of horror were made inevitable by the rise of the KKK, Grant's presidential failures, the Slaughterhouse Cases, and the subsequent failure of Reconstruction.