-On the evening of June 17, 2015, a stranger walked into an historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, known as Mother Emanuel.

He prayed with the Wednesday night bible study group for almost an hour.

Then he opened fire.

-We have nine victims, and I do believe this was a hate crime.

-Friends say the twenty-one year-old high school dropout was a longer, an unabashed racist with a deep hatred for Black people.

-He just said, I have to do it.

He said, you rape our women, and you've taken over our country.

-The massacre in Charleston touched off not only a debate over the Confederate flag, but it touched off a debate all over the country.

How did we get here, and why is this happening?

-It was easy, I guess, to think of that as a singular horror.

And it was convenient, I think, to think of it that way.

Unless you really wanted to understand how this could happen, and then that meant that you had to get into the history.

-Most of us know that our country fought a Civil War in the 1860s.

But less is known about what came afterward... The chaotic, exhilarating, and ultimately devastating period known as Reconstruction.

If we're looking for the roots of the tragedy at Mother Emanuel, this is where we have to start.

-The Reconstruction period is one of extraordinary excitement, the time when America could finally become that land of freedom that it had promised to be since the very beginning.

-Black people actually sat in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Poor whites and Black people saw a common cause with one another.

-You're seeing this opportunity and imagining that it will only get better.

And looking back, what we know, is those Black folks had no idea of the cliff that they were heading towards.

-The achievements of Reconstruction triggered a fearsome backlash, an onslaught of terror and oppression that lasted for decades.

-After 250 years of slavery, white Southerners could not quite accept the four million former slaves as equal members of their society.

-Violence is used in conjunction with Jim Crow in order to strip African-Americans of the rights and privileges they gained during Reconstruction.

The Charleston massacre comes from a long history of white terror against African-Americans.

-But Reconstruction left a legacy of hope as well as violence.

-We have to recognize the injustices that were inflicted, but we can't reduce all history to that injustice.

People who had been held in perpetual bondage confronted the greatest sin of American history straight on.

-Their hopes were far greater than maybe what any government can accomplish: a system functioning without race being a barrier to equality.

We still haven't quite gotten there.

-Almost a century and a half later, we still find ourselves haunted by the collapse of Reconstruction, a chapter of our history that's often been misrepresented and misunderstood.

It's time that we acknowledge the true story and complete the work of reconstructing America.

When I was in high school, Black history consisted of a few simple facts and a very happy ending.

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.

But this was the 1960s.

100 years after emancipation, Black people were fighting for the most basic rights.

So what happened to that happy ending?

It turns out, that wasn't the end of the story.

It was just the beginning.

April 9, 1865.

Palm Sunday.

At the village of Appomattox courthouse, in Virginia, Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, surrendered to United States Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant.

Lee's capitulation, effectively signaled the end of the Civil War and the death of slavery in the United States.

The news rippled out from Appomattox.

-A strange woman I never seen before, came runnin' down where we were all at work.

She said as loud as she could, "Hey, freedom.

You are free."

Everybody was getting' up his clothes and leavin'.

They didn't know where they was goin'.

Just scatterin' around.

-It was just like opening the door and letting the bird fly out.

He might starve, or freeze, or be killed pretty soon, but he just felt good because he was free.

-To a remarkable degree, it was the slaves themselves who had helped bring this to pass.

From the war's first days, legions of enslaved people defied their masters and fled to union lines.

Others were liberated by the United States army as it occupied parts of the South.

By the summer of 1862, many thousands of slaves had found safe haven.

Their brave actions, as much as any other factor, converted president Lincoln and many other Americans to emancipation.

When Black men were finally allowed to enlist in the Union army 180,000 answered the call.

Most of them former slaves.

-It was both the manpower that they brought to the Union side and also the denial of their manpower in the production of the Southern economy.

-There's no question that they strengthened the Union hand militarily, and they changed the nature of what a military victory would mean.

-The role of Black soldiers, Lincoln said this himself, was essential in ensuring that the war would end with the abolition of slavery.

-What would the future hold for these freed people?

Now untethered, their status as citizens was very much in question, with few legal rights or protections guaranteed.

Even so, the prayers of generations were being answered.

As Lee and grant negotiated the terms of surrender, the government, in Washington, was wrestling with what was being called Reconstruction.

On the surface, Reconstruction just meant restoring the rebel states to the union.

In fact, it raised a host of questions.

-Reconstruction is the process by which American society; North, South, Black, white, tried to come to terms with the consequences of the Civil War, the reunion of the nation, the destruction of slavery, the question of what the status of the four million former slaves would be as free people in American life.

-One of the first questions that the post-war period has to confront is who is a citizen and then what rights attend to citizenship?

Who are former slaves going to be in the body politic?

-In parts of the South that the army liberated during the war, officials had been confronted with issues like education, land ownership, and workers' rights.

Even at Appomattox, it was apparent that the north and the South saw Reconstruction quite differently.

-Grant goes into those negotiations thinking, well, we won.

Not just militarily, but our principles won.

Robert E. Lee comes into it thinking, it shows that you had more men and more cannon than we did.

We acknowledge no wrong.

And they just talk right past each other, which is one reason that it becomes not the end of all this struggle but in some ways the beginning.

-These ideas start to accumulate around Appomattox, of a merciful coming together of peace.

Many iconic images associate the surrender ceremony with Jesus entering the city of Jerusalem, the city of peace.

But they don't actually help us understand what happened there at all.

Whatever Appomattox is, it's not the start of peace.

-Two days after Appomattox Abraham Lincoln spoke about Reconstruction at the White House.

For the very first time in public, the president suggested that some Black men, the very intelligent and Black veterans, deserved the right to vote.

A man in the audience turned to his companion and said, "That is the last speech he will ever make."

On April 14, 1865, Good Friday, John Wilkes Booth made good on his threat.

The reckoning for America's original sin was just beginning.

-The early days of freedom were a bewildering mixture of exhilaration and apprehension, but the first order of business was to reconnect with family members who had been torn away by slavery.

-Information wanted.

I had two children sold from me about ten years ago, by a man by the name of pate.

My boy's name was Monroe Early, and my daughter's name Mary Early.

-Starting in 1865, so shortly after the end of the war you see people placing ads in newspapers.

It really gives a sense of the separation that had occurred during slavery.

-Information wanted.

Of my father, Jerry Hodges, of Norfolk County, Virginia.

I was sold from him when I was a small girl, about thirty years ago.

My mother's name was Phoebe, and she belonged to a man named ashcroft.

-This moment of emancipation is a serious moment of upheaval.

A lot of people are moving about.

There are a lot of things that are going on, but for African-Americans one of their big things is to try to build the lives that they've been thinking about while they were enslaved.

People took to the roads trying to find family members.

I mean, literally, walking to where they had last left family.

-Information wanted of my children, Lewis, Lizzie, and Kate Mason, whom I last saw in Owensboro, Kentucky.

They were then owned by David and John Hart.

That is, the girls were, but the boy was rather the property of Thomas Pointer.

-Imagine keeping this memory of your child, or your wife, or your husband, your father, your mother alive in your mind and in your heart and then trying to, to bring about some kind of reunification, but you hardly know where to start.

-The end of the Civil War brought more questions than answers.

Even the status of slavery was unresolved.

The 13th Amendment passed congress in January, but it hadn't been ratified by the states.

And what did freedom mean?

Could the freed people be citizens?

Were they entitled to a role in politics?

Could they earn wages in the free market?

It was a dangerous time that would have tested the abilities of even the greatest president.

Just hours after Lincoln's death, Andrew Johnson was sworn in at a hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue.

When Lincoln chose a Southern unionist Democrat as his running mate in 1864 few imagined that Johnson would ever ascend to the presidency.

-During Reconstruction the Republican Party is the party of civil rights.

It is the party that promotes a vision of an interracial democracy.

The Republican Party is the party of African-Americans.

-Although Johnson was a southerner and a Democrat, he had opposed secession, even at the risk of his life.

-Andrew Johnson grew up a poor white southerner.

He believed very strongly that the Civil War had been caused by the planter class, the Southern elite, and he hated them.

But he imagined that the primary victim of the planter class was the class to which he belonged, the poor whites of the South.

-Andrew Johnson was the first man in this country made president by an assassin's bullet.

He wouldn't be shy about using his newly gained power.

-Congress had gaveled out of session in March.

They're not coming back 'til December.

Out of session, they're stuck, and Johnson is in the driver seat.

-The most famous Black man in America, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, had his doubts about the new president.

-At Lincoln's second inaugural, Johnson meets with Frederick Douglass.

When Johnson realizes that he has to shake a Black man's hand his smile turns into a scowl.

Douglass smells the liquor on his breath.

He's already drunk at 11:00 a.m.

Douglass says to his friend, "No matter what else Andrew Johnson is, he is no friend of the Black."

-Even as the freed people celebrated the death of slavery, Douglass was forced to wonder, "In what new skin will the old snake come forth?"

The freed people longed for all of those things that other people enjoy, things denied them under slavery.

The right to marry, the right to make a home, the right to an education, and the right to earn a living.

For many, the basis of being truly free was the right to own land.

In the summer of 1865 the question of land was very much on the mind of Major General Oliver Howard.

That may, Howard had been given one of the most daunting assignments in American history.

As the head of a new government agency, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Howard was given a few hundred agents and then charged with overseeing the entire transition of Southern society from slavery to freedom.

-The Freedman's Bureau was supposed to protect Blacks from violence.

It was supposed to give them access to education.

It was supposed to in some way get them access to land.

It was supposed to make sure that local courts treated Blacks fairly.

White Southerners deeply resented the Freedman's Bureau, even though they were not there to quite protect the former slaves as to make sure that relations between white and Black were fair and equitable on both sides.

-The federal government had never done anything like this.

The budget of the Freedman's Bureau on an annual basis was not much more than what it cost to fight the Civil War for one week.

-Though having limited resources, what the Freedman's Bureau had plenty of was land... Over 850,000 acres of it, and Howard sensibly wanted the freedmen to have use of it.

-During the Civil War a lot of land came into the hands of the federal government.

Some of it was seized for non-payment of taxes.

Some of it was just abandoned by planters who fled unwhen the Union Army appeared.

The Freedmen's Bureau was to oversee this land.

-At the end of July, General Howard ordered his agents to begin renting out forty-acre plots.

The freedmen would have three years to buy the land outright.

-Of course this phrase forty acres and a mule was picked up by African-Americans all around the South.

Many people thought this is a blueprint for Reconstruction.

-But within weeks, Howard's plans were in trouble.

-Johnson's Reconstruction plan, which he put forward in May of 1865, basically gave amnesty to most white Southerners who would take an oath to the union and also accept the end of slavery.

But, he said, those who own $20,000 worth of property before the war are not gonna be covered by a blanket pardon.

They have to come and get an individual pardon from the president.

-Johnson also began setting up new state governments in the former Confederacy.

-President Johnson had a very soft version of Reconstruction, almost like a restoration of the Southern states.

-White Southerners have to accept the fact that slavery is dead, but other than that, Johnson was giving them a free hand in keeping the Black population under control.

-Many Republicans worried that Johnson was undermining the result of the war, but there wasn't much they could do because congress was in recess.

-Johnson felt that he could handle Reconstruction perfectly well and it would all be done by the time congress came back into session in December 1865.

-In May, Andrew Johnson decreed that wealthy rebels would only be pardoned if they appealed in person to him.

All through the summer of 1865 a steady stream of prominent Southerners, the very people Johnson loathed, called at the White House to beg the president's forgiveness.

-This was a poor boy who was not recognized among the elite class when he was in Tennessee.

People that he had hated are now coming to him and asking for pardons, and he liked it.

-By the end of the summer of 1865, many of the former Confederates who took the South out of the union have received presidential pardons, which means they are back in American society.

They could vote.

They get to make whatever laws they want, and there's nothing you can do about that.

-In September, Johnson ordered Howard to restore almost all of the lands in the hands of the Freedman's Bureau back to the Confederates he had pardoned.

-It fell to Oliver Howard to go and inform the freed people that they were probably gonna have to start entering into labor contracts with, in many cases, their former owners.

-Howard knew he had to deliver this devastating news in person, in places like Edisto Island on the South Carolina coast.

-They could not believe it, and so they refused to leave.

The freed people start shouting, "No, no," and then an old woman starts singing, "Nobody knows the troubles I've seen," and everyone in this church starts singing that song, and Howard is just devastated.

-The Edisto islanders desperately appealed directly to the president.

-We were the only true and loyal people that were found in possession of these lands.

We have always been ready to fight if needs be to preserve this glorious union.

Will the good and just government take from us all this right and make us subject to the will of those who have cheated and oppressed us?

We look to you in this trying hour as a true friend of the poor and neglected race.

-Their plea went unanswered.

-The United States had the opportunity at that time to make amends for centuries of enslavement.

The United States had the opportunity to make it possible for the formerly enslaved people to be economically independent.

And the country failed to do it.

By not redistributing that land, it consigned most of them to a dependence that remained for decades afterwards.

And we're still dealing with the fallout from that.

-How did you get involved with this, the planning of this monument?

More, perhaps than anyone else, historian, Eric Foner, has brought the truth about Reconstruction to light.

We visited the newly dedicated Reconstruction era national monument in Beaufort, South Carolina.

-This area was almost like a test case.

Could these former slaves really be freed people?

Could they learn?

Could they work as freed people?

Not everybody knew what the answer was gonna be, but they, they, you know, they proved themselves in Beaufort.

And it actually, therefore, had an impact on Reconstruction as it developed.

-You've written what many of us think is the bible on reconstruction.

You've written ten books on reconstruction, and you're gonna write an eleventh on the Reconstruction amendments.

To what do we attribute your fascination?

-You know, the ferment at the local level in Reconstruction, which really I think is the big story, how the end of slavery upends everything.

And a new system has to be created.

A new economic system, a new political system, a new legal system.

You know, slavery was a total institution.

When that's gone you gotta build a new society.

-And one of the barriers, of course, was the tremendous legacy of anti-Black racism.

-Absolutely.

You're absolutely right.

Racism, which is the deepest legacy of slavery, really, in our society, um... You know, it would be nice, but one can't very well expect that the legacy of racism would just be sloughed off because slavery ended.

It didn't happen and that was a tremendous barrier to change.

-Mm-hmm.

In 1866, a Richmond journalist published a book called, "The Lost Cause."

He argued that the war was, in reality, a gracious Southern civilization defending itself against northern aggression.

An idea that resonated deeply among the defeated white Southerners.

-One has to remember that the white South suffered a devastating loss of life in the Civil War... Something really without parallel in American history.

-The South is devastated.

People are literally starving.

They had destroyed their economy.

They had torn their families apart.

It was hard to see any real meaning in what the Confederacy had done.

I think people wanted to find something to hang on to.

-Many former Confederates stubbornly clung to the belief that their cause had been just.

-That whole lost cause myth developed out of the idea that the only reason why they were fighting at all was because the north was trying to suppress their rights.

For the Confederacy, the war was absolutely about slavery.

First, last, middle.

All we have to do is look at the Ordinances of Secession, the debates in the various state legislatures, private letters.

They're all talking about slavery as the cornerstone of their civilization.

-The Confederate constitution was very, very clear in terms of the role of slavery in its society.

Number one, that it shall, in fact, be perpetual.

And number two, if the nation expands slavery goes with it.

-Looking back almost a century later, a Southern writer noted, "Only at the moment when Lee handed grant his sword, was the Confederacy born."

-One of the things that's often forgotten is that many white Southerners did not want to fight for the Confederacy, had never supported secession in the first place.

But with the end of the war it becomes possible to imagine a kind of unified Confederacy as it recedes.

-The Confederacy in many ways has had far more of an active life after Appomattox than it did before.

After Appomattox, it was just a fantasy.

It was a dream of what that nation could have been.

-Some people cope with defeat by mythologizing slavery.

Others tried to recreate it.

In November of 1865, the government that Andrew Johnson had set up in Mississippi passed a set of oppressive laws that applied only to African-Americans.

Soon other Southern states followed suit.

These laws became known as the Black codes.

-The basic purpose of the Black codes was to recognize that slavery has been abolished, but to make sure that there is as little change from slavery to freedom as possible.

-The key to the Black codes was what they call vagrancy laws, things like that.

Every adult Black person was required to sign a labor contract for the year with a white employer.

If they didn't do that they would be considered a vagrant and they could be fined.

And if they couldn't pay the fine they could be auctioned off to someone who would pay the fine, and then they'd have to work off the fine for that person.

-What's even worse than being arrested if you don't have a job is having your children taken away.

So your neighbor down the road can go to the courts and say, John jones, you know, he can't take care of his children, he's indigent, but I'll take them in.

And I will train them in farming methods.

Or, I will train the daughters in housewifery.

And I will have their labor, and the parents will get a little bit of money at the end of their period of indenture.

But Black parents didn't have a say in this.

-A lot of parents are fighting back and saying no, they don't want their children to be apprenticed.

They can take care of them.

They also know that in apprenticeship conditions they can't protect their children from physical and sexual abuse.

It becomes a way for the planter class to continue stealing the labor of the children, and sometimes stealing the children themselves.

-Enforcement of the Black codes went hand-in-hand with relentless violence against the freed people.

-Outside of cities and towns the Union Army was shrinking rather than expanding.

You're looking at former slaveholders who can't imagine living in a world where slavery doesn't exist.

If the Union Army is not on the ground and the freedman's bureau is not there to enforce the new rules then they were gonna to do whatever they could to keep the African-American population in a state of subordination.

-The Ku Klux Klan is created in Tennessee in 1866.

It coincides with the creation of Black codes.

You could argue that on some levels that the Klan is doing the same thing that the slave patrols did.

During slavery the slave patrols would make sure people have passes, making sure that they are not loitering, they're not getting together in bands of people.

And the Klan is going to do the same type of thing.

-You have people who are targeted because they've managed to acquire a decent amount of land, or their children are in school, and a white person in their community is struggling at the same time.

What they decide is that the way to deal with this is to attack the person, to take away everything they have, to destroy their property, to run them off their land.

-At war's end Frederick Douglass had wondered what new form slavery might take.

After six months of Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction, the answer was painfully obvious.

Thaddeus Stevens, the passionately impatient Republican congressman, had been forced to wait on the sidelines for months, watching powerlessly as Andrew Johnson raced to implement his version of Reconstruction before congress reconvened.

The president declared that the former Confederate states had met his terms.

So their representatives were in Washington, ready to take their seats in congress as members of the Union once again.

Stevens thought this was outrageous.

-When the states met to elect new congressional delegations they elected to congress the vice-president of the Confederacy, four Confederate generals, six members of the Confederate cabinet, many Confederate congressmen.

-It is by its very nature defiant for Southern, white, former-Confederate officers to head to congress right after the war.

On the other hand, they never believed the war was about fundamentally restructuring their economic and political hierarchy.

The idea that if you served or if you had slaves at one point that now you are politically disenfranchised never was in the kind of Southern white imagination during that period of time.

-Once the Southern delegates were seated in congress, they'd represent their home states, back in the Union again.

-Either they were gonna be admitted, and that was gonna to be the end, and Reconstruction would have been over at that point, or they weren't.

-As leader of the house Republicans, Stevens found the prospect appalling.

-Thaddeus Stevens would say African-American men helped save the United States.

We have a moral obligation to create a foundation of freedom and equality before the law.

And without that, anything else is gonna be a fraud.

He was fired with this passion for justice that would saturate the entire social order.

He was ready for a revolution in the South.

-Stevens and his fellow house Republicans had planned for this moment.

At the stroke of noon, when the 39th Congress opened they set those plans in motion.

-The clerk began to read the roll of the members of congress, and he skipped over the representatives from the Southern states.

-As it becomes clear that they're not going to call upon any rebel state congressman, Democrats start to jump up and to scream, "This is revolution."

In fact, they were right.

It was a revolution.

-Each house of congress has the power to exclude those it finds unfit.

If the clerk fails to call your name, you're not a member of congress.

Not a single name from the rebel states did the clerk call that day.

Congress was boldly seizing control of Reconstruction.

-Some Democrats say the American republic died on December 4, 1865.

And in some ways, they might be right.

But a second American republic is born over the next five years that has a different constitution, one that's going to be written, painfully and slowly and imperfectly, but written by Stevens and his colleagues in congress.

-This Republican dominated congress turned its attention to a pioneering Civil Rights Act, which they passed over President Johnson's veto in April 1866.

-It was congress' answer, you might say, to the Black codes and to Johnson's Reconstruction plan.

It established the principle of birthright citizenship.

Anyone born in the country is a citizen.

-Why do they do this?

Because they know that Southern states are looking for ways to define ex-slaves as not citizens.

-Part of what the Civil Rights Act of 1866 is doing is pushing away the prospect that people can be, as had been true for Native Americans, that people can be physically removed from the nation.

-While Republicans were gaining the upper hand in Washington, a more brutal struggle was being waged throughout the South.

-The white South begins to realize that there's no real possibility of fighting the north, but they can win the struggle on the ground, at home, over the people that they're really worried about.

-All throughout the South, Black people were on the move, leaving the countryside for the city.

But as the crowding grew worse, tensions mounted.

-Where do you live?

-I've lived in Memphis very nearly three years.

-How old are you?

-I don't know exactly.

I suppose about 24.

-Were you here during the riots?

-Yes, sir.

-On the afternoon of May 1, 1866, the streets of South Memphis were even busier than usual.

The city was packed with freed people.

Memphis had been garrisoned by a Black regiment, and a Freedmen's Bureau office had opened there.

Late that afternoon, Lucy Tibbs heard gunfire in the distance.

The city's Black garrison was being demobilized, and many of the former soldiers were celebrating in the streets.

Memphis was seething with racial hostility, especially between the largely Irish police force and the Black garrison.

-African-American Civil War veterans return not only with a kind of bearing that comes from military service; many of them are going to come back with weapons that they have purchased from the Union.

They're going to March through the streets of their cities.

They're going to create militias.

And they will meet white Southerners for whom this is a real overturning of the old order.

-About 6:00, I saw boys and men with pistols firing at every Black man they could see.

They shot them down as fast as they could come to them.

-How many did you see shot down?

-The first was killed by John pendergrast.

He keeps a grocery by my house.

I was looking right at him when he shot that man.

-One of the things that I think is frightening about the violence is that many people do know the people who are perpetuating this violence against them.

They can name them.

-White mobs, including most of the city's police force, began to roam the streets on the hunt for Black people.

-At night they barred up all the doors, then surrounded the houses and told the folks to stay in there.

-Is that what they told you?

-Yes, sir.

But old man Pendergrast and his sons set them on fire.

When the fire got very hot I saw men, women, and children break out and run.

They shot at them as fast as they could while they were running.

-The freed people are sort of beyond the law.

And so, there's an incredible amount of casual violence.

-Did they come into your house?

-Yes.

I said, "please don't do anything to me.

I'm just here with two little children."

-Did they do anything to you?

-They done a very bad act.

I just had to give up to them.

-It took the army three days to regain control of Memphis.

By that time every Black church and every Black school had been burned to the ground.

At least forty-eight people had been killed, all but two of them Black.

Not a single white person had been killed by a Black person.

The nation was riveted by the news out of Memphis.

Then three months later, almost forty more people were killed by a white mob in New Orleans.

-The political consequence of this in the north was it helped to convince large numbers of Northerners that Johnson's Reconstruction plan was a failure.

Andrew Johnson was not down there committing acts of violence, but this was sort of the logical outcome of Johnson's Reconstruction plan.

When you say Blacks really have no rights whatsoever, obviously you're encouraging an atmosphere which does not feel, to use a modern phrase, that Black lives matter very much.

-Lucy Tibbs was among the dozens of victims who testified to congressional investigators.

-It's enormously meaningful, as an act of courage to testify.

They would have to worry about going home and effectively being subject to continued violence, this time perhaps even death.

-The testimony of the Memphis survivors helped to convince Republicans in congress that the rights of the formerly enslaved had to be written into the constitution itself.

-This is what enflames white Northerners so much, the widespread violence against the freed people, the massacres in New Orleans and Memphis.

So Reconstruction becomes stronger because of what the white South does.

-Republicans in Washington were interested in setting the nation on a new footing and that's what they did through the 14th Amendment.

-The 14th Amendment redefined the rights of the freed people, and by extension, the rights of all Americans.

Anyone born in the united states would automatically be granted citizenship, and no state could deny to any person due process and equal protection of the laws.

Congress passed the 14th Amendment in June of 1866.

It turns out that was the easy part.

The real challenge lay ahead.

Every Southern state had an all-white government that had been created by President Johnson, and every one of those state legislatures, except for Tennessee, refused to ratify the amendment.

How were Republicans in Washington going to get three quarters of the states to ratify the 14th Amendment?

The answer began to emerge almost a year later.

By the spring of 1867, the radical Republicans were firmly in control.

Every former state, except Tennessee, remained out of the union, having no say in federal elections.

The Northern-dominated electorate had given the Republicans huge congressional majorities in the 1866 midterms.

The newly-empowered majority lost no time in passing sweeping new laws over president Johnson's veto.

Reconstruction entered a bold, new phase.

-In the spring of 1867, congress turned from kind of the more moderate measures to saying, you know, we actually have to reorganize the South and set these states on a different course.

And so, the way that they do that is establishing the former Confederacy in five military districts.

Each one is gonna be overseen by a us general.

It was something that they called military Reconstruction.

-They March through the South, telling local officers, "We can fire you, we can overrule you."

Their goal is visibility, and their goal is to make a statement.

You're not in charge, Confederates, we are.

-Congress laid out strict new terms.

The rebel states had to adopt new constitutions, give Black men the right to vote, elect new state governments, and ratify the 14th Amendment.

Then, and only then, could they be readmitted to congress.

-How would you get the Southern states to adopt the 14th Amendment, to which they are deeply resistant?

You say, Black men must be able to vote and they also must be able to hold office.

This in the white Southern imagination is the great travesty of Reconstruction.

Some of the former Confederates who had been disenfranchised after the war still cannot vote, whereas Black men can.

So that is what just really infuriates the white South.

And they call it bayonet rule.

-When Southern whites imagined what could come after the war should they lose it was never a possibility of like a really flipped upside down social hierarchy with equality for African-Americans because that wasn't happening anywhere in the country.

-Many Northern states did not allow Black men to vote, and so Southern white conservatives felt that the provision of suffrage to African-American men in the South was something between hypocrisy and punishment.

-Activists and army officers spread out across the South, registering freedmen to vote.

At the beginning of 1867, fewer than 1% of all Black men in the United States could vote.

By the end of 1867, that figure was higher than 80%.

A vibrant, new, political culture sprang up, as freed men and freed women pressed for their rightful place in the union that they had sacrificed so much to save.

-The advent of Black suffrage unleashes a kind of utopian idea of change.

You see it in mass meetings where people get together just to read the constitution and debate, well, what is democratic government anyway?

How can we create it?

So it is a remarkable moment of hope and of militancy.

-Black men and women, these folks who had just come out of slavery, would take off work on Saturdays and walk 25 miles to a political meeting.

-The vote was considered basically owned by the collective, not just by individuals.

And so women and children were actually involved in political discussions.

They attended mass meetings.

-In some states, there were significant pockets of poorer white farmers who, actually many of them, had not been in support of the Confederacy, had not favored secession.

And many of them suffered as a result of the Civil War.

They were in dire economic straits.

It's not that they weren't racist anymore, but they were willing to work with Blacks to try to uplift poor farmers of both races via the Republican party.

-Former slaves themselves are breathing life into freedom, giving it substance.

Whether it's creating schools, or enacting their own political organizations, or reconstituting families they are giving the nation a kind of blueprint for the challenges but also the possibilities of Reconstruction.

-Andrew Johnson played almost no part in these profound changes.

Fending off impeachment, consumed the last months of his presidency.

Meanwhile, the new state governments in the South began ratifying the 14th Amendment.

In July of 1868, it became the law of the land.

-Ironically, if Reconstruction had gone more smoothly you might not have had the 14th Amendment.

If the white South had not insisted on putting exactly the same men back in power, if the white South had resisted the temptation of putting Black codes that made a mockery of emancipation, if the white South had not endorsed these massacres in its major cities it's easy to believe that there would not have been the fundamental changes in the American constitution that we had.

-No other new world slave society that emancipates slavery implements equal citizenship and equal protection under the law and suffrage for half of the former slave population within five years.

That is truly revolutionary.

-There was some degree of self-interest, frankly, in it, on the part of the Republican party.

Why fight this war and immediately allow the, the Southern leadership, the plantocracy, to reproduce not only a slave system, but the dominance of their party in the South?

So, for a time, the interests of the freedmen and the interests of the Northern-led Republican party were in step with one another.

-The 1868 presidential campaign presented voters with a stark choice.

The Republican candidate, Ulysses S. Grant, had led the United States army through victory and the post-war occupation of the South.

The Democratic campaign was perhaps the most racist in U.S.

History, and in parts of the South it was supported by a wave of murder and arson.

Would that campaign of violence succeed in preventing Black men from voting?

Tuesday, November 3, 1868 was an election day unlike any other.

South Carolina and seven other Confederate states had reentered the union in time for the election.

But white gangs terrorized Black voters in New Orleans, and Republicans in Georgia and Louisiana had to abandon campaigning altogether.

-On the one hand is this kind of euphoria and this sense of organization, kind of like a freedom summer or something like that.

On the other hand a real sense of danger in a lot of places.

-African-Americans had to arm themselves, they had to go to the polls in large numbers.

In some cases, African-Americans have to gather together the night before an election.

They sleep out in the woods, and they try to figure out when to go to the polls when there'll be the fewest whites at the polls so they'll actually be able to deposit their ballots.

-Nothing could staunch the tide.

Remarkably, half a million Black men cast their votes.

As a result, every Southern state, except Georgia and Louisiana, voted for Ulysses S. Grant.

-During the war grant had explicitly said the only we can win the war is with the support of Blacks, and so he treats them as equal citizens even before the 13th and 14th amendments.

-The freed people could take heart in the key role they played in electing the man who had crushed the Confederacy.

Even more remarkably, dozens of Black men were elected to office.

Many had been held as slaves just a few years before.

For them and for millions of freed people this was the moment in the sun.

The three years following the Civil War were among the most hopeful, momentous, and frightening in our history.

In those years, a generation that had been born into slavery and fought a war to kill the institution, helped reconstruct the united states so that it might live up to its ideals.

-One of the things about Reconstruction that to me has always been so powerful is the way in which American democracy was revitalized, and it was revitalized by the incredible commitment that former slaves and other people of African descent had to practicing democracy and the value that they held to it.

-When you look at the radical, amazing changes that happened within a few years of the demise of slavery, there was a kind of irrational exuberance, or what people thought was rational exuberance at that point in time.

-If you're living in this moment and you see the federal government in your community helping to hold up Black life, and that meant literal federal officials who's job it was to protect Black people.

This is literally like the cavalry has come to the rescue.

You see the future as limitless.

-There are not many moments in recorded human history where a group that was so subordinated, so dispossessed would within the space of a decade actually be fully integrated into the highest echelons of political society.

It's almost like that decade advanced the possibilities of the freedmen 100 years.

-Coming up on "Reconstruction"... -The future must have seemed limitless.

-Historic gains.

-Black people get to be judges.

-They have they're own businesses.

-14 Black men in U.S.

Congress.

-Full citizenship.

-But the revolution.... -From being property to owning the property.

-Absolutely.

-...unravels.

-White supremacy is a long-term campaign.

-"Reconstruction: America After the Civil War" continues on PBS.

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