Reconstruction: Port Royal, Vagrancy Laws and an Interrupted Revolution

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This episode argues that Reconstruction began well before Appomattox, with the Port Royal experiment of 1861, when Union forces took the Sea Islands of South Carolina, planters fled, and thousands of Gullah people began organizing schools, land and free labor. After the war, a quarter of white Southern men of military age were dead, white Southern per capita income fell from $125 in 1857 to $80 by 1879, and the country split between reconciliationist, white supremacist and emancipationist visions of what came next. Andrew Johnson, taking office after Lincoln's assassination, pardoned thousands of former Confederate leaders, and the restored governments passed Black Codes whose vagrancy laws leased fined Black men back to planters.

Northern anger, sharpened by Johnson's disastrous speaking tour of 1866, gave Radical Republicans two-thirds majorities. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts, and Johnson's firing of Edwin Stanton under the Tenure of Office Act led to his impeachment and a one-vote acquittal in 1868. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments followed, along with public schools and Black officeholders, while the Ku Klux Klan, the White League and the Red Shirts answered with terror. After the Panic of 1873 and the disputed 1876 election, the Compromise of 1877 put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House and withdrew federal troops from Southern politics.

• The 14th Amendment overturned the Dred Scott ruling by establishing birthright citizenship and equal protection under federal law.
• White mobs, often aided by police, killed dozens of Black citizens in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866.
• Ulysses S. Grant used the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 to suspend habeas corpus and send troops into South Carolina.
• The Dunning School portrayed Reconstruction as a corrupt mistake until W. E. B. Du Bois and later Eric Foner challenged it.
• Historian Manisha Sinha argues Reconstruction did not truly end until the 19th Amendment in 1920.