All Bound Up Together: Voices from Reconstruction

The end of the Civil War is often lauded as a great American triumph, but the legal abolition of slavery and the sacrifices African Americans made on behalf of the Union did not automatically beget racial equality—far from it. In this June 5, 1865 address to the people of the United States, a coalition of Black citizens in Norfolk, Virginia described their new status as “free” people still precluded from the rights and privileges enjoyed by white men, and called for justice: 

In 1867, Congress overrode President Andrew Johnson’s vetoes and passed the Reconstruction Acts, which required Southern state constitutions to grant voting rights to all men. This Harper’s Weekly illustration, titled “The First Vote,” shows a queue of Black men casting ballots. Source: Library of Congress

[C]ases have occurred, not far from Richmond itself, in which an attempt to leave the plantation has been punished by shooting to death; and finally, there are numbers of cases, known to ourselves, in the immediate vicinity of this city, in which a faithful performance, by colored men, of the duties or labor contracted for, has been met by a contemptuous and violent refusal of the stipulated compensation. These are facts, and yet the men doing these things are, in many cases, loud in their professions of attachment to the restored Union, while committing these outrages on the most faithful friends that Union can ever have […]You are further anxious that your government should be an example to the world of true Republican institutions; but how can you avoid the charge of inconsistency if you leave one eighth of the population of the whole country without any political rights…

Source: Library of Congress

For the entirety of the nineteenth century, Black women were afforded next-to-no political rights; for most of it, very few were even taught to read and write. Those who did learn and document their thoughts still often went disregarded in the historical record, their perspectives unpreserved. Consider those featured here, like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, exceptions that prove the rule.

Harper attended the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth and went on to become a prolific writer and lifelong civil rights activist. On May 1, 1866, one year into Reconstruction, she addressed the Eleventh National Women’s Rights Convention in New York City — including white suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony. Harper called for the addition of Black women into their equal-rights equation in her speech, “We Are All Bound Up Together”:

Before the Civil War, Harper toured the east and Midwest giving antislavery lectures. Her writings, such as the poem “Bury Me in a Free Land,” made a powerful plea for abolition. Source: Library of Congress

We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the Negro. You pressed him down for two centuries; and in so doing you crippled the moral strength and paralyzed the spiritual energies of the white men of the country. When the hands of the black were fettered, white men were deprived of the liberty of speech and the freedom of the press. Society cannot afford to neglect the enlightenment of any class of its members.

[…] I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of life. I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The good would vote according to their convictions and principles; the bad, as dictated by preju[d]ice or malice; and the indifferent will vote on the strongest side of the question, with the winning party. You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs.

Source: BlackPast

As part of this larger effort toward equity, Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau to aid freed Black and poor white populations in the decimated former Confederacy. The Freedmen’s Bureau made significant strides in education, founding over 1,000 schools and teacher-training institutions. It generated many states’ first public school systems. At the same time, the program and the Black people it supported contended with Black Codes, a series of restrictive laws passed by Southern legislatures in order to replicate the conditions of slavery. Harriet Jacobs, autobiographer of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, moved with her daughter Louisa to establish a freedmen’s school in Savannah, Georgia. Louisa Jacobs wrote of progress and peril in this May 26, 1866 letter:

A group of children and their teacher stand outside of a freedmen’s schoolhouse in North Carolina. Source: National Museum of African American History & Culture

I average ninety in the morning school, and still continue my afternoon school for adults.

I have much to encourage me in my labors, I have children who could not spell when I organized the school in November, now reading well and studying Arithmitic [sic] and Geography. This does not show inferiority of race. 

[…] The chains have fallen off from them; but justice has not yet found an echo in the hearts of their old oppressors. It will be a long time before things can be righted for the colored man South. Arrests are frequently made, and fines and punishments inflicted without any actual proof of guilt.

Source: Documenting the American South

The early years of Reconstruction also saw the founding of America’s first terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, in Pulaski, Tennessee. The Klan worked to dismantle civil rights initiatives and reinstate total white supremacy by inflicting violence on Black people. And many thousands of technically nonviolent white Americans were complicit: they believed in the project of white supremacy and supported the Klan’s aims to restore it. Most milestones crossed in the movement for racial justice, unimaginable just five years prior, further enflamed the Klan’s cause—especially the 1868 passage of the 14th Amendment, which legally granted citizenship and equal protection under the law to all Americans.

By the end of the decade, the Klan had extended into every Southern state and commonly enacted terror to intimidate freedmen out of exercising their newly established right to vote, hold office, and otherwise participate in the body politic. Its members also razed Black churches and schools, which had become centers and symbols of Black community, progress, and possibility. On February 7, 1869, Richard Reese—then President of the Grant Club of Schley County, Georgia—recounted this reign of terror firsthand:

White supremacists frequently desecrated Black communities to quash their advancement. In this Harper’s Weekly wood-etching of the Memphis massacre of 1866, a mob of white residents and policemen set fire to a freedmen’s schoolhouse. Source: Tennessee Virtual Archive

When the Ku-Klux commenced riding about the country I was at Macon attending the colored convention. When I got home some white men, Democrats, who were friends of mine, told me that the Ku-Klux would certainly kill me if I staid [sic] at home at nights. I took my blanket and hid in the woods. I have never had a gun or pistol in my life. I lay in the woods every night until after election.

[…] Last spring we built a school-house, and hired a white lady to teach our school for several months. We held meetings and schools every Sunday. Friday night, February 5, 1869, our school-house was burned up. […] We want the Government or somebody to help us build. We want some law to protect us. We know that we could burn their churches and schools, but it is against the law to burn houses, and we don’t want to break the law or harm anybody. We want the law to protect us, and all we want is to live under the law.

Source: Project Gutenberg

As the 1870s progressed, white supremacist backlash increasingly stymied the progressive goals of Reconstruction. Immense pressure from white Southerners convinced Congress to terminate the Freedmen’s Bureau, terrorism pervaded most political and physical spaces carved out for Black autonomy, and economic downturns weakened the Republican Party’s stature and initiatives. Many thousands of Americans who’d considered themselves abolitionists and then allies of freed-people rearranged their priorities to suit their financial interests. Most retellings of Reconstruction focus on its Southern contest, failing to also underscore the resiliency of white supremacy in the North.

Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to protect Black Americans across the nation from civil rights violations: it prohibited racial discrimination in public spaces decades before Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) would legalize segregation. But many Americans did not comply. On January 6, 1876, Reverend Benjamin Tucker Tanner of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania wrote in the The Christian Recorder of Henry Jones, a wealthy Black businessman who had recently legally purchased burial plots in Mount Moriah Cemetery for his family. Upon Jones’ death in 1876, white segregationist lot owners and cemetery managers stood at the cemetery gates and stopped his funeral procession and burial. Tanner noted that achievements in wealth, education, and legal status did not immunize African Americans from white supremacy:

It is not, then, the best thing for the nation to insist that an eighth of all its people shall be, practically, “a nation within a nation.” Not, indeed, if liberty and republicanism are to be preserved.

We are not unaware of the fact that some tell us this will not be so when the colored man gets education and money. But how are colored men now treated, who have both education and money? Scarcely a whit better than those of the same class who have neither. […] The body of Henry Jones, respected and well-to-do as he was, was driven from the gates of Mount Moriah Cemetery, Philadelphia – not, indeed, by a rabble, with stones in hand, but by managers, who claim to be gentlemen and Christians.

Source: Accessible Archives

Jones’ family sued the cemetery in Mount Moriah Cemetery Association v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1876), and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed his right to burial. This was a very progressive decision, especially considering the decades of legally enforced segregation and other civil rights rollbacks to come. 1877 saw a major reversal in federal priorities and the collapse of Reconstruction, marked by the end of federal involvement in protecting the rights and property of African Americans for nearly a century. And, as we have seen time and again, those protections remain uncertain today. The great promise and possibilities of Reconstruction have yet to be realized. So has its full educational potential. But the injustices of today have a history—and when something has a history, its trajectory into the future can be changed.

At the center of this 1874 lithograph, South Carolina representative Robert B. Elliott delivers a speech in favor of the Civil Rights Act, which Congress passed the following year. A banner hanging from the ceiling displays a quote from his speech: “What you give to one class you must give to all. What you deny to one class, you shall deny to all.” Source: Library of Congress

Above all, Reconstruction tells us that progress is not a straight line, and that the mechanisms of white supremacy and resistance to it are both longstanding and homegrown. When those lessons go unlearned or unvalued, we should always ask why. Historian and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois was born into Reconstruction and, as in many contexts, deserves the last word. The excerpt below is from “The Propaganda of History,” a chapter in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America: