Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xi

1 To Civil War: What Slavery Did 3

Resistance, unity, and diversity in the enslaved population

White Southerners and the pro-slavery consensus: the plantation elite and the nonslaveholding majority. Whigs, Democrats, and the struggle over secession

The crisis of up-country society and the emergence of Unionist disaffection

Slavery under the strain of war

2 National Politics: Andrew Johnson and the Lost Compromise 22

The Northern majority moves toward emancipation

Presidential Reconstruction from Lincoln to Johnson, Black Codes, and Conservative rule

Johnson vs. the Republican Congress: the Northern electorate decides

Black suffrage and Military Reconstruction

3 Emancipation and Terror in the Plantation South 47

Rebuilding the slave-style plantation-gang labor and tight control

Politicization of the freedpeople and the transition to decentralized tenant farming

Sharecropping and the emergence of Klan-style terrorism

4 Establishing the Reconstruction Governments 72

Congressional Reconstruction, goals, and mechanics

Institutionalizing change at the constitutional conventions

The interracial Republican coalition

Conservative backlash

Grant's election and the confirmation of the Reconstruction order

5 Railroads, Development, and Reconstructing Society 96

The search for native white support

Whiggish moderates and economic development: railroads as Southern panacea

Issuing bonds and financial complications

The corruption issue, civil rights, and the national context

6 Race, Faction, and Grant 119

The Grant administration and moderate whites

Radical reaction and black empowerment

Thestruggle for leadership and federal patronage, faction, and class in the black community

The Liberal Republican revolt, the Klan issue, and Grant's reelection

7 Gender, Race, and Civil Society in the Reconstruction South 143

Freedwomen, domestic work, and family life

Local government, society, and public education in the Reconstruction South

Taxes, debt, law enforcement, and the legal structure of equality

8 The Politics of Slaughter: Depression and Reaction 165

Consolidation of African-American political influence

The panic of 1873

Resurgence of racist violence: the White Leagues

Collapse of the Northern Republican majority and abandonment of civil rights protection

The Democratic sweep of 1874, North and South, and its consequences

9 Endgame in South Carolina: 1877 and After 194

Governor Chamberlain and the reform initiative

The limits of Republican retrenchment and bipartisan anti-corruption politics

Terrorism, Rutherford B. Hayes, and the end of Reconstruction

Toward Jim Crow and the civil rights movement to come

A Note on Sources 213

Index 219