The American Civil War, and the subsequent period of Reconstruction in the South, represented the possibility of a new start for African-Americans. The new Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, the new Fourteenth Amendment promised the former slaves equal protection under the law, and the new Fifteenth Amendment granted equal participation in the political process. African-Americans did indeed vote and win elections during Reconstruction, despite epic and deadly opposition from white supremacist groups like the early Ku Klux Klan. But as historian Philip Dray's insightful, if at times sprawling, account makes clear, if African-Americans were ready to use their new freedoms (and they were), Southern whites were decidedly not ready to let them.
Taking a hard look at Reconstruction
As African-Americans were beginning to exercise their new rights, a massive white backlash ensued in the South that would continue throughout Reconstruction, and for many decades afterward. As Dray explains, "Southerners [whites], in the absence of slavery, would not hesitate to use extreme violence to maintain supremacy over blacks." The big question facing the federal government's Reconstruction policy was not whether Southern whites would use vigilante violence to oppose African-American political participation (violent opposition was universally assumed); it was whether the federal government would forcefully intervene, with soldiers if necessary and with law enforcement certainly, to protect the rights of former slaves.
As Dray makes clear, the federal government would ultimately choose national reconciliation over civil rights. Thus, as Southern whites used violence to terrorize African-Americans who dared to vote, and developed an ideology of "states' rights" to argue against federal intervention to protect local voting, the promises of Reconstruction became noble-sounding words that would mean nothing in the everyday lives of African-Americans.
Southern whites and their allies, Dray shows, waged a successful propaganda campaign to discredit African-American participation in Reconstruction politics. Such popular propaganda depicted them as stupid, corrupt, and incapable of engaging in political discourse. (Most of this racist propaganda can't be repeated in a newspaper.) Yet as Dray explains through countless examples, it wasn't that African-Americans weren't ready for change; it was that Southern whites weren't ready. "Whatever corruption existed [among African-American voters and politicians], it surely paled in comparison to the far more gross illegalities - voter fraud, intimidation, and violence - practiced by those opposing Reconstruction's reforms," he writes.