After the Civil War, Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, pardoned all former Confederate leaders and resisted Congressional efforts at Reconstruction, the intended remaking of the former Confederacy into a free labor society. This meant laborers would be free to work for the highest bidder, (though, of course, no labor unions — Socialism!). Not that the highest bidders’ bids were high, but the conditions and pay, and the promise of owning land, were infinitely better than slavery, particularly the especially vicious American variant.

Reconstruction lasted throughout the two terms of Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency and real change was briefly accomplished. Three Constitutional amendments and several powerful laws, with federal enforcement, brought about a short period of freedom for Black Americans, who held majorities in more than one Southern state, voted in large numbers and elected Blacks to represent them in Congress.

Southern whites naturally decried the federal intervention to enforce the freedom amendments, including voting rights, as Bayonet Rule and continued to be outraged by the federal clamp down on the Ku Klux Klan, which had impeded southern style law enforcement for righteously terrified whites.

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As you might suspect, Reconstruction ended abruptly, and White Supremacy was restored, pursuant to a famous compromise to settle the contested election of 1876. Here’s Andrea Bernstein on the Hayes-Tilden Compromise:

The great-granddaughter of a Black congressman from South Carolina, voted out as soon as South Carolina whites regained control and Black voting disappeared for a century, continues, eloquently and poignantly. History can break your fucking heart.

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