The governments set up in the Southern states under the congressional program of Reconstruction were, contrary to traditional clichés, fairly honest and effective. Though the period has sometimes been labeled “Black Reconstruction,” the Radical governments in the South were never dominated by African Americans. There were no black governors, only two black senators and a handful of congressmen, and only one legislature controlled by blacks. Those African Americans who did hold office appear to have been similar in competence and honesty to the whites. It is true that these Radical governments were expensive, but large state expenditures were necessary to rebuild after the war and to establish—for the first time in most Southern states—a system of common schools. Corruption there certainly was, though nowhere on the scale of the Tweed Ring, which at that time was busily looting New York City; but it is not possible to show that Republicans were more guilty than Democrats, or blacks than whites, in the scandals that did occur.
Though some Southern whites in the mountainous regions and some planters in the rich bottomlands were willing to cooperate with the African Americans and their Northern-born “carpetbagger” allies in these new governments, there were relatively few such “scalawags”; the mass of Southern whites remained fiercely opposed to African American political, civil, and social equality. Sometimes their hostility was expressed through such terrorist organizations as the Ku Klux Klan, which sought to punish so-called “uppity Negroes” and to drive their white collaborators from the South. More frequently it was manifested through support of the Democratic Party, which gradually regained its strength in the South and waited for the time when the North would tire of supporting the Radical regimes and would withdraw federal troops from the South.
The Ulysses S. Grant administrations, 1869–77
Efforts to shore up the Radical regimes in the South grew increasingly unsuccessful. The adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), prohibiting discrimination in voting on account of race, had little effect in the South, where terrorist organizations and economic pressure from planters kept African Americans from the polls. Nor were three Force Acts passed by the Republicans (1870–71), giving the president the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and imposing heavy penalties upon terroristic organizations, in the long run more successful. If they succeeded in dispersing the Ku Klux Klan as an organization, they also drove its members, and their tactics, more than ever into the Democratic camp.
Growing Northern disillusionment with Radical Reconstruction and with the Grant administration became evident in the Liberal Republican movement of 1872, which resulted in the nomination of the erratic Horace Greeley for president. Though Grant was overwhelmingly reelected (
