Promises and Limits, 1865–1877
1Jubilee Hall, a tall brick building at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, was paid for partly by singing. Fisk opened in 1866 to educate people who had recently been enslaved. When the school ran short of money, a group of its students, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, began touring in 1871, singing spirituals for audiences in the North and later in Europe. The money they raised helped build Jubilee Hall, finished in 1876. Fisk was one of many colleges for Black students founded in these years, along with Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1867.
2Three amendments rewrote the Constitution after the war. The 13th Amendment (1865) ended slavery. The 14th (1868) made everyone born in the United States a citizen and promised every person the equal protection of the laws. The 15th (1870) said that the right to vote could not be denied because of race. Freedpeople used their new rights quickly. They made their marriages legal, searched for relatives who had been sold away, built churches and voted. Between 1870 and 1877, sixteen Black men served in Congress. Southern states, under new governments elected by Black and white voters, set up their first public school systems.
3Many freedpeople hoped above all for land. In January 1865 General William T. Sherman set aside land along the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida for freed families, in plots of up to 40 acres. Later that year President Andrew Johnson ordered most of this land returned to its former owners. Without land of their own, many freed families became sharecroppers: they farmed part of a landowner's fields and paid with a share of the crop, often half. Debts for seed, tools and food kept many sharecroppers poor for years.
4The new rights met violent resistance. The Ku Klux Klan and similar groups threatened and attacked Black voters and their white allies. In 1870 and 1871 Congress passed the Enforcement Acts, and President Ulysses S. Grant used federal troops and courts to break up the Klan. But many Northern voters grew tired of the South's problems, especially after an economic depression began in 1873. In one Southern state after another, white Democrats regained power, sometimes by using threats to keep Black men from the polls.
5The presidential election of 1876 ended in a dispute over 20 electoral votes from Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oregon. A special commission gave all 20 to the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes. In an unwritten deal in 1877, Democrats accepted Hayes as President, and the last federal troops left the statehouses of the South. Reconstruction was over.