In the early morning hours of May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls and a crew of fellow enslaved people board the confederate warship the C.S.S. Planter on the docks of Charleston, South Carolina. 

 

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Smalls and his men are a handful of the thousands of enslaved people who have been forced into service for the Confederacy. The white captain left a few hours earlier, leaving Smalls to watch over the heavily-armed ship. 

 

Smalls is a 23-year-old enslaved person from the nearby town of Beaufort. An expert sailor who grew up navigating the waters of Charleston Harbor, he’s the boat’s pilot, though his official title is ‘wheelman’ since the Confederacy can’t accept a non-white pilot. 

 

Now, in the dark, he puts on the long coat of a Confederate captain and wide-brimmed straw hat to cover his face. He instructs his fellow enslaved people to fire up the engines and raise the Confederate flag...all within sight of a Confederate general’s home.

 

After a quick stop at a nearby wharf to pick up his wife, two children, and eight other enslaved people, the ship eases along the narrow harbor. A mile offshore, a Union blockade lies in wait. To get to the safety of the Union ships, they have to pass beneath the watchful eyes - and massive guns - of five Confederate forts….

 

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Michael Moore: It was a life or death proposition. They all agreed that they would line the bottom of the boat with dynamite because if they were caught, they would blow the boat up. They knew that  if they were caught, that they would be executed, and that they would be killed in a particularly egregious and public way as…. a message to others who might have similar ideas, and so that was not for them. It was literally a life or death kind of a proposition. 

 

That’s Michael B. Moore, the great-great-grandson of Robert Smalls, describing his family’s Independence Day:

 

Michael Moore: And so... they head out and head toward Fort Sumter, which was the last of the forts and the largest and most dangerous and, of course, the place where the civil war began….

 

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You know as the boat sails toward Fort Sumter, I've often thought about that moment, because while they were approaching the most dangerous fort in the harbor, and certainly the cannons on Fort Sumter could have blown the Planter out of the water with... ease, but also just over the horizon, just past was freedom….

 

They were... required to deliver the appropriate passcode, Robert knew that and they….continue to sail along the route that traditionally a confederate boat would sail until they believed they were beyond the range of the cannons on Fort Sumter and then quickly veered South toward this US blockade. And at that point, the sentries at Fort Sumter realized that something was wrong, that this didn't make sense and opened fire on the Planter, but thankfully, for all those on board, and obviously, thankfully, for me, they were beyond….

 

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My great great grandmother, Hannah...had sewn together some white bedsheets. And so quickly, she went and retrieved that and they lowered the Confederate flag and raised the white flag of surrender I guess and sort of gingerly sailed toward this blockade. 

 

As they approach the confused Union sailors, Smalls takes off his hat and calls out, ‘Good morning, sir! I’ve brought you some of the old United States guns.’

 

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Robert Smalls is free. Within a year, he will be a captain in the US navy. He will recruit 5,000 Black men to join the Union forces, fight in 17 battles, and emerge as a decorated war hero.

 

He will use his war-time earnings to buy his former captor’s home, learn to read and write, and help launch a school, a railroad, and a Black-run newspaper. Within a decade, he will become a United States congressman. 

 

While Robert Smalls’ journey to freedom may be one of the most dramatic, he is not alone. In the decade and a half following Lee’s surrender, fourteen Black men will serve in Congress. Some two thousand will hold political office. Former enslaved people will establish schools, churches, and newspapers. And, in partnership with Congress, they will work to rewrite the Constitution and establish a true, multiracial democracy.

 

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And here’s the thing: for a little while, it works.

 

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I’m Nick Fogel, and this is Fireside History 1876 - a podcast about the death of Reconstruction, the rise of the Jim Crow South, and the contested election of Rutherford Hayes.

 

Episode 3 - Land of Hope and Dreams

 

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In the months following Lee’s surrender, President Andrew Johnson personally pardoned thousands of former slaveholders and allowed them to reclaim their old land - displacing former slaves in the process. He allowed white southerners to draft new state constitutions and elect new representatives. By December of 1865, ex-Confederates were returning to Congress and ex-plantation owners were rebuilding their operations. The south was returning to its antebellum form. But the Long War, the decades-long struggle between white supremacy and a true multiracial democracy, was just beginning.

 

In this episode, we look at how an unlikely coalition of Congressmen, capitalists, Black southerners, and poor white farmers fought back. 

 

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On the ground, the southern planter class, emboldened by Johnson, is moving to tighten its grip on power. Desperate to reassert political control and hold onto Black labor, they pass a series of discriminatory laws known as the Black Codes.

 

Kate Masur: You can see in these black codes…. what they're trying to do is…. reestablish slavery in all but name.

 

Kate Masur is a historian at Northwestern University.

 

Kate Masur: And so a lot of them are about making sure that people can't move from job to job, punishing people for being without employment, prohibiting black people from owning their own land, these kinds of things that are so clearly designed to keep African Americans as a kind of dependent labor force on plantations.

 

Though the Black Codes vary by state, all pass some form of Vagrancy Law that requires Black people to secure an annual labor contract with a white employer. Without a contract, you’re subject to arrest and a fine. If you can’t pay the fine, you’re “leased out” to a white property owner. If you run away from your “job” or search for a new job without permission, you can be arrested, returned to your “employer,” and denied wages for the rest of the year. If that sounds like slavery, well, that’s the point. 

 

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They also enact apprenticeship laws that allow white employers to enlist orphans or children whose parents are deemed unfit as so-called apprentices.  

 

Hilary Green: You will see white members of communities go to single mothers because their partner is either a veteran or they're separated because of slavery, deem them unfit parents. 

 

Historian Hilary Green says the children were then forcibly taken from their mothers.

 

Hilary Green: Their child becomes an apprentice to a person who's supposed to educate them and also train them into labor. It was another way to extract labor from children and break up families by declaring a parent unfit. It was all about getting the labor force. 

 

Beyond regulating labor, there are laws preventing black people from owning guns, traveling without a pass, and serving on juries. Remember, the war has decided the very limited question of slavery. Freed slaves aren’t citizens. There are no laws protecting their rights. And now Johnson is handing power back to the same people who benefited from slavery in the first place.

 

And it’s not just old plantation owners reasserting economic control. Less than a year after the war, former Confederates are returning to political power.

 

Charles Dew: In Louisiana, some members of the Constitutional Convention wore their Confederate uniforms to the floor of the convention. And they were essentially flaunting their return to power.  

 

This is Charles Dew, a historian at Williams College.

 

Charles Dew: And there was a reaction in the north to this, What did we lose all those men over? And to have people, former Confederates knocking on the door of Congress, saying, ‘Here we are. Let us back in.’ That was not sitting very well, either with Republican Congressional figures or the northern public at large. 

 

In Washington, a pair of outspoken congressmen, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, are leading the resistance.

    

Stevens and Sumner are titans in Washington. They are the AOC and Bernie Sanders of their day - the liberal wing of the liberal party. 

 

Sumner’s most prominent moment came in 1856 when he delivered a fiery speech calling the expansion of slavery to new western states the “rape of virgin territory.” 

 

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Two days after delivering that speech in 1856, Preston Brooks, a representative from South Carolina, approached Sumner on the senate floor …

 

Voice Actor: "Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina." 

 

He then proceeded to beat Sumner with a gold-tipped cane. As other senators rushed to intervene, another South Carolina representative pulled out a pistol and shouted: “let them be.” 

 

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Sumner barely survived, and it would take years before he could return to his Senate work. Massachusetts reelected him, choosing to leave his seat empty during his prolonged medical leave. But Brooks too became a hero. Southerners rallied to his defense, and supporters sent him hundreds of canes to replace the one he broke in the attack.

 

A decade and a bloody war later, Sumner and Stevens are intent on seeing the Black vision of freedom realized. Historian Colin McConarty:

 

Colin McConarty: Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner and those in their camp, see this as really the definitive moment to restructure the United States as an entity, and rebuild the Constitution, rebuild the way that the United States has been founded. And so they see this as the opportunity to do that, and they don't want to lose it. 

 

Hilary Green: And so you see this battle and showdown between Johnson, who does not want to see the extension of black rights. He just wants to see the nation restored as quickly as possible. And then you have other people like: “no, we need to deal with the 4 million slave people. They are now citizens. They were more loyal than the people who fought in the Confederacy.”

 

Stevens, Sumner, and other Congressional leaders known as the Radical Republicans hatch a plan. 

 

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On December 5th, when the clerks call the rolls to start the Congressional term, they pass over the southerners, effectively barring them from Congress. 

 

While the southerners are forced to wait outside, Stevens and Sumner establish a Joint Committee to determine whether after seceding, the southern states are “entitled to be represented in either House of Congress.” The committee quickly decides that they are not.

 

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Congress then passes laws to revoke the Black Codes and provide funding to the Freedmen’s Bureau, an organization which offers former slaves food, shelter, land, and other services. But President Johnson vetoes the bills.

 

Kate Masur again:

 

Kate Masur: And that sort of exemplifies, you know the shock among Republicans that even for these measures that they consider to be sort of obvious things we now have to do, the President was going to stand in their way. That pushed the republican coalition together.

 

With his vetoes, Johnson firmly allies himself with the southern planter class and declares war on Congress. It’s a bold move for a new President….A move that will prove to be a mistake.

 

Johnson gives a divided Republican Party a common enemy. Where Johnson is content to allow the ex-Confederates to reclaim power, Republicans see the need to support freed slaves. Some champion Black equality; others see Black voters as political allies; and still others only want to improve life for the Black South to prevent a mass migration of former slaves to the north. In the face of Johnson’s resistance and the return of ex-Confederates to power, the Republicans unite. They override Johnson’s vetoes - and recognizing the fragility of Congressional legislation, they begin drafting the 14th amendment to enshrine equal rights in the Constitution. 

 

As spring turns to summer in 1866, the battlelines in Washington have formed - Johnson and the white southern planter class against a newly unified Republican Congress. The country turns to the looming midterm election where the fate of Reconstruction hangs in the balance. At this point, it’s unclear which side has the upper hand, but soon a pair of brutal race massacres will upend the election and change the course of history.

 

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On May 1st, 1866 six white police officers are called to break up a gathering in the Black section of Memphis, Tennessee - a safe haven for former slaves.

 

Tensions between Black soldiers and white police officers have been simmering for months. When the police attempt to arrest a few Black soldiers who are celebrating the end of their military service, the tensions boil over. A scuffle breaks out and shots are fired. One police officer who is fleeing the scene dies when he accidentally shoots himself in the leg. The police blame the death on the Black soldiers.  

 

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Soon, a mob of white police officers, firefighters, and shopkeepers is organized. What happens next is captured in a Freedmen’s Bureau investigative report: 

 

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Freedmen’s Bureau Report: “The City Recorder arrived upon the ground and in a speech which received three hearty cheers from the crowd there assembled, councilled and urged the whites to arm, and kill every Negro and drive the last one from the city. Then during this night the Negroes were hunted down by police, firemen and other white citizens, shot, assaulted, robbed, and in many instances their houses searched under the pretense of hunting for concealed arms, plundered, and then set on fire, during which no resistance so far as we can learn was offered by the Negroes.”

 

Here’s historian Stephen Ash:

 

Stephen Ash: Witnesses later testified that they heard the rioters boasting that they intended to kill every Black person in Memphis or drive them out of the city. One rioter was heard inciting others with the cry “Kill every negro no matter who….” Another was heard proclaiming exultantly “It is the white man’s day now.”

 

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The violence continues for three days. The white mayor refuses to intervene. When order is finally restored after the federal army institutes martial law, every African American church and school is destroyed. Entire neighborhoods are reduced to smouldering ash. 46 Black people are dead. No one is arrested. 

 

The Daily Avalanche, a local newspaper, celebrates the attack: 

 

Daily Avalanche: "The chief source of all our trouble being removed, we may confidently expect a restoration of the old order of things. The negro population will now do their duty ... Negro men and negro women are suddenly looking for work on country farms ... Thank heaven, the white race are once more rulers in Memphis."

 

Three months later, a similar scene unfolds in New Orleans where a police force comprised of ex-Confederates opens fire on a crowd of mostly unarmed Black veterans marching in support of a constitutional convention to overturn the Black Codes. The attack soon moves from the streets to the convention hall.

 

Historian Ron Chernow describes the scene in his bestselling book Grant: 

 

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“The whites stomped, kicked, and clubbed the black marchers mercilessly. Policemen smashed the institute’s windows and fired into it indiscriminately until the floor grew slick with blood. They emptied their revolvers on the convention delegates, who desperately sought to escape. Some leaped from windows and were shot dead when they landed. Those lying wounded on the ground were stabbed repeatedly, their skulls bashed in with brickbats. The sadism was so wanton that men who kneeled and prayed for mercy were killed instantly, while dead bodies were stabbed and mutilated.”

 

In his report on the scene, General Phil Sheridan writes: 

 

Voice Actor: “It was no riot. It was an absolute massacre by the police... It was a murder which the Mayor and police of the city perpetrated without the shadow of a necessity.”

 

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The reaction in the north to the massacres in Memphis and New Orleans is immediate. 

 

Charles Dew: As the violence began to tick up, Northern public opinion started to say, what the hell did we fight this war over?.... These guys are terrorizing the freedmen. They are coming close to setting up conditions that we went to war to stop. 

 

With the midterms just a few months away, many in the north see the urgency for change.

 

Johnson attempts a last-ditch nationwide tour to champion his pro-South view of Reconstruction, but it’s a disaster. The midterm elections, perhaps the most important in the country’s history, are a landslide victory for Stevens, Sumner, and the Republicans. 

 

Charles Dew: The congressional elections of 1866 were a very rare circumstance where essentially the republicans who wanted a different reconstruction policy won two thirds majorities in both the House and the Senate, so they could override any presidential vetoes.

 

In the fight for Washington, Congress has won - and the consequences are enormous. A win for Johnson and the Democrats would have meant the end of Reconstruction and the continued rise of a new form of slavery. Instead, an empowered Congress undertakes the most active period of legislation in the country’s history. 

 

Armed with veto-proof majorities in both Houses, Congress passes the 14th amendment, which says that any person born on US soil, including former slaves, is an American citizen. It guarantees citizens equal protection before the law and grants Congress the power to enforce civil rights violations. Just a decade earlier, the Supreme Court had declared Black people were property. 

 

Congress also passes a series of Reconstruction Acts, which reinstate martial law and spell out the steps southern states must take to rejoin the Union: ratify the 14th amendment, write new constitutions and have them approved by Congress, hold new elections - and allow Black men to vote in those elections. Congress orders 20,000 soldiers to the south to enforce the laws.

 

Johnson continues to oppose Congress at every turn, but it hardly matters. Congress overrides his vetoes time and time again - and when they grow tired of that, they impeach him, the first impeachment in US history. Johnson survives removal from office in the senate by a single vote, but there is no question that power in Washington lies elsewhere.

 

And so, with Congress’s triumph, we enter the heyday of Reconstruction. 

 

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Black people across the south begin registering to vote in huge numbers. Hilary Green:

 

Hilary Green: And you're seeing hundreds of people signing up and just the opportunity to go from property and laws that guided their ownership to being able to craft the laws….they are also creating what are called these political organizations like union leagues and loyal leagues where they are meeting in churches at night, at schoolhouses, they are reading the news, they’re learning how to read a ballot, they are learning how to lead political meetings because they're going to start running for office. 

 

In state elections in 1867, the power of the Black vote is on full display. Despite the near constant threat of violence, African-Americans turn out in huge numbers to vote, often arriving before dawn in large groups to avoid confrontations with armed bands of former Confederates who surround ballot boxes and physically turn back Republican voters. Freedman Robert Sullivan of Georgia described the violence many Black voters face: 

 

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Robert Sullivan: Jim Blanchard, a white man, struck me with his fist twice on the side of my head, and cocked his pistol at me and attempted to strike me over the head with it, all because I said I was a radical….I also saw a great many colored people prevented from voting, unless they would vote the democratic ticket… A great many negroes voted the democratic ticket, but nearly all of them did so for fear of the whites, who threatened them in various ways if they did not. 

 

In 1868, 500,000 Black voters propel Ulysses S. Grant to the Presidency. He defeats a democratic ticket whose motto is: “This is a white man’s country. Let white men rule.” 

 

In a precursor to other race-baiting elections to come, political pundits are shocked by how close the race is. Grant, a national war hero, would have lost the popular vote without Black voters. 

 

But the close race carries a silver lining. It convinces Republican skeptics of the need to pass an amendment guaranteeing black suffrage. Racial equality aside, the threat of losing such a powerful voting block is too costly for the partisans in Congress to ignore. The fifteenth amendment granting Black men the right to vote is drafted as soon as Congress returns to session, and on February 3rd, 1870, it is ratified. 

 

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Hilary Green: Across the nation, not just the South. There are 15th amendment ratification parades. These are black men…. And many of them are in their former uniforms and to denote their new status as men, as full citizens of the nation…. And it’s not just Black men. You have Black women who are there and helping out because these are family decisions about a vote.

 

With most former confederate leaders barred from holding office, Republican coalitions seize control of statehouses across the south. 

 

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Charles Dew: They expanded the rights of women….Many of these states enacted the first divorce laws they had ever had…. They put in a public school system, first time public education had been present in the south…. 

 

Colin McConarty: They built schools, they built hospitals. 

 

This is Colin McConarty:

 

Colin McConarty: And meanwhile, white Southern Democrats on the ground, burn schools, killed politicians, and resisted in a broad array of fashions. 

 

To combat the violence, Congress establishes the Department of Justice and passes laws allowing the federal government to intervene to protect voting rights and oversee elections. One law, known as the Ku Klux Klan act, gives President Grant the power to arrest suspected Klan members without a trial. He quickly uses this power to arrest hundreds of Klan members, sending thousands more into hiding. The Klan is effectively driven into submission and won’t reappear in force for nearly fifty years.

 

But it’s not just laws and politics that are changing. The Black south is building a new society. 

 

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Bobby Donaldson: So reconstruction is literally the reconstruction of black families, the reconstruction of black communities, the reconstruction of black organizations and institutions, including schools and churches. 

 

That’s Bobby Donaldson, a historian at the University of South Carolina:

 

Bobby Donaldson: And so they're, they're beginning to develop an infrastructure that becomes the platform upon which African Americans speak.

 

Two of the biggest priorities for former slaves are education and a safe place to practice their religion. 

 

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Hilary Green: There's two buildings that usually get built first: a church and a school. And if they only built the church, that church becomes a school house during the day and during the middle of the week, that's where you have political gatherings at….So education and literacy, this is what was seen as the way that kept them enslaved: the lack of knowledge, keeping them ignorant, unable to read, sign their names…. So enslaved people came out of the Civil War, pretty clear that literacy, there was power in it. 

 

In the decade following Lee’s surrender, more than thirty Black colleges and universities are formed, including Howard University, the alma mater of Vice President Kamala Harris, and Morehouse College, where Martin Luther King Jr. attended school. 

 

To reduce their dependence on the white community, Black families establish orphanages, food banks, and burial funds.

 

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Hilary Green: So you start to see the social structures that everyone, the community from childhood - so from birth to death - would be taken care of for the black community, by the black community.

 

In the wake of slavery, the Freedmen’s Bureau expects to find thousands of child orphans, but they don’t find any. The community has absorbed parentless children and given them homes.

 

Hilary Green: They survived slavery as a community, they didn’t survived slavery as individuals, they survived as a community. They're going to survive freedom as a community…. If we could survive this darkness of slavery, there's only light in the future. Let's work towards that light.

 

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In the early 1870s, you can squint and see the light of a functioning multi-racial democracy. The same town squares that a decade earlier had held slave auctions now feature Black politicians giving speeches to Black voters. Instead of picking cotton under the watch of an overseer, Black children are spending their days in school.

 

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But look harder, and you can see darker forces. The Republican coalition is beginning to fracture. Many are worried about the continued use of the military and high taxes, and they are growing tired of hearing about problems far from home. 

 

Meanwhile, the white south is unifying under a new banner of white supremacy. Their attacks on Black leaders as corrupt and Black workers as lazy are finding receptive ears in the south as well as the north. Revisionist histories of the war are taking root, casting the 4 years of bloodshed as the first act in a larger struggle for control of the south. And anti-Black violence is ramping back up. The soldiers of the old Confederacy have not given up the fight.

 

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Next time on Fireside History:

 

Shawn Alexander: But the Klan will come and circle the house almost every night to terrorize them to simply say, we are here. 

 

The white south looks to unite under a new vision of white supremacy, threatening to break apart the Reconstruction coalition and reignite The Long War. 

 

Colin McConarty: We don't need to imagine what that guerrilla war would have looked like because I really believe that to some degree, it actually did occur.

 

With the white south waging the guerrilla war that President Lincoln long feared, how will the north respond? Will they double down on Reconstruction or retreat, abandoning the rights and liberties of more than 4 million Black Americans? 

 

Fireside History is produced by me, Nick Fogel. It is edited by Iris Adler. Scoring and sound engineering by Jason Albert and Hannah Barg. Voice acting from Kilo Martin and Sara Young. Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions and The Plantation Singers. Audio from Rhodes College. Special thanks to Michael B. Moore, Kate Masur, Hilary Green, Charles Dew, Colin McConarty, Stephen Ash, and Bobby Donaldson.