 Hi, Professor Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, and we're here today to talk about Southern Reconstruction after the Civil War. Now, there are two big issues here. The first is why the South became and remained poor. And the second is why the North adopted a program of radical reconstruction to transfer political power in the South to the people, including the blacks, and then why the South abandoned radical reconstruction. And of course, how are these two related? Well, the first thing to note is the South was rich before it committed suicide, political suicide. 1860, the South was by and large, especially for the whites, was richer than the North. The South was productive. Its agriculture was more productive than Northern agriculture. It had a very effective system of trade. The richest people in the country were in the South. By 1880, however, the South had become poor and it remained that way for a century. Mississippi, which is still the poorest state in the country, or one of the two or three poorest states, Louisiana and Arkansas, being right up there with it, has a pick up an income, half that of New England. At the low point in the 1920s, Mississippi had a pick up an income, maybe a third that of New England. They gained some ground since then, but the South went from being richer to being poorer. At the same time, the South experienced horrible physical and political devastation. Physical devastation cannot be understated. People think, oh, because they didn't have bombers or they didn't have nuclear weapons. They couldn't devastate a region. Well, you don't need that. People have an enormous capacity to just destroy things, even if it's with their hands and feet. Sherman's troops marched through Georgia. They burned, they drove off animals, they broke fences, they destroyed irrigation, they destroyed wells, and they left devastation. And it's not just Sherman. The whole South was fought over and it was a very bloody war. 250,000 Southern whites died in the Confederate army out of a population of nine million, which means four and a half million men, which means maybe 250,000 adult men, sorry, 2.5 million adult men, one in 10 killed. Another one in 10 wounded. That's a huge proportion of the able-bodied population of the South was killed or injured. Plus there were thousands more killed fighting for the Union. And then there were all those killed as collateral damage. Over half the livestock in the South was lost during the Civil War. The South's banking system was completely destroyed, not a single bank standing. They had virtually no gold or silver left. It had all been sent out of the country to try to buy munitions. The South fought very hard and when you fight that hard and lose, you lose it all. So one aspect of Reconstruction is the physical process. Now who's going to finance this? Northerners. Where else are you going to get the money? The South immediately was open for business. Northerners marched down South, bought up the lands, set to work employing the freemen as wage laborers. That's what Northern Reconstruction, economic Reconstruction was about and we're going to come back to that. Now President Andrew Johnson succeeded Lincoln when Lincoln was assassinated, set up what's called Presidential Reconstruction, one of the stupidest ideas in American history. Said okay, war's over, you guys come back. He invited Southern whites to hold elections, which they did and they elected their favorite people to office as members of Congress and senators and governors. Who did they elect? They elected people who fought in the Confederacy. After all, anybody in fight for the Confederacy was a traitor in the eyes of Southern whites who just months before were still fighting. So they elected more Confederate generals to Congress than there were Union generals in Congress. Congress reconvened, the Northerners looked across the aisle at the Southerners and said no way, we didn't fight a war for them to be back in power. So they threw them out. The Northerners established Congressional Reconstruction and the key point of Congressional Reconstruction was giving the blacks the vote. Why? Well, many of the moral absolutists in the North believed blacks should have the right to vote because they're people, good reason. Others, kind of the political wing of the anti-slavery movement, like yeah that's a good thing, civil rights are good, but also we need the blacks to vote so that we can continue to dominate the government. We need their votes because if blacks voted, they were a voting majority of the population of at least three Southern states and close to a majority in several others. If blacks could vote, there'd be no question of Republicans controlling Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, basically controlling Georgia and Alabama and Arkansas as well and close to a majority in North Carolina and Virginia and Texas. All the former slaves vote Republican. They're not going to vote Democratic. That was the idea of Congressional Reconstruction. Give the blacks a vote. It worked for a little while. Blacks had the vote. They elected Reconstruction governments, Republicans. They raised taxes to fund schools because the blacks, the free men wanted schools for their children. They funded internal improvements, railroads to promote economic development. They elected sheriffs and other offices, justices of the peace, who would protect the contracts of wage laborers, who would protect wage laborers from oppression, or good things, right? Except, wait a second, who were paying those taxes, remember? Who owned the land? Southern whites had sold a lot of the land to northerners who was employing the wage laborers who were being protected by the Reconstruction governments. The employers of the wage laborers were increasingly northerners. These northerners were like, we're not so sure that we like this. Northern landowners in the South started finding common cause with Southern white landowners against the free men. And when these free men and their representatives went to Congress, at first they were like, okay, we'll do what the Republican leadership tells us to do, but then they said, hey, we don't like tariffs. We're not so sure we like this banking system that favors the North. We're not so sure that we like these economic policies that favor the North at the expense of the South. So Southern Republicans started making common cause with Southern Democrats. All of a sudden Reconstruction wasn't looking so good for the North, for the Northern Republicans. And then the Ku Klux Klan and the Southern whites started burning people, lynching them, et cetera. And the only solution was to send the army in to protect the Southern blacks. And it worked. Grant sent the army in, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, and they put down that insipient rebellion of the white racists. Good. Should have done it a lot harder and done it a lot more often, but no, they didn't want to, because this cost money. And increasingly, these Northern Republicans were finding that they were on the wrong side in the South. They really wanted to be on the side of the landowners and the Southern whites, not on the side of their former friends, the free men. The free men in the South were abandoned by the North. In 1877, the famous compromise of 1877, where the Republicans let the Southern whites dominate the South, as long as the Southern whites would leave the Northern economic policy from the Civil War intact. That compromise came from the Northerners' discovery of their basic common interest with Southern whites against the free men. And the Northern Republicans' discovery that they didn't really have that much in common with the poor wage earners who were the former free men. So they abandoned them. It's a great tragedy for American history. It's led to much of the worst that's happened in America in the last century. And we'll talk about that more. So, have a nice day. Thank you. Bye-bye.