Confederate “Heritage” Month 2023, April 5: Northern troops and the end of Reconstruction

Heather Cox Richardson, in addition to being an academic historian, has also become one of the best-know “public historians” in the US, thanks to her Facebook posts and podcasts, also available on YouTube, and her frequent Substack column.

Richardson is very critical of the Lost Cause narrative because it’s bad history and also because it’s racist. It’s possible to put a racist spin on factually accurate claims, although the Lost Cause narrative is at its core racist propaganda, so it has to be and is dishonest about many important factual questions. Also, it’s not just racist propaganda “at its core” but in all its other aspects, as well.

But she’s also been good about a misleading claim that is also found in even anti-racist descriptions of the end of Reconstruction in the post-Civil War South, the idea that the federal government pulled the troops out of the South.

It’s very true that the federal government began shirking its Constitution duty to protect a “republican” (representative) form of government in the states. (Which didn’t include voting rights for women until 1920, of course.)

It was a thoroughly irresponsible decision. But it didn’t involve removing all troops from the South:

During the chaos after the [1876] election, President U.S. Grant had ordered troops to protect the Republican governors in the Louisiana and South Carolina statehouses. When he took office, [President Rutherford B.] Hayes [in 1877] told Republican governors in South Carolina and Louisiana that he could no longer let federal troops protect their possession of their statehouses when their Democratic rivals had won the popular vote.

Under orders from Hayes, the troops guarding those statehouses marched away from their posts around the statehouses and back to their home stations in April 1877. They did not leave the states, although a number of troops would be deployed from southern bases later that year both to fight wars against Indigenous Americans in the West and to put down the 1877 Great Railroad Strike. That mobilization cut even further the few troops in the region: in 1876, the Department of the South had only about 1,586 men including officers. Nonetheless, southerners fought bitter congressional battles to get the few remaining troops out of the South in 1878–1879, and they lost.

The troops did not leave the U.S. South in 1877 as part of a deal to end Reconstruction.¹ [my emphasis]

John Hope Franklin and Alfred Mose, Jr., although far from being sympathetic to the anti-democracy, white supremacist anti-Reconstruction “Redemption” movement, do seem to pick up this very mistake, although that don’t specify that all troops were pulled out of the South:

The [Presidential] campaign of 1876 was the great test for both parties. The Democrats were committed to a program to end Reconstruction in the South; the Republicans had not openly promised to do so, but there was at least one wing of the party that was willing to withdraw troops and leave the South to its own devices.

In the three states that had not been "redeemed," South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida, the election campaign approached civil war. The result was, in the case of the first two, a hotly disputed election with both sides claiming victory and establishing dual governments. The presidency of the United States hung on the decision regarding their disputed votes. To break the impasse, the Republicans promised not only to withdraw troops but also to assist the South in its long-cherished ambition to obtain federal subsidies for internal improvements and better representation in affairs in Washington. Thus when Hayes became president, the South was soon assuaged in its grief by his prompt withdrawal of troops. At last the South could rule itself without Northern interference or black influence.

With troops out of the South and in a spirit of great conciliation, Congress removed other restrictions. In 1878 the use of armed forces in elections was forbidden. In 1894 appropriations for special federal marshals and supervisors of elections were cut off. In 1898 the last disabilities laid on disloyal and rebellious Southerners were removed in a final amnesty. Before the dawn of a new century there was complete recognition in law of what the South had itself accomplished in fact even before the election of 1876.² [my emphasis]

In The 1619 Project that a number of this month’s posts will consider, this claim is also included:

In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a compromise with Southern Democrats that would grant him the presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull federal troops from the South. With the troops gone, white Southerners quickly went about eradicating the gains of Reconstruction.³ [my emphasis]

Richardson writes:

It matters that we misremember that history. Generations of Americans have accepted the racist southern lawmakers’ version of our past by honoring the date they claimed to have “redeemed” the South. The reality of Reconstruction was not one in which Black voters bankrupted the region by taking tax dollars from white taxpayers to fund roads and schools and white voters stepped in to save things; it was the story of an attempt to establish racial equality and the undermining of that attempt with the establishment of a one-party state that benefited a few white men at the expense of everyone else. [my emphasis]

The fight against Reconstruction, i.e., against democratic rights for citizens of all races, was waged with normal politics, in the courts, and with violence and intimidation. As Franklin and Mose put it, even the 1876 election saw conditions that “approached civil war.” It was the duty of the federal government to see that representative government was maintained.

The fact that not all federal troops were physically withdrawn from the South in some ways make the behavior of the national government after 1876 even worse. It was not that the federal government had no forces in place to prevent violent suppression of democracy. The federal forces were there, but the government refused to use them to maintain Constitutional government in the former Confederate states.

Richardson elsewhere describes what was lost by this betrayal of democracy and the Constitution:

As Northerners struggled to fight and fund a war of unprecedented magnitude, they replaced a prewar system run by a handful of wealthy Southern slaveholders with a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." That new, popular government took firm root in the country after the war, as citizenship was extended and all men [sic] got the right to vote. Between 1860 and 1870, it seemed, a second American Revolution had finally aligned the Constitution with the promise of the Declaration of lndependence that all men were created equal. [my emphasis]⁴

And she stresses the responsibility of the whole United States for the suppression of democracy that the Redemption movement represented: “Reconstruction failed not because Southern whites opposed it - although most of them did - but because Northerners abandoned it.“

A Reconstruction-era illustration from Harper’s Weekly of a US soldier restraining a white mob from attacking a groups of Black men (who appear to be willing to defend themselves, as well)

1. Richardson, Heather Cox (2023): Letters from an American: March 2, 2023. Substack 03/03/2023. (Accessed 2023-26-2023).

2. Franklin, John Hope and Alfred Mose, Jr., Alfred (2003): From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (Eighth Edition), 281. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

3. Hannah-Jones, Nikole (2019): Introduction. In: The 1619 Project, New York Times Magazine 08/18/2019, 21.

4. Richardson, Heather Cox (2015): Killing Reconstruction. Jacobin 18:2015, 71.