RECONSTRUCTION: AMERICA AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

Gates Jr: When the Civil War began in 1861, nearly 4 million black people were trapped in bondage for life.

After the war was over and slavery abolished, Reconstruction was well underway, and although there were challenges ahead, black people were filled with an unprecedented amount of hope.

Frederick Douglass felt triumphant.

"The black man," he declared, "is a citizen.

The black man is enfranchised.

We live in a new world.

At last," he said, "the black man has a future."

The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, barred racial discrimination in voting.

Black men took to the polls.

Muhammad: Then you see all of these black people in charge.

More than 1,500 black officials move into positions of public leadership.

Richardson: If you were an African-American who had just been elected to the legislature, it was your time.

The future must have seemed limitless.

Gates Jr: Robert Smalls of South Carolina was one of these legislators.

He had escaped slavery by boldly commandeering a Confederate ship and delivering it to the United States Navy, blockading Charleston Harbor.

After the war, Smalls returned home to Beaufort and became one of the first heroes of Reconstruction.

Michael, tell me about your great-great grandfather's life.

Moore: You know, society told Robert that he was less than a human being, that he was a piece of chattel, that he was devoid of higher-level thinking, and...and strategy and planning.

But he rejected all of that in the way that he commandeered the boat that was the vehicle of his freedom.

In the middle of the night putting on the top hat and the long coat of the Confederate Captain.

I just admire the audacity he had to steal his freedom, to seize his freedom.

He was born in a shack behind the house.

He was enslaved here.

After the war he comes back and he owns the place.

Gates Jr: From being property, to owning the property.

Moore: Absolutely.

Gates Jr: He went from being enslaved to being elected a state legislator in six years.

Moore: He was elected to the South Carolina house and then the South Carolina Senate before going to, to Washington and Congress.

Gates Jr: That is the most remarkable "up from slavery" story I ever heard.

Once he was in office what sort of issues were important to him?

Moore: You know, he grew up with the children of his master and would see them going to school, and it just bothered him.

He thirsted for education and sought, through legislation, to extend that to others.

Gates Jr: Were you insufferable among your friends when you were in school?

Would you say, "my great-great grandfather's famous."

Moore: No, actually quite... Quite the contrary.

I grew up in the 70's in Boston.

Race was a touchy issue then with bussing.

In April of 1976, I was thirteen.

I had an opportunity to unveil the bust of Robert Smalls that's here in Beaufort.

And that was the first time I spoke about Robert Smalls, and I've done it hundreds and hundreds of times since.

Look, this is American history.

Robert's story is a metaphor for this broader movement that empowered a whole race of people.

Gates Jr: Reconstruction is a story of great expectations, enormous strides and wrenching retreats.

Early on, in its most hopeful moments, it seemed like a revolution was taking place in the halls of Congress.

Tell me about where we're standing.

What would this place have been like during Reconstruction?

Wasniewski: This is the old hall of the House.

Now Statuary Hall.

In the 1870s when the African-American members were here there would have been vendors in here, selling food and snacks as members traversed the North-South access from the House chamber over to the Rotunda on the Senate side.

Gates Jr: Tell me about the first black Congressman.

Wasniewski: The first is Hiram Revels from Mississippi.

Elected to the US Senate, and he comes in in February of 1870, and he's celebrated as the 15th Amendment in flesh and blood, the symbolic triumph of Reconstruction.

And then in December, we have Joseph Rainey of South Carolina, the first African-American in the House.

Gates Jr: How would they have been greeted?

Wasniewski: They didn't exactly roll out the red carpet, but the door didn't get shut either.

Many of the African-American members lived in the same neighborhoods that white members of Congress did.

So they weren't segregated in that sense, but they often times had to pay higher rents.

Gates Jr: The black tax?

Wasniewski: Essentially, yes.

Gates Jr: Yeah.

Wasniewski: Imagine you have these two men who occupy the seats of former slave holders, and they come to work in this magnificent temple of liberty.

But it's a place that had also been constructed with slave labor.

Muhammad: This is an incredibly heady moment.

Kind of like Barack Obama becoming president.

There's like fourteen black men in US Congress.

There's two Senators.

Blanche K. Bruce's name is on money.

He's signing currency in the United States.

Clyburn: See all of these people served starting in the 1870s.

I may be the only African-American from South Carolina now, but I am the ninth.

You had the Robert Smalls the Richard Cain, Robert Elliott, De Large, Ransier.

So over that period of 25 years, you had real participatory democracy taking place.

Stauffer: The photograph of Hiram Revels highlights this statesman who happens to be African-American.

Frederick Douglass recognized a camera captured the equal and essential humanity of that man or woman, black or white.

Douglass: Whatever may be the prejudices of those who look upon it, they will be compelled to admit that the Mississippi Senator is a man.

Stauffer: He is represented with the same stature as Lincoln or Seward or Grant or any other white politician.

Douglass did the same thing.

At a time in which most whites tried to argue that blacks should not have equal citizenship.

And one way of out-citizening white citizens is, you portray yourself with a greater sense of dignity and respectability and in a sense humanity than many whites.

Cain: We do not come here begging for our rights.

We come here clothed in the garb of American citizenship.

We come demanding our rights in the name of justice.

O'Hara: Richard Cain could capture an audience.

I think all his years in the pulpit made him a really good speaker.

In the House, he stood up to the white supremacists, who were basically calling him, you know, inferior.

And he said, look at me.

I have two eyes, I have two ears, I have two hands, I have two feet.

How are we different, when it comes to our manhood?

Davis: I was amazed when I began to read the speeches of black Congressmen in that period.

I mean, here are people who are arguing about what the laws of the nation will provide in terms of human rights and had a sophisticated understanding of the underlying principles that make these freedoms necessary in a Democratic society.

The level of discourse was so far above the level of discourse in Congress today.

It was shocking.

Gates Jr: In state houses across the South, black men and white men were attempting to govern together for the first time.

In South Carolina, where African Americans made up almost 60% of the population, voters elected a black majority House of Representatives.

Clyburn: It was the seat of black power USA.

The Lieutenant Governor.

Secretary of State.

State Treasurer.

Gates Jr: Unimaginable today.

Clyburn: Absolutely.

Foner: Many parts of the South didn't have a educated and experienced black leadership ready to step into power, which you did have in South Carolina.

It had a free-black group before the Civil War in Charleston, which was well-educated and politically articulate.

Elliott: Behind us lie two hundred and forty-three years of suffering, anguish, and degradation.

Before us lies our mighty future.

That future is ours to shape.

O'Hara: Robert Brown Elliott was very ambitious.

He was educated as a lawyer.

He had a photographic memory.

He was absolutely fearless.

Ayers: It's hard to imagine more daunting challenges than all of these governments have.

Some parts of the South had really been devastated by war.

So you've gotta try to build a forward-looking government at a time where there are very few resources.

Brown: The state legislatures create public schools, public hospitals, public welfare systems in a way that hadn't been seen in the South.

Medford: Black men go into these legislatures with an idea of how they're going to improve their communities.

One of the most important things they do is to establish free public schools.

Guelzo: There were no public education systems in most of the Southern states.

If you had money to buy it for your children you had it.

If you didn't, well you did without.

Williams: And you start to see state Constitutions adopting some policy that says, education is a right.

And this is providing it for all children.

Gates Jr: Across the former confederacy, free schools opened for both black and white children.

Only a few years earlier there were laws on the books in the South that prohibited enslaved people from learning to read and write.

Muhammad: Black people knew how much their freedom depended upon literacy.

It was not uncommon to see five-year-old's and ninety-five year-olds flocking to schoolhouses for a chance to learn how to read.

Foner: Free blacks realize white families are not gonna send their kids to school with blacks, and so in every single state you had separate schools, and black leaders generally said that's okay.

As long as black people get education we're not gonna try to force whites to go to school where they don't want to.

And many black parents wanted black teachers.

They didn't trust white teachers to be fair and to have the right attitudes toward their children.

Gates Jr: To meet this demand for teachers, governments, black churches, and missionary organizations established black colleges and universities.

Fisk university in Nashville, Tennessee, was founded in 1866.

Group: Let my people go Kwami: Crescendo.

And into this phrase.

Group: Go down, Moses Way down in Egypt land Gates Jr: The Fisk Jubilee Singers became the voice of black Reconstruction.

They introduced the world to the artistry of freed people and to the songs of their enslaved ancestors, the spirituals.

Anderson: Most white people who had ever seen blacks on stage had done so in the minstrel show.

Mitchell: Minstrels, white men who would paint their faces black, enlarge their lips with white makeup and spoof the African-American.

America found this entertaining.

Gates Jr: But in concert after concert, first in Northern American cities and then in Europe, the singers defied expectations.

Anderson: They had a decorum and a dignity on stage that challenged all of the prevailing stereotypical images that white Americans had.

Sanders: These are songs of overcoming.

They were about healing.

They were about love.

They were about the black struggle.

Mitchell: They allowed someone else to understand what it means to be in your world or in your shoes.

Group: Coming for to carry me home Gates Jr: Using the profits from performances, Fisk was able to buy the land on which it sits today.

Fisk is one of many historically black colleges and universities established during Reconstruction that are still educating students.

Black people were also beginning to make inroads into other spheres of American life.

They were buying land, setting up businesses and becoming economically independent.

Man: I started a farm.

Richardson: I owned one lot, seven acres, another one acre, and another about a quarter of an acre.

Cathcart: I bought myself a little plantation.

I bought another place and together that makes 98 acres.

Tutson: I bought 150 acres.

I have about fifty or sixty acres tending.

Tanner: I rented 43 acres of land.

I have a good crop in.

Lyon: My husband put up an elegant blacksmith shop.

Man: I have a son I sent to school.

Williams: It's a moment of possibility.

They have reunited their families.

They have formalized their unions.

They have property.

They have their own businesses.

Crenshaw: The Fourteenth Amendment had granted equal citizenship to all Americans, especially African-Americans.

Medford: It was about being able to claim an American birthright.

Full citizenship.

They saw themselves as really moving forward.

Muhammad: What does real equality look like?

It looks like equal protection under the law.

Hahn: Now African-Americans could serve as sheriffs.

So they were able to go out and make arrests and bring white perpetrators in for justice.

Muhammad: Black people get to be judges.

They get to sit on juries.

They get to sign contracts in their own interest.

Gates Jr: John Roy Lynch, a successful young businessman in Natchez, Mississippi, was appointed in 1869 as a justice of the peace.

O'Hara: He was born a slave in 1847 in Louisiana, the son of the plantation manager.

And at the end of the Civil War he attended night school.

Dray: As a very young man, he distinguished himself working in a photographer's studio.

O'Hara: He went to a few Republican meetings.

Dray: And impressed Adelbert Ames, who was the Reconstruction governor of Mississippi.

Even though Lynch was only 21 years old Ames appointed him to be a magistrate.

Foner: In his memoir he wrote about how former slaves would bring all their problems to him as a local justice of the peace.

There was a black man in this office.

There had never been such a thing in Mississippi before the Civil War, and so former slaves kind of identified with him.

Lynch: A case that came before me was that of a white man.

He threatened the life of an old colored man over a business transaction.

He remarked, do you mean that it's a crime for a white man to curse a nigger?"

"Yes," the court replied.

It is as much a crime for a white man to curse a Negro as it is for a Negro to curse a white man."

"Well!"

He exclaimed, "that's news to me."

Muhammad: If you're living in this moment you're imagining that it will only get better.

Masur: In slavery, African-Americans could not control their communities.

And so if people are drawing on the resources that they had developed in slavery, on their sense of what it meant to have family relationships, friendships, communities.

And they're able to institutionalize them in new ways.

Ayers: They create fraternal organizations like the Masons that find solidarity and strength in mutual support.

It's remarkable how the whole black world of their own organizations and support structures grow up and develop.

Gates Jr: During Reconstruction churches became the cornerstones of the black community.

Many enslaved people had been forced to worship in secret or only with the master's blessing, but now black people were free to worship God any way they wanted.

At Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the Reverend Richard Cain helped revive a congregation that had been banned under slavery.

How did you first hear about your great-great grandfather?

Did your mother say you come from people?

That's what my mother would have said.

Grizzell: Yes, yes.

Gates Jr: Your great-great grandfather was the greatest black preacher in history.

Grizzell: Yes, my mother and my great aunt.

And they always talked about Richard Harvey Cain and the great work that he was able to do.

Gates Jr: He was born free in what's now West Virginia.

He was a pastor in Brooklyn in 1865.

Some people would have said stay in Brooklyn where it's safe.

Grizzell: Yeah.

He said that he felt like a lion bound.

I mean he wanted to be here in the South and be a missionary to the newly freed slaves.

Gates Jr: I don't think people today understand the role of the church in the 19th century.

The church was their institutional universe.

Grizzell: Yes, the black church was the center of everything that happened with the community.

The emotional, the educational, the political.

Cain taught the newly freed slaves that they were no longer inferior.

They could accomplish anything!

Gates Jr: And he epitomized that.

Grizzell: Yeah.

Gates Jr: He was a one-man band for the black community.

Grizzell: Oh yes.

Gates Jr: Entrepreneur, minister, editor, writer.

Grizzell: Yes, yes.

Congressman, state senator.

Gates Jr: Too powerful, too influential.

Grizzell: Yes, yes.

Gates Jr: And therefore in danger.

Grizzell: Yes, he lived in constant fear.

Gates Jr: One of the most tragic aspects of Reconstruction is that the more African Americans achieved, the more they put their lives at risk.

Man: "I could hear the noise of the horses."

Man 2: "They Ku-Klux my house."

Woman: "They had on white gowns, masks on their faces."

Man: "Seventy-Five men..." Man 2: "They were Ku Klux."

Woman: "They tore her clothes off."

Man: "I was blindfolded."

Man 2: "Cut me with knives."

Man: "They whipped me."

Man 2: "They whipped me."

Woman: "They whipped me."

Man: "Put a rope around my neck to hang me."

Gates Jr: Southern Democrats used violence and terror tactics to disrupt Republican control and plot their return to power.

They saw themselves as the redeemers of their states.

Williams: Violence is efficient.

It's easy.

It's fast, and you can often do it under the cover of night.

Klan attacks become so pervasive because that's how widespread the fear of black enfranchisement is.

Crenshaw: The Klan is actually committing atrocities against everyone.

They're attacking freedmen and white Southerners who were sympathetic to the union cause and to the Republican Party.

Ayers: To their eyes emancipation was wrong.

They are washing the South with blood, to redeem it.

Crenshaw: This isn't simply a question of trying to return to an earlier way of life.

This is actually a political counter-revolution.

Gates Jr: To document the violence Congress, in 1871, launched one of the most extensive investigations in our history, known as the Ku Klux Klan hearings.

The United States never had a truth and reconciliation commission after slavery ended.

The Klan hearings were as close as we came.

It was extraordinary.

Congress was actually listening to black people testifying about the atrocities committed against them.

Colby: I was elected to the legislature.

They offered me two thousand five hundred cash if I would let another man go to the legislature in my place.

I told him I would not go back on my people.

Sixty-five came to my house.

My little daughter came out and begged them not to carry me away.

They drew up a gun and threatened her.

I may say that they hit me five thousand blows.

Some of them are the first-class men in our town.

One is a lawyer, one a doctor, and some are farmers.

My little daughter never got over it until she died.

I have never got over it yet.

They broke something inside of me.

Williams: The hearings are open and public.

Hunter: Women showed up at those hearings, and it took a lot of courage for them.

They could face retaliations by the KKK.

Williams: But they want the world to know what had been done to them.

Tutson: All the time I was planting my crop they worried me.

About if they ever saw me they would hurt me.

Alexander: Whites are really attacking Hannah and her family because they had been too successful.

It's jealousy.

It flies in the face of the idea that blacks are inferior.

Tutson: Five men bulged right against the door.

George McCrea catch the little child by the foot and slinged it out of my arms.

They carried me to a pine and tied my hands there, pulled off all my linen.

They said, "God damn you.

You are living on another man's premises."

I said, "No, I'm livin' on my own premises.

I gave a hundred fifty for it."

They whipped me from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet.

Every time they would go off George McCrea would get his knee between my legs and say, "Old lady, if you don't let me have to do with you, I will kill you."

He said, "God damn you, I'm gonna kill you."

Alexander: There are 8,000 pages of testimony given by everyday Americans.

This is a haunting tale of American history and something that we don't talk about enough.

Violence has always been here.

And it goes side by side in American history to the creation of a white supremacist racial ideology that has driven us from slavery all the way to the present day.

Gates Jr: The Union war hero, Ulysses S. Grant, had run for President under the slogan, "Let us have peace."

But as reports poured in from the former Confederate states, it was becoming painfully obvious that the terror was not going to stop.

Chernow: Grant didn't start out as a hero in terms of race relations.

At first he was very dubious about the fighting abilities of blacks, but he ended up becoming one of the greatest champions of recruiting and arming and equipping black soldiers.

He had a remarkable record in terms of integrating blacks into the federal government.

Guelzo: Grant's reaction to Klan violence is a strenuous one.

He makes it clear to the Speaker of the House that Congress is going to have to address the situation.

Gates Jr: Grant was in step with a Congress that was determined to take action.

Davis: Congressman Rainey, when he was arguing for protection against the Klan said that when he and other black Congressmen left the seat of government to return home they were at risk.

Dray: There were a couple of incidents where he and others were physically confronted on the road, and only the intervention of federal troops kept things from taking a dire turn.

He had absolutely no patience listening to anyone say that maybe the Klan didn't really exist, or maybe it wasn't such a big problem.

Rainey would say, "Well I just saw them a couple days ago, what are you talking about?"

And then go on to deliver a very convincing lecture.

Davis: Saying that that violence was treasonous and the federal government had an obligation to do something about it.

Gates Jr: Congress passed a series of Enforcement Acts to address the crisis, the third of which is known as the Ku Klux Klan Act.

Guelzo: All of which together were intended to put weapons into the hands of the federal government to directly intervene.

Masur: The Fourteenth Amendment established that states could not deprive people of privileges and immunities of citizenship or of due process of law or equal protection of law.

Jones: So what Congress is doing in the Enforcement Act, right, is trying to create a new category of offense using the Fourteenth Amendment to, in essence, get around the fact that Southern courts are not going to convict white Southerners.

Alexander: Most importantly, the federal government can suppress habeas corpus.

Where violence occurred they can hold individuals for a crime without being charged for that crime.

And they can also use the militia or the military to go in and suppress violence.

Gates Jr: To spearhead the operation, Grant appointed Amos T. Akerman as attorney general of the newly created United States Department of Justice, established in the executive branch in 1870.

Guelzo: He supervises the deployment of Federal Troops to restrain violence.

Alexander: Many of the Klan members that believe that they're going to be charged by the federal government begin to run away and hide.

Guelzo: Here is the federal government finally...finally taking the situation with the Ku Klux Klan in hand and directly striking back at it.

The difficulty was going to turn out to be persistence.

Gates Jr: The federal government could try to contain the violence, but it couldn't contain the spread of white supremacist ideology, manifesting itself in full force.

Guelzo: Southern oligarchs who have held power in the pre-Civil War South for decades did not want to surrender that power.

Hahn: White supremacy, an alliance between white people against black people, was always an important device that held Southern politics together.

Maxwell: Southern white elites knew how to activate that bond of whiteness with poor Southern whites.

Brown: And that was difficult work to do.

A lot of propaganda had to go into that.

Downs: Planters in the Democratic Party have to sell white supremacy to other white Southerners who might not have the same or even any significant economic stake in white supremacy.

The planters play upon racial economic rivalry; the idea that any gain by any black man deprives all white men.

They're creating a racial zero-sum fight for economic power, for government, for jobs, and promising a psychological benefit, a psychological wage of whiteness.

Gates Jr: In 1870, when former Confederate general Robert E. Lee died, many white Southerners poured out their grief and sorrow for their fallen hero, a symbol of their so-called "lost cause."

It seemed that the longer Reconstruction continued, the more the former Confederates lamented the loss of their way of life.

Robert E. Lee's death became a symbolic focal point for a wrenching outpouring of nostalgia and grief.

Medford: When he died, it's like a king has died.

Ayers: Bells ring throughout the South.

Medford: Schools close.

Ayers: People close their stores.

Medford: They wore sashes and put things on their doors to commemorate his passing.

Ayers: Newspapers border their entire pages with black.

Medford: They mourn him as if this is the second time they have lost the war.

Ayers: In the eyes of the white South here is a man who embodied the things that they admired the most: manly courage, Christian virtue, devotion to those underneath him, of his soldiers, and a kind of apparent paternalism toward enslaved people.

And not only was Lee this perfect person, but he had been the perfect war hero.

He had outsmarted the Yankees, but he was always up against larger forces.

He helped create that myth at Appomattox that we have succumbed in the face of greater might.

Our cause was not unjust, it just happened to have lost.

It became a lost cause.

Medford: When great leaders die or when persons die that people think of as great leaders, people are guided by emotion.

As a consequence you have this cult of Robert E. Lee developing.

Chernow: And in fact the cult of Lee had become so powerful by the 1870s that Frederick Douglass remarked that you cannot pick up a newspaper nowadays without reading the most nauseating flatteries about Robert E. Lee.

Douglass: The ostentatious and noisy exhibitions of sympathy and grief on the part of the rebel democracy all over the South for the man who made such Herculean efforts to destroy the government is a most painful proof that the great body of the Southern white people are far more ready to weep for the loss of a Confederate general than to sustain the government under which they live.

Stauffer: Douglass recognized if you rewrite the story of the war that can have profound implications for race relations.

The symbolism of Lee could become very dangerous.

Gates Jr: The clock was ticking on Reconstruction.

And the presidential race of 1872 was a test of its popularity.

With black voters solidly in his corner, President Grant easily won re-election.

But the campaign revealed growing fault lines in the Republican Party.

Masur: Grant faced a renegade, liberal-Republican movement that was critical of the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Chernow: They're good government types who were very upset by the scandals that had been exposed in the Grant administration.

Guelzo: Credit Mobilier was basically a phony company that was set up to provide financing for the Pacific Railroad project, and it laundered money.

It made lots of money for corrupt individuals.

The difficulty is that those corrupt individuals were often members of Congress.

Chernow: Grant was personally quite honest, but he seemed blind, credulous, almost childlike to the presence of unscrupulous people.

Guelzo: Corruption is as American as apple pie, and if we find it in the Grant administration and the Reconstruction South that's not because Reconstruction was inherently corrupt.

It's because corruption happens.

You can almost make a bumper sticker out of it.

Foner: Liberal Republicans are also adopting more of a states' rights position now.

We can't just keep intervening in the South and nominated their own candidate for President Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York tribune, a long-standing anti-slavery advocate.

Chernow: Greeley made this famous statement that he's confident that masses of our citizens, North and South, are eager to clasp hands across the bloody chasm that divides them.

Foner: The split in the Republican Party is the harbinger of a retreat from Reconstruction.

Gates Jr: Support for Reconstruction was waning in the North where many had grown weary from the growing cost of peace.

In this environment, black legislators became targets of scorn, ridicule, and anti-Black, racist propaganda.

Foner: Derogatory images of African-Americans become more and more prominent in the 1870's.

Williams: Even someone like Thomas Nast, who was a very vocal advocate for African-American political rights during Reconstruction, used his artistry with Harper's Weekly to depict African-Americans in South Carolina, for example, where they have a black majority, in the most vile ways.

Foner: James Pike, a Republican, works on the New York Tribune, publishes this book called "The Prostrate State."

South Carolina is under the rule of barbarism, incompetence.

Holt: There's a famous passage in which he's describing really buffoons.

Those who are not buffoons are corrupt or incompetent.

Richardson: He hammers again and again and again on almost animalistic stereotypes of fieldworkers to say, really?

Are these the people you want to have in charge of your government, passing laws that suck tax dollars out of hardworking Americans?

No.

And in fact, we're pretty sure they shouldn't be parts of polite American society at all.

Williams: They perpetuate an idea that Reconstruction has effectively failed and that the federal government and the Republican Party needed to cut its losses and remove itself from the South.

Leave the Negro to those who know him best, white Southerners.

Gates Jr: As enthusiasm for Reconstruction dwindled in the North, Democrats felt emboldened to intensify their counterrevolution throughout the South.

Year after year, election after election, they would not relent.

In 1873, amidst the fallout from a fiercely contested election in Louisiana, black Republicans in the town of Colfax staged an armed occupation of the courthouse to prevent Democrats from taking over the Parish seat.

Downs: White paramilitary organizations surround the courthouse with artillery.

Guelzo: The white vigilantes offered guarantees of safe conduct if you will come out, if you will surrender yourselves.

The white vigilantes line them up and execute them.

It's nothing more than pure, unadulterated murder.

The United States attorney in Louisiana, under the Enforcement Acts, is responsible for the arrest of over 100 of the white vigilantes.

However, Louisiana juries turned out to be extraordinarily reluctant to convict.

Only three convictions are obtained.

Masur: White Southerners made it difficult for the Republicans and the Northerners to enforce Reconstruction policy.

The organized, white supremacist groups were trying to make the cost of Federal Intervention higher than the federal government was willing to bear.

Downs: In state after state increasingly organized societies, paramilitary clubs, white leagues claim control of public places.

Gates Jr: John Roy Lynch, now a congressman, was targeted when he returned home to Mississippi to campaign.

Lynch: At Fayette... they paraded the streets, yelled, fired cannon.

Each club had a wagon with fodder.

Colored men said these wagons contained guns.

Democrats had all gathered around the place.

I took the stand.

They commenced to yell at the top of their voices, so as to drown out every word I attempted to utter.

Cobb: Southern whites were attempting to take the South back.

The Red Shirts and the Knights of the White Camelia.

That's essentially what the so-called redemption movements were.

Ayers: They are the ones who are defending the right order of things in civilization.

That white people control black people and that's the way it should be.

Gates Jr: The brutal violence was accompanied by a major economic downturn, the first since the end of the war.

It was known as "the Panic."

Banks and railroads were at the center of the storm, but soon it spread to every corner of the economy.

Guelzo: The Panic of 1873 has enormously destructive influences through the economy, North and South.

The really devastating impact is political.

Downs: Northern Republicans lose election after election in the midterms of 1874 to Democrats who promise first to save the economy but also to end Reconstruction in the South.

Guelzo: Democrats achieve a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War.

Gates Jr: Democrats also gain control of state governments in Alabama, Texas, and Arkansas.

Reconstruction's future was perilous.

But the fight wasn't over.

In 1874, Congressional districts with majority black populations elected leaders like Robert Smalls and John Lynch.

They would face stiff opposition as members of the minority party.

Guelzo: A Democratic majority in the House of Representatives means no more money for Reconstruction initiatives.

So, if there will be political troubles around election time, if the Ku Klux Klan will suddenly reawaken and begin intimidating voters at the polls, murdering black people on the roads, night riding to terrorize blacks into submission, there will be no initiative coming out of Washington.

Gates Jr: Was there a sense of desperation because of the reversal of the 1874 election?

Wasniewski: What had been a hundred-seat majority for Republicans turned into roughly an eighty-seat majority for Democrats.

Coming into the new Congress, we had a long lame duck session of about three months.

The clock is ticking, and African-Americans know that this is really, probably gonna be the last shot at a far-reaching civil rights bill.

O'Hara: It prohibited discrimination in public transportation, juries, public accommodation such as hotels, and public education.

Immediately when the civil rights bill came to the floor Southern Democrats and Northern Democrats alike railed against the bill.

They believed that it was unconstitutional.

Masur: Opponents of the bill thought the U.S.

government had no business telling the proprietors of restaurants or the people who run railroads who they could admit.

These are private businesses and they can decide who their clientele is.

Crenshaw: The critics believed that it was not about non-discrimination.

They saw it as about social equality.

And their view is that social equality could not be legislated.

It couldn't be enforced.

It shouldn't be imposed.

O'Hara: This is pushing integration that is unnatural.

Masur: You're gonna force a white person to ride next to a black person, and the next thing you know you're gonna force a white person to have a black person over for dinner or interracial marriage.

Crenshaw: They were apoplectic about the idea that they had to protect their whiteness, and in particular protect their white women against this exposure, um, to African-Americans.

O'Hara: Near the end of the first full day of debate most members were given 20 minutes each to speak.

And Alexander Stephens, of Georgia, former Confederate Vice President, stood up, feebly, because he was confined to a wheelchair and requested a full hour to speak.

And Republican leadership agreed, as long as Robert Brown Elliott also had a full hour to provide his rebuttal.

Stephens, leaning precariously on a big stack of papers gives this long, monotone, prepared speech, in which he goes over the unconstitutional arguments for the civil rights bill.

When he sits down, it's late.

George Hoar of Massachusetts says, "Well, you know, what?

Maybe we won't have Elliott speak today.

Maybe he can go first thing tomorrow."

And that may have been strategic.

Because word got out that Robert Elliott was going to provide the rebuttal to the former Vice President of the confederacy.

The next day when Elliott takes the floor the galleries are packed with African-American observers.

The reporters had shown up.

The whole chamber is just filled with people.

Elliott gives this really booming delivery.

Elliott: The Constitution of a free government ought always be construed in favor of human rights.

I cannot and I will not forget that the welfare and rights of my whole race in this country are involved.

The race whom he spurned and trampled on are here to meet him in debate, and to demand the rights which are enjoyed by their former oppressors.

O'Hara: When Elliott finishes, the whole room erupts into the booming applause.

People line up to shake his hand.

This is a real symbolic moment.

The old planter class appears feeble and on its way out, and this dark-skinned, suave, intelligent, African-American man represented the way forward.

Medford: Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, but there was a clause that was stripped from the final act and that was about education.

Americans were not ready for that kind of equality in education yet and apparently wouldn't be for many, many more years.

Gates Jr: While Congress managed to get the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to cross the finish line, another branch of government blunted the reach of the 14th Amendment.

In 1876, the Supreme Court announced its ruling in United States versus Cruikshank, the appeal of the three white men convicted of murdering African Americans guarding the courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana.

Guelzo: The decision which is handed down in Cruikshank is one of the most remarkably feeble-minded and disastrous decisions that a United States Supreme Court has ever handed down.

And the reasoning ran like this: the Fourteenth Amendment was only intended to restrain states from depriving U.S.

citizens of the privileges and immunities that they're supposed to enjoy.

But what went on in the Colfax massacre, first of all, was not a state action.

It was not the state of Louisiana, but this was, in fact, merely individuals.

Davis: It was a local crime.

Private violence is the business of the states.

And if they are not taking care of it, that's just too bad.

Crenshaw: Mobs of whites decide to kill you.

Have you been denied your right?

Well, the Supreme Court decided that you've not been denied your right if you were murdered.

As long as it's just private individuals, whether individually or collectively that are interfering with your rights, that's not a federal case.

Gates Jr: While the Cruikshank decision didn't close the door on possible future prosecution, it narrowed the pathways for enforcing the 14th Amendment.

Crenshaw: Little stood between the redeemers and their ultimate goal, which was, terrorize African-Americans so completely that across the South hundreds of thousands who had been registered and had been politically active would be reduced to a few hundreds in many of the jurisdictions that they once actually dominated.

Gates Jr: Grant saw the support for Reconstruction was eroding.

So he decided to pull back on military interventions in the South to enhance his party's chances in the North.

With the next presidential election months away, Washingtonians, black and white, came together to honor a past president; Abraham Lincoln.

For one man, the occasion afforded an unprecedented national platform for a call to action.

On April 14th, 1876, this plaza near Capitol Hill was teeming with people, including members of both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court justices, and the President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant.

The crowd had gathered here on the 11th anniversary of Lincoln's assassination to witness the unveiling of this monument, honoring his crowning achievement, the Emancipation Proclamation.

The most memorable words spoken that day were those of Frederick Douglass.

Douglass: Truth compels me to admit even here in the presence of the monument Abraham Lincoln was not our man.

He was preeminently the white man's president.

You are the children of Abraham Lincoln.

We are best his step-children.

To you it especially belongs to preserve and perpetuate his memory and commend his example.

Gates Jr: When he says Abraham Lincoln was a white man's President you go, "Whoa!"

That is an amazing thing to say in front of the most powerful politicians in the Republic in the year 1876.

It's shocking.

Blight: Yeah, it's a presidential election year.

It appears that Reconstruction is unraveling.

He used this opportunity to make a speech about the responsibility of the U.S.

government, which was sitting right in front of him, to hold together whatever was left of Reconstruction if they could.

Stauffer: There's this understanding in 1876 that blacks have all the rights now that they should expect.

We have the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

The Republican Party; it's become a party of large financiers, corporate men, and captains of industry.

Now let's focus on the economy.

Guelzo: When Republicans cast around for a likely candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes seems to be the man.

He finished the war as a Union general, but by the time he becomes governor of Ohio he has begun to pull back on black equality.

He's untainted by corruption, which will be extremely valuable, because Samuel Tilden is running almost entirely on an anti-corruption platform as a Democrat.

But Hayes is also bland enough that he will offer no objection to anyone.

He is a first-rate, second-rate man.

Williams: Both candidates pledge that they would bring Reconstruction to an end.

Downs: Election night is complete and utter confusion.

Williams: Even though Tilden won the popular vote, the results from Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, where African-Americans faced severe, violent repression, were undetermined.

Downs: Republicans convince Southern governments to declare enough votes invalid to swing the electoral college to Hayes.

Chernow: The Democrats were so outraged by the fact that Tilden was not declared the winner that they began to rally their voters under the slogan Tilden or Blood.

There were real fears of a Civil War.

Grant started to call in troops to guard Washington.

He said either party can afford to lose an election, but we as a people cannot afford to have a presidential election that is tainted by false or illegal results.

Congress created a bipartisan commission that declared Hayes the winner by one vote.

Williams: Democrats predictably cried foul.

Chernow: Hayes was referred to as, "Rutherfraud B. Hayes".

He was called His Fraudulency.

Williams: February, as inauguration day neared, the election still remained undecided.

Republicans and Democrats came together and cut a deal.

Hayes is inaugurated as President of the United States.

Maxwell: It's hard to imagine in the moment of an election a party trading a presidential victory unless it means protecting their way of life.

White supremacy is a long-term campaign.

It was more important to reinstate that power structure than it was to win the White House.

Williams: Hayes promises white Southerners that he will leave the South to conduct its own affairs, unimpeded.

And that the Negro problem will be its to solve.

Chernow: These federal troops will stop enforcing the kinds of reforms that had marked the Reconstruction era.

The Southern states had been redeemed.

Medford: Whoever had been elected, whether it was Hayes or Tilden, black people were going to suffer because Northerners had decided to move on.

Gates Jr: It was a time of so much hope and so much optimism.

The horizon seemed limitless and then, boom, came redemption.

Moore: I can only imagine it was the most frustrating thing for Robert Smalls.

Here's someone who literally risked his life to be free and devoted himself to creating this new America.

And to see that dismantle must have just been horrible.

You know, one of his famous quotes is, "My race needs no special defense, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be the equal of anyone, anywhere.

All they need is an equal shot at the battle of life."

Gates Jr: From the very beginning, the success of Reconstruction depended on the will of the nation to hold the line against the forces of violence eager to undo it.

As the nation's will faltered, the rights of African-Americans would be sacrificed to political expediency.

After 12 tumultuous years, black people faced an uncertain future.

As Frederick Douglass put it, "If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?"

Narrator: Coming up on "Reconstruction"... Blight: It's a set of beliefs, philosophies, attitudes.

Narrator: Race relations hit bottom.

Barnes: The Jim Crow era.

Gates Jr.

: Racist stereotypes of African Americans came in all shapes and sizes.

Narrator: New possibilities emerge.

Crenshaw: Out of the decline came different pathways.

Narrator: While history is rewritten.

Williams: They still hope, they still believe.

What other choice do they have?

Narrator: "Reconstruction: America after the Civil War" continues on PBS.