“Fighting for White Supremacy”

This chapter covers the years of Reconstruction from 1865 until its end in 1877. It discusses adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, President Lincoln’s assassination after praising the amendment’s granting of Black voting rights, adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, granting Blacks the “equal protection of the laws,” and adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869, providing federal enforcement of Black voting rights. Congress also established the Freedmen’s Bureau to assist newly freed Blacks, especially in setting up schools for Black children, although only one-fifth actually attended school. It also discusses the violent White resistance to Black voting, led by hooded nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan, and the massacre on Easter Sunday in 1873 of some two hundred Blacks in Colfax, Louisiana, murdered by Whites after Blacks were elected as sheriff and other officials. Three White men were convicted of participation in the massacre, but the Supreme Court reversed the convictions in United States v. Cruikshank in 1876, opening the door to the end of Reconstruction after the “stolen election” that year ended with Rutherford Hayes as a Republican president who capitulated to southern demands that federal troops withdraw from slave states, paving the way for Black disenfranchisement and restoration of White control.

Domestic Contradictions

In Domestic Contradictions, Priya Kandaswamy analyzes how race, class, gender, and sexuality shaped welfare practices in the United States alongside the conflicting demands that this system imposed upon Black women. She turns to an often-neglected moment in welfare history, the advent of the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction, and highlights important parallels with welfare reform in the late twentieth century. Kandaswamy demonstrates continuity between the figures of the “vagrant” and “welfare queen” in these time periods, both of which targeted Black women. These constructs upheld gendered constructions of domesticity while defining Black women's citizenship in terms of an obligation to work rather than a right to public resources. Pushing back against this history, Kandaswamy illustrates how the Black female body came to represent a series of interconnected dangers—to white citizenship, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist ideals of productivity —and how a desire to curb these threats drove state policy. In challenging dominant feminist historiographies, Kandaswamy builds on Black feminist and queer of color critiques to situate the gendered afterlife of slavery as central to the historical development of the welfare state.

Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era

In Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era, Jonathan Noyalas examines the complexities of life for African Americans in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. Although the Valley was a site of fierce conflicts during the Civil War and its military activity has been extensively studied, scholars have largely ignored the black experience in the region until now. Correcting previous assumptions that slavery was not important to the Valley, and that enslaved people were treated better there than in other parts of the South, Jonathan Noyalas demonstrates the strong hold of slavery in the region. He explains that during the war, enslaved and free African Americans navigated a borderland that changed hands frequently—where it was possible to be in Union territory one day, Confederate territory the next, and no-man’s land another. He shows that the region’s enslaved population resisted slavery and supported the Union war effort by serving as scouts, spies, and laborers, or by fleeing to enlist in regiments of the United States Colored Troops. Noyalas draws on untapped primary resources, including thousands of records from the Freedmen’s Bureau and contemporary newspapers, to continue the story and reveal the challenges African Americans faced from former Confederates after the war. He traces their actions, which were shaped uniquely by the volatility of the struggle in this region, to ensure that the war’s emancipationist legacy would survive.

The Origins of Incivility in Nursing: How Reconstruction-Era Policies and Organizations Impacted Social Behavior Within the Nursing Profession

Historians and scholars from varied disciplines acknowledge the existence of race-based discriminatory policies at the turn of the 20th century. However, little attention has been given to how the Freedmen's Bureau and Black Codes in post-Civil War Reconstruction shaped and impacted social behavior within the nursing profession. This article sheds light on the origins of incivility in nursing by taking a closer look at how early Reconstruction-era policies, structures of hierarchy in the U.S. armed forces, and its nursing corps and in the Red Cross, impacted the profession. The argument is made that the tandem workings of these policies and organizations, which produced racially insensitive and discriminatory practices, primed and erected systems of structural racism that perpetuated incivility within the nursing profession.

The nonprofit incorporation of America, 1860-1932

This project is an examination of the formation of corporatized charitable organizations from 1860-1932. Focusing on six organizations--the United States Sanitary Commission, the Freedmen's Bureau, the Peabody Foundation, the Slater Fund, the American National Red Cross, and the Young Men's Christian Association--it encourages scholars to view large-scale charities as more than good works, instead acknowledging the inherently corporate nature of nonprofit corporations. This study makes three arguments. First, the experience of the Civil War produced two possible paths to a modern civil society, with the model of independent organizations winning out over direct government intervention. Second, into the void left by the federal government's exit came private foundations, which desired to operate in a corporate manner, while expecting a corporate culture among those receiving their funds. This led to the corporatization of organizations that sought legitimacy in the eyes of major donors. Third, with organizations becoming corporatized, they were welcomed into the government-big business-association alliance that became the basis for governing in lieu of direct federal intervention. A system which was exposed as not up to the task presented by the Great Depression as it failed to respond appropriately to a drought in Arkansas in 1932.