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1 1 A TREMENDOUS AND SEARCHING SOCIAL REVOLUTION [W]e infer the triumph of a Republican ticket in every Southern State. . . . Was there ever a more tremendous and searching social revolution? I know of none since the noblesse of France were crushed by the canaille of Paris. —George Templeton Strong, New York City, August 1867 the setting Today’s United States is in large part the product of three epochs of revolutionary change: the era of the American Revolution (1763–89), the Civil War and Reconstruction (1861–77), and the Great Depression (1929–41). The Revolutionary War and subsequent efforts at nation building stimulated Americans during the first of these eras “to reconsider the meaning of . . . old words and some others as well—independence, the nation, liberty, and equality.”1 The travail of the Civil War and Reconstruction then transformed the federal republic, creating a new and more centralized polity. While all but one of the first dozen amendments to the Constitution had limited the authority of the federal government, “six of the next seven, beginning with the Thirteenth . . . in 1865, vastly expanded those powers at the expense of the states.”2 Finally, the Great Depression dramatically accelerated this trend; that searing ordeal, and the New Deal’s response to it, “purged the American people of their belief in the limited powers of the federal government and convinced them of the necessity of the guarantor state.”3 In focusing on the second of these epochs, this book offers the first, and to date only, detailed and systematic study of the delegates who attended the “Black and Tan” conventions. (“Black and Tan,” referring to blacks and mixed-race delegates, was an invidious moniker given to the conventions by unreconstructed southern whites. We have decided to use the term, primarily for the sake of convenience, as there is no other term for these conventions that is as concise. At the time of the conventions the term was used pejoratively, but the racist implications are now only a faded historical relic.) The documents drafted by these conventions , even in the face of vigorous conservative opposition, were obligatory to the restoration of civilian authority in the ten former Confederate states under military rule in March 1867. Framed over a fifteen-month period from early November 1867 through early February 2 blacks, carpetbaggers, and scalawags 1869, these constitutions—produced by radical new political coalitions of scalawags, carpetbaggers , and the first blacks ever elected to public office—established the radical southern Reconstruction-era state governments. This systematic examination of the activities of these delegates responsible for this noteworthy achievement thus offers precise insights into the ideologies and aspirations of these often obscure delegate-politicians (whether voting as radicals, conservatives, or swing voters) as Republicans assumed control of nearly all of the former Confederate states following the brief postwar interlude of a failed Presidential Reconstruction. In framing these new constitutions, southern Republicans strove to achieve a multifaceted and ambitious reform agenda: enfranchisement of the freedmen, augmentation of the power and authority of state governments, sizable expansion of state-funded services such as public education, restoration of the region’s infrastructure, and rebuilding and modernizing its economy. Although some of these objectives were achieved, many of the reforms were short lived. Republicans were soon routed throughout the South. Constitutionally their fall was symbolized poignantly over a three-decade period—beginning in Arkansas in 1874 and concluding in Virginia in 1902—a period during which each Black and Tan constitution was replaced by another framed by “redeemers” hostile to Reconstruction. Ideals of racial equality, however, remained dormant throughout the South for decades. They reawakened dramatically during the “Second Reconstruction” of the 1950s and 1960s, a time in which the South underwent fundamental social and political transformations, acquiescing and finally to some extent even embracing much of its long-abeyant Reconstruction heritage. The focus of this study is the 1860s—when military victory secured national survival, and Congressional Reconstruction promised a new birth of freedom. These years witnessed the most active period of constitution writing in American history. During the 1770s, twelve states framed thirteen constitutions. This activity continued on a lesser scale throughout the remainder of the eighteenth century; five state constitutions were drafted from 1781 to 1790 and six more between 1791 and 1801. Though troubled by both economic crisis at home and military threat abroad, the two-decade period of 1920–40 saw only one new constitution, Louisiana ’s in 1921.4 In contrast, 32 new...

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