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Blacks During Reconstruction

© Kathryn Morse

Before the Civil War, slavery advocates insisted that slavery was the only condition in which blacks could be happy. They maintained that the blacks of the South were the happiest people in the world and they would be miserable if they were set free to contend for themselves.

After the Civil War, the Louisiana white ruling class, intended to maintain the pre-war living and working conditions of blacks. Cheap and docile labor was needed on cotton and sugar plantations. Even though the slaves were now free, most whites did not change their views that blacks were inferior intellectually and morally and it was the right of whites to dominate their lives.

A sharecropping system was developed and employed former slaves and poor whites to work plots of land owned by a landlord. The landlord provided land, a house, work animals, tools and seed. At the end of harvest the crop was divided between the landlord and the sharecropper.

Before the harvest, the sharecropper could feed and clothe his family on credit from stores owned by the landlord. So even in years of good harvests, many families would be left destitute after their debt to the store was paid.

The Louisiana legislature passed laws that "bound" a sharecropper to his landlord until all debts were paid. Because of the inflated prices at the plantation stores, many sharecropper families never got out of debt and remained virtual slaves.

The constitution of 1879 provided for a public school system for both whites and blacks. However, the school system was inadequately funded. Louisiana blacks had an illiteracy rate of over 70 percent for decades.

During Reconstruction blacks were registered to vote. And for awhile, registered black voters outnumbered white voters. This situation presented a challenge to the white ruling class who did not want blacks to vote, but who also did not want to antagonize the federal government and cause more federal intervention in Louisiana affairs. Whites manipulated the voting system through voting commissioners who filed false results, and thereby, controlled election outcomes. This was easy to do because of the high illiteracy rate.

In general, the conditions of blacks did not improve after the Civil War. The sharecropping system replaced slavery, effectively binding a family to a landlord rather than an owner. Schools were inadequately funded severely limited educational opportunities and voting was manipulated to benefit the white ruling class.

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