RECONSTRUCTION
Research & Resources
RECONSTRUCTION: 1865-1875
During Reconstruction, Ten nessee was at the forefront of political and social change; as a result, the state also experienced the backlash against the stunning transformations that took place during the war and its aftermath. Slavery was legally abolished in Tennessee even before the war officially ended. Early in April 1865, the Tennessee General Assembly unanimously ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. During the Reconstruction period, Tennessee’s former slaves continued the transition to freedom that had begun during the war, establishing communities outside of the rule of slavery. They created churches, cemeteries, and schools, including the First Beale Street Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee’s oldest surviving African-American church edifice, and Jubilee Hall of Fisk University in Nashville, the nation’s first permanent building for the higher education of black citizens. Black Tennesseans also commemorated their new status by holding annual, public Emancipation Day celebrations in communities throughout the state.
In 1866, Tennessee became the first former Confederate state to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which specified that no state should “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law,” and shortly thereafter Tennessee became the first former Confederate state to return to the Union. African-American men gained the franchise in 1867, two full years before Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment. A small number of black Tennesseans took positions in local and state government, including Sampson W. Keeble, a Nashville barber who in 1872 became the first black citizen elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives.
From 1865 to 1872, many former slaves in Tennessee took advantage of local offices of the Freedmen's Bureau, created by Congress to help manage the transition from slavery to freedom. The Bureau administered schools, negotiated labor contracts between ex-slaves and white employers, provided legal advice to freedpeople, and organized such institutions as hospitals, orphanages, and elderly homes. Because it was poorly funded, the Bureau’s effectiveness was limited. Conflict also arose between Bureau agents who were intent on restoring order and former slaves who were dedicated to ensuring that freedom differed significantly from slavery.
In response to the assertive efforts of black Tennesseans to take full advantage of their new civil rights, many of these rights were stripped from African Americans before they could fully be exercised. State legislators wrote a “poll tax” clause into the new state constitution of 1870, and although this clause was repealed three years later, legislators would reactivate it in 1890. Violence characterized countless individual interactions between whites and blacks, especially disputes between employers and their workers. Late in 1865, the Ku Klux Klan, one of several emerging vigilante groups, was organized in Pulaski, Tennessee, to promote the political ambitions of former Confederate soldiers through the intimidation of black residents. In May 1866, race riots erupted in Memphis over a three-day period and resulted in the deaths of 46 blacks and 2 whites, among other outrages.
In the midst of this racial unrest, Tennesseans worked to rebuild their towns, transportation systems, and farms. The national economic depression of the early 1870s only made these postwar economic challenges more difficult. Wartime destruction, emancipation, and a lack of capital resulted in the bankruptcy and breakup of antebellum plantations. The result was a system of sharecropping for the cultivation of cotton and tobacco. New industries, funded by Northern capital, developed around the extraction of natural resources. The timber and mining industries provided jobs but did not create a lot of wealth for Tennesseans. While Tennessee would remain a predominantly rural and agricultural state, the state would see steady growth of its towns and cities.
As Tennesseans struggled to come to terms with upheaval within the state, one of their own grappled with change on the national scene. After the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865, East Tennessean Andrew Johnson had inherited an atmosphere of confusion and political turmoil. Weighing the options for the restoration of the Union, Johnson was soon waging his own war with Congress. Johnson, who had become increasingly sympathetic toward the South’s wealthy landowners whom he had once denounced, opposed the plans of the Radical Republicans in Congress. Impeached by the House of Representatives, Johnson was acquitted by the Senate by one vote.
To visit sites in Tennessee associated with Reconstruction, see our guide Tennessee's Reconstruction Past: A Driving Tour.
LEGACIES: 1870-1930
The devastation of the Civil War deeply penetrated the consciousness of nineteenth-century Americans, as did the transformation of the United States into a country where all persons were free. The legacies of these powerful experiences have left a strong imprint on Tennessee's landscape.
Even as the war continued, efforts began to commemorate the soldiers who had died on the battlefield in Tennessee. The Hazen Monument, erected by Union soldiers at the site of the Battle of Stones River in Murfreesboro in 1863, remains the oldest intact monument in the nation dedicated to the fallen of the Civil War. Also during the war, newly freed slaves in cities and towns began the public commemoration of emancipation by holding Emancipation Day celebrations in town squares. During the early postwar years, women spearheaded efforts by former Confederate supporters to mark the graves of the Confederate dead.
As time passed, and as the economy improved in the state, commemorative activities became increasingly elaborate and politicized. Tennesseans honored both the Confederate and Union dead through the creation of state and national military parks and the erection of monuments near county courthouses. Residents created new institutions to venerate Tennessee's Civil War heritage, including state and local branches of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Grand Army of the Republic, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Veterans’ homes and other institutions provided medical care and retirement services for former Union and Confederate soldiers. Educational institutions memorialized the war by changing their names to reflect army leadership.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, East Tennesseans sought to commemorate their Unionist past. Upon the death of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1885, East Tennessee Wesleyan College, known today as Tennessee Wesleyan College in Athens, changed its name to Grant Memorial University. In 1897, Lincoln Memorial University was founded in Claiborne County by a local minister, his wife, and the former head of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The U.S. government rewarded East Tennessee for its Unionism as late as 1903, with the establishment of the United States Soldiers’ Home (later known as Mountain Home) near Johnson City in Washington County.
The racial divisions that had characterized the Reconstruction period continued into the late nineteenth century, evolving into a rigid system of racial segregation throughout the former Confederacy by early in the twentieth century. In Tennessee and elsewhere, rail and streetcar lines were some of the first places transformed by segregationist laws. Racial violence also became entrenched, as ritualistic lynchings spread fear throughout black communities in Tennessee.
The Civil War and Reconstruction affected every county in Tennessee and the legacies of these events can be traced through the music, art, and stories that remain with Tennesseans today. Museums display artifacts, paintings, and documents from the Civil War and Reconstruction period. Thousands of people from around the country travel to Tennessee to research and study the war, re-enact the battles, visit Civil War-era sites, and pay their respects to those who fought and died here.