On May 10, 1865, thirty-two years after the American Anti-Slavery Society was founded, its members packed the Church of the Puritans in New York.
It had been quite a month. Four weeks earlier, the Confederate general Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox Court House, marking the beginning of the end of the Civil War. Six days after that, during a performance at Ford’s Theatre, a stage actor named John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln, the president of the United States. Now thousands of abolitionists who had been on the front lines of this fight—who had barnstormed the country delivering lectures on the evils of slavery; who had stood strong in the face of mob violence; who had mourned the loss of their compatriots to a house divided against itself—were faced with a question: Where do we go from here?
In some ways, they had already exceeded their loftiest expectations. In a matter of decades, they had awakened the conscience of a nation—and helped usher in the end of the most evil chapter in the history of the United States. With this progress in mind, William Lloyd Garrison, the American Anti-Slavery Society’s founder, brought forward a resolution to dissolve the organization entirely. “Rejoicing with joy unspeakable that the year of jubilee has come, so that further anti-slavery agitation is uncalled for,” he wrote, “we close the operation and the existence of this society.”
He continued: “My vocation as an Abolitionist, thank God, is ended.”
No one denied that Garrison had earned his rest: For a quarter of a century, he had done as much as anyone to lead the movement. But his partner in this fight, Frederick Douglass, saw things differently. Unlike Garrison, Douglass had actually lived through the horrors of slavery—separated from his mother, beaten by his overseer, barred from learning how to read—yet he did not believe the days following the Civil War were a moment to celebrate how far America had come. He believed it was a moment to recognize how much further we still had to go.
“Slavery is not abolished,” he explained, “until the black man has the ballot.”
African Americans, Douglass had argued in a speech earlier that year, had been treated as citizens whenever “this nation was in trouble.” They had been forced to fight in the Revolutionary War, they had taken up arms during the War of 1812, and they had just played a key role in quelling the now defeated Great Rebellion. Every time America had needed their help, as we would see over and over again in the future, African Americans had answered the call, raising the question: “Shall we be citizens in war, and aliens in peace? Would that be just?” For Douglass, the answer was an unequivocal no.
“Here where universal suffrage is the rule, where that is the fundamental idea of the Government,” he said, “to rule us out is to make us an exception, to brand us with the stigma of inferiority, and to invite to our heads the missiles of those about us.”
That is why, at the convention in New York, he argued that slavery would never truly be abolished until Black Americans had the vote. And, at the end of the day, his fellow members agreed, rejecting Garrison’s resolution to disband the Anti-Slavery Society and instead adopting a new motto:
“No Reconstruction Without Negro Suffrage.”
If you’re from my generation, basically everything you were taught about Reconstruction was wrong.
And that was intentional.
I bet you, like me, were told that it didn’t work; that the North was too slow to welcome the South back to the Union; that Republicans advocating for universal suffrage were radical; that the African Americans who were elected after the Civil War were incompetent—to the extent that they were mentioned at all. And that’s because, for half a century, members of the press and historians were committed to promulgating that narrative.
These Lost Cause propagandists called African American legislatures “monkey houses.” They lied about whether African Americans in Congress could read and claimed—falsely—that they didn’t pay their taxes. In some cases, the names of Black officials weren’t even included in public records, because, as one Democrat wrote, “it would be absurd to record the lives of men who were but yesterday our slaves.” In D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, one of the early twentieth century’s highest-grossing films, Black elected officials during Reconstruction were portrayed as alcoholics who drank on the floor of Congress. It was nothing short of a coordinated attempt to erase the period in American history when our country saw the beginnings of a multiracial democracy—when, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
But in recent decades, a new generation of historians, building on the work of Du Bois’s groundbreaking Black Reconstruction, and led by Eric Foner, my former professor at Columbia, have looked back on Reconstruction and discovered a fundamentally different story—the true one—a story at once more brutal and more hopeful than the one most of us were taught growing up.
The years following the Civil War were indeed full of bloodshed—defined, in no small part, by the rise of white supremacists, the growth of the Ku Klux Klan, and the macabre massacres these racists perpetrated. But these years also opened America’s eyes to the possibility of making the vision of a multiracial democracy a reality. And in so many ways, Reconstruction was a success.
In just over a decade following the end of the Civil War, close to two thousand African Americans held elected office—serving in city halls, governor’s mansions, and even Congress. There were Black mayors, Black sheriffs, Black senators. And they used that power to make a difference, persisting in the face of death threats to advocate for workers, reform the criminal justice system, and most important, increase access to education.
As Du Bois wrote, “The first great mass movement for public education at the expense of the state, in the South, came from Negroes.” It paid off: Within years, public school enrollment among Black Americans skyrocketed from 91,000 to 572,000, as illiteracy was cut almost in half. And poor whites benefited from this expansion to the social safety net as well.
Through reforms like these, Black Americans proved that the outcome of the Civil War wasn’t meaningful only because it brought an end to the institution of slavery. It was also meaningful because it helped America realize its promise as a democracy—and demonstrated that government can be a force for positive change when it reflects the will of all the people.
Of course, the story of Reconstruction doesn’t have a happy ending. Eventually, the rebirth of American democracy was aborted, as lynchings in the South and abandonment by the North allowed white supremacy to once again rule the land. But this doesn’t mean that what happened in America in the years following the Civil War didn’t matter. To the contrary—it couldn’t be more important.
That’s because Reconstruction, perhaps more than any period in the history of America, is proof that the moral arc of the universe isn’t truly predestined to bend in any one direction. Our country moves forward and backward. We grant rights and then take them away. If you don’t hold on to the progress you’ve made—if you don’t remain vigilant in defending it—it will be reversed. That is the lesson of Reconstruction. And as we are faced with a new wave of attacks on our democracy, the only question is whether we will repeat the mistakes of our past or learn from them.
When Douglass, Garrison, and the rest of the American Anti-Slavery Society met at the Church of the Puritans, our country was in a liminal moment—the brief period between the end of the Civil War and the expansion of suffrage to Black Americans. It was a precarious time. Because it wasn’t clear whether those who had earned their freedom would also earn the vote.
After all, before the war, even in the North, African Americans had only been allowed to cast ballots in a total of five states. And across the country, initiatives aimed at expanding the franchise were rejected over and over again, including in states led by Republicans like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Connecticut—back when the Republican Party was the party of voting rights.
Even after the war, in the eyes of President Andrew Johnson, Republicans who supported expanding access to the ballot represented a “radical and fanatical element” of Americans. And unlike President Lincoln, who had believed in Black suffrage—though he supported it only for “the very intelligent” and “those who serve our cause as soldiers”—Johnson had no intention of making it easier for any Black Americans to vote. He wanted a “white man’s government.” Plain and simple.
And he had violence on his side. When Black Americans in New Orleans organized a convention in favor of suffrage in 1866, thirty-four of the attendees and their supporters were murdered. And over the following twenty-four months, according to Yale professor David Blight, a full 10 percent of folks who went to similar conventions across the country were assaulted.
Despite these threats, there were people in positions of power who believed Black Americans had earned the right to vote through their service during the Civil War. This included Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, who promised that “when the fight is over the hand that drops the musket cannot be denied the ballot.” And Republicans in Congress, led by abolitionists like Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips, were dead set on finding a way to follow through on this commitment.
The first step in this process was ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment, which enshrined the term “right to vote” in our nation’s founding document—even if that right wasn’t yet a reality—and established “equal protection of the laws” for all Americans, ensuring no state could “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process.” In a country where slavery had persisted for centuries, in a document that condoned this original sin, this was a monumental breakthrough.
The problem, though, as Keyssar writes in The Right to Vote, was that nowhere in the amendment did the Constitution mandate that states expand access to suffrage, which was why Wendell Phillips called it “a fatal and total surrender.”
This is where the Reconstruction Act of 1867 came into the picture. Designed to set the terms for how Confederate states could regain entrance to the union, the law required that they enfranchise Black Americans. It also mandated that they allow the federal government to deploy troops to their region—and that they ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. This didn’t come without backlash. Alabama, for instance, signed a petition saying Black voters would “bring, to the great injury of themselves as well as of us and our children, blight, crime, ruin and barbarism on this fair land.” Over time, though, and through the intervention of the federal government, even in the deepest, bleakest, most discriminatory corners of the Confederacy, Black Americans gained access to the ballot—and over a period of two years, the percentage of Black men in the South eligible to register to vote rose from less than 1 percent to more than 80 percent.
This set the stage for what Eric Foner calls “The Second Founding” in his landmark work of the same name, as thousands of Black voters flocked to the polls, ran for office, and changed the face of American democracy. In South Carolina, for instance, more than three hundred Black Americans ended up serving in government during Reconstruction. They included heroes of the Civil War like Robert Smalls, a former enslaved person who went undercover and stole a Confederate ship, before sparking a movement to integrate public transportation in Pennsylvania as a free man and eventually becoming a congressman.
The election of officials like Smalls—as well as Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, the first two African American Senators—was powered by the tens of thousands of Black Americans who were registered to vote by the Freedmen’s Bureau, a department of the federal government established by President Lincoln to aid former slaves in their transition to freedom; and by grassroots organizations like the Union Leagues, which devoted themselves to building Black political power.
For the millions of Americans who had been freed, declining to exercise this right they had fought so hard to obtain wasn’t an option. As a reporter on the ground in Alabama on Election Day 1868 wrote, “In defiance of fatigue, hardship, hunger, and threats of employers,” as well as a “pitiless storm,” Black voter after Black voter waited in line barefoot so they could make their voices heard. They embodied the idea John Lewis would capture a century later, when he was known to say, “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.”
But as the participation of Black Americans in elections increased, so too did the brutality they endured. Beginning in 1869, the Ku Klux Klan—a terrorist organization founded in large part by middle-class Confederate veterans—began murdering Black Americans en masse. Their goal, as Emanuel Fortune, a former enslaved person who became a member of the Florida Constitutional Convention, explained, was to “kill out the leading men of the Republican party.” On block after block, in town after town, they would assassinate Black Americans who dared to participate in democracy, from North Carolina, where they killed thirty Black political leaders, to Mississippi, where they mutilated and murdered Jack Dupree, a Republican organizer, in front of his wife and children for being “known as a man who would speak his mind,” to South Carolina, where they killed minister Benjamin Randolph for the “crime” of campaigning, even though his right to do so was protected by the Constitution of the United States.
Adding to the horror, after most killings like these, the perpetrators would be exonerated in court—or never tried—and wouldn’t have to serve even a night behind bars, in no small part because many of the attacks took place with the tacit approval, or in some cases willing participation, of law enforcement.
This is the democracy Ulysses S. Grant inherited in 1869 when he took the oath of office after around half a million Black Americans helped elect him president of the United States—a democracy where Black Americans had the right to vote according to the law, but, in so many places, could not exercise it without putting their lives on the line. Against this backdrop, President Grant had two priorities: One, a Fifteenth Amendment, which would build on the Thirteenth and Fourteenth by expanding Black suffrage to every state in the union; and two, an Enforcement Act aimed at cracking down on the Ku Klux Klan, so its members could be prosecuted by the federal government.
How, exactly, the Fifteenth Amendment would guarantee the right to vote remained to be seen—and, as Alexander Keyssar describes in The Right to Vote, there was no shortage of drafts.
The first was produced by Representative George Boutwell of Massachusetts. It was written to be narrow, with the goal, simply, of making sure no one could be denied access to the ballot “by reason of race, color, or previous condition of slavery.” There were more radical drafts, too, including one by Samuel Shellabarger of Ohio that, as Keyssar explains, would have also barred “property, tax, nativity, and literacy requirements.”
Unfortunately, more representatives ended up siding with Boutwell—afraid that broader language would lead to the enfranchisement of too many Americans, from Chinese workers in the West to European immigrants in the North. That’s because, regardless of what the Fourteenth Amendment said, America still didn’t actually view the vote as a universal right. They viewed it as a privilege, one Congress hadn’t even considered bestowing on women.
The Senate’s debate on the Fifteenth Amendment followed a similar script. Like Boutwell in the House, Senator William Morris Stewart of Nevada believed that passing an amendment was essential but he didn’t want it to be too sweeping. On the other side was Henry Wilson, an ardent abolitionist from Massachusetts who believed Congress had a duty to give “to all citizens equal rights, and then protect everybody in the United States in the exercise of those rights.” That meant enfranchising not only Black Americans but also immigrants—and making sure states couldn’t enact literacy tests.
He made a persuasive case, but it was eventually rejected—not only by racist senators like James Doolittle from Wisconsin, who claimed African Americans were “incompetent to vote,” and James Bayard, Jr., from Delaware, who called Black Americans “an inferior” and “more animal” race, but also by mainstream institutions like The New York Times. “The country is not prepared,” wrote their editorial board.
Nonetheless, the language Wilson had put together made its way through the Senate, leaving the task of reconciling the House and Senate versions of the amendment up to a committee of members from both chambers. And in the end, on February 26, 1869, the moderates—if you can call people who didn’t believe in universal suffrage “moderates”—won out, with the final language hewing closely to Boutwell’s draft. It read:
Section I: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section II: The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
For so-called Radical Republicans, who were actually the reasonable ones, this was an outrage—with Wilson calling the draft “lame and halting,” fearing that it would do nothing to stop former Confederate states from implementing literacy tests, poll taxes, and other forms of voter suppression. But across the country, the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment was met with jubilation. Frederick Douglass declared that Black Americans had finally been “placed upon an equal footing with all other men.” Wendell Phillips called the amendment “the grandest and most Christian act ever contemplated or accomplished by any nation.” William Lloyd Garrison said that “nothing in all of history” could compare to “the wonderful, quiet, sudden transformation of four million human beings from the auction-block to the ballot-box.”
Building on this progress, through the Enforcement Acts, Congress set out to make sure the Fifteenth Amendment would be put into practice across the country—without interference from the Ku Klux Klan. One of the biggest advocates of these laws was Robert Brown Elliott, a Black American elected to Congress from South Carolina. On the floor of the House, he lambasted the “pitiless and cowardly persecution” of his people. “It is the custom of democratic journals to stigmatize the Negroes of the South as being barbarous,” he explained. “But gentlemen, tell me, who is the barbarian here?” His argument won out—and between 1870 and 1871, Congress passed three Enforcement Acts aimed at ridding America of the scourge of the Ku Klux Klan.
For the first few years, this legislation was successful, as thousands of members of the Klan were prosecuted. And for a moment, American democracy seemed like it was going to continue to expand, as seven hundred thousand Black Americans registered to vote in the years following the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. But as more time passed after the Civil War, the federal government’s will to continue the hard work of Reconstruction eroded.
For one thing, there was an economic crisis to worry about, as the Panic of 1873 led to devastation across the country—and seeded a lack of faith in the Republican Party. Reconstruction was also hampered by a series of conservative, reactionary, reckless Supreme Court decisions that, as one dissenting justice wrote, reduced the Fourteenth Amendment to a “vain and idle enactment.” In U.S. v. Cruikshank, the court went as far as to reverse the convictions of Ku Klux Klan members who had led an Easter Day massacre of Black Americans fighting for their voting rights in Louisiana, rendering the Enforcement Acts null and void. With these decisions, the court determined that only states, not the federal government, could prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan for murder—states, mind you, that had led an insurrection in defense of slavery less than a decade earlier. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that there were fewer than 10 percent as many prosecutions under the Enforcement Acts at the end of the decade than there were at the beginning.
From this moment forward, as a Republican newspaper wrote, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had become “dead letters,” and the federal government was left to implement a “let-alone policy,” refusing to hold former Confederate states accountable for violations of voting rights. This led to the reintroduction of an American apartheid, as white Democrats regained complete control of their legislatures and waged destruction and violence against those trying to exercise their hard-won right to participate in our democracy.
As Adelbert Ames, a senator from Mississippi—a state where Republican leaders had been murdered, voters’ lives had been threatened, and ballot boxes in Black neighborhoods had been destroyed—lamented: “A revolution has taken place—by force of arms—and a race are disenfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom.”
We were on the verge, Ames said, of “an era of second slavery.” And while he wasn’t precisely right—slavery as a de jure institution never came back, even as, in the words of historian Douglas Blackmon, “slavery by another name” surely returned—he was correct that the period of Reconstruction, the decade during which America had tried, in fits and starts, to expand the tent of its democracy, was over.
With the presidential election of 1876, it became official. Before taking office, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had a lead in the Electoral College, faced a rebellion in Congress not unlike the one led by Republicans following Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. Only this time it was Democrats who refused to certify the victor—and perhaps because unlike Trump, their candidate, Samuel Tilden, had actually won the popular vote, their protest proved more successful, leaving the country without a president-elect two days before the inauguration was set to take place.
With time running out and the integrity of America’s elections at stake, Hayes agreed to a compromise: In exchange for the Southern electoral votes he needed to secure a majority, he would pull the remaining U.S. troops out of the former Confederacy—conceding that the federal government would no longer even try to protect the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. And the South wasted no time taking advantage of this opportunity.
Within months, Georgia implemented a poll tax—and during the next election, only 10,000 of the state’s 369,511 eligible Black voters were able to register. “We are in a majority here,” one Black man said, “but you may vote till your eyes drop out or your tongue drops out, and you can’t count your colored man in out of them boxes; there’s a hole gets in the bottom of the boxes some way and lets out our votes.” Similar laws were enacted in Tennessee and Virginia, where a representative at their constitutional convention admitted that “the great underlying principle” of the Democratic Party was “the elimination of the negro from the politics of this state.”
The goal, according to another delegate, was “to discriminate to the very extremity of permissible action under the limitations of the Federal Constitution, with a view to the elimination of every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.”
Take a moment to think about the significance of this: As is the case today, even in the era following Reconstruction—even in the capital of the Confederacy—voter suppression was implemented surgically, enacted not with explicit bans on voting by African Americans that would have violated the Fifteenth Amendment but with laws that took advantage of its ambiguities, the same ambiguities Republicans like Samuel Shellabarger and Henry Wilson had warned about when it was being debated on the floor of Congress.
And in 1890, Mississippi wrote the playbook for how to block African Americans from voting almost entirely. Through a “dizzying array of poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, newfangled voter registration rules,” as Carol Anderson writes in One Person, No Vote, Mississippi managed to rebuild a democracy not much different from the one it had before the Civil War—a democracy in which registrars could force Black Americans to correctly answer unanswerable questions like “How many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?” before allowing them to vote while asking their white counterparts no such questions. (These were called literacy tests, even though these kinds of interrogations didn’t, of course, only test literacy, which itself would have been discriminatory, since so many Black Americans had been banned from learning how to read during slavery.)
As Anderson explains, all these policies, like the voter suppression laws of today, were “dressed up in the genteel garb of bringing integrity to the voting booth,” even though they were designed to be racially discriminatory. “This feigned legal innocence,” she writes, “was legislative evil genius.”
The numbers spoke for themselves: After the Mississippi plan was implemented, of the 147,000 Black Americans who should have been eligible to vote in the state, only 9,000 were registered. In Louisiana, where similar policies had been enacted, the numbers were even starker, with under 1 percent of eligible Black voters registered.
The same held true across the former Confederacy, including in South Carolina, where suddenly, elected officials like Robert Brown Elliott, the congressman who had spoken so eloquently in favor of the Enforcement Acts, no longer stood a chance at winning elections. And the Black power that had been built in the state over the prior decade was vanquished. Indeed, across the South, with only a few exceptions, Black Americans were shut out of elected office for close to one hundred years—until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law.
For this reason, as the turn of the nineteenth century approached, the hope that had animated abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass at the American Anti-Slavery Society, and the belief that the Fifteenth Amendment would bring about equality under the law, felt like a distant memory. And over the decades that followed, with the proliferation of segregation and the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, the multiracial democracy that had been promised at the dawn of Reconstruction—and had had a moment in the sun in the diverse legislatures of states like South Carolina—once again grew further and further out of reach, erased from the history books as though it had never even happened.
But it did happen. And that matters. It matters that there was a time in American history when Black Americans were represented in governments across the nation—and used that power to make a difference for their communities. It matters because of the schools they funded, because of the reforms they implemented, and because of the legacy they left behind, a legacy whispered about by future generations of Black Americans, who were told by their elders that people who looked like them had once stood in the halls of power; and that they, too, could one day occupy the highest offices in the land.
And it matters that this period of American history when anything felt possible was extinguished—not by any one bad actor but by the failure of an entire nation to follow through on its promise to build a system of government where all our voices would be heard and all our votes would be counted. It matters because it’s a reminder that our democracy is precious and that its condition is precarious—perfected one decade, poisoned the next, if you’re not paying attention.
It’s easy, more than a century after Reconstruction, to see all this as ancient history—and as the first African American attorney general of the United States, you won’t find me denying that our democracy has made progress that was once unimaginable; to do so would dishonor the memory, sacrifice, and courage of those who came before me and made my success possible. But I am also a Black man in America, whose grandmother was born in 1870, so the recency of all this, the trauma passed down through the generations, lives inside me, too. Indeed, it lives in the psyches and hearts of all Black Americans.
And that matters as well. Because the only way we’re going to save our democracy is if we recognize its fragility—and if we remember how quickly the gains we have made can be taken from us before our very eyes.