"Renegade Negro" in the hands of the Klan. The Birth of a Nation, 1915. Source: Museum of Modern Art, Film Stills Archive.

In 1867, a Congress bent upon revenge placed Southern states under a military dictatorship. That Congress imposed government manned by outsiders (carpetbaggers), turncoat Southern whites (scalawags), and their ignorant Negro allies, once slaves, now freedmen. For the next ten years, alien governments looted the South, impoverished Southerners with high taxes, spread a reign of corruption and terror. This era of hatred finally came to an end in 1877 when the Democratic Party of the South, composed of virtuous white Southerners, once again won local elections and took control of their own destiny.

Like all myths, there was some truth to this one. There were Union armies in parts of the South. There was corruption in some Southern state governments. There were black officeholders holding state office in several Southern states, most notably in South Carolina. But, even in South Carolina, black state officeholders did not control or dominate politics. There were rises in taxes in a number of Southern states in the late 1860s and the early 1870s. But, a more balanced picture will give us a better sense of both the nature of the myth-making process and of the realities of our historical experience.

First, what about military dictatorship for a decade? In most wars that we know about, there have been mass arrests, convictions, imprisonments, executions. What happened to the members of the Confederate army? The common soldiers were simply required to take a straightforward oath of allegiance to the Union henceforth. They were pardoned and sent home with the rights to vote and to hold office restored. All the officers, except one, were paroled and sent home with their men. The one officer arrested, tried, and executed for war crimes was Captain Henry Wirtz, the commandant of Andersonville prison, a prisoner of war camp for Union soldiers captured in battle. What about the Confederate civil leaders? A handful were arrested; none was ever brought to trial. All but one, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, were released in a few months. Davis stayed in prison for two years and was released. With the exception of their former slaves, the property of the civil officers was restored to them. The only disability that most suffered at all was a restriction of their rights to vote and hold office. But, even this did not last long. By 1872, all but a handful of the Confederate civil officers were pardoned. By the early 1870s, that is five, six, seven years after war's end, most of the governors of Southern states, many of the members of Congress, had, but a few short years before, been Confederate officers either in the Confederate armies or in state government.

Under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 the South was divided into five military districts. Union forces were to remain in those districts to oversee registration of voters and election of new state governments. But, due to rapid demobilization, there was only a skeleton military force left throughout the states of the old Confederacy. From Virginia throughout the rest of the South, there were only 20,000 troops. Of those, 7,000 were located just in Louisiana and Texas, not to oversee Reconstruction but to provide a defensive force against Native Americans. By 1868, military rule ended in all Southern states except for Virginia, Texas, and Mississippi. In those states, military occupation ended by 1869 or 1870.