History of Tennessee - Reconstruction and Jim Crow

Reconstruction and Jim Crow

After the war, Tennessee adopted a constitutional amendment forbidding property in men February 22, 1865; ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on July 18, 1866; and was the first state readmitted to the Union on July 24, 1866.

Because it ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, Tennessee was the only state that seceded from the Union that did not have a military governor during Reconstruction.

As in most Southern states, many white citizens had not accepted the results of the Civil War. Reactions have to be seen against an environment of wholesale shifts in power, and no group gives up power willingly. Many whites had not changed their thinking about allowing freedmen full citizenship and the exercise of suffrage. They had deprived blacks of education and come to believe the African Americans could not learn. Tensions ranged from fear of competition with blacks for jobs in East Tennessee, to concerns by planters in Middle and West Tennessee about being able to get enough labor for their farms. Often they did not think African Americans would work without coercion.

On January 4, 1868, the Nashville Republican Banner published an editorial calling for a revolutionary movement of white Southerners to unseat the one-party state rule of the Republican Party and restore the racial subjugation of the region's blacks. "In this State," the paper argued, "reconstruction has perfected itself and done its worst. It has organized a government which is as complete a closed corporation as may be found; it has placed the black man over the white as the agent and prime-move of domination; it has constructed a system of machinery by which all free guarantees, privileges and opportunities are removed from the people.... The impossibility of casting a free vote in Tennessee short of a revolutionary movement ... is an undoubted fact."

In fact there were only two or three African Americans in the Tennessee legislature during Reconstruction. Others served as state and city officers. Even with increased participation on the Nashville City Council, African Americans held only one-third of the seats.

Whites thus clearly continued to control the state during Reconstruction. In his race for Congress in 1872, Andrew Johnson addressed African Americans in speaking campaigns in western counties, saying, "If fit and qualified by character and education, no one should deny you the ballot." If the freedmen had generally been "fit by education", they would have been more fit than many poor whites, who could not pass educational requirements, either, and were also later disenfranchised.

In the 1870s, white elites worked to reclaim political power, using paramilitary groups against freedmen and their allies to terrorize them, suppress voting, and control labor. White Democrats regained power.

In 1889 the Tennessee General Assembly passed four acts of self-described electoral reform that resulted in the disenfranchisement of a significant portion of African American voters as well as many poor white voters. The timing of the legislation resulted from a unique opportunity seized by the Democratic Party to bring an end to what one historian described as the most "consistently competitive political system in the South."

In the political campaign of 1888, the Democrats waged a battle unparalleled in corruption and violence to gain quorum control over both houses of the legislature. With Republicans unable to stall or defeat antiparty measures, the disenfranchising acts sailed through the 1889 general assembly, and Governor Robert L. Taylor signed them into law. Hailed by newspaper editors as the end of black voting, the laws worked as expected, and African American voting declined precipitously in rural and small town Tennessee. Many urban blacks continued to vote until so-called progressive reforms eliminated their political power in the early twentieth century.

The white, elite-dominated legislature thus had the power to add more Jim Crow laws and establish state segregation with provisions that would last until the mid-20th century. Disenfranchising provisions worked against poor whites as well as blacks for decades. Tennessee became a white-dominated state, with the Democratic Party in power in the Middle and Western sections; the Eastern section retained Republican support based on its Unionist leanings before and during the war.