As we mark Juneteenth today — the day in 1865 when Union troops under Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston to enforce emancipation in Texas1 — it’s worth asking: What could America have become if Reconstruction hadn’t been sabotaged from the start?
I’ve become deeply interested in the Reconstruction era over the past few years. When I was in school in Texas, Reconstruction was barely taught in our American history courses. And what little we were taught largely echoed the “Lost Cause” narrative, framing Reconstruction as a period of Northern misrule symbolized by corrupt carpetbaggers and inept governance. I suspect the story is still largely skimmed over.
Reconstruction was meant to be a national rebirth after centuries of slavery and four years of bloody civil war. Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865, briefly opened a window when it seemed possible the country might remake itself into a multiracial democracy. But that possibility was derailed early, helped along by a disastrous political choice: Abraham Lincoln’s decision to replace Vice President Hannibal Hamlin with Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat from Tennessee who had remained loyal to the Union but was an unapologetic white supremacist. The switch was made in the name of national “unity” for the 1864 ticket.
It was one of the biggest mistakes in American history. We can never know how Hamlin might have governed after Lincoln’s assassination on April 15, 1865, but we do know what Johnson did. His “restoration” policies immediately began to unravel the fragile gains of emancipation. He gave power back to former Confederate leaders, many of whom should have been put on trial for treason, and favored the protection of wealthy plantation owners over redistributing land to freed people. He overturned Gen. William Sherman’s famous “40 acres and a mule” orders. The effort to rebuild America under “a new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln imagined at Gettysburg, never fully recovered.
Donald Trump is doing his best to seize the title of worst president ever, and figures like James Buchanan, Warren Harding, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush all have their claims. But Andrew Johnson remains secure, for now, at the bottom of most presidential rankings.
Eventually, congressional Republicans managed to wrest control from Johnson, impeaching him but failing to convict him by a single vote. They pursued a different vision, creating a promising glimpse of what a just America might have looked like. But violent white backlash and the rise of so-called Redeemer governments in the South and Northern fatigue over a long, messy struggle for racial justice crushed that vision.
The Compromise of 1877 resolved the contested 1876 election in favor of Republican Rutherford Hayes in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction. The federal government and much of the North simply walked away. A century of Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement and racial terror followed. Reconstruction gave way to an American apartheid.
Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom. It’s also a reminder of a lost promise. It’s a reminder that emancipation alone didn’t secure justice or equality.
Reconstruction stands as a tragic story of failure: the failure to hold traitors accountable, the failure to enforce lasting conditions for readmission to the Union, and the failure to reckon with the racism that has always run deep in the American character.
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1Granger’s General Order No. 3 informed Texans that “all slaves are free,” but it also instructed that freed people should “remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages.” It warned “that they will not be supported in idleness.” While the order marked the end of slavery in Texas, it reinforced racial hierarchies and foreshadowed the limited and conditional nature of freedom that would undermine Reconstruction from the start.
