When 12 does not equal 246
As we turn our attention to the 250th anniversary since the nation declared its independence from Great Britain, 2026 is also the 150th commemoration that ended the experiment known as Reconstruction.
Reconstruction was a post-Civil War policy, whereby the federal government occupied the South to pave the way for Black equality. After declaring its independence on the basis that everyone is free and equal, America sought to remedy the 87-year gross violation of its central creed to descendants of Africa in 12 years (1865-1877). Though Reconstruction did not officially end until 1877, it was the election of 1876 that dealt the final blow to the Reconstruction project.
The Compromise of 1877, also known as the Hayes-Tilden Compromise, was an informal agreement between southern Democrats and allies of the Republican presidential nominee Rutherford Hayes to settle the result of the 1876 presidential election.
The election of 1876 pitted Republican Hayes against Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. Though Tilden won the popular vote, the outcome of the race hinged largely on Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina—the only three states in the South with Reconstruction-era Republican governments still in power. A bipartisan congressional commission debated over the outcome early in 1877, allies of the Republican Party candidate Rutherford Hayes met in secret with moderate southern Democrats to negotiate accepting Hayes’ election.
By an 8-7 margin the appointed Electoral Commission awarded the electoral votes from South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana to Hayes, and therefore the presidency. The price exacted for Hayes’ victory was the removal of Federal troops in the South.
Hayes supported civil rights for Black Americans, but the South saw its opportunity to seize their pound of flesh by returning to a pre-Civil War normalcy by disenfranchising newly enfranchised citizens.
In one of the great Faustian bargains in U.S. history, it was decided that the 12-year experiment to include Black Americans into the 1776 commitments to liberty and equality was sufficient to remedy several centuries of systematic dehumanization.
Reconstruction failed because the impulses to return to the practices that ultimately led to the Civil War were greater than the nation’s civic virtue. The blame does not fall solely on Hayes. The political winds, North and South possessed a shared feeling by 1876 that the statute of limitations had expired on the attempts to integrate Black Americans into society. Ending Reconstruction, the dominant culture concluded that it had done all it could to right a terrible wrong by returning to conditions that inspired the original injury. Using the questionable math equation, the nation concluded that 12 years was equal to 246.
Does 12 years of Reconstruction suffice for 246 years of enslavement? Moreover, it wasn’t until 1965 with the Voting Rights Act that one could state every American possessed all the rights to citizenship. Reconstruction, in retrospect, was a 12-year interruption of 335 years to the commitment to dehumanize Americans of African descent.
The post-Civil War outcome reflects America’s civic immaturity—a condition that has plagued the nation since its inception. The 13 colonies naively attempted to create a nation based on the civic virtue of liberty and equality, while unofficially attempting to co-exist with second class citizenship for all, except white male property owners.
This is part of America’s ongoing tension, whereby those not originally included in America’s commitments, possessed the audacity to read the nation’s sacred obligations for themselves.
How many currently drink from the well of liberty and equality that were never considered when the Declaration was ratified? Are they guilty of misreading the document? Should women have taken “all men are created equal” literally; and all others should have seen “only for white male property owners” that was clearly written in invisible ink? If so, they would have known where the preamble of the Constitution begins, “We the People,” they were systematically excluded from one of the most inclusive words in the American lexicon.
In the 150th anniversary of the failed attempt to align the nation to its original commitments, America has returned to those nefarious wells of dehumanization that ran a parallel course with its origins. Though not everyone, but too many view the American experiment not through a set of radical ideals, but a credo that justifies the superiority of a particular hue. Anything or anyone that challenges that hierarchy is by definition an enemy of the state.
Ironically, such opposition throughout the American narrative illustrates profound ignorance. Those in opposition are objecting to the nation doing exactly what it proposed in 1776.
Instead of living up to its sacred obligations, America has historically opted for the shortcut of othering those perceived as different. America, as constructed, is a slow moving Leviathan that perennially frustrates those that seek change. Women were forced to wait an additional 50 years after the impediments to vote were theoretically removed for Black men with the ratification of the 15th Amendment to get similar rights acknowledged in the 19th Amendment.
The situation that America finds itself today, though vastly improved over its 19th century antecedent, is the result of what it failed to do 150 years ago.