Questions About John Brown

[Wild Bill]

The Freedmen's Bureau showed that there was more caring in CONGRESS until 1868 when its program was gradually phased out by 1870. The other congressional "caring" was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (which became the first part of the 14th Amendment), the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, and the so-called Force acts in the early 1870s designed to curtail the operations of the KKK and other private white armies. But most of this was declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court by 1880, which allowed the private armies openly to obstruct Reconstruction once again so long as the individual states did not sanction their use, and Congress' inability to pass the Fourth Force Act against the South in the 1890s, which led to the disfranchisement of Black voters and the separate but equal doctrine, which held until the Brown case in the 1950s and the Civil Rights Public Accommodations Act in 1864 and the Voting Rights or the Fifth Force Act in 1965.

Admittedly Louisiana was different from the ret of the South in its well educated, large, mixed race population in New Orleans, but the state excelled in corruption so rampant that one commentator once called it the US's only "banana republic." One of the best sources here is Frank Wetta's book, The Louisiana Scalawags."

Actually the only Reconstruction president who showed the slightest interest in protecting blacks in the South was US Grant (through vigorous carrying out of the Force Acts by drawing the Seventh US Cavalry off the plains and sending it to Louisiana, Kentucky and South Carolina), not Lincoln (although he admittedly signed the original Freedmen's Bureau Act for a one year duration) or Johnson (whose veto of its extension was overridden by Congress). Even Congress gave up on Civil Rights after passing the 1874 public accommodations act in honor of Charles Sumner in 1874. The readmission of most of the Confederate states back into the Union in 1868 really marked the beginning of the end for the whole process.