One hundred and fifty years ago in Charleston, South Carolina, on March 17, 1868, delegates who had been elected to write a new constitution for their state after the Civil War finished their work. What they had accomplished over the previous two months was extraordinary. In a state whose prewar leaders had prided themselves on confining government to rich and powerful men, the delegates to the South Carolina constitutional convention of 1868 had created a blueprint for a new government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
The road to this revolutionary document was not smooth. In the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson, who had taken office after Abraham Lincoln’s murder in April, had set out to restore South Carolina to the Union with a government that looked much like the one that had ruled the state before the war. He had pardoned all but a few leading Confederates and then told state officials to write a new constitution that abolished slavery, declared secession illegal, and invalidated South Carolina’s war debt. Having accomplished this repudiation of the Confederacy, he promised, the state could rejoin the Union.
The South Carolina convention organized under Johnson’s orders did as he asked—more or less—but its leaders were quite clear that they were not going to change the nature of their government. They considered democracy dangerous. “Everybody… dreads popular elections,” one observer of the constitutional convention wrote. “Dozens of delegates have said to me that it isn’t well to allow the people to elect their own rulers.”
That attitude carried into the state government that convened under the new constitution that fall. Its members wrote laws, together dubbed the Black Code, that forbade black people from owning guns; kept them from working as artisans, mechanics, or shopkeepers without an expensive license that had to be renewed every year; prohibited them from selling anything without written permission from their employers; and contained a raft of similar regulations. Black people, the code said, “are not entitled to social or political equality with white persons.”
But Republicans in Congress had no intention of resurrecting a new version of the Old South under the same leaders who had led the secession movement in 1860. They rejected Johnson’s new governments across the South and insisted that southerners instead ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, making former slaves citizens and giving them the same legal protections as white men, as a precondition for rejoining the Union. White southerners in every state except Tennessee refused. They had no intention of accepting black equality.
So on March 2, 1867, Congress passed “An Act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States.” This law became popularly known as the Military Reconstruction Act because it divided the ten remaining Confederate states into five military districts. But it did something much more important than that: It provided for new constitutional conventions in southern states. And delegates to those conventions were to be elected by men “of whatever race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In other words, for the first time in American history, African American men could vote for the men who would construct their government. As a leading Republican politician later explained, the recalcitrance of southern white leaders had led Republicans to pass a law that was of “transcendent importance and… unprecedented character. It was the most vigorous and determined action ever taken by Congress in time of peace. The effect produced by the measure was far-reaching and radical. It changed the political history of the United States.”
Over the course of the summer of 1867, US troops registered voters in South Carolina. Since many southern Democrats boycotted the process, the voters were heavily Republican. In elections held in late November, they chose 124 men to write their new constitution. Reflecting the fact that far more African Americans than white Americans lived in South Carolina, seventy-six of them—a majority—were African Americans, ready to work together with their forty-eight white colleagues to rebuild a new South Carolina.
The convention convened in mid-January in Charleston and got down to business in a private building commandeered by the US Army. Over the course of 53 working days, the delegates wrote a remarkably democratic constitution. It began by providing representation according to population, rather than by population and wealth, as the formula in place previously had done. It got rid of property qualifications for voting and guaranteed universal male suffrage without regard for race. It provided for free education and required it for everyone, and it gave women both the right to own property and to divorce. “All political power is rested in and derived from the people only,” the preamble of the new constitution declared.
In recognition of that principle, US military officers called for a popular vote on the constitution. The vote either to accept or reject it was set for April 14, 15, and 16. Furious white supremacists organized as the Ku Klux Klan to keep Republicans from the polls by terrorizing them, but their violence did not work: voters approved the constitution and elected representatives both to Congress and to a new South Carolina legislature. South Carolina had a new democratic government.
But that triumph was short lived. The backlash against a democratic government that properly represented South Carolina’s black majority was particularly toxic. The first legislature under the new system convened in July 1868 and, like the constitutional convention, it had a black majority. Eight-eight of the legislators were black and sixty-seven were white. While those legislators were not particularly racially or socially conscious– they consistently refused to protect black laborers in the harsh conditions of postwar South Carolina– they did try to rebuild the crippled state.
To raise funds, the legislature placed taxes on all property at its full value, rather than undervaluing land, as prewar legislatures had done in order to shift the tax burden to urban professionals, merchants, and bankers. This new tax valuation meant that landowners, especially large landowners, faced higher taxes at a time when their land had lost significant value and their cash was at an all-time low. When the legislature then voted to use state funds to buy land for resale to settlers—usually freedmen—on easy terms, white South Carolinians howled that black legislators—the “crow congress”– were redistributing wealth from hardworking white people to lazy African Americans through tax policy.
This formulation doomed the new government. When the state began to collect the new taxes, opponents of black rights organized a “Tax-payers’ Convention” to protest that “the most intelligent, the influential, the educated, the really useful men of the South, deprived of all political power… [are] taxed and swindled by… the ignorant class, which only yesterday hoed the fields and served in the kitchen.” African Americans, this argument went, wanted a government handout rather than working.
The overlap of race and class in South Carolina permitted wealthy white men to oppose a democratic government on racial, rather than class, grounds. They argued that a democratic government that answered the needs of its people was not, in fact, protecting equality; it was undermining white workers by redistributing white tax dollars to lazy blacks. This argument took shape in the wake of the remarkable South Carolina constitution of 1868, and it has been with us ever since.
South Carolinians wrote a new constitution in 1895, limiting the suffrage to those whom the white registrar at the polls thought accurately understood the US Constitution, a mechanism designed to exclude black voters. The new constitution also segregated the schools, a harbinger of the Jim Crow laws that would take over the state and keep African Americans from having a say in their own government. But for a brief, shining moment in the wake of the Civil War, South Carolina had made Abraham Lincoln’s vision a reality.