Reconstruction, 1865-1875
According to the Presidential plan of reorganization, a provisional governor for Alabama was appointed in June 1865. A state convention met in September of the same year, and declared the ordinance of secession null and void and slavery abolished. A legislature and a governor were elected in November, and the legislature was at once recognized by President Andrew Johnson, but not by Congress, which refused to seat the delegation. Johnson ordered the Army to allow the inauguration of the governor after the legislature ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in December, 1865. But the legislature's passage of Black Codes to control the freedmen who were flocking from the plantations to the towns, and its rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment, intensified Congressional hostility to the Presidential plan.
In 1867, the congressional plan of Reconstruction was completed and Alabama was placed under military government. The freedmen were enrolled as voters. Numerous white citizens were temporarily disfranchised, as the government suspected the loyalty of former Confederates. The new Republican party, made up of freedmen, Union sympathizers (scalawags), and northerners who had settled in the South (disparagingly called carpetbaggers), took control two years after the war ended. They called a constitutional convention in November 1867, and framed a constitution which conferred universal manhood suffrage. Whites who had fought for the Confederacy were disfranchised for a temporary period. The Reconstruction Acts of Congress required every new constitution to be ratified by a majority of the legal voters of the state. The whites of Alabama largely stayed away from the polls. After five days of voting, the constitution needed 13,550 to secure a majority. Congress then enacted that a majority of the votes cast should be sufficient. Thus the constitution went into effect, the state was readmitted to the Union in June 1868, and a new governor and legislature were elected.
Many white citizens resisted postwar changes. Later the myth about Reconstruction was that it was notable for legislative extravagance and corruption, and control by freedmen. In fact, whites had the most control. A biracial coalition created the first system of public education in the state, which would benefit poor white children as well as freedmen. They also created charitable public institutions, such as hospitals and orphanages, to benefit all citizens. Debt rose in contrast to before the war, when there was little state investment for citizens. The wealthy elite could educate their children privately, for instance, and they also paid privately for roads and services.
The state endorsed railway bonds at the rate of $12,000 and $16,000 a mile until the state debt had increased from eight million to seventeen million dollars. Mostly the white elite benefited from such arrangements, and similar corruption characterized local government. The native white people united, formed a Conservative party and elected a governor and a majority of the lower house of the legislature in 1870. As the new administration was overall a failure, in 1872, voters reacted in favor of the Republicans.
By 1874, however, the power of the Republicans was broken, and conservative Democrats regained power in all state offices. A commission appointed to examine the state debt found it to be $25,503,000; by compromise, it was reduced to $15,000,000. A new constitution was adopted in 1875, which omitted the guarantee of the previous constitution that no one should be denied suffrage on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude. Its provisions forbade the state to engage in internal improvements or to give its credit to any private enterprise, an anti-industrial stance that limited the state's progress for decades.
Read more about this topic: History Of Alabama