Reconstruction Timeline
The following is a comprehensive timeline of the laws and events that occurred during the Reconstruction Era, and their connections to Hilton Head Island. Because the island was isolated from the mainland until 1956, very little change was felt in the residents’ daily lives during this period.
Aug. 6, 1861 - The first U.S. Confiscation Act: This Act authorized Union seizure of rebel property, and stated that all slaves who fought with or worked for the Confederate military services were freed of further obligations to their masters.
Nov. 7, 1861 - Invasion of Hilton Head by the Federal amphibious forces secures the island for the Union.
July 17, 1862 - The second Confiscation Act: This Act proclaimed that slaves of civilian and military Confederate officials “shall be forever free,” however, it was enforceable only in areas of the South occupied by the Union Army. This Act also extends the 1st Confiscation Act allowing the Tax Commissioners to collect the tax in insurrectionary districts.
October 1862 - The Establishment of Mitchelville: General Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel issued a military order freeing the slaves from Hilton Head and nearby islands, then set land aside to create a town, giving each a quarter-acre plot to grow crops and run their own affairs. They were able to buy land, vote, farm for wages, and grow sweet potatoes and greens which provided vital supplements to their diets. They elected their town officials, imposed taxes, had street cleaners, stores selling household goods, and compulsory education for children aged six to 15 - the first law of its kind in South Carolina. Click here to access a listing of over 700 (out of 1500) documented residents of the village.
1862 - Establishment of Penn School: Penn School was the first school for freed slaves established on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. Classes were held at The Brick Church, and 80 pupils were enrolled. Records of Hilton Head Island students have not yet been found.
January 1, 1863 - Emancipation Proclamation: President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."
Despite this expansive wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the United States, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy (the Southern secessionist states) that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union (United States) military victory.
Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation, it captured the hearts and imagination of millions of Americans and fundamentally transformed the character of the war. After January 1, 1863, every advance of federal troops expanded the domain of freedom. Moreover, the Proclamation announced the acceptance of black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom.
September 16, 1863 - Land Set Aside for Sale: President Lincoln orders survey of certain properties to be sold, proposes sales to members of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps for a quarter down, and instructs that lots be set aside for sale to “Heads of Families of the African Race.” Hilton Head is not included in this directive nor are other parcels needed by the military.
December, 1863 - Land Sales for unpaid taxes: These sales continued sporadically through 1876.
Jan. 1, 1864 - Jan. 1, 1872 One-year leases, called Indentures, were made between individuals and the Direct Tax Commissioners or the Internal Revenue Collection Agents. Many of these were purchased by formerly enslaved residents.
Jan. 16, 1865 - Special Field Order No. 15: This order, issued by Gen William Tecumseh Sherman, limits sales of all sea-island land to blacks only and reserves a strip of land 30 miles wide along the mainland from Charlestown to St. John’s River in Florida to blacks. The order explicitly called for the settlement of Black families on confiscated land, encouraged freedmen to join the Union army to help sustain their newly won liberty, and designated a general officer to act as inspector of settlements. Inspector General Rufus Saxton would police the land and work to ensure legal title of the property for the Black settlers. In a later order, Sherman also authorized the army to loan mules to the newly settled farmers.
January 31, 1865 - 13th Amendment: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, nor any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Mar. 3, 1865 - The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands is established in the War Department: The Bureau assumes custody of confiscated lands or property in the former Confederate States, Border States, District of Columbia, and Indian Territory. The Freedmen's Bureau, as it came to be called, was authorized to give legal title for forty-acre plots of land to freedmen and white Southern Unionists.
April 15, 1865 - The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln abruptly changed the course of Reconstruction, bringing to office Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Unionist who, although a former slave owner, had made his career as an opponent of the planter elite. Johnson wanted the states to take certain steps to show that they honored the authority of the US government: abolish slavery, ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, repeal secession, and repudiate Confederate debts. Yet he did not insist that they allow black men to vote. Johnson at first barred wealthy ex-Confederates from taking part in the process, hoping that Unionist yeomen would take control of southern politics. But he soon began granting wholesale pardons to planters. All-white electorates in the states proceeded to elect new officials, many of them former secessionists and Confederate leaders, including former Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens
1865 – Establishment of Freedman’s Bank:
• Chartered by federal government for use by African Americans
• Encouraged new African American citizens to save money
• 37 branch offices, 70,000 depositors, $57,000,000
• Collapse in 1874 – most deposits lost, about ½ recovered @60%
• Click here for a listing of the Freedman’s Bank records from Hilton Head
September, 1865 - South Carolina Constitutional Convention:
• Recognized that slavery had been abolished, but not much else
• Removed property qualifications for office, however, continued racial restrictions
• Eliminated lowcountry parishes in favor of districts
• Gave the governor veto power, but did not give citizens the power to ratify
• Men elected to the legislature and congress were the pre-war elite
October, 1865 - South Carolina General Assembly: Ratified the 13th Amendment
December, 1865 - South Carolina General Assembly: President Johnson insisted that legal protection be extended to freedmen before the state could be admitted back into the Union, so the assembly established what came to be known as the Black Codes. The codes protected the freedmen by making white Carolinians, in effect, their legal guardians.
• The Statutes and regulations concerning slaves are now inapplicable to persons of color; and although such persons not entitled to social and political equality with white persons,” they did have the right to buy and sell property, make contracts, sue and be sued, and be protected in their persons and property under the law.
• Defined a person of color as seven-eighths black
• Prohibited interracial marriages
• Limited travel
• Forbade freed persons to engage in trades unless they paid exorbitant license fees
• Created a system of district courts in which only blacks would be tried
• Forbade persons of color to own a weapon without written permission of the district court unless he was a property owner, and then only a hunting piece
• If a freed person signed a labor contract, he could not “be absent from the premises without the permission of the “master”
1866: Black Codes modified to remove reference to race to meet the letter of the Civil Rights Act, but South Carolina congress refused to ratify the 14th Amendment.
March, 1867 - 1st and 2nd Reconstruction Acts:
• Except for Tennessee, the acts ruled that no state governments existed in the South; Created 5 military districts instead
• Established requirements for re-admission into the Union:
o Voter rolls open to all male citizens
o Elections held for a constitutional convention would be based on universal male suffrage
o Creation of a state constitution including universal male suffrage that would be approved by the people
o Ratify the 14th amendment
o Disband all military organizations
1868 – Establishment of Mather School in Beaufort, a boarding school for freed African American females in 1868 by Boston school teacher Rachel Crane Mather. The school is one of many post-Civil War developments that sought to educate recently emancipated African Americans, and first served elementary school-age girls.
July 9, 1868 - 14th Amendment Ratified: All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
1868 South Carolina Constitutional Convention: “Remarkable in its accomplishments”
• 124 delegates, 73 black, 36 white native-born, 15 white northerners
• Provided for a uniform system of free public schools
• Established the right to vote for every male citizen (aged 21 and above), regardless of their educational background or material wealth Hilton Head Island 1868 Voter Registration
• Created counties, each with a 3-man elected board
• The number of representatives to the state congress would be chosen by population alone
• Abolished debtors’ prison
• Abolished property ownership as a qualification for office holding
• Granted some rights to women
• Abolished the Black Codes of 1865
• Provided for a militia comprised of "all able-bodied male citizens of the State between the ages of eighteen and forty-five years, except such persons as are now, or may hereafter be, exempted by the laws of the United States. Hilton Head Island 1869 Militia Enrollment
Feb. 3, 1870 - 15th Amendment: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
May 22, 1872 - Amnesty Act of 1872: Signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, this Act restores full civil rights to all but about 500 Confederate sympathizers. The Act also allows redemption of property by pre-war owners for payment of back taxes and interest. Much of sea island land is still in the hands of the Federal Government, however, nine plantations were redeemed on Hilton Head Island.
February 04, 1875 - Civil Rights Act: The original bill of 1870 outlawed racial discrimination in juries, schools, transportation, and public accommodations. The weakened legislation—which only passed after all references to equal and integrated education were stripped completely—failed to have any lasting effect. The Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Bill in 1883 on the grounds that the Constitution did not extend to private businesses.
1876 Presidential election: This contested election had to be decided by congressional committee. The commission, which had a Republican majority, chose to award the disputed electoral votes to Rutherford B. Hayes. Southern Democrats agreed to back the decision if the Republicans would recall the federal troops that were supporting Reconstruction
The Compromise of 1877:
• Hayes agreed to cede control of the South to Democratic governments and back away from attempts at federal intervention in the region, as well as place a Southerner in his cabinet. In return, Democrats would not dispute Hayes’s election, and agreed to respect the civil rights of Black citizens.
• Soon after his inauguration, Hayes made good on his promise, ordering federal troops to withdraw from Louisiana and South Carolina, where they had been protecting Republican claimants to the governorships in those states. This action marked the effective end of the Reconstruction era, and began a period of solid Democratic control in the South.
• For their part, white Southern Democrats did not honor their pledge to uphold the rights of Black citizens, but moved quickly to reverse as many of Reconstruction’s policies as possible.
1882 - South Carolina Voter Registration and Election Law “Eight Box Law”:
• Required all citizens of the state of South Carolina to register by 1 June 1882. Those who missed the initial registration deadline were given a single one-day window per month until the July preceding a November election. After that, new voters would be prohibited from voting in that year’s election. These provisions were designed to have a disproportionate impact on the state’s wage workers and sharecroppers because it required them to re-register (and pay) every time they moved, even on the same farm.
• Required voters to deposit a properly marked ballot in a separate labeled box for each of the eight electoral races at the local, state, and federal levels. This effectively established a literacy test.
June 7, 1882 - South Carolina Special Session: Initiated gerrymandering in the state following the 1880 census results, creating 7 districts. Democratic control was established in six of the seven new districts with 25% of the state’s black population in one district.
December 4, 1895 - South Carolina Constitutional Convention:
• Primary Goal was black disenfranchisement
• Representatives were 112 Tillmanites, 42 Conservatives, and 6 Republicans (Blacks from the Lowcountry)
• Defined a negro as having 1/8 or more negro blood
• Mandated separate schools for blacks and whites without equal funding
• Disenfranchisement in the right to vote:
o Must pass a Literacy Test
o Must pay a Poll Tax six months before the election
o Must own at least $300 worth of property
o Prohibited individuals who had been convicted of bigamy, burglary, arson, or robbery
• Established Democratic control of the 7th District (Beaufort, aka “The Black District”)
1896 Plessy V. Ferguson: A landmark United States Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine.
Sources:
• Walter Edgar, South Carolina A History (University of South Carolina Press; 1998), 383 - 384
• SCETV, Teaching American History in South Carolina; https://digital.scetv.org/teachingAmerhistory/tTrove/1868Constitution.htm
• United States House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives; https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1851-1900/The-Civil-Rights-Act-of-1875/#:~:text=First%20introduced%20by%20one%20of,%2C%20transportation%2C%20and%20public%20accommodations.
• History.com, How the 1876 Election Tested the Constitution and Effectively Ended Reconstruction; https://www.history.com/news/reconstruction-1876-election-rutherford-hayes
• Robert David Bland, Requiem For Reconstruction: The South Carolina Lowcountry and Representations of Race and Citizenship, 1880-1980 (Doctoral dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the University of Maryland, College Park, 2017), 39-42
• Cornell Law School, Legal Information Institute (U.S. Constitution 14th Amendment) https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv
• South Carolina Department of Archives & History, Militia Enrollments, 1869; http://www.archivesindex.sc.gov/SeriesDescriptions/S192021.html
• Charleston County Public Library, The South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868; https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/south-carolina-constitutional-convention-1868
• Constituteproject.org, Constitute, United States of American 1789 (rev. 1992); https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/United_States_of_America_1992
• South Carolina SCIWAY; https://www.sciway.net/afam/reconstruction/majorevents.html#:~:text=In%20addition%2C%20South%20Carolina's%20constitution,was%20set%20by%20Governor%20B.F.
• United States National Park Service; https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalhistoriclandmarks/upload/Reconstruction.pdf
• The Green Book of South Carolina; https://greenbookofsc.com/locations/mather-museum-and-interpretive-center/
The National Archives, Washington, DC; https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation#:~:text=President%20Abraham%20Lincoln%20issued%20the,and%20henceforward%20shall%20be%20free.%22