Lessons from Sister Mary Jerome Lauer’s Master’s Thesis: The Civil Rights Act of 1866

I’ll never meet Sister Mary Jerome Laurer. But I feel I know her after reading her Master’s thesis, deposited for the faculty at Marquette University in April 1943.

She does a terrific job of explaining the conditions that gave rise to the Ku Klux Klan in 1866.

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When Andrew Johnson succeeded to the presidential office, Confederate armies, somewhat broken but still capable or offering resistance, were retarding Sherman's victorious march. Measures for disbanding the former became necessary when southern leaders, recognizing the hopelessness or continuing resistance, made overtures looking to an armistice which took place, and to the surrender which subsequently followed. It became urgent to discontinue the enlistment or men in the loyal states, to economize expenses, and to muster out or service as expeditiously as possible the grand army or Union volunteers.

The skill to which years or experience had brought the machinery or the War Department enabled the majority or the Union army to return without delay to their homes, where they would discard the character or soldiers and melt insensibly into the civil population to resume the pursuits or peace….

The political theories of the South had been put to the test of the sword and were now discredited. Two problems were settled beyond dispute: the Negro was free; and the Union was preserved. Thus the Republican Party, preeminently the Union Party, found itself in full control of every branch of the federal government, and its rule must be established and perpetuated.

To the mind of the North, the Democratic party could not be entrusted with any part of the solution of the problems of reconstruction. Though slavery and state sovereignty were no longer at issue, there were many problems pressing for solution. The territory formerly occupied by the seceding states must be reorganized and under certain conditions, readmitted to the Union; provisions had to be made for ways and means for liquidating the vast war debt incurred on both sides, by both, governments and by the individual States.

Above all else loomed the Negro problem. Five million whites and three and a half millions blacks were to live together. What system of laws could southern conventions and legislatures frame that would make it possible for them to accomplish that which Thomas Jefferson had declared impossible? Two dangers confronted them.

One was, the armed bands of Negroes headed by returning Negro soldiers. The other chief danger was that idleness among the Negroes would lead to crime. The South was in a state of utter exhaustion. They protracted their struggle against the federal authority until all hope of successful resistance had ceased, and they laid down their arms because there was no longer any power to use them.

The loss of life in the Confederate army had been large, while many suffered from wounds, and from diseases, and  from hardships of camp and prison. These men, many of them unable to work, came home to find almost complete economic ruin. The people were impoverished. Nearly all business was destroyed and the farms were wrecked. There was no money in circulation, the banks were generally broken; there was no credit system, most of the commercial agencies were inoperative or suspended. Private debts incurred in a period of great prosperity prior to 1861, and unpaid at the beginning of the war -were still unpaid, and the property on which most of these debts were contracted, no longer existed. The railroads and other means of transportation, as well as factories and other industries were generally destroyed. Agriculture, the main means of support in the South, was demoralized by the need of work animals and because of the disorganized labor.