Download Notes Missed by 5th Hour - Wednesday Positions on Reconstruction

Notes Missed by 5th Hour - Wednesday
Positions on
Reconstruction
 Radical
Republican
39th Congress – refuses to seat more than 60 former C______________________
 Including - 4 generals, 4 colonels, 6 cabinet officers
Democrats – sell themselves as the party of the W_________ M_______
The 14th
Amendment
As Southern governments are unable to keep law and order and protect African
Americans – Republicans drafts the first federal civil rights bill – protecting all
citizens without regard to r________
 Johnson v_______ it
 Republicans o_____________ v_____________
 Then Republicans overwhelmingly passes the ______th amendment – the
rights of a citizen cannot be taken away due to r________
o Must be ratified by _________ of states
Resistance of
Whites to New Role
of African
Americans
New Orleans Riot
R_______________ Political Convention
 Ch__________ out of hall
 M______________ in street
 _____ blacks and _____ whites killed
Positions on
Reconstruction
Radical Republican
After New Orleans Riot –
Republicans win _____ of seats in both houses of Congress
Pass Radical Republicans Reconstruction Plan –
 Divide former Confederate states in 5 m____________
d_________________
 Commanded by a g_____________
 New governments would have to be created – to be readmitted must
o B____ must be able to v_____
o Must ratify _________________________
New Role of African
Americans
In the new military districts Black men have the right
 to v__________
 to r_____ for o_________
But it would take scores of Union s____________ guarding the p___________
Many white Southerners b_________________ the elections
 Said the North was hypocritical because on ___________ Northern sates
allowed black men to v_______
Sharecropping
"Carpetbaggers"
Development of Sharecropping
 White southerners return to their l__________
 Assert their cl_______ for the land
 But need l_________________
 Problem - can't p______ workers - have no m______________
 So n____________ with their former s__________
o You can work this land, but must plant some acres for me
Who are "Carpetbaggers"?
 New governments forming in the South under m_______________ rule
o C_________________ can't vote so can't help form new governments
o But A______________ A______________ and former
N___________________ can
 Northerners had gone into South for two reasons
o Set up b_________________
o Buy cheap l___________

Northerners resented - Term "Carpetbaggers" developed by
n________________________
o
Resistance of
Whites to New Role
of African
Americans

Packed up his few belongings in a c___________________, a cheap
suitcase, and travels South to get r_______ off of a defeated people
In G__________________________
o Legislature voted to e____________ its b___________ members
39th Congress/ "Rebel Strut:"
NARRATOR: In December 1865, the Thirty-Ninth Congress, the first since the end of the Civil War,
convened in Washington. More than sixty former Confederates prepared to take their seats,
including four generals, four colonels and six confederate cabinet officers, even Alexander H.
Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy, expecting as one observer put it, "to
govern the country he had been trying to destroy."
BLIGHT: If the South was going to "rise again" so to speak, control it's own political life, control the
freed people, indeed if the ex-Confederates themselves were going to be allowed back into
leadership at the national level, then to so many white northerners it seemed like the war would
have been fought in vain.
NARRATOR: On the opening day, the Clerk of the House refused to announce the names of the
Southern delegates in his roll call. The former Confederates were denied their elected seats and
sent packing. The fight for control of Reconstruction had begun.
BLIGHT: In many ways, Congress was a poisoned atmosphere in the debates over the
Reconstruction policy. There were raw war memories being played out. There were visceral
hatreds being played out on the floor of Congress between Republicans and Democrats. These
debates are between men who have experienced this war, who have fought this war. They are
fighting, literally, about the meaning of that conflict they have just fought.
NARRATOR: Northern Democrats sided with Johnson, and railed against Republicans across the
aisle. Washington must get out of the way, they insisted, and let southerners run their own affairs.
AYERS: The Democrats had always identified themselves as the party of the white man. They
very explicitly said, "We are here to protect the rights of white men North and South, and how do
we do that? We hold the Union together." For that reason the Democrats saw themselves as
trying to put the North and South together as quickly as possible during the Civil War and as soon
as it's over, trying to knit North and South together at the expense of black men.
BLIGHT: At one point in the debates Thaddeus Stevens stood up, and answering his Democratic
colleagues says, "Do not, I pray, admit those who have slaughtered half a million of our
countrymen, until their clothes are dried and until they are re-clad. I do not wish to it side by side
with men whose garments smell of the blood of my kindred." It was Stevens's way of saying,
"We're going to keep the South out of the Union, as long as we can, and we're not going to
allow anybody back in here who was responsible for making the war."
NARRATOR: A Congressional committee on Reconstruction concluded that southern
governments were unable to keep law and order, or stem violence against African Americans.
Allowing southern states unchecked power so soon after the war, the committee said, was
"madness and lunacy." Moderate Republicans had hoped to persuade Johnson to provide
minimal protections for blacks in the south. Now even they were growing impatient with the
president's policies. In March 1866, both houses of Congress passed a landmark Civil Rights Bill
that protected the rights of American citizens without regard to race. Republicans warned
Johnson not to veto the bill if he hoped for any continued cooperation with Congress. Two
weeks later, Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Bill.
WALKER: Johnson is opposed to the granting of those kinds of protections to black people. This
had not been done for the white immigrants who had come to America why then are you
doing it for these black people?
NARRATOR: Moderate republicans were outraged.
FONER: Johnson was stubborn, self-righteous, rigid in thinking. He was really the worst person
possible to become President accidentally, at a time when flexibility, vision and creative
leadership were really what was required.
BLIGHT: Moderate Republicans were forced into the Radical camp because they had to
oppose Andrew Johnson. Johnson's plan of Reconstruction was so lenient, in utter contempt of
black liberty that it was simply unacceptable.
NARRATOR: A united Republican party overrode Johnson's veto. America had its first Civil Rights
Act. But many in Congress argued that the act was not enough -- that safeguarding civil rights
required changes to the Constitution itself. Republican leaders proposed a new amendment.
FONER: The Fourteenth Amendment becomes the crux of the political battle in 1866, and
basically what they put into the Constitution is a new definition of American nationality and
citizenship, making African Americans, for the first time, full citizens of the United States. This is the
origin of the concept of civil rights in American society, rights which obtain to you as a citizen,
which cannot be rescinded because of your race.
BLIGHT: This is a titanic debate about just what the authority of the Federal Government is going
to be. There were plenty of Americans who argued the federal government had no right to
declare black people citizens.
FONER: The Democrats are constantly putting forward racist arguments: You are eradicating a
line between black and white which has existed forever. To Republicans, what's at stake here,
really, is the definition of freedom. If a person can be discriminated against in every walk of life
because of their race, has slavery really been abolished?
NARRATOR: Congress overwhelmingly passed the Fourteenth Amendment, but it had to be
ratified by three fourths of the states. The President denounced the amendment, and accused
the Republicans of treason.
WALKER: Johnson is opposed to an expansion of Federal power. For him, constitutional authority
resides at the state level, not at the national level. And Johnson believes that the Republicans
are engaged in an enormous usurpation of state authority.
NARRATOR: The lines were drawn.
NEW ORLEANS RIOT
NARRATOR: Since the end of the war, black political conventions had been taking place across
the South. The central issue was black suffrage. "We simply ask that we be recognized as men,"
declared the South Carolina Convention of Colored People, "that the same laws which govern
over white men shall govern black men." "We stood by the government when it wanted help," a
delegate from Mississippi wrote President Johnson, "Now will it stand by us?" In New Orleans,
hundreds of black men declared they were ready to fight for the right to vote. Militant whites in
the city vowed to stamp out black agitators and Radical Republicans. President Johnson
dismissed the growing signs of trouble. At midday on July 30th 1866, New Orleans exploded. At
the state convention, a mob attacked white Radical Republican delegates and their black
supporters. The Republicans were chased out of the convention hall and shot down. Black men
were murdered in the streets. By the time federal troops restored order, thirty-four blacks and
three white Radicals had been killed.
AYERS: And the Radicals say, "We told you. We told you that unless you stamp out this serpent of
white power in the South, unless you kill it, it's going to rise up again."
"SWING AROUND THE CIRCLE"/ RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION After the Riot
NARRATOR: The growing violence in the South turned the mid-term elections of 1866 into a
referendum on Presidential Reconstruction. With Union war hero Ulysses S. Grant at his side,
Johnson barnstormed the Northeast and the Midwest. Dubbed "The Swing Around the Circle,"
the speaking tour was an unprecedented effort to sell his policies to northern voters. It was a
disaster. At the podium, the president traded insults with hostile crowds. And blamed the
slaughter in New Orleans on Congress.
BLIGHT : He called the leadership of the Republican party traitors. He even referred to himself as
a Jesus figure, being crucified on the cross of Radical Reconstruction, which to many northerners
was just a kind of pathetic political rhetoric.
WALKER: Many northerners felt that black people should receive minimal constitutional
protections. And it is the South's intransigence, and the policy that President Johnson pursues by
encouraging the South to reconstitute itself, that drives many northerners away from his position.
NARRATOR: The Atlantic Monthly called the president "egotistic to the point of mental disease....
Insincere as well as stubborn, cunning as well as unreasonable, vain as well as ill-tempered." That
fall, Republicans won three-fourths of the seats in both houses of Congress, enough to override
any Johnson veto. In only eighteen months, the Radicals had gone from a fringe minority to the
center of Republican leadership. Now it was their turn to define the course of Reconstruction.
Thaddeus Stevens was 75-years-old, so frail that he had to be carried into the Senate by
admirers. In a voice his colleagues could barely hear, the tireless Stevens made a final plea for
federal intervention in the southern states.
READING, Thaddeus Stevens: Congress has been sitting here, and while the South has been
bleeding at every pore, Congress has done nothing to protect the loyal people there -- white or
black -- either in their persons, in their liberty, or in their property."
NARRATOR: In March 1867, both houses of Congress again rejected a veto by President Johnson,
and passed the Radicals' Reconstruction plan. The former Confederate states were divided into
five military districts, each commanded by a General with power to enforce law and administer
justice. New southern governments would be created. They would have to ratify the Fourteenth
Amendment. And -- black men would have the right to vote.
FONER: This really was a remarkable leap in the dark for world history. It was the first large scale
experiment in interracial democracy that had existed anywhere.
NARRATOR: When Tunis Campbell learned of the Radicals' bold plan, he immediately decided
to run for office. Marshall Twitchell also went into politics, as a delegate to Louisiana's
Constitutional Convention. It was like nothing he'd ever seen. More than half the delegates were
black. Within a year, Andrew Johnson would be impeached by the Senate for high crimes and
misdemeanors. His presidency would survive, by a single vote.
"BIG DRUNK" / VOTING / TUNIS CAMPBELL RUNS FOR OFFICE
NARRATOR: In March 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War, the United States Congress
decided to bring racial equality to the South. For the last all-white legislature in North Carolina, it
was the beginning of the end. They threw a wild party in the state capitol. We had "the very best
liquor, [and] ice, lemons and sugar," wrote one state senator. "The whole capital was in an
uproar." Under Congress' new Radical Reconstruction plan, military rule would be imposed on
the South. White state lawmakers would be swept from their seats. And the unthinkable: black
men, many of them former slaves, would have the right to vote and run for office. "We have lost
all hope of escaping the vengeance of the Northern people," a senator wrote "and are
preparing for the worst." That fall, southern blacks embraced Congress' plan. In Louisiana, about
a hundred black men approached the town of Natchitoches, ready to defend their new rights
with sticks and guns. They had come to cast their ballots. Scores of Union soldiers, many of them
black, stood guard at the polls. It was a scene repeated throughout the South.
FONER: This really was a remarkable leap in the dark for world history. It's the first large-scale
experiment in interracial democracy that had existed anywhere.
EDWARD AYERS, HISTORIAN: This may be the most radical single change that emerges out of this
entire era, to go from being an enslaved person, to not merely a citizen, but to being a voter
and a holder of office.
NARRATOR: In Georgia, Tunis Campbell was among the first blacks to run for political office. Right
after the war, he had set up an independent black colony in the Sea Islands of Georgia -- and
declared it off-limits to whites.
RUSSELL DUNCAN, HISTORIAN: Tunis Campbell was impressive in appearance. He was 6 feet tall,
habitually dressed in a 3-piece suit with a bow tie, carried an umbrella, a top hat. The planter
class is in awe of him. But African Americans are also in awe of him. And he uses that to great
advantage.
NARRATOR: Trained as a minister, he could reach into the heart of a community.
DUNCAN: He often stood behind the pulpits in black churches on Sundays and said, "Under the
new acts of Congress, we're going to be allowed to vote. You're going to be protected in that
vote. We have a great black majority in this district. We are going to elect black judges. We are
going to elect black sheriffs. We are going to elect black senators."
BLIGHT: The right to vote for black people was an almost spiritual experience. It was a physical
manifestation of their freedom. It meant that somebody was actually recognizing them as a
political human being. The right to vote was like breathing life into them.
NARRATOR: Many white Southerners boycotted the elections.
AYERS: They say the government that's created by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington
for proud, independent, enlightened men, is now going to be occupied by former slaves who
cannot read. This must be an injustice, they say. This must be a farce.
FONER: At this time only five northern states -- all of them in New England, with very small black
populations -- give African Americans the right to vote. Ohio doesn't. New York only gives a tiny
number the right to vote. Pennsylvania doesn't. Illinois doesn't.
AYERS: And white southerners feel that this is just one more example of the hypocrisy of
Reconstruction, that white northerners are willing to inflict upon white southerners things they
would not tolerate in their own home states.
NARRATOR: When the votes were counted, Tunis Campbell had won a seat in the Georgia state
senate with an overwhelming majority.
WALKER: Black voting carried with it an enormous meaning. It meant that political power was
going to be shared between blacks and whites. This is a very frightening thing for many white
southerners because they have, in effect, lost control over what they had deemed to be their
birthright, which is the right to run these governments.
NARRATOR: One white southerner uttered words of warning: "Let not your pride flatter you into
the belief that you ever can or ever will govern the white men of the South."
FAN BUTLER RETURNS TO GEORGIA - SHARECROPPING DEVELOPES
READING, FAN BUTLER: "The day was cloudless, the air soft and balmy; the wild vegetation that
edged the river beautiful beyond description...Not a sound broke the stillness but the dip of our
oars [and] the wild minor chant of the Negro boatmen."
NARRATOR: Anxious to reclaim their land, 28-year-old Fan Butler and her father, Pierce, were
nearing their plantation on St. Simon's Island in Georgia. Rice, not cotton, had been king here
before the war. And Pierce Butler had been one of the richest of the rice aristocracy. Fan Butler's
mother, the celebrated English actress Fanny Kemble, had made headlines around the world,
when she publicly declared that she could not live with a slaveholder. After her parents
divorced, Fan Butler had to make a choice.
DUNCAN: She was involved in not a brothers' war, but a family war. When her parents were
divorced, she took sides, and she sided with the South and with her father.
NARRATOR: From the safety of Philadelphia, the Butlers heard that their land was being
confiscated by victorious Union troops.
DANA D. NELSON, HISTORIAN: Pierce saw it not only as the possible ending of his family's
plantations in Georgia, but he saw it as the end of the way of life that he treasured. And so they
headed back South as soon as they could.
NARRATOR: They found the Butler plantation in ruins.
READING, FAN BUTLER: My bed stood under a hole in the roof, through which the rains came. The
whole country was absolutely swept. Not a chicken, not an egg was left. For weeks I lived on
[nothing but] hominy, rice, and fish.
NARRATOR: Fan and Pierce got one piece of good news: a federal decree returned the
plantations to their original owners. But their claims on the land were fiercely resisted by
freedmen.
AYERS: Black southerners say, "the South is mine too." I helped make this place. I remember when
this plantation was nothin' other than woods. And we cleared it. And it's ours. And I'm not
leaving. This is rich land."
READING, FAN BUTLER: We found the Negroes on St. Simon's Island in a very different frame of
mind. They had been brought under the influence of Northerners, some of whom had filled the
poor people's minds with all sorts of vain hopes and ideas, among others that their former
masters would not be allowed to return, and the land was theirs.
NARRATOR: In this charged atmosphere, the Butlers had to negotiate with their former slaves.
READING, FAN BUTLER: My father. . . told [the Negroes] they might have [their corn and cotton],
but that they must put in twenty acres for him, for which he would give them food and clothing,
and another year, when he hoped to put in several hundred acres, they should share the crop.
They consented without any show of either pleasure or the reverse."
NARRATOR: The new system came to be called sharecropping, but many landowners wanted
something more than their share.
NELSON: Pierce's plan was to evolve his relationship with his former slaves back into something
that would probably look and work a lot like slavery. And as Fan would later say, when it was her
land, "You have the freedom to leave, but I have freedom too. And what's more, I own this land.
And if you're going to stay here, you have to do what I say."
NARRATOR: Fan Butler was not as confident as she sounded
READING, FAN BUTLER: We are, I am afraid, going to have terrible trouble...with the Negroes, and
I see nothing but gloomy prospects for us ahead."
MARSHALL TWITCHELL, CARPETBAGGER FROM VERMONT
NARRATOR: New Orleans in the fall of 1867 was a bankrupt city with just four paved roads. The
war had left the whole state of Louisiana, one official lamented, "dirty, impoverished, and
hopeless." But in Mechanics Hall, there was excitement about the future. Under the new
Reconstruction law, delegates had gathered to draw up a new constitution for the state.
TED TUNNELL, HISTORIAN: The majority of the delegates to this convention are black. They were
well spoken, they were well dressed, and they play a dynamic role in this convention. The
constitution that results from this assembly will, in large part, be their work.
NARRATOR: Among the white delegates was Marshall Twitchell, a battle-scarred former Union
soldier from Vermont. Right after the war, he'd come up the Red River and settled in the
northwest part of the state. It was a wide-open frontier.
James G. Marston, III, Descendant of Planter: My ancestor, Henry Marston, in the 1840s bought
land up here. It was land speculation. And it was rich fertile land to be cleared into cotton land.
And so I imagine Mr. Twitchell was very excited about what he was going to do.
NARRATOR: The thrifty Twitchell had saved enough to buy 420 acres of cotton land. He married
Adele Coleman, the daughter of a local planter, and got to know his neighbors, both black and
white.
BLIGHT: The vast majority of northerners who moved south moved there because the South was
now, uh, the new pioneer society.
FONER: They came as business people. They came to buy land. They came to set up businesses.
They came to invest. At first they were welcomed.
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1867 Twitchell made a fateful decision. He agreed to represent his
district at the state convention. He'd commanded black troops in the war, but this was a new
world.
TUNNELL: For the next few months, Twitchell is going to have to work with black men as equals in
a way that he has never done before.
NARRATOR: Twitchell supported most of the provisions in the new constitution, including a
controversial one that would take voting rights away from white men associated with the old
Confederate government. He had crossed a line: many white southerners resented watching
northerners like Twitchell making crucial political decisions.
TUNNELL: Midway through the conventions, you can see the conservative newspapers covering
the conventions sort of searching for some new language to describe these people. And then
they hit upon the word "carpetbagger." It conjures up the image of a lowlife Yankee. He packs
his scanty belongings in a carpetbag and takes the first steamship south, to profit upon the
misery of a defeated people
NARRATOR: Twitchell came to be viewed with suspicion by some of his white neighbors.
MARSTON: He's a villain. The carpetbaggers are always thought of as a danger. You had the boll
weevils; they were a danger. Of course low prices, and the carpetbagger.
NARRATOR: The Yankee from Vermont was starting to make powerful enemies in Louisiana.
TUNIS CAMPBELL EXPELLED FROM GEORGIA LEGISLATURE
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1868, Tunis Campbell entered the Georgia state legislature in
Atlanta. With him came thirty-one other black members of the Republican party. The work of remaking the southern states had begun.
FONER: Suddenly you get hundreds of men elected to every office from member of Congress,
the Senate, House of Representatives, member of state legislature, state positions, down to
sheriff, justice of the peace, school board official, you name it.
NARRATOR: For Democrats, who had bitterly resisted the Republican Reconstruction plan, the
very idea of blacks in political office was an aberration. "The Negro is unfit to rule the State," The
Atlanta Constitution declared. "The Democratic party will protect him in every civil right. It is
unwilling, however, to make him Congressman, Governor, and Judge. It will not consent to
degrade its own race by elevating an inferior above it." In the Georgia legislature, blacks were
outnumbered four to one. As soon as Tunis Campbell took his seat, he came under attack from
whites on both sides of the aisle.
WALKER: What you have here is a very volatile moment in which alliances politically are shifting
very rapidly, and from one day to the next, you don't know really what's going to happen.
NARRATOR: The few white Republicans who did support black legislators were branded as
traitors to their race. Blacks "should quit dabbling in politics," argued one newspaper, "and go to
work...to earn an honest subsistence." Most whites in the legislature maintained that the new
Georgia Constitution only gave blacks the right to vote, not the right to hold office.
DUNCAN: The Georgia constitution did not specifically allow office-holding by black Americans.
Of course it didn't specifically authorize office holding by white Americans either...
NARRATOR: One legislator, Henry McNeal Turner, expressed the outrage of his black colleagues.
He was entitled to his seat, he said and would not cringe or beg for it. Tunis Campbell also
refused to be intimidated.
READING, TUNIS CAMPBELL:
"On behalf of nearly five hundred thousand loyal citizens of this State, we do enter our solemn
protest against the illegal, unconstitutional and oppressive action of this body."
NARRATOR: White legislators made it clear that Campbell was not welcome in the chamber.
DUNCAN: Many of them put their hands on the butts of the pistols of the guns they wore into the
chamber. They shuffled their feet. They banged on the desk. They-, they, uh, talked about the
"Congo senator's insolent harangue."
NARRATOR: Just two months after it had first convened, the Georgia legislature voted to expel its
black members. "You may drive us out," Turner warned, "but you will light a torch never to be put
out."