Download Nov. 18 From Presidential to Radical reconstruction

11/18/2015
Reconstruction: Outline
I. The states of affairs, Spring 1865
II. Presidential reconstruction
A. The Freedmen’s Bureau
B. Black codes
C. Race riots of 1866
III. Congressional reconstruction
A. Reconstruction Acts
B. Civil Rights
C. Black political participation
IV. Conclusion
Reconstruction: Outline
I. The states of affairs, Spring 1865
"Peace at the End of the Civil War," Rotunda, US Capitol, Washington, DC
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“Worse Than Slavery.” Harper’s Weekly (October 24,
1874), p. 878.
"War is merely the
continuation of policy
[politics] by other means.“
Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz
“Politics is war without
bloodshed while war is
politics with bloodshed."
Mao Zedong
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Preston Brooks caning Sen. Charles Sumner in the Senate chamber - 1856. New York Public
Library - Aster, Lenox & Tilden Foundations.
The Room in the McLean House, at Appomattox C.H., in which Gen. Lee surrendered to
Gen. Grant. The Major & Knapp Eng. Mfg. & Lith. Co. 71 Broadway. 1867.
Thomas Nast, “Emancipation,” Harper’s Weekly, January 24, 1863
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View of Richmond above the Canal Basin, after the Evacuation Fire of 1865.
War Department. Office of the Chief Signal Officer. National Archives.
“Fugitive Negroes fording the Rappahannock (during Pope’s retreat).” 1862
photo by Timothy H. O'Sullivan.
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Lincoln’s “10% plan” of Dec. 1863
• A wartime plan for returning Unioncontrolled Louisiana to the Union
• “Proclamation of Amnesty and
Reconstruction”
• 10% of population must swear oath
of loyalty to Union
• Must ratify 13th Amendment
abolishing slavery
• Freedpeople: ??
“any provision which may be adopted by such state government in relation to the freed
people of such state, which shall recognize and declare their permanent freedom, provide
for their education, and which may yet be consistent as a temporary arrangement with their
present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class, will not be objected to by the
National Executive.”
Representative Henry W. Davis of Maryland (on
the left) and Senator Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio
(on the right) sponsored the Wade-Davis Bill, a
strict plan for re-admittance of Confederate
states to representation in the Union.
Henry Winter Davis, ca. 1855-1865, Brady-Handy Photograph Collection,
both images from Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
The Assassination of President Lincoln (Currier & Ives, 1865)
Broadside advertising reward for
capture of Lincoln assassination
conspirators
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Andrew Johnson taking the oath of office in the small parlor of the Kirkwood
House [Hotel], Washington, [April 15, 1865]. Frank Leslie's Illustrated
Newspaper.
Andrew Johnson on reconstruction:
“Treason must be made odious, traitors must be made
odious and impoverished. They must not only be
punished, but their social power must be destroyed.” (April
21, 1865)
“There’s no such thing as reconstruction. These States
have not gone out of the Union. Therefore reconstruction
is unnecessary.” (May 21, 1865)
“White men alone must manage the South.” (Johnson to
John Conness, Summer 1865)
“In the progress of nations Negroes have shown less
capacity for government than any other race of people. No
independent government of any form has ever been
successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they
have been left to their own devices they have shown a
constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.” (Annual
message to Congress, 1867)
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• What did the Georgia ministers argue was
most needed?
• What did Frederick Douglass argue was most
needed?
Reconstruction: Outline
I. The states of affairs, Spring 1865
II. Presidential reconstruction
A. The Freedmen’s Bureau
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The Freedmen’s Bureau
• Origins
– American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission
(3/63)
– March 1865: Congresses establishes Bureau of
Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands
under War Department
– 1st and only Superintendent: Union General
Oliver Otis Howard
• The “Christian General”
• Bowdoin College
• Functions
–
–
–
–
Relief
Education
Abandoned lands
Alternative court system
Freedman’s Bureau officers, who were often taken from the ranks of military officials, were charged with
reconstructing the plantation regime by negotiating between planters and the freedpeople
Excerpts from the testimony before Congress of J. D. B. DeBow, 1866
J. D. B. De Bow was a wealthy and prominent southerner who lived through the Civil War years. He published
DeBow’s Review, an influential journal, out of New Orleans, Louisiana. DeBow’s Review offered a conservative
slant on the problems of Reconstruction, often echoing the paternalism of the southern white elite. DeBow
offered the following testimony before Congress in 1866.
I think if the whole regulation of the negroes, or freedmen, were left to the people of the
communities in which they live, it will be administered for the best interest of the negroes as
well as of the white men. I think there is a kindly feeling on the part of the planters towards the
freedmen. . . . The sentiment prevailing is, that it is for the interest of the employer to teach the
negro, to educate his children, to provide a preacher for him, and to attend to his physical wants.
. . . The Freedmen’s Bureau, or any agency to interfere between the freedman and his former
master, is only productive of mischief. There are constant appeals from one to the other and
continual annoyances. It has a tendency to create dissatisfaction and disaffection on the part of
the laborer, and is in every respect in its result most unfavorable to the system of industry that is
now being organized under the new order of things in the South.
Source: Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, part iv, p. 134.
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• Why did Andrew Johnson veto the 2nd
Freedmen’s Bureau Bill?
Veto of the Freedmen's Bureau Bill
Andrew Johnson
February 19, 1866
“The power that would be thus placed in the hands of the President, is such as in time
of peace certainly ought never to be intrusted to any one man. If it be asked whether
the creation of such a tribunal within a State is warranted as a measure of war, the
question immediately presents itself, whether we are still engaged in war. Let us not
unnecessarily disturb the commerce and credit and industry of the country, by declaring
to the American people and the world that the United States are still in a condition of
civil war. At present there is no part of our country in which the authority of the United
States is disputed. Offences that may be committed by individuals should not work a
forfeiture of the rights if the same communities. The country has entered or is returning
to a state of peace and industry, and the rebellion is in fact at an end. The measure,
therefore, seems to be as inconsistent with the actual condition of the country as it is at
variance with the Constitution of the United States.”
Source: Andrew Johnson, His Life and Speeches by Lillian Foster, New York: Richardson & Co., 1866.
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=1940
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Reconstruction: Outline
I. The states of affairs, Spring 1865
II. Presidential reconstruction
A. The Freedmen’s Bureau
B. Black codes
Black Codes
• Laws passed by southern state governments, 1865
• Strict controls over terms of labor
• Vagrancy laws kept freedpeople a docile, immobile
labor force
• Denial of basic civil rights
• Violation of free market principles
Mississippi Black Code (1866)
Section 2. Be it further enacted, that all freedmen, free Negroes, and
mulattoes in this state over the age of eighteen years found on the second
Monday in January 1966, or thereafter, with no lawful employment or
business, or found unlawfully assembling themselves together either in the
day or nighttime, and all white persons so assembling with freedmen, free
Negroes, or mulattoes, or usually associating with freedmen, free Negroes, or
mulattoes on terms of equality, or living in adultery or fornication with a
freedwoman, free Negro, or mulatto, shall be deemed vagrants; and, on
conviction thereof, shall be fined in the sum of not exceeding, in the case of a
freedman, free Negro, or mulatto, 150, and a white man, $200, and
imprisoned at the discretion of the court, the free Negro not exceeding ten
days, and the white man not exceeding six months.
Source: Laws of the State of Mississippi, Passed at a Regular Session of the Mississippi
Legislature, held in Jackson, October, November and December, 1865 (Jackson, 1866),
pp. 82-93, 165-67.
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Excerpts from “What’s to Be Done with the Negroes?”
by George Fitzhugh, DeBow’s Review 1:6 (June 1866)
We of the South would not find much difficulty in managing the negroes, at least
tolerably well, if left to ourselves, for we would be guided by the lights of
experience and the teachings of history, sacred and profane. . . . We should be
satisfied to compel them to engage in coarse, common manual labor, and to
punish them for dereliction of duty or nonfulfillment of their contracts with
sufficient severity, to make the great majority of them useful, productive
laborers….
To punish idleness is the first and most incumbent duty of government….
Vagrant laws are hardly needed by the whites, and they sleep upon our statute
books. The white race is naturally provident and accumulative, and but few of
them thieves…. But a great deal of severe legislation will be required to compel
negroes to labor as much as they should do, in order not to become a charge
upon the whites. We must have a black code, and not confound white men with
negroes…. Immemorial usage, law, custom and divine injunction, nay human
nature itself, have subordinated inferior races to superior races. Never did the
black man come in contact with the white man, that he did not become his
subordinate, if not his slave.
“Address of the Colored State Convention to the People of the State of South
Carolina,” 1865
We ask for no special privileges or peculiar favors. We ask only for even-handed
Justice, or for the removal of such positive obstructions and disabilities as past,
and the recent Legislators have seen fit to throw in our way, and heap upon us….
Without any rational cause or provocation on our part, of which we are
conscious, as a people, we, by the action of your Convention and Legislature,
have been virtually, and with few exceptions excluded from, first, the rights of
citizenship, which you cheerfully accord to strangers, but deny to us who have
been born and reared in your midst, who were faithful while your greatest trials
were upon you, and have done nothing since to merit your disapprobation….
We simply desire that we shall be recognized as men; that we have no
obstructions placed in our way; that the same laws which govern white men
shall direct colored men; that we have the right of trial by a jury of our peers,
that schools be opened or established for our children; that we be permitted to
acquire homesteads for ourselves and children; that we be dealt with as others,
in equity and justice.
A Missouri Democrat rejects the black codes:
“The contest [i.e., the Civil War] was not closed when Lee
surrendered. It only changed its form. We have no longer a
known foe and an open field. Intrigue and chicanery come
by gift of nature to all Southern races. For skirmishes we are
to have speeches; for battles, conventions, and in place of
campaigns, the sessions of Legislatures and Congresses. The
rebel puts aside the bayonet, and takes up the ballot. It is
for us to say whether it will not prove the more deadly
weapon of the two….
We cannot justly leave all the rights of the freedmen at the
mercy of those who so long held them in slavery. We cannot
safely leave four millions of people so utterly defenseless
against the cruelty or revenge of a hostile and exasperated
race. . . .
“The Rights of the Nation, and the Duty of Congress,”
by W. M. Grosvenor, New Englander and Yale Review 24, no. 93
(October 1865): 755-77.
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Reconstruction: Outline
I. The states of affairs, Spring 1865
II. Presidential reconstruction
A. The Freedmen’s Bureau
B. Black codes
C. Race riots of 1866
Harper’s Weekly 10, no. 491 (May 26, 1866)
“The riot in New Orleans – murdering negroes in the rear of Mechanics'
Institute ; Platform in Mechanics' Institute after the riot.” Harper's Weekly
(1866).
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“The rebels of New Orleans have
proved worthy of their cousinship to
the rebels in Memphis. They have
fleshed their maiden swords in the
blood of the negro. . . . [They
demonstrate] their devotion to the
President’s [lenient] policy by a riot
or massacre, inaugurated in order to
suppress free speech and to prevent
the people of Louisiana from
enjoying their Constitutional right
to assemble peacefully and petition
for the redress of grievances. . . .”
Chicago Tribune (August 1, 1866)
"The Riot in New Orleans," Harper's
Weekly (August 25, 1866).
Virginia freedpeople call for government aid:
“We know these men -- know them well -- and we assure
you that, with the majority of them, loyalty is only ‘lip deep,’
and that their professions of loyalty are used as a cover to
the cherished design of getting restored to their former
relations with the Federal Government, and then, by all
sorts of ‘unfriendly legislation,’' to render the freedom you
have given us more intolerable than the slavery they
intended for us. . . .
“We are ‘sheep in the midst of wolves,’ and nothing but the
military arm of the government prevents us and all the truly
loyal white men from being driven from the land of our
birth. Do not, then, we beseech you, give to one of these
‘wayward sisters’ the rights they abandoned and forfeited
when they rebelled, until you have secured our rights by the
aforementioned amendment to the constitution.”
Late Convention of Colored Men of Virginia, “Address to the Loyal
Citizens of the United States and to Congress,” New York Times
(August 13, 1865).
Reconstruction: Outline
I. The states of affairs, Spring 1865
II. Presidential reconstruction
A. The Freedmen’s Bureau
B. Black codes
C. Race riots of 1866
III. Congressional reconstruction
A. Reconstruction Acts
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Radical Republicans respond
Charles Sumner, Massachusetts Senator
and Radical Republican
Thaddeus Stevens, Pennsylvania
Congressman and Radical Republican
Congressional Reconstruction (1867-77)
• a.k.a. “Radical” or “Military” Reconstruction
• Reconstruction Act of 1867 a response to Southern
intransigence on black rights
• All former Confederate states removed from Union
(except Tennessee)
• Former Confederacy placed under military rule
• New conditions for re-entry of states into Union:
– Voting for delegates in the conventions = universal
manhood suffrage (no racial exclusion)
– Service as delegates open to all on same basis
– Stricter loyalty oath (“ironclad oath”) required
– The constitutional conventions had to ratify the 14th
Amendment
Radical Reconstruction:
The Military Reconstruction Act of 1867
The former Confederacy was divided into military districts during Congressional (or “Military”)
Reconstruction
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Reconstruction: Outline
I. The states of affairs, Spring 1865
II. Presidential reconstruction
A. The Freedmen’s Bureau
B. Black codes
C. Race riots of 1866
III. Congressional reconstruction
A. Reconstruction Acts
B. Civil Rights
Civil Rights Act (1866)
“All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign
power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens
of the United States; and such citizens, of every race and color,
without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary
servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall
have been duly convicted, shall have the same right, in every State
and Territory in the United States, to make and enforce contracts, to
sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell,
hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal
benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and
property, as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like
punishment, pains, and penalties, and to none other, any law, statute,
ordinance, regulation, or custom, to the contrary notwithstanding.”
Civil Rights Act (1866)
• Intended to ensure that federal and state citizenship
were the same
– Closes a loophole opened in the Dred Scott case of 1857
• Defined new “civil” rights (i.e., those social rights
deemed sufficiently important for government to
protect – part of the meaning of “freedom”)
• Federal government becomes guarantor
– Because states could not be relied upon to do so
– A reversal of longstanding principles of federalism?
• Johnson’s veto (overriden)
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In all our history, in all our experience as people living under Federal and State law, no
such system as that contemplated by the details of this bill has ever before been
proposed or adopted. They establish for the security of the colored race safeguards
which go infinitely beyond any that the General Government has ever provided for the
white race. In fact, the distinction of race and color is by the bill made to operate in
favor of the colored and against the white race.
They interfere with the municipal legislation of the States, with the relations existing
exclusively between a State and its citizens, or between inhabitants of the same
State—an absorption and assumption of power by the General Government which, if
acquiesced in, must sap and destroy our federative system of limited powers and
break down the barriers which preserve the rights of the States.
It is another step, or rather stride, toward centralization and the concentration of all
legislative powers in the National Government. The tendency of the bill must be to
resuscitate the spirit of rebellion and to arrest the progress of those influences which
are more closely drawing around the States the bonds of union and peace….
14th Amendment
• To ensure constitutionality of Civil Right Act of
1866
• Both guaranteed citizenship of former slaves
• Closed the “dual citizenship” loophole Taney
opened in Dred Scott (1857)
• Republican response to the intransigence of the
planter South (the black codes)
• Proposed 1867; ratified 1868
• Centrality of dialogue and contention
• Long-lasting effects; reinterpreted for business
The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, 1868
Section 1. 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.
Constitution, amend. XIV.
1. Closes “dual citizenship” loophole; state citizenship confers
national citizenship.
2. Privileges and immunities clause
3. Due process clause
4. Equal protection clause
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The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, 1868
Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States
according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons
in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any
election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the
United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers
of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the
male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of
the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in
rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced
in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the
whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Constitution, amend. XIV.
To the extent that states deny enfranchisement, to that extent
their population will be reduced for purposes of representation.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, 1868
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or
elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military,
under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an
oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a
member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any
State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in
insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the
enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House,
remove such disability.
Constitution, amend. XIV.
Disfranchisement of former Confederate officials.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, 1868
Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by
law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for
services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But
neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or
obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United
States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such
debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Constitution, amend. XIV.
The federal government may not assume debts incurred on
behalf of the Confederacy (including those to foreign countries),
nor indemnify those who had slaves for the loss of their slaves.
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Reconstruction: Outline
I. The states of affairs, Spring 1865
II. Presidential reconstruction
A. The Freedmen’s Bureau
B. Black codes
C. Race riots of 1866
III. Congressional reconstruction
A. Reconstruction Acts
B. Civil Rights
C. Black political participation
Why black enfranchisement?
• Conservative constitutional foundations
• States’ rights federalism: highly proscribed role for
federal government in local matters
• Protection of black rights required federal
intervention
• Enfranchisement = blacks can use the vote to protect
themselves
• Distasteful federal intervention minimized
Frederick Douglass on black enfranchisement (1866)
While there remains such an idea as the right of each State to control its
own local affairs, -- an idea, by the way, more deeply rooted in the
minds of men of all sections of the country than perhaps any one other
political idea, -- no general assertion of human rights can be of any
practical value. To change the character of the government at this point
is neither possible nor desirable. All that is necessary to be done is to
make the government consistent with itself, and render the rights of the
States compatible with the sacred rights of human nature.
The arm of the Federal government is long, but it is far too short to
protect the rights of individuals in the interior of distant States. They
must have the power to protect themselves, or they will go unprotected,
spite of all the laws the Federal government can put upon the national
statute-book. . . .
Source: Frederick Douglass, "Reconstruction,” Atlantic Monthly 18 (December 1866), 761765.
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The state constitutional conventions of 1867-68 were remarkable. In no other post-emancipation
society did those formerly enslaved become full participants in the formal political process. Once in
office, African Americans supported the Republican Party in launching a sweeping agenda that promised
to revolutionize the South.
Delegates to states constitutional conventions, 1867-1869
120
100
Southern whites
80
Outside whites
60
Blacks
40
Unclassified whites
20
Unclassified
delegates
0
Delegates to all ‘67-’69 constitutional conventions
38 8
Southern whites
257
Outside whites
549
Blacks
159
Unclassified whites
Unclassified delegates
6
8
10
35
8
17
45
Arkansas
72
14
South Carolina
68
Texas
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Number of Black Elected Federal and State Legislators Who Served Terms During the
Reconstruction Period, by State: 1869 to 1901
Federal
Representat
Senators
ives
State
State
Total
Representat
Senators
ives
State total
Total
Alabama
0
3
3
6
69
75
78
Arkansas
0
0
0
2
12
14
14
Florida
0
1
1
10
38
48
49
Georgia
0
1
1
3
37
40
41
Louisiana
0
1
1
24
97
121
122
Mississippi
2
1
3
6
58
64
67
North Carolina
0
4
4
22
56
78
82
218
South Carolina
0
8
8
33
17
210
Tennessee
0
0
0
0
12
12
12
Texas
0
0
0
4
35
39
39
Virginia
0
1
1
14
78
92
93
Total
2
20
22
124
670
794
816
African Americans elected to state and federal legislatures,
1869-1901
VirginiaAlabama
Arkansas
Texas
Florida
Tennessee
10% 2%
11%
Georgia
5%
6%
1%
South
5%
Louisiana
Carolina
15%
NorthMississippi
27%
Carolina 8%
10%
African-Americans in Congress during Reconstruction
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J.R. Rainey of
South Carolina,
an antebellum
free African
American
Hiram Revels
occupied the
Mississippi
Senate seat
once held by
Jefferson
Jonathan
Jasper Wright,
1st black state
supreme court
justice (South
Carolina)
Robert Smalls, former slave, war hero,
Congressman from South Carolina
“Hon. H.R. Revels,” Harper’s Weekly,
February 19, 1870, p. 116.
“Tim Works Wonders,” Harper’s Weekly,
April 9, 1870, p. 232.
“Time Works Wonders”
IAGO (Jeff Davis): "For that I
do suspect the lusty moor
hath leap'd into my seat: the
thought whereof doth like a
poisonous mineral gnaw my
inwards." -- Othello
In a historical twist of fate, Senator Hiram
Revels took the Senate seat formerly held by
Jefferson Davis, who had served as president
of the Confederate States of America. In this
cartoon by Thomas Nast, Revels is welcomed
to the Senate chamber by fellow-Republican
senators (l-r), Henry Wilson of
Massachusetts, Oliver Morton of Indiana,
Carl Schurz of Missouri, and Charles Sumner
of Massachusetts. Nast often tapped the
plays of Shakespeare, which were well
known to nineteenth-century Americans, as
sources of inspiration and symbolism. In this
illustration, the artist portrays Davis as the
evil Iago, who schemed against the innocent
Othello, the Moor (African).
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The Radical state governments
• Blacks hold office in most states
• Free schools, social institutions, internal
improvements
• All southern states fall out of Republican
hands by 1877
Reconstruction: Outline
I. The states of affairs, Spring 1865
II. Presidential reconstruction
A. The Freedmen’s Bureau
B. Black codes
C. Race riots of 1866
III. Congressional reconstruction
A. Reconstruction Acts
B. Civil Rights
C. Black political participation
IV. Conclusion
Take-aways
• The war settled questions of union and slavery,
but did not (could not) alter class relations and
class interests in the South
• Desires for speedy reunification clashed with
imperative of protecting rights of the freedpeople
• Showdown over the use of federal power ensued
between Johnson and Congress
• This demanded the clarification of black rights,
and the fed’s role in protecting them
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