Download Chapter 22 Rejoinders

Question 1
a. Upon learning of the Emancipation Proclamation, many slaves, runaways and former
slaves attempted to join the Union army.
b. Pent-up anger inspired many slaves to vandalize master’s homes and farms on the day
of liberation either on their own or in league with Union troops.
c. It was not uncommon for slaves to take new names after emancipation, shedding the
ones given to them by their masters. Some also insisted that whites formally address
them as “Mr.” or “Mrs.”
d. Some slaves resisted the liberating Union armies and remained loyal to their
plantation masters.
e. Correct answer. Southern segregation and racial discrimination would make
interracial unions difficult for many succeeding generations.
Question 2
a. The Exodusters were not former slaves who refused to pick cotton after
emancipation; they were those who relocated to Kansas in a mass migration over two
years that ended in 1880.
b. Correct answer. The Exodusters were the roughly twenty-five thousand blacks from
Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi who fled to Kansas in a mass exodus (hence, their
nickname) from 1878 to 1880. This mass movement was cut off after steamboat
captains refused to transport more black migrants across the Mississippi River.
c. While tens of thousands of emancipated slaves did head out to find their long-lost
relatives, they were not termed Exodusters.
d. After emancipation, the church became the cornerstone of black community life, as
blacks—who as slaves had worshipped alongside whites—in freedom, they founded
their own churches. The 150,000-member black Baptist Church of 1850 reached
500,000 by 1870, while the African Methodist Episcopal Church quadrupled from
100,000 to 400,000.
e. Many free blacks were determined never again to don the course fabrics that were the
mark of slavery. Instead, they wanted silks, satin, and other fine fabrics.
Question 3
a. Although the Freedmen’s Bureau was authorized to settle former slaves on forty-acre
tracts confiscated from the Confederates, few blacks ever received any land.
b. The Freedman’s Bureau may have been established to aid former slaves, but its
administrators were often appointed from within a local area. Rather than help
negotiate fair labor contracts for former slaves, bureau administrators often
collaborated with planters in ridding towns of blacks or enticing them to sign labor
contracts to work for former masters.
c. Correct answer. The role of the Freedman’s Bureau, as established by Congress, was
to provide food, education, medical care, and other social services to freed slaves and
white refugees. It taught an estimated 200,000 blacks how to read.
d. Local administrators—and not transplanted Washington D.C. agents—oversaw their
own regions as agents of the Freedman’s Bureau, which facilitated widespread
corruption.
e. The Freedman’s Bureau, which was deemed meddlesome to the South and was
abhorred by President Andrew Johnson, nonetheless withstood several attempts to kill
it before it expired in 1872.
Question 4
a. Born to poor parents in North Carolina and orphaned early, Johnson did not attend
school but was apprenticed to a tailor at age ten.
b. Johnson, who never attended school, taught himself to read, and later his wife taught
him to write and do simple arithmetic.
c. Johnson had been a Congressman and governor of Tennessee.
d. Correct answer. Johnson’s claim to fame came as a champion of poor white farmers
against the planter aristocrats, despite the fact that he himself ultimately owned a few
slaves.
e. Johnson was not a lifelong Republican. The Republicans, seeking to shore up
Lincoln’s support in his re-election bid in 1864, sought support from the War
Democrats and other pro-Southern elements. Since Johnson was a Democrat, it made
him an appealing choice for vice president.
Question 5
a. Johnson agreed with Lincoln that the seceded states had never legally been outside
the Union, since both believed that the Constitution did not legally allow for
secession.
b. Presidential Reconstruction disenfranchised certain leading Confederates, including
those with taxable property worth more than $20,000. However, it allowed for them
to individually appeal to the president for a pardon.
c. Under Presidential Reconstruction, state conventions were required to repeal the
ordinances of secession, repudiate all Confederate debts, and ratify the Thirteenth
Amendment, which freed the slaves. Once they complied, they would be restored to
the Union.
d. Correct answer. Lincoln and Johnson both embraced a 10 percent Reconstruction
plan. According to this plan, a state could be readmitted to the Union when 10 percent
of its voters in the presidential election of 1860 had taken an oath of allegiance to the
United States and pledged to accept emancipation. Then, they would need to formally
put a state government in place. It was the Wade-Davis Bill that upped Lincoln’s 10
percent to 50 percent, but Lincoln pocket-vetoed this bill by refusing to sign it after
Congress had adjourned.
e. Once the state met the requirement of stated allegiance (as noted in D above), they
had to reorganize their governments. Upon establishment of a new state government,
they could apply for readmission to the Union.
Question 6
a. Correct answer. The Black Codes were laws passed in the South to restrict and
regulate the newly freed slaves, just as slave laws had done in pre-Civil War era. The
goal was to keep former slaves as a subservient work force, and as such, any black
who did not adhere to a labor contract—however oppressive—faced extreme
penalties, which included making them work for the same employer for a year at
miniscule wages.
b. The Black Codes were actually most severe in Mississippi, while Georgia had the
most lenient laws. The Codes typically varied from state to state.
c. The Black codes were not about restricting former masters by forcing them to rehire
their newly-freed slaves as sharecropping farmers. Instead, they were designed to
force slaves to work on their old plantations for one year.
d. Although the Black Codes did recognize legally the freedom of former slaves—
including new rights such as that to marry—the codes kept blacks from other rights of
citizenship, namely the right to sit on a journey, and some banned them from
renting/leasing land.
e. No single state allowed blacks to vote in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.
Question 7
a. Although Southern representatives from the newly-reorganized Southern states
arrived in Washington in December 1865 expecting to be seated, this is not why
Northern Congressmen questioned who really won the war.
b. Former Confederate President Jefferson Davis was not elected to the U.S. Senate
from the South after the war; he was imprisoned. His vice president, Andrew
Stephens, was initially under indictment for treason.
c. Correct answer. Before the war, a slave was counted as three-fifths of a person in
determining congressional representation. After the war, he was an entire person,
which meant that the rebel states got 12 more votes in Congress after the war and
twelve more presidential electoral votes, than they previously had. That led the North
to wonder who won the war.
d. Although many despised the sharecropping system, that was not the force behind
concerns that the South may have lost the battles, but ultimately won the sociopolitical aspects of the war.
e. While Northern leaders were continuously irked by southern efforts to eliminate the
Freedmen’s Bureau—even leading to a skirmish in Congress—it was not the reason
Congressmen wondered who won the war.
Question 8
a. The Fourteenth Amendment granted former slaves citizenship and civil rights,
excluding the right to vote.
b. Correct answer. The right to vote was not included in the Fourteenth Amendment and
would require its own amendment—the Fifteenth—to legally enfranchise blacks.
c. The Fourteenth Amendment reduced the representation in Congress of any state in
Congress and the Electoral College that denied blacks the ballot.
d. The Fourteenth Amendment disqualified from federal and state office certain former
Confederates, who as federal officeholders had once sworn “to support the
Constitution of the United States.”
e. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed the federal debt while repudiating all
Confederate debts.
Question 9
a. Moderates wanted reunification of the Confederate states into the Union to happen
quickly. Radicals, on the other hand, were opposed to rapid restoration of the
Southern states, and wanted to keep them on the outside as long as possible.
b. It was Radicals—not moderates—who wanted to reinvent the Southern economic
system before readmitting southern states. Their vision of a restored Union included a
completely transformed South.
c. Correct answer. Moderates were more attuned to states’ rights and self-government,
and wanted to limit federal intervention in the South. Instead, they sought policies
that prevented states from abridging citizens’ rights, rather than policies that directly
involved the federal government in individual lives.
d. Radicals wanted more federal involvement in the south. They believed that with
greater federal involvement, citizens’ rights could best be protected.
e. The one issue that both radicals and moderates agreed on was the need for blacks to
be given the vote. They were also both willing to send in federal troops to the South
to enforce that right if necessary.
Question 10
a. Congressional reconstruction required that readmitted states to the Union ratify the
fourteenth amendment, which gave former slaves citizenship.
b. Under the Reconstruction Act passed on March 2, 1867, the South was divided into
five military districts, which were each commanded by a Union general and policed
by blue-clad soldiers.
c. The Reconstruction Act required that state constitutions included full suffrage for
former adult male slaves.
d. By 1870, all southern states had met the Reconstruction Act’s requirement that they
establish new constitutions and reorganized state governments.
e. Correct answer. In a nod to the moderates, the Reconstruction Act did not provide the
freedmen with federally funded land or education.
Question 11
a. The wording of the Fifteenth amendment says that the vote cannot be denied on the
basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Both Lincoln and Johnson
initially wanted to only grant the vote to those blacks who met education, property
ownership, or military service requirements, but later fought to enfranchise all blacks.
b. It was the Fourteenth Amendment—and not the Fifteenth—that inserted the word
male for the first time into the Constitutional definition of citizenship. The Fifteenth
simply prohibited the denial of the vote on the basis of “race, color, or previous
condition of servitude.”
c. The Fifteenth Amendment said nothing about ex-Confederate leaders voting.
d. Correct answer. Women, who had played a vital role in the abolitionist movement,
lacked the same civil rights that former slaves lacked, and hoped that the Fifteenth
Amendment would fix both lapses. Women even suspended their own campaign for
the right to vote during the war to focus on emancipation. The amendment, however,
only enfranchised free men, leaving women to battle on their own for several more
decades to receive a constitutional amendment giving them the right to vote.
e. The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed blacks everywhere the right to vote. Ironically,
most Northern states before the amendment has long denied the ballot from their tiny
black minorities.
Question 12
a. Scalawags were not former slaves at all, let alone officeholders. Carpet baggers were
not characterized as members of the Freedmen’s Bureau.
b. Correct answer. Scalawags were pro-Union Southerners or Whigs who participated in
Radical Reconstruction; carpet baggers were Northerners who went South seeking
profit and power. The image was of them packing everything they owned into a
carpetbag suitcase at war’s end to cash in on the South’s bitter defeat. Most were
former Union soldiers.
c. Scalawags were Southerners, but they were not those who sold land to former slaves.
Carpet baggers were fortune-seekers, not government officials sent to ensure fair
elections.
d. Few Southerners supported black enfranchisement, and if they existed, they were not
labeled scalawags. To the South, however, carpetbaggers were regarded as
Northerners who sought to exploit the South’s postwar economic crisis for personal
gain.
e. While scalawags did support Yankee reforms and carpet baggers had engaged in
labor activism in the North, more significantly, they contributed to changes in the
South. For example, for the first time in Southern history, the region moved toward
establishing adequate public schools.
Question 13
a. Correct answer. Congress—not the Southern state governments—enacted the Force
Acts of 1870 and 1871 to prevent violence against blacks who tried to exercise their
new citizenship rights. Federal troops made major inroads, but many of the racist
groups continued their tactics in the guise of dancing clubs, missionary societies, and
rifle clubs.
b. Angry, many whites joined reformulated or new secret organizations such as the
“Invisible Empire of the South,” or Ku Klux Klan, founded in Tennessee in 1866, to
intimidate blacks from enjoying their new freedoms. They would go out at night,
dressed in sheets to cover their faces, and make frightening visits to black homes at
night.
c. Literacy tests were used to exclude blacks from the polls. Administered by whites,
they often allowed illiterate whites to vote.
d. Beginning around 1890, schemes ranging from intimidation to fraud to outright
trickery were employed to keep blacks from voting.
e. Passing black codes and segregating blacks and whites in public spaces was a major
way southerners used to chip away at blacks newfound rights and freedoms.
Question 14
a. Johnson was falsely accused by Congress of having a harem of dissolute women in
the white house. His enemies in Congress used this to attempt to weaken his power
and popularity, but it was not the justification for impeachment.
b. In truth, Johnson was a heavy drinker and was often drunk in the White House, but
under the Constitution, this is not a legal justification for impeachment.
c. Correct answer. The actual charge against Johnson in his impeachment hearings was
that he violated the Tenure of Office Act. Passed in 1867, the Tenure of Office Act
required the president to obtain the Senate’s consent before removing one of his
appointees from office. Johnson dismissed Edwin Stanton, secretary of war, in early
1868, who he suspected as secretly spying on him for the Radical Republicans in
Congress. The House of Representatives immediately voted 126 to 47 to impeach
Johnson for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Two additional articles related to
Johnson’s verbal assaults on the Congress, involving “disgrace, ridicule, hatred,
contempt, and reproach.”
d. The Alaska Purchase, handled by Secretary of State William Seward in 1867, had
nothing to do with the impeachment matter. However, most Americans thought the
purchase of the frigid state from the Russians was a silly waste.
e. Johnson had obstructed the Radical Republicans’ vision of Reconstruction, which is
why they wanted to get rid of him, but this was not the official reason for his
impeachment.