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Reconstruction
Reconstruction Timeline
During War:
Lincoln’s “10% Plan” (Dec 1863)
Election of 1864
Lee Surrenders (Apr 1865)
Lincoln Assassinated
Post War
13th Amendment (Dec. 1865)
14th Amendment (July 1868)
Impeachment (Feb. 1868)
15th Amendment (March 1870)
Compromise of 1877
Composition of the Union Party, 1864
Presidential Election, 1864 (by county)
Questions as Reconstruction began...
* What were the freedpeople’s expectations?
* What would southern whites who had supported the rebellion have to do to have their
citizenship restored?
* To what extent would whites comply with efforts to guarantee the civil rights of former
slaves?
* Who in Washington, D.C. would be in charge of Reconstruction – the President or
Congress?
Ford’s Theater, Washington DC
Police blotter reporting the assassination
of Lincoln
The hanging of four of Booth’s eight convicted
co-conspirators (including one woman) in July 1865
Main ideas for Reconstruction
1 The future of political and economic power
for freed slaves.
2 The future of North-South economic and
political relations
Presidential Reconstruction
• Lincoln’s attempt to reunify
the nation
• Lincoln’s (Proclamation of
Amnesty and Reconstruction)
“10% plan” - Dec 1863
– requirements
– omissions
– political concerns more
important than moral.
Congressman
Thaddeus Stevens
of Pennsylvania
Andrew
Johnson
Johnson’s Reconstruction Program
• Requirements
– take loyalty oath to have rights
reconfirmed - return of all property but
slaves
• Confederate officials & $20,000 property
owners excluded
– only those who swore could vote
– would revoke martial law once a new
constitution drafted & officials elected
• Omissions
– individual pardons granted to all who ask
Johnson’s Reconstruction Program
• Fails to live up to his rhetoric
– more lenient than Lincoln
– no requirement to ratify 13th Amendment
(ending slavery)
– ignores the issue of the articles of
secession
– fails to require that Confederate states
renounce their war debt
• Speeds readmission of Southern States
into Union
– completed summer of 1865!
• Angers Republican dominated
Congress
Civil Rights Act of 1866
• Response to black codes
• Defined all persons born
in the United States as
citizens and listed certain
rights that all citizens
possessed
• Established federal
government as final
arbiter of citizenship
rights. States could not
discriminate against
blacks
• Johnson’s veto pushes
moderate politicians to
support radicals
Congressional Reconstruction
1866-77
1 citizenship and suffrage for former slaves.
2 a requirement that southern states ratify the
Fourteenth Amendment before readmission.
– More rigorous tests for readmission to the Union
– Wade-Davis Bill
3 military occupation of the defeated south
– Destroy power of the Southern planter class through
confiscation and redistribution of land
Military Reconstruction of the South, 1866-1877
five districts and commanding generals
Congressional Reconstruction, 1866-1877
• Republicans during
Reconstruction
– Conservative: supported
Johnson’s policies
– Moderate: problems
with Johnson’s policies
– Radical: opposed
Johnson’s policies
• Johnson’s Veto of Civil
Rights Act of 1866
Thaddeus Stevens,
Radical leader in
the House of
Representatives
“A Man Knows a Man,”
Harper’s, April 22, 1865
“Radical” Reconstruction
• Military Reconstruction
– Divided former Confederate states (except
Tennessee) into five military districts
– Invalidated Lincoln and Johnson governments
– States required to
• Hold new constitutional conventions
• Create new state governments that allowed black male
suffrage and ratified 14th Amendment (twelve states
had rejected ratification by March 1867)
– President
• Required to issue orders through General of the Army
• Prohibited from replacing federal officials who
opposed his policies
The Freedmen’s Bureau, created 1865; staffed by officers of the Union
Army, literally stood between freed slaves and their former masters
The South under Reconstruction
• The Experience of
Freedom
– African Americans’
responses to emancipation
• Moving around; rebuilding
families, churches, schools
• Demanding social change:
refusing to defer, challenging
discrimination
– White southerners’ reaction
• Insistence on racial separation
• Violence against blacks: race
riots, Ku Klux Klan
The South under Reconstruction
• Black Codes: statutes passed at local and state level
throughout the South and designed to control freed blacks
– Allowed freedpeople to
•
•
•
•
Marry
Own property
Make contracts
Testify against each other
– Restrictions
•
•
•
•
Segregated public places
Prohibited intermarriage
Barred testimony against whites or service on juries
Prohibited from leaving plantations without permission
Political cartoonist Thomas Nast criticizes the Black Codes
in Harper’s Weekly, 1866
The South under Reconstruction
– Land and Labor
• Blacks lacked
access to land
ownership; whites’
need for labor
– Sharecropping
– Crop-lien system
• Problems
– Falling cotton
prices, economic
stagnation of
agriculture
– Lack of southern
industrial growth
– Corruption
The South under Reconstruction
• The Ku Klux Klan
– Secret organization formed in 1866
• Most members were small-scale farmers
and workers
• Leaders were planters, merchants,
lawyers
– Major goals of Klan and similar
groups
• Restore white supremacy
• Destroy the Republican party in the
South
– Tactics
• Intimidation of black and white
Republicans
• Punishment of blacks
• Destruction of black churches and
schools
Fourteenth Amendment
ratified 1868
• Fourteenth Amendment (passed Congress, June
1866; ratified July 1868)
– Defined federal citizenship
– Extended prohibition of federal interference with basic
civil rights (Bill of Rights) to protection against actions
by state governments
• States could not deny rights without due process or deny equal
protection of the laws
• States that refused black men the right to vote could have
representation reduced
– Former Confederates excluded from politics until
restored by 2/3 vote of Congress
Seward’s Folly
Ticket to Johnson’s impeachment trial, March 1868
Johnson’s Impeachment 1868
• Impeachment: Constitution,
Article I, Sections 2 & 3
– House brings charges
(impeaches)
– Senate holds trial with Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court
presiding
• 2/3 vote convicts and president
removed
• Johnson impeached for
violating 1867 law prohibiting
removal of federal officials
– Vote to convict failed by one
vote
– Rationale for failed conviction
Ulysses S.
Grant
as president
The inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant, March 4, 1869
Grant Administration
• Problems
– Corruption
– Liberal Republican challenge in
Election of 1872
– Panic of 1873 and onset of
economic depression
• Reconstruction policies
– Northern indifference/ southern
violence
– Enforcement Acts, 1870-1871
• Protected black voters and
provided for federal supervision
of southern elections
• Ku Klux Klan Act: strengthened
sanctions against those who
impeded black suffrage
Fifteenth Amendment
ratified 1870
• Black
Enfranchisement:
– In 1869, Congress
approved amendment
extending the right to
vote regardless of
“race, color, or
previous condition of
servitude”
African-American men voting
during Reconstruction
The Fifteenth Amendment Adopted
(1870 lithograph)
Freed slaves in
Charleston, S.C.
Reconstruction’s last phase
• Civil Rights Act of 1875
– Outlawed racial segregation in transportation
and public accommodations
– Prevented exclusion of blacks from jury service
Struck down by U.S. Supreme Court in 1883
Civil Rights Cases: 14th Amendment does not
prohibit discrimination by individuals, only
states
The Collapse of Reconstruction
• Redemption
– The Republican
party in the South
• Tenuous political
position
• Freedmen voted,
elected to Congress
and other offices
• Policies of
modernization, but
high taxes spurred
opposition
“Redeemers” and the Southern
Democratic Party
Victories by
Democrats in
state elections
“redeemed” those
states from
Republican rule.
“Redeemers”
often benefited
from actions
of the Klan and
other terrorist
organizations.
The Compromise of 1877
• Election of 1876
Rutherford B. Hayes
(Rep.)
Samuel J. Tilden
(Dem)
– 20 disputed
electoral votes
1 vote
• 19 in South
Carolina,
Louisiana, and
Florida
• One in Oregon
– Fifteen-member
commission (8
Republicans, 7
Democrats)
awarded all
disputed votes to
Hayes
7 votes
8 votes
4 votes
Compromise of 1877
– Democrats dropped
Tilden’s claims to
votes in exchange
for
• End to federal
intervention in the
South
• Federal subsidies
for Southern
railroads and canals
– Hayes elected,
Reconstruction
ended
Analyzing Reconstruction
• Consider main goals
1 Slavery ended but blacks become 2nd class
citizens; lose the vote after 1890
2 Confederacy dead; Rebs = Americans
3 Modernization speeds up in North
– Business booms; era of Free Enterprise
– South becomes poor “Third World” backwater
– Texas best off in South, but still poor