Download Johnson`s Reconstruction

Reconstruction
Chapter 12
1865-1877

With the Civil War over, Union and Confederate
soldiers return home.

However, the Confederate soldiers return to
devastated homes and land.

The Lost Cause was a transitional phase that white
Southerners went through after the war. While some
Southerners viewed the war as a “Lost Cause,” most
Southerners viewed the war as a temporary setback
before the South’s vindication.

Southerners spent the
summer and fall of 1865
haunted by ghosts of loved
one’s lost, beautiful
memories, self-assurance,
and slavery.

The Southerners believed
that God had spared them
for something greater and
made Robert E. Lee the
patron saint for his nobility
against the Yankees.

While the North added their victory to history
books and moved on, the South took their
defeat to rationalize and remember.

White Southerners saw African Americans as
adversaries whose attempts at selfimprovement, where a direct challenge to
white racial superiority.
Lincoln’s Plan for
Reconstruction

Ten-Percent Plan

Government would pardon all Confederates who
would swear their allegiance to the Union and
obey its laws; High ranking officials and those
accused of crimes against prisoners of war were
EXEMPT from this plan.

Once 10% of 1080 voters took this oath, a
Confederate state could form a new state
government and send representatives to Congress.

Before Lincoln’s death, Arkansas, Louisiana,
Tennessee, and Virginia were moving towards
being readmitted into the Union.
Radical Republicans

Proposed laws to ensure African American rights.
 Citizenship
 Right to Vote

Senator Charles Sumner (Mass.) and Representative Thaddeus Stevens (Penn.)
wanted to destroy the political power of former slaves holders.

Wade-Davis Bill (July 1964)
 Response to Lincoln's Ten-Percent Plan
 Proposed Congress, NOT the president, would be responsible for
Reconstruction.
 Declared state governments could only be formed by majority rules, rather
than 10% rule.
 Lincoln used a pocket veto to kill the bill.

Thaddeus Stevens of
Pennsylvania led the radical
forces in the House of
Representatives.

Stevens envisioned a South
with no large plantations
and few landless farmers.

Stevens found very few
supporters for is ideas.
Johnson’s Reconstruction

Andrew Johnson
became president after
the assassination of
Lincoln.

Johnson had been the
only Southern senator in
the U.S. Senate to
remain after the South’s
concession.

Johnson’s Reconstruction Plan (Presidential
Reconstruction)

Johnson extended pardons to Southerners who swore an oath of
allegiance.

Restored property rights to Southerners who swore an oath of
allegiance.

His plan had nothing to say about the voting and civil rights of former
slaves.

Declared Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, N. Carolina, S.
Carolina, and Texas could be readmitted to the Union.
Presidential Reconstruction
Comes to a Standstill



With slavery emancipated, Congress decided to do
more for the African American people.
Freedmen’s Bureau- established by Congress,
provided social, educational, and economic services,
advice, and protection to former slaves and homeless
whites.
Freedmen’s Bureau also rented out confiscated and
abandoned farmland in 40 acre plots, with an
opportunity to buy.

Freedmen’s Bureau was most successful in education, creating
more than fifty philanthropic and religious groups, which later
turned into three thousand freedmen’s schools in the South
serving 150,000 men, women, and children.

The Bureau also distributed clothes and food, set up over 40
hospitals, 4,000 primary schools, 61 industrial institutes, and
74 teacher-training establishments.

Single young women from the North comprised much of the
teaching staff in these schools.

26 year old Martha Schofield opened a school in
Aiken, South Carolina in 1871, which has been in the
public school system since 1953.

By the end of the Civil War only 10% of black
Southerners were literate, versus the 70% literacy rate
for white Southerners.

Within the next ten years, the Freedmen’s schools had
reduced illiteracy to under 70%.
Civil Rights Act of 1866

Black codes- laws passed by states and municipalities
denying many rights of citizenship to free blacks after
the Civil War.

Codes also allowed blacks to be arrested for not
having employment documentation and residence, or
who were “disorderly.”

Blacks were sentenced to hard labor on farms or road
construction crews.


President Johnson vetoed both the Freedman’s
Bureau Act and the Civil Rights Act.
Johnson had now alienated the moderate Republicans
and proved that he supported the South’s plan to deny
African-Americans’ rights.
Congressional Reconstruction

To keep freedmen's right
safe from presidential
vetoes, state legislatures,
and federal courts added the
Fourteenth Amendment to
the Constitution.

Fourteenth AmendmentGuaranteed every citizen
equality before the law by
prohibiting states from
violating the civil rights of
their citizens, thus
outlawing the black codes.
Reconstruction Act of 1867

Republicans dominated Congress from 1867-1870,
that controlled the Reconstruction era.

Did not recognize state governments under the Lincoln or Johnson plan.
(Except Tennessee who ratified the 14th Amendment and was accepted back in
the Union).

Divided the remaining 10 Confederate states into 5 military districts.

Required new state constitutions to grant African-American men the right to
vote and ratify the 14th Amendment.

Johnson vetoed this legislation; Congress overturned his veto.
Johnson’s Impeachment

Tenure of Office Act (March 1867)

Act prohibited the president from removing certain cabinet officers
“during the term the president by whom they may have been
appointed” without the Senate’s consent by two-thirds majority.

Johnson deliberately violated the act in February of 1868
when he fired Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton.

The House brought 11 charges of impeachment against
Johnson; 9 of which were based on violations of the Tenure
of Office Act.


Impeachment trial lasted 11 weeks.
Johnson missed being impeached by one
single vote.

Ulysses S. Grant gained
the Republican party
nomination in 1868.

Fifteenth Amendmentpassed in 1869,
guaranteed the right to
vote for American men,
regardless of race.
Southern Republican Governments

Republican party was gaining momentum in the South.

Scalawags- southern whites, mainly small landowning farmers
and well off merchants and planters, who supported the
Southern Republican party during Reconstruction.

CarpetbaggersNortherners who moved to the
South after the war; Freedman’s
Bureau agents, teachers, ministers
who felt morally obligated to
move south; others were former
Union soldiers who wanted land.

Brought very few belongings with
them.


Union Leagues- Republican party
organizations in Northern cities that became an
important organizing device among freedmen
in Southern cities after 1865.
They demanded “the right of universal
suffrage” for “all loyal men without distintion
of color.”
Migration to Cities

After the war, African Americans travelled to large cities to
find families, seek work, escape farm work, and test out their
rights to move around.

Once in the city, freedmen settled in cheap low-lying areas or
on the outskirts of cities where building codes did not exist.

Many blacks went from door to door looking for work.

Many worked for families as guards, laundresses, maids
getting paid very little.
Faith and Freedom

Many African Americans found inspiration
and courage in their religious faith.

Most black churches split from whitedominated congregations after the war.



Baptist
Methodist
Black churches created a variety of
organizations that served the black community.
Forty Acres and a Mule

By June 1865, more than forty thousand former slaves had
settled along the southeastern coast called “Shermanland.”

Southern Homestead Act- law passed by Congress in 1866,
that gave black people preferential access to public lands in
five southern states.

By the 1870’s, over fourteen thousand African American
families had taken advantage of this program to finance lnd
purchases with state-funded, long-term, low-interest loans.

Sharecropping- labor
system that evolved
during and after
Reconstruction,
whereby landowners
furnished laborers with
a house, farm animals,
and tools and advanced
credit in exchange for a
share of the laborers’
crops.
The Collapse of Reconstruction

As African American started to come out to vote,
compete for work, and carried arms as part of
occupying Union forces, Southern whites started to
lose their patience.

Ku Klux Klan- founded in Tennessee in 1866 by six
Confederate veterans. Originally, a social club that
soon assumed a political purpose.

Racial violence and the combative reaction it
provoked both among black people and Republican
administrations energized white voters.
Civil Rights Act of 1875

Introduced by Charles Sumner, the bill passed in a
watered down version after his death.

Bill prohibited discrimination against black people in
public accommodations (theatres, parks, trains) and
guaranteed freedmen’s rights to serve on juries.

Overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883.
Advances

Black families and institutions played a crucial role in
Reconstruction era.

Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equality before the law.

Fifteenth Amendment protected the righ tot vote for men.

Slaughterhouse cases- group of cases resulting in one
sweeping decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1873 that
contradicted the intent of the Fourteeth Amendment by
decreeing that most citizenship rights remained under state, not
federal control.
Democrats “Redeem” the South


Redemption –
Democrats regain
control if the South.
Election 1876


Rutherford B. Hayes
(Rep.) vs. Samuel J.
Tilden (Dem.)
Electoral College
nightmare?
Compromise of 1877

Congressional settlement of the election of
1876.

Put Rutherford B. Hayes into the White House
and gave Democrats control of all state
governments in the South.

Home rule – ability to run state governments
without federal intervention.