Download RECONSTRUCTION ERA 1865-1877

RECONSTRUCTION ERA 1865-1877
I. Myths About Reconstruction
1. Reconstruction-how to bring the former Confederate states back into the Union.
a. Constitutional Question-there is nothing in the Constitution to guide the country in this process.
2. Most of the myths about Reconstruction were created by two movies.
a. 1915 The Birth of a Nation
1) President Woodrow Wilson called the greatest work of the arts in history.
2) Wilson was both a racist and sexist
b. Gone With the Wind
1) Based on a book by Margaret Mitchell
2) The movie opened in Atlanta in 1939
3) It gave the illusion the South was perfect before the war and tortured after the war.
II. Lincoln’s Assassination
1. April 14, 1865 Lincoln is shot in Ford’s Theater by John Wilkes Booth.
a. Lincoln died the next morning
b. After Booth shot Lincoln, he jumped from the Presidential Box and shouted “Sic Semper
Tyrannis”-So it will always be with tyrants. It is the state motto of Virginia.
c. Booth is later surrounded in a barn and shot against orders. He was to be taken alive .
d. The five conspirators, including a women, Mary Suratt, were convicted and hanged.
1) In her last confession, she must have told her priest that she was innocent, because afterwards he
told the authorities you have executed an innocent women.
2) D r. Samuel Mudd, a Maryland doctor, who treated Booth’s broken leg was sent to prison for life
at America’s version of Devil’s Island-Dry Tortugous. It is still unclear if he was part of the conspiracy.
He gained an early release for helping stop a yellow fever epidemic in prison. His family is still working
to this day to gain an unconditional pardon. So far, their efforts have failed.
e. When Lincoln dies, Secretary of War Edwin Staunton says, “He now belongs to the Ages.”
f. Walt Whitman writes his most famous poem about Lincoln’s assassination O Captain! My Captain.
g. Andrew Johnson, a democrat from Tennessee becomes president.
III. Presidential Reconstruction
1.
Lincoln’s moderate plan-“Let them down easy.”
2.
Lincoln’s second inauguration speech-“With malice towards none and charity for all, lets
work to bind up the nations wounds quickly.”
3.
Lincoln’s plan was called “The Ten Percent Plan.”
a. When 10% of a former Confederate state’s male population takes a loyalty oath, it can return to
the Union.
4. April 1865 may have been the most crucial month in American history.
a. With Lincoln dead, would former Confederates wage a guerrilla war for decades.
b. A speech by Robert E. Lee to a New York paper ends this possibility.
5. Andrew Johnson tries to follow Lincoln’s plan but gets into trouble with the two factions of the
Republican party.
a. The Moderates-they a want to make an easy peace with the South.
b. The Radicals-They wanted to punish the South. The leading radicals are:
1) Thaddeus Stevens from Pennsylvania in the House of Representatives.
2) Charles Sumner from Massachusetts in the Senate.
3) The radicals wanted to breakup large plantations into 40 acre plots, supply a mule, and give it to
a former slave-a freeman.
4) 1864-The Wade-Davis Bill-the radical plan of Reconstruction which stated every white male
would have to sign the “Iron-clad Oath” swearing he was never in the Confederate army or served in
the Confederate government. This eliminated practically every white man and a former Confederate
government would have to wait for a generation to pass before it could re-enter the Union. Lincoln
pocket-vetoed it.
IV.
Radicals and Moderates
A. President Andrew Johnson
1. Picked as Lincoln’s vice president even though he was a democrat from Tennessee.
2. He was the champion of the small farmer, hated the “Traitorous aristocrats.”
3. Johnson pleased the Moderate Republicans.
4. The Radicals expected Johnson to act on his well-known dislike of the planter class.
B. The Aftermath of the War
1. The Civil War was a watershed, or turning point in history.
a. It changed the South radically
1) Slavery was ended
b. All Americans had to face the moral and legal questions of slavery.
2. The war’s end freed more than 4 million slaves
a. The South’s wealth was in slaves and land and one is gone, the other devastated.
b. The slave society was torn apart.
c. Poor whites in the South gained land on which they could farm from the shattered plantations.
d. The war caused enormous loss of life in the South and property loss.
C.
The Black Codes
1.
Former slaves were called freedmen, the radicals are concerned how they were being
treated.
a.
The 13th Amendment ended slavery, and most Southern states set up governments
when they ratified, or accepted the 13th Amendment.
b.
Whites were in the majority and powerful and well organized. Southern blacks
could not protect their rights without Northern help.
c.
Southern legislators passed regulations called The Black Codes designed to keep in
a condition of semi-slavery.
1)
Blacks could not vote
2)
The only work they could do was farming and household work.
2. The Black Codes alarmed many Northerners but the new Southern elections alarmed them even
more.
a. Southern voters were all white
b. Many of the leaders of the Civil War were elected.
c. The new leaders were all members of the democratic party.
d. Admitting these into Congress was even too much for the Moderates.
1) Both houses of Congress voted not to admit the new Southern representatives.
2) Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction was rejected.
D. Johnson and the Republicans
1. The Freedman’s Bureau was set up by the army to care for war refugees.
a. 1866, a new bill was passed increasing the power of the Bureau to protect southern blacks.
b. Johnson decided to veto, or refuse to approve the Freedman’s Bureau Bill.
1) He agreed with the intent of the bill, but argued it was unconstitutional to apply military law to
civilians in peacetime.
c. Congress attacked the Black Codes by passing a Civil Rights Act.
1) This law made blacks citizens of the U.S.
2) It was necessary to pass the law because of the Dred Scott Decision declared even free blacks
were not American citizens.
3) It also made laws like the Black Codes illegal.
d. Johnson vetoed this bill too.
1) He said blacks should not be made citizens right away. He said blacks should wait, that it was
unconstitutional, white immigrants had to wait for citizenship.
2) His dislike of the planter class did not keep him from being prejudiced against blacks.
e. Both houses of Congress pass the Civil Rights Act.
1) Congress obtained the necessary 2/3’s majority to override the presidents veto.
2) This was the first veto of an important law ever to be overridden.
V. The Civil War Amendments
A. The Reconstruction Acts
1. The 14th Amendment-Congress drafted this in order to put the terms of the Civil Rights directly
into the Constitution.
a. All persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens of the U.S. and the state they live in.
1) This amendment struck down the Black Codes.
2) No state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
3) “Nationalized the Bill of Rights.
2. The 14th Amendment guaranteed equal protection of the law to all Americans.
a. It did not make segregation-separation of the races illegal.
b. It did not tell the States to allow blacks to vote.
3. The Southern states strongly oppose it and it is impossible to get the necessary ¾’s of the states to
ratify it.
4. After the failure of the Southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment, Congress passed the
Reconstruction Act of 1867.
a. This stern measure divided the South into five military districts.
b. To end :army rule” each former CSA state would have to draw up a new Constitution allowing
blacks the right to vote and ratify the 14th Amendment.
c. Congress had ordered a military occupation of the South.
d. Tennesee escaped military occupation because it ratified the 14th Amendment.
e. The South hated military occupation but hated the idea of racial equality even more.
f. By 1870, Georgia finally ratified the 14th Amendment.
B. President Johnson is Impeached
1. Radical Republicans blamed President Johnson for the stubborn resistance of white Southerners.
2. Feb. 1868, Congress decided to use the impeachment process to remove Johnson.
3. The Impeachment Process
a. The House of Representatives brings the charges against the president.
b. Impeachment does NOT mean guilt.
c. The Senate decides guilt or innocence, like a jury, except a 2/3’s majority is required for
conviction.
d. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presides over the trial.
4. Johnson was brought to trial for violating the Tenure of Office Act by dismissing Edwin M. Stanton,
the Secretary of War.
a. The Senate must approve all presidential appointments of high officials. The constitution says
nothing about the removal of high officials without the Senate’s consent.
b. Andrew Johnson was acquitted by one vote.
1) Edmund Ross of Kansas cast the faithful vote.
C. The Election of 1868
1. The Republican candidate-Ulysses S. Grant.
2. The Democratic candidate-Horatio Seymour.
3. Results
a. Grant wins easily in the Electoral College
1) Grant 214 votes to Seymour’s 80
b. The popular votes in many of the Northern states was extremely close.
c. Because of the Reconstruction Act, the army protected the blacks right to vote in the South and
they voted Republican
d. Republicans realized the black vote was important, and with it, they could keep the hated
Democrats out of power for years.
4. The Fifteenth Amendment-“the rights of citizens of the U.S. to vote shall not be denied on account of
race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
5. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are known as the Civil War Amendments.
VI Freedom After Slavery
A.
The Privileges of Freedom
1.
Blacks did not have to work as long or as hard and began to take advantage of the
education advantages offered by the Freedman’s Bureau.
2.
Whites resented education for blacks, but had to admit they could learn as well as whites.
3.
Whites continued to oppose teaching black and white children in the same schools.
B.
Blacks in Government
1. “Black Republican” governments were what opponents call them. Those states that had blacks in
state legislatures, local government.
a. South Carolina had a black majority of government seats from 1868 to 1877.
b. Government at all levels was still controlled by whites.
c. Carpetbaggers-Name for northern whites who went south to take advantage of the economic
conditions and became rich.
d. Scalawags-the name for Southern whites who joined the Republican Party.
1) Got their name from the term for runty, poorly bred cattle.
e. In the end, both black and white politicians were corrupt, but whites stole more money because
they were better at it.
f. Southern state governments did raise taxes to pay for education, building projects, and began to
rebuild the Southern economy.
C. Sharecropping
1. Because of the shortage of cash after the war, whites could not afford to pay cash for farm labor so,
a system called sharecropping was devised.
a. The land owner provided the workers with houses, tools, seeds, and other supplies.
b. The workers supplied the skill and labor to grow the crops.
c. Harvest
1) Half to two/thirds went to the landowner
2) The rest went to the sharecropper.
d. Most blacks preferred sharecropping to working for wages.
3. Problems with the System
a. Blacks were often cheated by the landowner
b. Blacks had to use credit and when the crop was sold, they used the money to pay off the debt.
c. The high interest rates whites had to pay on borrowed money caused high prices in the stores where
the sharecroppers supplies came from.
1) Black sharecroppers were in so much debt they could not leave the land.
2) The system is failing because of a shortage of money in the South.
3) The whole system seemed similar to slavery. Because of the debt, blacks were caught up in a
process called peonage. Peonage-you had to work off your debt before you could leave your job.
d. In 1911, in the case Bailey v. Alabama, the whole sharecropping system was declared
unconstitutional.
D. The Crop-Lien System
1. Crop-lien-banks would lend money to landowners and the loan was secured by the crop.
a. Lien-a legal claim on the profits from the sale of the crop or harvest.
2. In order to get a loan, the landowner had to plant a cash crop-a product for which there was a world
market.
a. Cotton
b. Tobacco
c. These could be converted into cash anytime, they could be stored until market conditions improved.
3. By concentrating on a few crops, the soil became exhausted in the South.
4. The size of the harvest was unpredictable.
a. Large harvest-prices of crops went down
b. Small harvest-prices were too high
5. Because of the shortage of money in the South, it took twenty years for farm production to get to
where it was when the Civil War began.
VII TROOPS LEAVE THE
A. Resistance to Reconstruction
1. Whites form secret organizations to hold down blacks by terror.
2. Ku Klux Klan
a. It was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee by Nathan Bedford Forrest.
b. They wore white sheets to claim they were the “ghosts of the Confederate dead.”
1) “haints”-black word for ghosts. Because of their background in voodoo and other religions
brought fromAfrica, they were terrified by them.
c. The Klan at first, tried to frighten blacks, when this failed they turned to violence.
1) When this occurred, many of the original Klan members, including Nathan Bedford Forrest left
the Klan.
3. The Ku Klux Klan Act
a. The army was sent in to stop the violence, they arrested many Klan leaders.
b. To counter this, more white Southerners joined the Democratic party.
c. The Panic of 1873, causes both the north and south to become disinterested in Reconstruction.
B. The Election of 1876
1. The election of 1872
a. U.S. Grant defeats the Democratic candidate Horace Greeley.
b. Grant’s second term is marred by many scandals and the Panic of 1873.
c. Panic of 1873 causes
1) Jay Cooke’s Investment Firm fails
2) Great Chicago and Boston fires bankrupt most large insurance companies.
2. The North is losing interest in the South
a. They are satisfied the South is not going to reenslave blacks
b. They don’t want to control the South by means of the army
c. Blacks then chose not to risk voting and exercising other rights
3. Amnesty Act of 1872-allowed former Confederate officials to hold political office.
a. Former Confederates flocked to the Democratic party and ran in almost every Southern election.
4. The Republican party was hurt by the failure of President Grant to live up to expectations as
president.
a. Grant was a war hero and honest but was a poor chief executive.
b. He was the innocent victim of scandals and corruption in his administration.
c. The Election of 1872 Grant defeated the Democrat Horace Greeley but the Republicans were
growing weaker.
5. By 1876, the Republicans controlled only three Southern states.
a. Louisiana
b. South Carolina
c. Florida
6. The Election of 1876
a. The Republicans run Rutherford B. Hayes
b. The Democrats nominate Samuel Tilden of New York
c. Tilden has a majority of the electoral votes and won the popular vote by 250,000 votes.
d. The Republican leaders saw by switching the electoral votes of the three Southern states, plus a
disputed vote from Oregon, Hayes would win 185-184 in the electoral college.
e. The Republicans change the votes and the Democrats send in the original numbers.
f. The election is thrown into a chaotic situation because the Constitution makes no provision for
solving the problem.
7. The Special Electoral Commission
a. Ten members from Congress
1) Five democrats
2) Five republicans
3) Five members of the Supreme Court
a) S
upreme Court members were supposed to be nonpolitical, but 3 were Republicans and 2 Democrats.
b. The commission found out more democrats voted in the South than Republicans but large numbers
of blacks had been kept away from the polls and would have voted Republican.
C. The Compromise of 1877
1. The commission votes along party lines 8 to 7
2. Democrats felt cheated and for a time it looked like Civil War would break out.
3. The Compromise
a. Hayes agreed to withdraw all Federal troops in the South.
b. He would appoint a Southern conservative to his cabinet.
c. Hayes would sponsor to build a railroad from Texas to California.
d. Democrats promised to guarantee blacks their rights and not prevent them from voting.
VIII The Long Night Begins
A. Second Class Citizens
1. After the Compromise of 1877, northern whites turned their backs on the black citizens of the
South.
2. Blacks became second class citizens and the Long Night of Racial Segregation began.
3. Poll Tax-blacks had to pay in order to vote. The price was too costly for them.
4. Literacy Tests-if you could not read or write you could not vote.
a. If a black could read, he was given a foreign language passage to read.
4. Plessy V Ferguson 1896
a. Separation but equal was declared legal
b. Justice John Marshall Harlan, whose family owned slaves, said the
Constitution should be color blind.
C. The Atlanta Compromise
1. Tuskegee Institute
a. Founded in Alabama to teach blacks trades
b. Built by Booker T. Washington
2. The Atlanta Compromise
a. Blacks would accept separate-but-equal principle, but expected whites to be fair.
b. The Atlanta Compromise looks like blacks accepted second-class status, but they were desperate to
hold on to the gians they made.
c. Accommodation-accepting these conditions to survive.
d. The Grandfather Clause-if you could not vote before 1867, you and your descendants could not
vote.
1) In 1915, Guinn v U.S. the Supreme Court ruled grandfathers clauses were unconstitutional.
B. The Court and Segregation
1. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 provided that every citizen of every race and color, were entitled to
use restaurants, hotels, trains, and all public places of amusement.
2. The Jim Crow Laws
a. They were first passed in Tennessee
b. Named for the black-faced characters in 19th century song and dance acts.
c. This segregated blacks in public places.
3. The Civil Rights Cases 1883
a. The Supreme Court said the Civil Rights Acts of 1875 were unconstitutional.
b. It was not illegal for private business to practice racial segregation.