Reconstruction Chapter 12

1. ReconstructionChapter 12 1865-1877

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 self-improvement, where a direct challenge to white racial superiority.

5. 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.

6. Before Lincoln’s death, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia were moving towards being readmitted into the Union.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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%.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. Congressional Reconstruction • To keep freedmen's right safe from presidential vetoes, state legislatures, and federal courts added the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. • Fourteenth Amendment-Guaranteed every citizen equality before the law by prohibiting states from violating the civil rights of their citizens, thus outlawing the black codes.

17. 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.

19. 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.

20. Impeachment trial lasted 11 weeks. • Johnson missed being impeached by one single vote.

21. Ulysses S. Grant gained the Republican party nomination in 1868. • Fifteenth Amendment- passed in 1869, guaranteed the right to vote for American men, regardless of race.

22. 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.

23. Carpetbaggers- Northerners 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.

24. 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.”

25. 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.

26. Faith and Freedom • Many African Americans found inspiration and courage in their religious faith. • Most black churches split from white-dominated congregations after the war. • Baptist • Methodist • Black churches created a variety of organizations that served the black community.

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. 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.

31. 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.

32. 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.

33. 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?

34. 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.