Chapter 15: Reconstruction and the New South

American History: A Survey

APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON

Impact of the Civil War on the South

Political Developments Economic Developments

Political dominance of the North

Established federal supremacy

Johnson’s Reconstruction Plan

Abolition of slavery (13th)

Black codes

14th and 15th Amendments and disenfranchisement

Scalawags and carpetbaggers

Compromise of 1877

Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896

Jim Crow Laws, Redeemers

3.5 million slaves freed

Property losses and damage

Labor force needed/plantations

Sharecropping

African-American migration

New South, Henry Grady

Growth of textile industry in the Carolinas

Growth of steel industry in AL

Deflation

Impact of the Civil War on the North

Political Developments Economic Developments

Political dominance of the North

Established federal supremacy

Impeachment of A. Johnson

Radical Republicans

Election of 1868 – U.S. Grant

Scandals: Whiskey Ring and Credit Mobilier

Election of 1876 – Hayes/Tilden

Compromise of 1877

Party bosses/political machines

Beginnings of Progressivism

Civil War as catalyst to transform America into industrial nation

Laissez-faire & pro-business

Railroad subsidies/land grants

Greenbacks/silver issue

Capital, resources, labor

Factories, growth of industries

Immigration/labor force

Migrations/labor force

Urbanization

Impact of the Civil War on the West

Political Developments Economic Developments

Settlement of West becomes important

Homestead Act, 1862

Federal troops available for enforcing resettlement of Native Americans

Indian Wars

Interstate Commerce Act, 1887

Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882

Populist Movement

Beginnings of Progressivism

Construction of railroads – impact on western migration, on buffalo, on Native Americans, on cattle drives, on opening of eastern markets

Cattle drives

New inventions/technologies

barbed wire

Farmers’ Alliance, farmers’ cooperatives

Exodusters - migration

Mail order catalogs

INTRODUCTION Reconstruction and the New South

Reconstruction: the years following the Civil War, literally meaning “rebuilding”

Southern Viewpoint: vindictive Northerners inflicted humiliation and revenge on the South and delayed genuine reunion

Northern Viewpoint: believed their policies were the only way to keep Confederates from restoring Southern society as it had been before the war

Big Question: how to prevent the same sectional problems that had produced the Civil War in the first place?

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Other Big Questions

How would the South be rebuilt?

How would liberated blacks fare as free men and women?

How would the Southern states be reintegrated into the Union?

Who would direct the process of Reconstruction – the southern states themselves, the president, or Congress?

Did freedom mean simply the absence of slavery, or did it imply other rights for the former slaves? And if so, which ones: equal civil rights, the vote, ownership of property? During Reconstruction, freedom became a terrain of conflict, its substance open to different, often contradictory interpretations.

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Competing Notions of Freedom

Former slaves were united in their desire for independence, but they differed with one another on how to achieve that freedom (some demanded redistribution of land, others wanted legal equality).

For southern whites, freedom meant the ability to control their own destinies without interference from the North or the federal government, to keep black workers legally tied to the plantations, to preserve white supremacy.

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Issues of Reconstruction

Readmitting the South would reunite the Democrats and weaken the Republicans.

Republicans disagreed about the proper approach to Reconstruction:

Conservative/Moderate Republicans: insisted that the South accept the abolition of slavery, but proposed few other conditions

Radical Republicans: Led by Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, urged that the Confederate leaders be punished, that legal rights of blacks be protected, and that property of wealthy whites be confiscated and distributed among the freedmen

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Emancipation

Emancipation took effect unevenly, and there was a variety of responses to emancipation by both blacks and whites

The church became the focus of black community life following emancipation.

Emancipation meant education for many former slaves.

With planters seeking to establish a labor system as close to slavery as possible, and former slaves demanding economic autonomy and access to land, a long period of conflict over the organization and control of labor followed on plantations throughout the South.

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The Freedmen’s Bureau

The Freedmen’s Bureau was an experiment in government social policy that seems to belong more comfortably to the New Deal of the 1930s or the Great Society of the 1960s than to nineteenth-century America. Bureau agents were supposed to establish schools, provide aid to the poor and aged, settle disputes between whites and blacks and among the freed-people, and secure for former slaves and white Unionists equal treatment before the courts.

The Freedmen’s Bureau lasted from 1865 to 1870. Even at its peak, there were fewer than 1,000 agents in the entire South. Nonetheless, the Bureau’s achievements in some areas, notably education and health care, were striking.

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Plans for Reconstruction

Lincoln’s “10 percent” Reconstruction Plan: a state could be reintegrated into the Union when 10 percent of its voters in the presidential election of 1860 had taken an oath of allegiance to the US and pledged to abide by emancipation, then a formal erection of a state government

Wade-Davis Bill: required that 50 percent of a state’s voters take the oath of allegiance and demanded stronger safeguards for emancipation (Wade-Davis revealed deep differences between the president and Congress, and differences among Republicans) (Lincoln’s pocket veto)

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President Andrew Johnson

A fervent believer in states’ rights, Johnson insisted that since secession was illegal, the southern states had never actually left the Union or surrendered the right to govern their own affairs.

Johnson held deeply racist views, and he believed that African Americans had no role to play in Reconstruction.

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Plans for Reconstruction

Johnson’s version of Lincoln’s proposal (Restoration): he recognized several governments, then disfranchised leading Confederates, though they might petition him for personal pardons, repudiate all Confederate debts, and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment

Republicans grew furious (Union blood in vain?) as the pattern of the new governments became clear:

Black Codes: designed to regulate affairs of the emancipated blacks, much as slave statutes did during slavery…severity varied from state to state, but they all ensured a stable and subservient labor force. The codes sought to restore the pre-emancipation system of race relations, mocking the idea of freedom.

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Congressional Elections of 1866 and Radical Reconstruction

Congress tried to temper the worst features of the codes by passing the Civil Rights Bill (1866).

In the congressional elections of 1866, Republicans rolled up more than a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, giving them veto-proof power and unlimited control of Reconstruction policy.

Reconstruction Act: (1867) divided the South into five military districts, each commanded by a Union general and policed by soldiers

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The Reconstruction Amendments Key Concept 5.3 (IIIC)

Thirteenth Amendment: abolished slavery (1865)

Fourteenth Amendment: made former slaves citizens, and it also stated that the state cannot deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law (1868)

Fifteenth Amendment: provided suffrage for African American males (1870)

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The Fourteenth Amendment Key Concept 5.3 (IIIC)

In a compromise between the radical and moderate positions on black suffrage, the Fourteenth Amendment did not grant blacks the right to vote. But it did provide that if a state denied the vote to any group of men, that state’s representation in Congress would be reduced. (This provision did not apply when states barred women from voting.) The abolition of slavery threatened to increase southern political power, since now all blacks, not merely three-fifths as in the case of slaves, would be counted in determining a state’s representation in Congress. The Fourteenth Amendment offered the leaders of the white South a choice – allow black men to vote and keep their state’s full representation in the House of Representatives, or limit the vote to whites and sacrifice part of their political power. Nonetheless, by writing into the Constitution the principle that equality before the law regardless of race is a fundamental right of all American citizens, the Fourteenth Amendment made the most important change in that document since the adoption of the Bill of Rights.

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The “Great Constitutional Revolution” Key Concept 5.3 (IIIC)

Before the Civil War, American citizenship had been closely linked to race. The first Congress, in 1790, had limited to whites the right to become a naturalized citizen when immigrating from abroad. No black person, free or slave, the Supreme Court had declared in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, could be a citizen of the United States. The laws and amendments of Reconstruction repudiated the idea that citizenship was an entitlement of whites alone. The principle of equality before the law, moreover, did not apply only to the South. The Reconstruction amendments voided many northern laws discriminating on the basis of race. And, the amendments expanded the liberty of whites as well as blacks, including future immigrants.

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The “Great Constitutional Revolution” (continued…)

Key Concept 5.3 (IIIC) The Civil War Amendments (also known as the Reconstruction

Amendments) established judicial principles that were stalled for many decades but eventually became the basis for court decisions upholding civil rights.

In the twentieth century, many of the Supreme Court’s most important decisions expanding the rights of American citizens were based on the Fourteenth Amendment, perhaps most notably the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that outlawed school segregation.

Reconstruction redrew the boundaries of American freedom.

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Reconstruction Amendments and Women Key Concept 5.3 (IIIB)

Women activists saw Reconstruction as the moment to claim their emancipation. The destruction of slavery had feminists to search for ways to make the promise of free labor real for women. Some leaders, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because it did nothing to enfranchise women.

By opposing the Fifteenth Amendment, Stanton and Anthony alienated more moderate feminists and causes a final breakdown of the alliance between feminists and abolitionists, who had worked together so closely since the 1840s.

Basically, the women’s rights movement was both emboldened and divided over the 14th and 15th Amendments.

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The New South Key Concept 6.1 (IIC)

The term "New South" is used in contrast to the Old South and the slavery-based plantation system of the antebellum period.

The New South campaign was championed by Southern elites in hopes of making a fresh ("new") start forming partnerships with Northern capitalists in order to modernize and speed the economic development of the South. New South advocates (such as Henry Grady) wanted southern economic regeneration and sectional reconciliation.

The rise of the New South involved the continued supremacy of whites over blacks, who had little or no political power.

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Prompt: Henry Grady promoted the idea of a New South. To what extent were his ideas accurate?

Following Reconstruction, the South experienced some measured industrial growth as Northern businessmen moved their textile factories out of New England and into the South in an effort to lessen the cost of transporting raw materials, and to take advantage of lower taxes and cheaper nonunion labor. However, the South remained firmly entrenched in its antebellum heritage by remaining predominantly agriculturally based and heavily dependent on single cash crops. Its newly installed Redeemer governments reintroduced Democratic Party dominance. Also, its continuing beliefs in black inferiority kept African Americans in a perpetual state of subservience. Therefore, the ideas promoted by Henry Grady and the idea of a New South were not in the end accurate.

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Radical Reconstruction in the South The Black Officeholder

Key Concept 5.3 (IIB) Among the former slaves, the passage of the Reconstruction Act

inspired an outburst of political organization.

The highest offices remained almost entirely in white hands, and only in South Carolina, where blacks made up 60 percent of the population, did they form a majority of the legislature. Nonetheless, the fact that some 2,000 African-Americans occupied public offices during Reconstruction represented a fundamental shift of power in the South and a radical departure in American government.

Hiram Revels: born free in North Carolina, served as a chaplain in the wartime Union, in 1870 became the first black senator in American history.

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Radical Reconstruction in the South “A Reign of Terror”

Key Concept 5.3 (IIIA) In wide areas of the South, secret societies sprang up with the

aim of preventing blacks from voting and destroying the organization of the Republican Party by assassinating local leaders and public officials.

The most notorious such organization was the Ku Klux Klan, which in effect served as a military arm of the Democratic Party in the South. The Klan was a terrorist organization, committing some of the most brutal criminal acts in American history. In many counties, it launched what one victim called a “reign of terror” against Republican leaders, black and white.

Colfax Massacre: (1873) armed whites assaulted the town, murdering hundreds of former slaves, including a black militia unit after they had surrendered.

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Reconstruction and Post-Reconstruction Discrimination (getting around the Fifteenth Amendment)

Key Concept 5.3 (IIIA)

Only property owners could vote

Had to pay a fee before voting (poll tax)

Had to pass a literacy test

(These restrictions kept many African-American and white people from supporting Populist candidates.)

Grandfather Clauses: exempts a group of people from obeying the law if they had met certain conditions before the law was passed.

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Reconstruction and the Supreme Court Key Concept 5.3 (IIIA)

The Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) sanctioned “separate but equal” public facilities for African Americans.

There was only one dissent to this decision, by Justice Harlan, who called the ruling as “pernicious” as Dred Scott. Harlan saw Jim Crow as an assault on liberty. “Our Constitution is color-blind,” he wrote, “and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Not one of Harlan’s colleagues agreed. Their abandonment of the Republican party’s founding principles still haunts Americans more than a century later. Plessy delivered a final blow to the civil rights that many had fought for in the Civil War.

Plessy is considered the legal foundation for segregation until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case.

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Is This a Republican Form of Government? A cartoon by Thomas Nast, 1876, illustrating his conviction that the overthrow of Reconstruction meant that the United States was not prepared to live up to its democratic ideals or protect the rights of black citizens threatened by violence.

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Sharecropping and the crop lien system Key Concepts 5.3 (IIA) and 6.1 (IIC)

The majority of freedmen entered sharecropping arrangements with former masters and other nearby planters. Sharecropping and the crop lien system led to a cycle of debt and depression for Southern tenant farmers.

Both black and white farmers found themselves caught in the sharecropping and crop-lien systems.

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Johnson and Impeachment

Believing the president was impeding their plans for reconstruction, the radical Republicans began looking for ways to remove him

The only constitutional grounds for impeachment are “high crimes and misdemeanors” and Republicans could not come up with anything

Johnson violated the Tenure of Office Act

Accusers argued that Johnson had defied Congress

Defenders claimed that he had acted properly in challenging what he considered an unconstitutional law

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Summarize the following:

Northern Whites: at first hoped to assist the freedmen and unite the North and South in economic prosperity; by the end they wanted an end to strife, even at the cost of abandoning the freedmen

Southern Whites: wanted to remove, by force if necessary, all white Republicans; while acknowledging that slavery would not be restored, they hoped to control the freedmen in conditions that approached the control they had during the slavery era

Blacks (freedmen): hoped for the civil and voting rights that had been promised and for educational opportunities; by 1877 they are trying to survive

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Redeemers Key Concept 5.3 (IIC)

redeem: to rescue or ransom; to save from an evil state; to restore honor or reputation

Why did the Southern governments refer to themselves as redeemers?

Radical Republicans’ efforts to change southern racial attitudes and culture and establish a base for their party in the South ultimately failed, due both to determined southern resistance and to the North’s waning resolve.

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The Grant Administration

could have had the nomination for either party

entered White House with no political experience

used spoils system more blatantly than most

Credit Mobilier scandal: used positions as Union Pacific stockholders to steer large and fraudulent contracts to their construction company, then transferred stock to key members of Congress to prevent investigations.

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Compromise of 1877

Republican candidate = Rutherford B. Hayes

Democratic candidate = Samuel J. Tilden

Newly created commission voted along party lines

Behind closed doors, democrats agreed to allow the election to Hayes if he agreed to withdraw the last federal troops from the South, the appointment of at least one southern to the Hayes cabinet, generous internal improvements, and federal aid for the Texas and Pacific Railroad

The Compromise of 1877 is widely noted as the end of Reconstruction.

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Different Viewpoints: Reconstruction

SUCCESS FAILURE

Made some contributions to the efforts of former slaves to achieve equality

Not as disastrous as most believed at the time

African-Americans did create new political opportunities for themselves after emancipation

Old south was in many ways more resurrected than reconstructed

A noble but failed attempt to establish an interracial democracy

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Did Reconstruction fail as a result of racism?

YES NO

Racism colored the thinking not only of southern whites but of most white northerners as well and produced only half-hearted efforts by the Radical Republicans in the postwar period to sustain a commitment to black equality.

The failure of Radical Reconstruction was primarily a consequence of a national commitment to a free-labor ideology that opposed an expanding central government that legislated rights to African Americans that other citizens had acquired through hard work.

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Chapter 15 Summary

In the years following the Civil War, former slaves and their white allies, North and South, sought to redefine the meaning and boundaries of American freedom. The laws and Constitution would be rewritten to guarantee African-Americans, for the first time in the nation’s history, recognition as citizens and equality before the law. Black men would be granted the right to vote, ushering in a period of interracial democracy throughout the South. Black schools, churches, and other institutions flourished, laying the foundation for the modern African-American community. Many of the advances of Reconstruction would prove temporary, swept away during a campaign of violence in the South, and the North’s retreat from the ideal of equality. But Reconstruction laid the foundation for future struggles to extend freedom to all Americans.

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