Reconstruction

Life as a Freedmen

After the Civil War, the thousands of freedmen (former slaves) faced even more challenges. They were now homeless and had little more than the clothes they were wearing.

Many went from place to place looking for food, shelter, and work.

Others searched for spouses, children, and others who had been sold away from them during slavery.

Some traveled just because they now had the freedom to do so.

Freedmen’s Bureau

In an effort to help the freedmen, the U.S. government established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March 1865 which later became known as the Freedmen’s Bureau.

Goals of the Bureau

1. Supervise and manage all abandoned lands and "all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen from rebel states"

2. Issue provisions, clothing, fuel, and shelter for destitute refugees and freedmen

3. The authority to set apart abandoned or confiscated lands for use by freedmen and refugees with the possibility of purchase of such land after three years

Contributions of Freedmen’s Bureau

Education became a priority…set up schools 4,000 primary

schools, 64 industrial schools, and 74 teacher-training schools

Atlanta University Center…Morehouse College, Clark, Spellman

Agricultural South

After the war, land owners needed workers to work their land.

Former slaves and landless whites needed jobs.

Sharecropping

Landowners provided land, house, farming tools, animals, seeds, and fertilizer… everything needed to farm except labor.

Workers agreed to give the owner a share of harvest.

Downside of Sharecropping

Workers did not have basics until crops were sold.

Owners often let them have food, medicine, clothing, and other supplies on credit until crops sold.

Credit was often bad for borrower because after crops sold and credit paid back, little was left.

Most workers were uneducated and could be easily cheated.

Continued to get further in debt.

Tenant Farming

Similar to sharecropping, but tenants usually owned some equipment and farm animals.

They also bought their own seed and fertilizer.

Paid back set amount of money or share of crop and the end of the season.

Tenants usually make some profit.

Reconstruction

Reconstruction is the time period after the Civil War when the South began to rebuild.

South was ruled by Union army. Southern states began to rejoin the Union.

Lincoln’s Reconstruction Plan

Abraham Lincoln had thought about the process of restoring the Union from the earliest days of the war. His guiding principles were to accomplish the task as rapidly as possible and ignore calls for punishing the South.

Lincoln’s Reconstruction Plan

1. A general amnesty (no punishment for the crime) would be granted to all who would take an oath of loyalty to the United States and pledge to obey all federal laws pertaining to slavery.

2. High Confederate officials and military leaders were to be temporarily excluded from the process

3. When one tenth of the number of voters who had participated in the 1860 election had taken the oath within a particular state, then that state could launch a new government and elect representatives to Congress… Often called the “Ten-Percent Plan”

Congressional Reconstruction Plan

Congress and many Northerners opposed Lincoln’s plan…thought the South should be punished.

Congress passed Wade-Davis Bill as their own plan for reconstruction.

1. A state must have a majority within its borders take the oath of loyalty

2. A state must formally abolish slavery

3. No Confederate officials could participate in the new governments.

Lincoln’s Assassination Lincoln saw this as

an attempt to punish South and felt the Union would be too difficult to repair if passed.

Lincoln was assassinated before his plan could be put into place.

Vice President Andrew Johnson became president.

Johnson’s Reconstruction Plan

Pardons would be granted to those taking a loyalty oath

No pardons would be available to high Confederate officials and persons owning property valued in excess of $20,000

A state needed to abolish slavery before being readmitted

A state was required to repeal its secession ordinance before being readmitted.

Johnson’s Plan

Most of the seceded states began compliance with the president’s program. Congress was not in session, so there was no immediate objection. However, Congress reconvened in December and refused to seat the Southern representatives. Reconstruction had produced another deadlock between the president and Congress.

New Requirements

President Johnson was pressured into adding other requirements.

1. Southern states had to approve the 13th Amendment, which made slavery illegal.

2. Southern states had to nullify their ordinances of secession.

3. Southern states had to promise not to repay the individuals and institutions that had helped finance the Confederacy.

Changes to the Constitution

After the Civil War, 3 amendments were passed and ratified to ensure the rights of the former slaves. They are sometimes called the

Reconstruction Amendments.

13th Amendment

Officially abolished slavery. Was passed by Congress in January 1865 and

submitted to the states for ratification (approval/acceptance and implementation).

President Johnson made ratification of the amendment a requirement for the southern states to rejoin the Union.

13th Amendment

It abolished slavery, but it did not abolish discrimination.

By 1865, most of the Southern states, including Georgia, had passed a number of laws known as Black Codes, which were designed to restrict the rights of freedmen.

14th Amendment

The 14th Amendment was in response to the Black Codes.

It granted citizenship to the freedmen and forbade any state from denying anyone the “equal protection of the law.”

15th Amendment

Granted all male citizens the right to vote regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Women still could

not vote. Voting age was

21.

Henry McNeal and the Black Legislators

In 1867, African Americans voted for the first time in Georgia electing 29 African Americans to the Georgia House of Representatives and 3 to the Georgia Senate… Henry McNeal was one of them.

All of these men were expelled on the grounds that although the Constitution had given them the right to vote, it did not specifically give them the right to hold office.

Klu Klux Klan

The Klan was one of several secret organizations to keep freedmen from exercising their new rights.

Began in Pulaski, Tennessee as a social club for returning soldiers, but changed into a force of terror.

Klu Klux Klan

Members dressed in robes and hoods so no one would recognize them.

They terrorized and intimated African Americans to keep them from voting hoping to return control of the state to the Democrats. Numerous reports of

beatings, whippings, and murder.