what did reconstruction achieve? an online professional development seminar for north carolina...

What Did Reconstruction Achieve?

An Online Professional Development Seminar for North Carolina Teachers

Made possible by a grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.

Reconstruction, 1867(Library of Congress)

Competency Goal 3

Crisis, Civil War, and Reconstruction (1848-1877) - The learner will analyze the issues that led to the Civil War, the effects of the war, and the impact of Reconstruction on the nation.

Objectives

3.04 Analyze the political, economic, and social impact of Reconstruction on the nation and identify the reasons why Reconstruction came to an end.

3.05 Evaluate the degree to which the Civil War and Reconstruction proved to be a test of the supremacy of the national government.

GOALS

To deepen your understanding of both the process and era of Reconstruction in the United States

To provide fresh material and ideas to strengthen teaching(Feel free to plunder the Power Point.)

FROM THE FORUMChallenges, Issues, Questions

Kevin Clary, Stokes County SchoolsRace and gender issues

Barbara Berry, Green Hope High School, Wake CountyNation-building and citizenship

Mary Jae Peterson, Orange County High, HillsboroughSouthern perspective on Reconstruction

Sara Keever, Northwood High, Chatham CountyRescue Reconstruction from coming “across as a battle between the president,

Congress, and political parties over the issue of federal power.” Wants “to incorporate more perspectives and experiences in discussions . . . materials I can use to chart the various perspectives and outcomes of Reconstruction in a way that personally connects.”

Ben Thomas, Lee County High, SanfordRescue Reconstruction from marginalization as a mere “epilogue to the Civil War.” How did the Union win the war and then lose the peace? How much did national

fatigue contribute to Reconstruction's end?

FROM THE FORUMChallenges, Issues, Questions

James Jolley, East Wake School of Integrated Technology, Wake County“Discuss the way Americans of all races viewed themselves during this time period and how they justified these perspectives; focus on how the African-American perspective on themselves and their cause changed from

the end of the Civil War through the end of Reconstruction.

FRAMING QUESTIONS What did former slaves, women, workers, and white Southerners hope the outcome of Reconstruction would be? What did they fear it would be?

Which of these aspirations conflicted with other aspirations? Could the aspirations of these various groups be reconciled? What were some of the ways in which these conflicting visions of Reconstruction were expressed?

By the end of the Reconstruction era, had the aspirations or hopes of these various groups been met? What alliances and compromises allowed some groups to be satisfied with the outcome? Which alliances failed?

In Division and Reunion, how did Woodrow Wilson interpret Reconstruction? What do you think the lasting significance of Wilson’s interpretation of Reconstruction may have been?

Fitzhugh Brundage

National Humanities Center Fellow1995-96

William B. Umstead Professor of History

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

A Socialist Utopia in the New South: The Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee

and Georgia, 1894-1901(1996)

Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1939

(1993)

“Reconstruction” describes both an era and the project of reincorporating the former Confederacy back into the nation.

Our challenge as teachers is to not allow the latter use of the word to obscure or dominate the discussion of the era. Yet at the same time the “reconstruction” of the nation was the central political and national undertaking of the era.

If we can meet this challenge, we will address two classroom goals raised in the forum:

to rescue Reconstruction from coming “across as a battle between the president, Congress, and political parties over the issue of federal power,”

to rescue Reconstruction from marginalization as a mere ‘epilogue to the Civil War.’”

Two Views of Reconstruction

The Second RevolutionAn opportunity for a new beginning

An Unfinished RevolutionA set of stalled or thwarted innovations

Innovations

What was proposed?

What was feasible?

Which ones became part of the nation’s public life and culture?

Making Sense of Reconstruction

Former slaves

White Southerners

Working class man and women

What did they hope Reconstruction would do?What did they fear it would do?

Equal Suffrage Address from the Colored Citizens of Norfolk,

Virginia . . . 1865

“We do not come before the people of the United States asking for an impossibility; we simply ask that a Christian and enlightened people shall, at once, concede to us the full enjoyment of those privileges of full citizenship, which, not only are our undoubted right, but are indispensable to the elevation and prosperity of our people.”

. . .

“Give us suffrage and you may rely upon us to secure justice for ourselves. . .”

Objective 3.04

Discussion Questions

What did the assembled freed people advocate? What innovation did they propose?

On what basis did the freed people make their claims?

How did they justify claims for citizenship for a people who only months before were property with almost no rights that a white man had to respect?

How do they appeal to their audience?

What are the implications of their request?

What did the freed people fear?

Was their innovation feasible?


Virginia . . . 1865

“You are, above all, desirous that no future intestine [internal to a nation] wars shall mar the prosperity and destroy the happiness of the country; will your perfect security from such evils be promoted by the existence of a colored population of four and a half million, placed, by your enactments, outside the pale of the Constitution, discounted by oppression, with an army of 200,000 colored soldiers, whom you have drilled, disciplined, and armed, but whose attachment to the state you have failed to secure by refusing them citizenship?”

Objective 3.04





How do they attempt to persuade their audience?





Virginia . . . 1865

“The surest guarantee for the independence and ultimate elevation of the colored people will be found in their becoming the owners of the soil on which they live and labor.”

. . .

“Every Christian and humane man must feel that our demands are just; we have shown you that their concession is, for us, necessary, and for you expedient.”

. . .

“We are Americans. . . .”

Objective 3.04





How do they attempt to persuade their audience?




Charge to the Initiates of the Knights of the White Camelia

1869

“[O]ur main and fundamental object is THE MAINTENANCE OF THE SUPREMACY OF THE WHITE RACE in this Republic. History and physiology teach us that we belong to a race which nature has endowed with an evident superiority over all other races, and that the Maker, in thus elevating us above the common standard of human creation, has intended to give us over inferior races, a dominion which no human laws can permanently derogate.”

Objective 3.04


What did the Knights aspire to? What innovation did they propose?

What did they fear?


Charge to the Initiates of the Knights of the White Camelia

1869

“We hold, therefore, that any attempt to wrest from the white race the management of its affairs in order to transfer it to control of the black population, is an invasion of the sacred prerogatives vouchsafed to us by the Constitution, and a violation of the laws established by God himself; that such encroachments are subversive of the established institutions of our Republic, and that no individual of the white race can submit to them without humiliation and shame.”

. . .“Our statues make us bound to respect sedulously the rights of the colored inhabitants of this Republic, and in every instance, to give them whatever lawfully belongs to them.”

Objective 3.04


What did the Knights aspire to? What innovation did they propose?

What did they fear?


Address of Susan B. Anthony1872

“Our democratic-republican government is based on the idea of the natural right of every individual thereof to voice and a vote in making and executing the laws. We assert the province of government to be to secure the people in the enjoyment of their unalienable rights. We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights.”

Objectives 3.04 and 3.05


How did Anthony present the case for voting rights for women in the context of the nation’s recent history?

What innovation does Anthony propose?

Compare her arguments to those made by the black petitioners for equal suffrage.

Was her innovation feasible?


“One-half of the people of this nation to-day are utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write there a new and a just one. The women, dissatisfied as they are with this form of government, that enforces taxation without representation,-that compels them to obey laws to which they have never given their consent, -that imprisons and hangs them without a trial by a jury of their peers, that robs them, in marriage, of the custody of their own persons, wages and children,-are this half of the people left wholly at the mercy of the other half, in direct violation of the spirit and letter of the declarations of the framers of this government, every one of which was based on the immutable principle of equal rights to all.”

Objective 3.04







“It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex. The most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe. An oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant; or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household; which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.”

Objective 3.04







“And any and every discrimination against any class, whether on account of color, race, nativity, sex, property, culture, can but embitter and disaffect that class, and thereby endanger the safety of the whole people.”

. . .

“I admit that prior to the rebellion, by common consent, the right to enslave, as well as to disfranchise both native and foreign born citizens, was conceded to the States. But the one grand principle, settled by the war and the reconstruction legislation, is the supremacy of national power to protect the citizens of the United States in their right to freedom and the elective franchise, against any and every interference on the part of the several States.”

Objectives 3.04 and 3.05






Address of H. J. Kykendall1867

“. . . But capital and labor never have or can unite. Capital will never be content unless it control labor. The speaker saw that some of the papers here advocated the formation of cooperative establishments. But they always figured 10 per cent for the interest of capital. But that is three or four times what it should be. When capital is made to recognize the right of the laboring man to one-third of his time, his audience must then see that the laws do not allow capital to tax the producing wealth of the country three or four times more than its annual increase. Capital must not be allowed to be centralized in the hands of the few.”

Objective 3.04


What did labor activists and their supporters want from the post-war order? What innovation did they propose?


What did they fear?

Major Questions for Reconstruction

Could the aspirations of these various groups be reconciled?

Were the white supremacists willing to make any concessions to African American aspirations?

What concessions did the freed people offer?

What concessions did Susan B. Anthony offer?

Could the claims of “capital” and the aspirations of labor be bridged?

What were some of the ways in which these conflicting visions of Reconstruction were expressed?

Labor agitation: example of Chicago workers shutting down firms that worked 10 hour shifts

Political mobilization: black voting organizations and Anthony’s casting a ballot

Speeches and public meetings: Anthony’s speaking tours, black meetings Violence and intimidation: Klan and other white paramilitary groups

William Tecumseh Sherman to Senator John Sherman

Headquarters Military Division Of The Missouri, St. Louis, Sept. 28, 1867.

Dear Brother:

We have now been near two months on the Indian Commission, and I can pretty closely judge of the result. It cannot be complete or final, because it will take years to do all the law requires, and I suppose the pressure will force Congress to do something conclusive this winter. According to existing treaties with Indians, they have a right to wander and hunt across all the railroads toward the West, and Henderson thinks we had no right to locate roads through without a prior assent, and by the payment of damages. Whether right or wrong, those roads will be built, and everybody knows that Congress, after granting the charters and fixing the routes, cannot now back out and surrender the country to a few bands of roving Indians. Henderson says, also, that the demand of these railroads, stage, telegraph, and other lines on me for military aid or protection were not contemplated, but that these companies took their franchises and contracts with a full knowledge of the difficulties. Now I and all who have gone before me have acted on the general theory that when Congress located a road, that it amounted to an implied promise to give reasonable military protection. However, by the time Congress meets, we can, I think, submit to you some general plan that is practicable, and will in time — not at once — attain a result. . . .

Yours,W. T. Sherman. Objectives 3.04 and 3.05


How did Sherman view his post-Civil War activities?

What was the task at hand?

How does Sherman’s letter shift our focus from the process of reconstruction in the South to broader concerns of the era?

By the end of Reconstruction,

Whose hopes had been realized?

Which groups has cause to be optimistic about the fulfillment of their aspirations?

Which groups had cause for frustration?

Formerly enslaved?White Southerners?

Women?Labor?Capital?

Woodrow Wilson, Division and Reunion, 1893

Its [Congressional Reconstruction] practical operation was of course revolutionary in its effects upon the southern governments. The most influential white men were excluded from voting for the delegates who were to compose the constitutional conventions, while the negroes were all admitted to enrolment. Unscrupulous adventurers appeared to act as the leaders of the inexperienced blacks in taking possession, first of the conventions, and afterwards of the state governments; and in the States where the negroes were most numerous, or their leaders most shrewd and unprincipled, an extraordinary carnival of public crime set in under the forms of law. Negro majorities gained complete control of the state governments, or, rather, negroes constituted the legislative majorities and submitted to the unrestrained authority of small and masterful groups of white men whom the instinct of plunder had drawn from the North. Taxes were multiplied, whose proceeds went for the most part into the pockets of these fellows and their confederates among the negroes. Enormous masses of debt were piled up, by processes both legal and fraudulent, and most of the money borrowed reached the same destination.


How did Wilson interpret Reconstruction?

Does Wilson’s interpretation sound familiar to you?

What is the significance of Wilson’s tone?

What do you think the lasting significance of Wilson’s interpretation may have been?

According to Wilson, did national fatigue contribute to Reconstruction’s end?

Does Wilson’s interpretation suggest that the North won the War but lost the peace?

Woodrow Wilson, Division and Reunion, 1893

Soon after his inauguration, President Hayes very wisely ordered the withdrawal of the federal troops from Troops the South; and the Republican governments of South Carolina and Louisiana,— upon whose de facto authority his election had turned, — were quietly superseded by the Democratic governments which had all along claimed the right to occupy their places. In Florida, too, decisions of the courts effected the same result. The supremacy of the white people was henceforth assured in the administration of the southern States.

May 10, 1876, had witnessed the opening of an International Industrial Exhibition at Philadelphia, which had arranged in celebration of the centennial anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. It was a fit symbol and assurance of the settled peace and prosperity which were in store for the country in the future. All the great commercial and industrial nations were represented in its exhibits, among the rest, of course, England, whose defeat the Exhibition was planned to celebrate. Her presence made it also a festival of reconciliation. It spoke of peace and goodwill with all the world. It surely is not fanciful to regard it, besides, as a type and figure of the reconstruction and regeneration of the nation.

The Union was now restored, not only to strength, but also to normal conditions of government. National parties once more showed a salutary balance of forces which promised to make sober debate the arbiter of future policies. It showed the economic resources of the South freed, like those of the North, for a rapid and unembarrassed development. The national spirit was aroused, and conscious now at last of its strength. The stage was cleared for the creation of a new nation.


How did Wilson interpret Reconstruction?

Does Wilson’s interpretation sound familiar to you?

What is the significance of Wilson’s tone?

What do you think the lasting significance of Wilson’s interpretation may have been?

According to Wilson, did national fatigue contribute to Reconstruction’s end?

Does Wilson’s interpretation suggest that the North won the War but lost the peace?

What did Reconstruction Achieve?

1867 1874

Final Slide.

Thank you

what did reconstruction achieve? an online professional development seminar for north carolina...

Documents

era of reconstruction

reconstruction era

end of reconstruction

outcome of reconstruction

sanfordrescue reconstruction

outcomes of reconstruction

various perspectives

various groups