| I.
The Struggle for National Reconstruction |
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A. |
Presidential Approaches: From
Lincoln to Johnson |
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1. |
The Constitution did not address the question of secession or any procedure for
Reconstruction, so it did not say which branch of government was to handle the
readmission of rebellious states. |
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2. |
Lincoln offered general amnesty to all but high-ranking Confederates willing to
pledge loyalty to the Union; when 10 percent of a state’s voters took this
oath—and abolished slavery—the state would be restored to the Union. |
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3. |
Most Confederate states rebuffed the offer, assuring that the war would have to
be fought to the bitter end. |
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4. |
As some African Americans began to agitate for political rights, congressional
Republicans proposed the Wade-Davis Bill, a stricter substitute for Lincoln’s
Ten Percent Plan, which laid down, as conditions for the restoration of the
rebellious states to the Union, an oath of allegiance by a majority of each
state’s adult white men, new state governments formed only by those who had
never carried arms against the Union, and permanent disfranchisement of
Confederate leaders. |
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5. |
The Wade-Davis Bill served notice that congressional Republicans were not going
to turn Reconstruction policy over to the president. |
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6. |
Rather than openly challenge Congress,
Lincoln
executed a pocket veto of the Wade-Davis Bill by not signing it before
Congress adjourned. |
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7.
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Lincoln also initiated informal talks with
congressional leaders aimed at finding common ground;
Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson, however,
held the view that Reconstruction was the president’s prerogative. |
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8. |
Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat, championed farmers and laborers. |
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9. |
The Republicans had nominated Johnson for vice president in 1864 in order to
promote wartime political unity and to court southern Unionists. |
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10. |
After
Lincoln’s
death, Johnson offered amnesty to all southerners, except high-ranking
Confederate officials and wealthy property owners, who took an oath of
allegiance to the Constitution. |
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11. |
Johnson also appointed provisional governors for the southern states and, as
conditions for their restoration, required only that they revoke their
ordinances of secession, repudiate their Confederate debts, and ratify the
Thirteenth Amendment. |
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12. |
Within months, all the former Confederate states had met Johnson’s requirements
for rejoining the
Union and had functioning,
elected governments. |
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13. |
Southerners held fast to the antebellum order and enacted Black Codes designed
to drive the ex-slaves back to plantations; they had moved to restore slavery
in all but the name. |
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14. |
Southerners perceived Johnson’s liberal amnesty policy as tacit approval of the
Black Codes; emboldened, the ex-Confederates filled southern congressional
delegations with old comrades, even including the vice president of the
Confederacy, Alexander Stephens. |
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B. |
Congress versus the President |
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1. |
Republicans in both houses refused to admit the southern delegations when
Congress convened in early December 1865, blocking Johnson’s Reconstruction
program. |
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2. |
In response, some Black Codes were replaced with nonracial ordinances whose
effect was the same, and across the South a wave of violence erupted against
the freedmen. |
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3. |
Republicans concluded that the South had embarked on a concerted effort to
circumvent the Thirteenth Amendment and that the federal government had to
intervene. |
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4. |
Congress voted to extend the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau, gave it direct
funding for the first time, and authorized its agents to investigate cases of
discrimination against blacks. |
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5. |
President Johnson was particularly angered by a congressional civil rights bill
that declared formerly enslaved people to be citizens and granted them equal
protection and rights of contract, with full access to the courts. |
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6. |
In early 1866, Andrew Johnson vetoed both bills, declaring that the
U.S.
government
was for white men only. |
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7. |
Galvanized by Johnson’s attack on the Civil Rights Bill, Republicans enacted
the Civil Rights Act of 1866. |
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8. |
As an angry Congress renewed the Freedmen’s Bureau over a second Johnson veto,
Republican resolve was reinforced by news of mounting violence in the South. |
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9. |
Republicans moved to enshrine black civil rights in the Fourteenth Amendment to
the U.S. Constitution. |
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10. |
Johnson urged the states not to ratify the amendment and began to maneuver
politically against the Republicans; the Fourteenth Amendment became a campaign
issue for the Democratic Party. |
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11. |
Johnson embarked on a disastrous railroad tour campaign and made matters worse
by engaging in shouting matches and exchanging insults with the hostile crowds. |
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12. |
Republicans won a three-to-one majority in the 1866 congressional elections,
which registered overwhelming support for securing the civil rights of
ex-slaves. |
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13. |
The Republican Party had a new sense of unity coalescing around the unbending
program of the radical minority led by Charles Sumner in the Senate and
Thaddeus Stevens of the House. Both men represented the party’s abolitionist
strain. |
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14. |
For the Radicals, Reconstruction was never primarily about restoring the
Union but rather remaking southern society. |
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C. |
Radical Reconstruction |
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1. |
The Reconstruction Act of 1867 divided the South into five military districts,
each under the command of a
Union general. |
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2. |
The price for reentering the
Union was
granting suffrage or the vote to the
freedmen and disenfranchising the South’s prewar political class. |
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3. |
Congress overrode Johnson’s veto of the Reconstruction Act. |
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4. |
After Congress adjourned in August 1867, Johnson “suspended” Edwin M. Stanton
and replaced him with General Ulysses S. Grant; he then replaced four of the
commanding generals governing the South. |
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5. |
When the Senate reconvened, it overruled
Stanton’s
suspension, and Grant, by now Johnson’s enemy, resigned so that
Stanton could resume
office. |
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6. |
On February 21, 1868, Johnson dismissed
Stanton;
the House Republicans introduced articles of impeachment against
Johnson. |
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7. |
A vote on impeachment was one vote short of the required two-thirds majority
needed, but Johnson was left powerless to alter the course of Reconstruction. |
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8. |
Grant was the Republicans’ 1868 presidential nominee, and he won out over the
Democrats’ Horatio Seymour; Republicans retained two-thirds majorities in both
houses of Congress. |
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9. |
The Fifteenth Amendment forbade either the federal government or the states to
deny citizens the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or “previous
condition of servitude,” although it left room for poll taxes, property
requirements or literacy tests. |
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10. |
States still under federal control were required to ratify the amendment before
being readmitted to the
Union; the Fifteenth
Amendment became part of the Constitution. |
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11. |
Passage of
the Fifteenth Amendment was an astonishing feat. Lawmakers in the
Western Hemisphere had left emancipated slaves in a
condition of semi-citizenship, with no voting rights. |
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12. |
After the
amendment was ratified, hundreds of thousands of African American men flocked
to the polls across the South, in an atmosphere of collective pride and
celebration. |
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D. |
Woman Suffrage Denied |
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1. |
Women’s rights advocates were outraged that the Fifteenth Amendment did not
address women’s suffrage. |
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2. |
At the 1869 annual meeting of the Equal Rights Association, Frederick Douglass,
an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, pleaded with white women to
understand the importance of granting the vote for black men before white
women. The convention ended in bitter debate. |
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3. |
The majority of women’s rights activists, led by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe
of the American Women’s Suffrage Association, accepted the priority of black
suffrage over women’s suffrage. |
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4. |
Stanton’s new
organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association, accepted only women,
focused exclusively on women’s rights, and took up the battle for a federal
woman suffrage amendment. Susan B. Anthony assisted
Stanton in forming the organization. |
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5. |
In 1873, NWSA members decided to test the limits of the new constitutional
amendments. Suffragists tried to register to vote across the
United States;some were arrested. |
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6. |
In Minor v. Happersett (1875), the Supreme Court dashed suffragist hopes for protection of women’s
voting rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court ruled that suffrage
rights were not inherent in citizenship; women were citizens, but state legislatures
could deny women the ballot if they wished. |
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7. |
Despite these
defeats, radical Reconstruction created the conditions for a high-profile, nationwide movement for women’s voting rights. |
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8. |
In 1869,
Wyoming granted women
the right to vote. Proponents argued that voting women in
Wyoming
continued to carry out their responsibilities as mothers and wives while also
cleaning up corruption in
Wyoming
politics. |
| II. The Meaning of Freedom |
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A. |
The Quest for Land |
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1. |
One of freedmen’s most pressing goals was land ownership. Thousands of African
American former slaves expected to receive small pieces of the former
plantations of their owners. |
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2. |
After Johnson’s order restoring confiscated lands to the ex-Confederates,
African Americans reacted angrily and fought pitched battles with plantations
owners in some locations. But white landowners frequently prevailed. |
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3. |
Republicans
wanted to restore cotton as the country’s leading export, so they attempted to
transform former slaves into wage-workers on cotton plantations, but not as
independent farmers. |
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4. |
Only a small
number of Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens believed in giving former
slaves pieces of their former owner’s estates. Congressmen believed in taking
land from Indian tribes and returning plantations to their former owners to
restart the southern cotton industry. |
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5. |
Landowners
wanted to retain the old gang-labor
system, with wages replacing the food, clothing, and shelter that slaves
had once received. Landowners paid low wages for black agricultural work,
leading to major poverty for the former slaves. |
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6. |
Blacks fought
back by going on strike, by seeking work in lumber and turpentine and railroad
camps, and bargaining for fairer wages. |
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7. |
A major
conflict raged between employers and freed people over the labor of women. When planters demanded that freedwomen go back into the fields,
blacks resisted resolutely. |
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8. |
For African
American women, emancipation may have increased subordination within the black
family. Some black women, however, headed their own households. For many
freedwomen and freedmen, the opportunity for a stable family was one of the
major successes of post-Civil War life. |
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9. |
Many African
American families accepted the northern ideal of domesticity. Women attempted to remain in the home and devote
themselves to motherhood, while men were urged to work diligently and support
their families. |
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10. |
Sharecropping was a distinctive labor system for cotton agriculture in
which the freedmen worked as tenant farmers, exchanging their labor for the use
of land, house, and implements. |
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11. |
Sharecropping was an unequal relationship, since the sharecropper had no way of
making it through the first growing season without borrowing for food and
supplies. |
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12. |
Storekeepers “furnished” the sharecropper and took as collateral a lien on
the crop; as cotton prices declined during the 1870s, many sharecroppers fell
into permanent debt. |
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13. |
If the merchant was also the landowner, the debt became a pretext for peonage,
or forced labor. |
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14. |
For ex-slaves, sharecropping was preferable to laboring for their former
owners, but it was devastating to southern agriculture; it committed the South
inflexibly to cotton because it was a cash crop and limited southern incentives
for agricultural improvements. A rural economy emerged that was mired in
widespread poverty and an uneasy compromise between landowners and laborers. |
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B. |
Republican Governments in the South |
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1. |
Between 1868 and 1871, all the southern states met the congressional
stipulations and rejoined the
Union. |
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2. |
Republicans
in the South needed the African American vote and helped to organize
organizations like the Union League, a biracial secret fraternal order that
functioned as a powerful political club to uphold justice to freedmen. |
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3. |
The
Freedmen’s Bureau also helped freedmen on economic matters and established
schools for African Americans, including black colleges such as Fisk and
Hampton Institute. By 1869, there were over 3,000 teachers, over half of whom
were black, instructing freedmen in the South. |
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4. |
Southern white Republicans were called scalawags by Democratic
ex-Confederates; white northerners who moved to the South were called carpetbaggers.
Both groups wanted to bring northern capital into the South for economic
development and personal gain. |
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5. |
Although never proportionate to their size in population, black officeholders
were prominent throughout the South. |
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6. |
Republicans modernized state constitutions, eliminated property qualifications
for voting, got rid of the Black Codes, and expanded the rights of married
women. |
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7. |
Reconstruction social programs called for hospitals, more humane
penitentiaries, and asylums; Reconstruction governments built roads and revived
the railroad network. |
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8. |
Most impressive of Republican Reconstruction government achievements was in the
field of education. By 1875, over half of black children were attending school
in several deep southern states. White children also benefited from higher
graduation rates during this progressive period in southern public education. |
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C. |
Building Black Communities |
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1. |
After
emancipation, Southern blacks could engage in open community-building. In doing
so, they cooperated with northern missionaries and teachers. |
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2. |
Independent
churches quickly became central institutions of black life. Black churches
served as schools, social centers, and meeting halls. Black ministers were
community leaders and often political spokesmen. |
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3. |
Teachers and
charity leaders embarked on a project of “racial uplift” while black
entrepreneurs built businesses that catered largely to a black clientele. |
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4. |
Some black
leaders promoted integration of public facilities, but most stayed away from
the thorny issue, while many black parents preferred all-black schooling to
protect their children from hostile whites. |
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5. |
At the
national level in 1870, Congress addressed desegregation with a civil rights bill championed by Radical Republican Charles Sumner. By
the time it passed in 1875, it was a narrower version, requiring full and equal
access to jury service and to transportation and pubic accommodations
irrespective of race. Another near-century would pass before Congress passed
the Civil Rights Act of 1964. |
| III.
The Undoing of Reconstruction |
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A. |
The
Republican Unraveling |
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1. |
The death of
Radical Charles Sumner in 1874 signaled the wane of Reconstruction. |
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2. |
Events of the
1870s, as well as racist media reports, deepened northern white disinterest in
southern black issues. |
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3. |
Scandals,
such as Credit Mobilier and the Whiskey Ring, in the
Republican administration of President Ulysses S. Grant eroded public
confidence in Grant’s policies, particularly during his second term in office. |
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4. |
A sudden
economic depression in 1877 created massive unemployment, which decreased
public support of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Republican Party, as well as
public spending and private investment in the South. |
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5. |
Northern
resolve was also worn down by southern white resistance against Reconstruction. |
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6. |
The collapse
of the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company signaled that the party of Reconstruction
was losing its moral leadership. |
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7. |
Classic liberals, those who believed in free
trade, smaller government, and limited voting rights, broke away from the
Republican Party and formed the Liberal Republican Party. They ran Horace
Greeley in the presidential election in 1872, longtime publisher of the New York Tribune. Grant won
overwhelmingly. |
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8. |
Liberals denounced universal suffrage and decried
that blacks were unfit to govern. Grant won overwhelmingly, capturing 56
percent of the popular vote and every electoral vote. |
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B. |
Counterrevolution in the South |
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1. |
The undoing of Reconstruction was as much about southern resistance as northern
acquiescence. Most white southerners believed that Reconstruction governments
were illegitimate regimes. |
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2. |
Democrats worked hard to get the vote restored to ex-Confederates, appealing to
racial solidarity and southern patriotism and violently attacking black
suffrage as a threat to white supremacy. |
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3. |
The Ku Klux Klan first appeared in Tennessee in 1866 under Nathan Bedford
Forrest; by 1870, the Klan was operating almost everywhere in the South as an
armed force whose terrorist tactics served the Democratic Party. |
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4. |
Congress between 1869 and 1871 attempted to suppress the Klan through
legislation known as the Enforcement Laws. |
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5. |
The Grant administration’s assault on the Klan illustrated how dependent
African Americans and the southern Republicans were on the federal government. |
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6. |
But northern Republicans were growing weary of Reconstruction and the bloodshed
it seemed to produce. |
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7. |
Prosecuting Klansmen was an uphill battle with
U.S.
attorneys, who usually faced
all-white juries and lacked the resources to handle the cases; after 1872,
prosecutions began to drop off and many Klansmen received hasty pardons. |
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8. |
Republican governments that were denied federal help found themselves
overwhelmed by the massive resistance of their ex-Confederate enemies; between
1873 and 1875, Democrats overthrew Republican governments in
Texas,
Alabama, and
Arkansas. |
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9. |
In
Mississippi,
armed local Democrats paraded and stuffed ballot boxes, taking control of the
state in 1875. |
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10. |
By 1876, Republican governments remained in only
Louisiana,
South Carolina, and
Florida; elsewhere the former Confederates
were back in control. |
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11. |
As early as
1873, in the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Court began to undercut the
power of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the Civil
Rights Cases (1883), the justices also struck down the Civil Rights Act of
1875. The Court effectively had cut off the avenue of the federal courts for
the pursuit of justice and equal rights. |
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C. |
The Political Crisis of 1877 |
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1. |
Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes as their presidential candidate, and
his Democratic opponent was Samuel J. Tilden; both favored home rule for
the South. |
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2. |
When Congress met in early 1877, it was faced with both Republican and
Democratic electoral votes from
Florida,
South Carolina, and
Louisiana. |
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3. |
The Constitution declares that Congress regulates its own elections, so
Congress appointed an electoral commission; the commission awarded the disputed
votes to Hayes by a vote of 8 to 7. |
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4. |
Democrats controlled the House and set about stalling a final count of the
electoral votes, but on March 1 they suddenly ended their delaying tactics and
Hayes was inaugurated. Reconstruction had ended. |
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D. |
Lasting Legacies |
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1. |
In the short run, the withdrawal of
U.S.
troops had little impact on
the lives of most southerners. The broad trend of Radical Republican loss of
power and the rise of Confederate and southern Democratic power exerted the
most impact on southerners. |
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2. |
Although southern whites used violence to put down black aspirations to
political power, they could not return the South to the antebellum reality of
slavery. Reconstruction had shaken the entire legal framework that justified
the
United States
as a white man’s country. |
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3. |
Legal cases brought by other minorities showed that the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth amendments had transformed the nature of American citizenship. |