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Slavery and Sectionalism tear America apart

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Slavery and Sectionalism tear America apart

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Slavery and Sectionalism are the CAUSES of the Civil War.
Sectionalism means that the country is divided into sections; they are divided by beliefs, economics, and politics.

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Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860; he promised to preserve the Union (to keep the US united) by leaving the issue of slavery alone.

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The South Carolina Secedes (leaves the Union)

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The South Carolina Secedes (leaves the Union)

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Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Florida, Mississippi also leave and form the Confederate States of America. These are the losers of the Civil War!

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The FIRST battle of the Civil War! It was a surprise attack on Fort Sumter; watch the video to learn more!

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One of many battles of the Civil War! This one was one by the Confederates!

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First Battle of Bull Run ‑ Dates, Location & Who Won | HISTORY

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The First Battle of Bull Run was the first major battle of the American Civil War. The battle, fought in 1861 by poorly trained volunteers, ended in Confederate victory. The high casualty count from the battle made both sides realize it would be a long, costly war.

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Robert E Lee (Confederate General) takes a huge loss!

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After the Battle of Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln gives the Gettysburg Address. The Battle of Gettysburg was the turning point because it represented the end to Confederate attempts to invade the Northern territory.

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The Battle of Gettysburg: The Civil War in Four Minutes

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The plan to strangle the South was led by Sherman! He slowly built a naval blockade around the South and then trashed everything he came into contact with as he pushed into Southern territory.

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William Tecumseh Sherman, Portrait in a Minute

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In the battle of Vicksburg, Union troops were able to strategically divide and conquer Confederate troops along the Mississippi River!

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Vicksburg Campaign: The Civil War in Four Minutes

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In Appomattox Court House, Robert E Lee surrenders to Union General Ulysses S Grant.

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To rebuild or Reconstruct the country, Union and Confederate states had to reunify.

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The Confederate states rejoined the United States from 1866 through 1870, during the period of Reconstruction. The first state to be readmitted was Tennessee in 1866, while the rest of the South was broken up into five regions before their readmittance.

In 1868, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina were readmitted to the Union. Georgia, however, promptly forced all the black Americans out of their state legislature, which forced the U.S. Government to reinstate martial law. It was once again admitted back into the Union in 1870 along with the final former Confederate states of Texas, Virginia and Mississippi.

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When Did the Confederate States Rejoin the Union?

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The Confederate states rejoined the United States from 1866 through 1870, during the period of Reconstruction. The first state to be readmitted was Tennessee in 1866, while the rest of the South was broken up into five regions before their readmittance. In 1868, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina were readmitted to the Union.

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Southern states were required to accept the new Reconstruction amendments to equalize African Americans and their experiences in America.
13th Free
14th Citizenship
15th Voting Rights

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Despite the changes that occured, there are continued efforts to profit off of African American labor. Sharecropping is a system that forced many freed African Americans into the same agricultural work they did prior to the Emancipation. Additionally, workers were charged rent and other fees as a part of their contract.

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crash course reconstrution sharecropping thought bubble

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Southern states adopted a series of laws to create "separate but equal" accommodations for African Americans and other people of color. The Jim Crow Laws are systematically racist legal codes and would be abolished in the 1960s. Some businesses and companies still debate the right to deny service according to religious beliefs.

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Jim Crow law, in U.S. history, any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Jim Crow was the name of a minstrel routine (actually Jump Jim Crow) performed beginning in 1828 by its author, Thomas Dartmouth ("Daddy") Rice, and by many imitators, including actor Joseph Jefferson. The term came to be a derogatory epithet for African Americans and a designation for their segregated life.

From the late 1870s, Southern state legislatures, no longer controlled by so-called carpetbaggers and freedmen, passed laws requiring the separation of whites from "persons of colour" in public transportation and schools. Generally, anyone of ascertainable or strongly suspected Black ancestry in any degree was for that purpose a "person of colour"; the pre- Civil War distinction favouring those whose ancestry was known to be mixed-particularly the half-French "free persons of colour" in Louisiana-was abandoned. The segregation principle was extended to parks, cemeteries, theatres, and restaurants in an effort to prevent any contact between Blacks and whites as equals. It was codified on local and state levels and most famously with the " separate but equal" decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

In 1954 the Supreme Court reversed Plessy in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. It declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional, and, by extension, that ruling was applied to other public facilities. In the years following, subsequent decisions struck down similar kinds of Jim Crow legislation. See also Black code; racial segregation.

Origins

Prior to the Civil War the inferior status of slaves had made it unnecessary to pass laws segregating them from white people. Both races could work side by side so long as the slave recognized his subordinate place. In the cities, where most free African Americans lived, rudimentary forms of segregation existed prior to 1860, but no uniform pattern emerged. In the North free Blacks also laboured under harsh restrictions and often found an even more-rigid segregation than in the South.

One might have expected the Southern states to have created a segregation system immediately after the war, but that did not happen. In some states the legislatures imposed rigid separation, but only in certain areas; Texas, for example, required that every train have one car in which all people of colour had to sit. The South had had no real system of public education prior to the Civil War, and as the postwar Reconstruction governments created public schools, those were as often as not segregated by race. Nonetheless, New Orleans had fully integrated schools until 1877, and in North Carolina former slaves routinely sat on juries alongside whites.

In 1877 the Supreme Court ruled in Hall v. DeCuir that states could not prohibit segregation on common carriers such as railroads, streetcars, or riverboats. In the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, the court overturned key elements of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, thereby sanctioning the notion of " separate but equal" facilities and transportation for the races (though it did not use the term separate but equal). Seven years later the court approved a Mississippi statute requiring segregation on intrastate carriers in Louisville, New Orleans & Texas Railway v. Mississippi (1890). As those cases demonstrated, the court essentially acquiesced in the South's "solution" to the problems of race relations.

From 1887 to 1892 nine states, including Louisiana, passed laws requiring separation on public conveyances, such as streetcars and railroads. Though they differed in detail, most of those statutes required equal accommodations for Black passengers and imposed fines and even jail terms on railroad employees who did not enforce them. Five of the states also provided criminal fines or imprisonment for passengers who tried to sit in cars from which their race excluded them. The Louisiana Separate Car Act passed in July 1890. In order to "promote the comfort of passengers," railroads had to provide "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races" on lines running in the state.

Challenging the Separate Car Act

The Louisiana Separate Car Act marked a dramatic and humiliating reversal of fortune for the Black and mixed-race citizens of Louisiana. Although a slave state, Louisiana in general and New Orleans in particular had always had, because of their French origins, a more-tolerant attitude toward people of colour than did other Deep South states. In addition to the usual demarcation between Black and white, since the 1700s New Orleans had acknowledged a third class, free people of colour (in French, gens de couleur libres), sometimes called Creoles, the freed descendants of European fathers and African mothers who had enjoyed a great deal of autonomy. Although Louisiana, like most Southern states, had laws against marriage between slaves, it did allow free people of colour, whites, and the gens de couleur to marry, testify in court against whites, and in some cases inherit property from their fathers. Some became slaveowners themselves, and apparently many of them accumulated significant property. Their social standing, especially in New Orleans, had insulated them from some of the white reaction following the war. But when whites regained power after the end of Reconstruction, they saw only two races, and the privileged position of the gens de couleur evaporated; from then on they were Black as far as the law was concerned.

Gens de couleur helped form the American Citizens Equal Rights Association when the Separate Car bill was introduced, and they pledged to fight it. Among the members of the committee was Louis A. Martinet, a Creole attorney and doctor who had also founded the Daily Crusader, and he and his newspaper became the leading opponents of the law. After its passage his paper called for both a legal challenge and a boycott of those railroads that had segregated cars. Martinet received the help of Albion W. Tourgée, a white lawyer, who had fought for the North, and served as a lawyer and judge in North Carolina.

A citizens' committee (the Citizens' Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law), drawn primarily from the Creole community, raised $3,000 to fund a lawsuit, and Tourgée agreed to be lead counsel in the case. But they also needed a local lawyer, since the challenge to the law would have to go through state courts before it could be appealed to the federal system. A white lawyer, James Walker, finally agreed to take the case in December 1891. Martinet did not consider any of the Black lawyers in New Orleans competent to raise a constitutional question, since, as he explained, they practiced almost entirely in the police courts.

Tourgée and Martinet considered several possibilities. They could have a Black passenger buy a ticket outside Louisiana and then travel into the state, thus raising a challenge to the law under the commerce clause. They might have a fair-skinned person of mixed race attempt to enter the ladies' car, but there they ran into the problem, as Martinet noted, that she might not be refused admission. In New Orleans, he wrote to Tourgée, "people of tolerably fair complexion, even if unmistakably colored, enjoy here a large degree of immunity from the accursed prejudice."

But Tourgée wanted someone who was an octoroon, a person who was "of not more than one eighth colored blood," because he believed the winning strategy would be to expose the ambiguities in the definition of race. How did the law, or a train conductor, determine the race of a passenger? "It is a question," Tourgée told his colleague, that the Supreme Court "may as well take up, if for nothing else, to let the court sharpen its wits on." Martinet agreed, and in New Orleans he began talking to sympathetic railroad officials who wanted the law overturned for their own financial reasons. It would not do if their test passenger was merely excluded from boarding or even thrown off the train; he would have to be arrested so that a real case existed and he could claim injury in federal court. One railway informed him that it did not enforce the law, while another said that though it opposed the statute as too costly, it did not want to go against it publicly. Then the Louisville & Nashville line agreed to a test case. As it happened, for reasons neither Martinet nor Tourgée expected, their test case fizzled.

On February 24, 1892, 21-year-old Daniel Desdunes purchased a first-class ticket on the Louisville & Nashville from New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama, and took a seat in the whites-only car. He was arrested according to the plan and charged with a criminal violation of the Separate Car Act. Tourgée, Martinet, and the local attorney, James Walker, filed a "plea of jurisdiction," arguing that since Desdunes was a passenger in interstate commerce, he had the right and privilege to travel free from any governmental regulation save that of the Congress. Tourgée also introduced his claim that the determination of race was a complex question of both science and law and so could not be delegated to a train official. The lawyers assumed that their plea would be denied, Desdunes would be convicted, and then they would appeal. Then, on April 19, 1892, the presiding judge, Robert Marr, suddenly disappeared, and no one knew what had happened to him.

While Desdunes's attorney tried to figure out what to do next, on May 25 the Louisiana Supreme Court handed down its decision in Louisiana ex rel. Abbott v. Hicks. A train conductor on the Texas and Pacific Railway had been prosecuted for seating a Black passenger in a white car, and the railway argued that since the passenger was traveling between two states, either the Louisiana law did not apply to interstate travel or, if it did, then it was unconstitutional under the commerce clause. Much to everyone's surprise, the Louisiana high court agreed that regulations of the Separate Car Act could not apply to interstate passengers. Given that development, the new judge in Desdunes's case, John Ferguson, dismissed the case.

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Jim Crow law | History, Facts, & Examples

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Jim Crow law, any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the U.S. South from the end of Reconstruction to the mid-20th century. The segregation principle was codified on local and state levels and most famously with the Supreme Court's 'separate but equal' decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

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A law that allowed people (even freed slaves, and women) to claim 160 acres of land! However, Native Americans were forced from their lands and onto reservations to make way for homesteaders.

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What Was the Homestead Act?

In a July 4, 1861, speech, Lincoln told the nation the purpose of America's government was "to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial burdens from all shoulders and to give everyone an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life."

He followed through with the passage of the Homestead Act, which remained active for 124 years until it was repealed in 1976, and resulted in 10 percent of U.S. land-or 270 million acres-to be claimed and settled.

The incentive to move and settle on Western territory was open to all U.S. citizens, or intended citizens, and resulted in 4 million homestead claims, although 1.6 million deeds in 30 states were actually officially obtained. Montana, followed by North Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska had the most successful claims.

But to achieve this, thousands of Native Americans were forced from their lands and onto Indian reservations to make way for homesteaders.

During a speech made in Ohio in February 1861, Lincoln said the act was "worthy of consideration, and that the wild lands of the country should be distributed so that every man should have the means and opportunity of benefiting his condition."

After it passed Congress, Lincoln signed the Homestead Act into law on May 20, 1862.

Requirements of the Homestead Act

To make a claim, homesteaders paid a filing fee of $18: a $10 fee to make a temporary claim on the land, $2 for commission to the land agent and an additional $6 final payment to receive an official patent on the land. Land titles could also be purchased from the government for $1.25 per acre following six months of proven residency.

Additional requirements included five years of continuous residence on the land, building a home on it, farming the land and making improvements. Homesteaders, who had to be the head of a household or 21 years of age and had to certify they had never borne arms against the United States, also needed two neighbors or friends to attest to the government that they had fulfilled the requirements. Union soldiers could shave off time served in the Civil War from the five-year residency requirement.
WATCH: Matthew Pinsker on the Homestead Act
Land Speculators and the Homestead Act

Of course, there were those who took advantage of homesteading. According to the National Archives, a limited number of farmers and laborers could afford to build a farm, which included access to tools, crops, livestock and more.

"In the end, most of those who purchased land under the act came from areas quite close to their new homesteads (Iowans moved to Nebraska, Minnesotans to South Dakota, and so on)," the agency states. "Unfortunately, the act was framed so ambiguously that it seemed to invite fraud, and early modifications by Congress only compounded the problem. Most of the land went to speculators, cattlemen, miners, lumbermen, and railroads."

Other loopholes included building the required 12-by-14 dwelling in inches, rather than feet, since the exact measurement wasn't specified. A shortage of investigators also allowed false claims to be approved. And unpredictable weather, water shortages and remoteness led many homesteaders to abandon their claims well before the five-year mark.

But with improvements in rail lines and growing populations, new towns and states were created. "One hundred years ago the Congress passed the Homestead Act," President John F. Kennedy said in his message on conservation, sent to Congress in 1962, "probably the single greatest stimulus to national development ever enacted."

Repeal of the Homestead Act

Homesteading virtually came to a screeching halt with the enactment of the Taylor Grazing Act, signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934, which regulated grazing on federal public lands and authorized the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to apportion grazing districts.

In 1976, the Homestead Act was repealed with the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which stated "public lands be retained in Federal ownership." The act authorized the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to manage federal lands. Homesteading was still allowed for another decade in Alaska, until 1986.

In 1974, a Vietnam War veteran and native of California named Kenneth Deardorff filed a homestead claim on 80 acres of land on the Stony River in southwestern Alaska. After fulfilling all the requirements of the act and living and working on the land for over a decade, Deardorff received his patent in May 1988. He was the last person to receive the title to land claimed under the Civil War-era act.

Today, the Homestead National Historical Park outside Beatrice, Nebraska, commemorates the Homestead Act. Why the tiny midwest town? That's where Daniel Freeman, deemed the first homesteader to file a claim (on Jan. 1, 1863) by the Department of the Interior, established his homestead site.

Sources

Homestead Act (1862). National Archives.
Homestead Act: Primary Documents in American History. Library of Congress.
Landmark Legislation: The Homestead Act of 1862. United States Senate.
FREE LAND was the Cry! Homestead National Historical Park. National Park Service.

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Homestead Act: 1862 Date & Definition - HISTORY

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In a July 4, 1861, speech, Lincoln told the nation the purpose of America's government was "to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial burdens from all shoulders and to give everyone an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life."

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The Dawes Act made it easier for Americans to colonize Native territories. The Law set a process to assimilate Native Americans, slowly erasing their culture and replacing it with American customs. Any lands unclaimed by the Native were sold off to Americans.

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The Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the federal government to break up tribal lands by partitioning them into individual plots. Only those Native Americans who accepted the individual allotments were allowed to become US citizens.

The objective of the Dawes Act was to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream US society by annihilating their cultural and social traditions.

As a result of the Dawes Act, over ninety million acres of tribal land were stripped from Native Americans and sold to non-natives.

Background to the "Indian problem"

Although violent conflict had plagued relations between white settlers and Native Americans from the very beginning of European colonization of the New world, such violence increased in the mid-nineteenth century as American settlers moved ever further west across the continent. Most white Americans believed they could not live in peace with Native Americans, whom they regarded as "primitive."

As a result of this widespread belief, the US government created the reservation system in 1851 keep Native Americans off of lands that European-Americans wished to settle. Many indigenous people resisted their confinement to the reservations, resulting in a series of conflicts between Native Americans and the US Army known as the Indian Wars. Ultimately, the US Army subdued Native Americans and forced them onto reservations, where they were allowed to govern themselves and maintain some of their traditions and culture.

But as white Americans pushed ever westward, they came into conflict with Native Americans on their tribal lands. Many of these white settlers viewed the continued practice of native traditions as barbaric and intolerable. They believed that assimilation (being completely absorbed) into mainstream white American society was the only acceptable fate for Native Americans. This belief was often couched in religious terms; many white Christians argued that only by abandoning their spiritual traditions and accepting Christian dogma could Native Americans be "saved" from the fires of hell.

In the late nineteenth century, a political consensus formed around these ideas, and the result was the 1887 passage of the Dawes Act.

Provisions and effects of the Dawes Act

The Dawes Act of 1887, sometimes referred to as the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 or the General Allotment Act, was signed into law on January 8, 1887, by US President Grover Cleveland. The act authorized the president to confiscate and redistribute tribal lands in the American West. It explicitly sought to destroy the social cohesion of Indian tribes and to thereby eliminate the remaining vestiges of Indian culture and society. Only by disavowing their own traditions, it was believed, could the Indians ever become truly "American."

As a result of the Dawes Act, tribal lands were parceled out into individual plots. Only those Native Americans who accepted the individual plots of land were allowed to become US citizens. The remainder of the land was then sold off to white settlers.

Amendments to the Dawes Act

Initially, the Dawes Act did not apply to the so-called "Five Civilized Tribes" (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole). They had already adopted many elements of American society and culture, which is why they were characterized as "civilized." Moreover, they were protected by treaties that had guaranteed that their tribal lands would remain free of white settlers. However, after they had proven unwilling to voluntarily accept individual allotments of land, the Curtis Act of 1898 amended the Dawes Act to apply to the Five Civilized Tribes as well. Their tribal governments were obliterated, their tribal courts were destroyed, and over ninety million acres of their tribal lands were sold off to white Americans.

During the Great Depression, the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt supported the US Indian Reorganization Act, which authorized a "New Deal" for Native American Indians, allowing them to organize and form their own tribal governments, and ending the land allotments created by Dawes Act.

What do you think?

Why do you think white Americans viewed Native Americans as such a threat?

Do you think the Dawes Act was intended to help or harm Native Americans?

What was the effect of the Dawes Act on Native American cultural beliefs and traditions?

What do you see as the primary difference between Native American and European American conceptions of land and ownership?

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The Dawes Act (Dawes Severalty Act) (article) | Khan Academy

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The Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the federal government to break up tribal lands by partitioning them into individual plots. Only those Native Americans who accepted the individual allotments were allowed to become US citizens. The objective of the Dawes Act was to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream US society by annihilating their cultural and social traditions.