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Political Cartoon #2

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Civil War and Reconstruction Study Guide

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Civil War and Reconstruction Study Guide

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Civil War, and Reconstruction Study Guide

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Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the United States, was pro-slavery throughout his career in the Senate and as the Military Governor of Tennessee.

In 1864, Republican Abraham Lincoln chose Andrew Johnson, a Democratic senator from Tennessee, as his Vice Presidential candidate. Lincoln was looking for Southern support. He hoped that by selecting Johnson he would appeal to Southerners who never wanted to leave the Union.

Johnson, like Lincoln, had grown up in poverty. He did not learn to write until he was 20 years old. He came to political power as a backer of the small farmer. In speeches, he railed against "slaveocracy" and a bloated "Southern aristocracy" that had little use for the white working man.

The views of the Vice President rarely matter too much, unless something happens to the President. Following Lincoln's assassination, Johnson's views now mattered a great deal. Would he follow Lincoln's moderate approach to reconciliation? Would he support limited black suffrage as Lincoln did? Would he follow the Radical Republicans and be harsh and punitive toward the South?

Riots rocked New Orleans on July 30, 1866, when a convention met to stop Louisiana's Black Codes from taking effect. Official reports listed 37 dead and 146 wounded, but witnesses claimed that the tolls were much higher.

Johnson believed the Southern states should decide the course that was best for them. He also felt that African-Americans were unable to manage their own lives. He certainly did not think that African-Americans deserved to vote. At one point in 1866 he told a group of blacks visiting the White House that they should emigrate to another country.

He also gave amnesty and pardon. He returned all property, except, of course, their slaves, to former Confederates who pledged loyalty to the Union and agreed to support the 13th Amendment. Confederate officials and owners of large taxable estates were required to apply individually for a Presidential pardon. Many former Confederate leaders were soon returned to power. And some even sought to regain their Congressional seniority.

Johnson's vision of Reconstruction had proved remarkably lenient. Very few Confederate leaders were prosecuted. By 1866, 7,000 Presidential pardons had been granted. Brutal beatings of African-Americans were frequent. Still-powerful whites sought to subjugate freed slaves via harsh laws that came to be known as the Black Codes. Some states required written evidence of employment for the coming year or else the freed slaves would be required to work on plantations.

In South Carolina, African-Americans had to pay a special tax if they were not farmers or servants. They were not even allowed to hunt or fish in some areas. Blacks were unable to own guns - and even had their dogs taxed. African-Americans were barred from orphanages, parks, schools and other public facilities. The Freedman's Bureau, a federal agency created to help the transition from slavery to emancipation, was thwarted in its attempts to provide for the welfare of the newly emancipated. All of these rules resulted in the majority of freed slaves remaining dependent on the plantation for work.

Andrew Johnson's policies were initially supported by most Northerners, even Republicans. But, there was no consensus as to what rights African-Americans received along with Emancipation. Yet a group of Radical Republicans wanted the rights promised in the Declaration of Independence extended to include all free men, including those who were formerly slaves. A political power struggle was in the offing.

"Everyone would, and must admit, that the white race was superior to the black, and that while we ought to do our best to bring them up to our present level, that, in doing so, we should, at the same time raise our own intellectual status so that the relative position of the two races would be the same."

-Andrew Johnson, 1866.
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Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the United States, was pro-slavery throughout his career in the Senate and as the Military Governor of Tennessee. In 1864, Republican Abraham Lincoln chose Andrew Johnson, a Democratic senator from Tennessee, as his Vice Presidential candidate. Lincoln was looking for Southern support.

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Documents A-I

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Many Congressional Republicans believe that the 10 Percent Plan is too lenient since it does nothing to end the economic and political power of the planter class or protect the civil rights of ex-slaves. They also feel that the president has overstepped his authority by issuing a plan for reconstruction without consulting Congress.

Congressional Republicans outline their plan for reconstructing the union. The Wade-Davis Bill requires each state to abolish slavery, repudiate their acts of secession, and refuse to honor wartime debts. It also stipulates that a majority, rather than 10 percent, of voters in 1860 take an oath of allegiance before a state can be reorganized. Finally, it specifies that anyone who wants to vote in a constitutional convention in a former Confederate state must swear that he never voluntarily supported the Confederacy.

Lincoln refuses to sign the Wade-Davis Bill because, he wrote, he is not ready "to be inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration."

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Many Congressional Republicans believe that the 10 Percent Plan is too lenient since it does nothing to end the economic and political power of the planter class or protect the civil rights of ex-slaves. They also feel that the president has overstepped his authority by issuing a plan for reconstruction without consulting Congress.

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From Don't Know Much About History

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What was Reconstruction  from Don't Know Much About History

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You Will Love History

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You Will Love History American Reconstruction

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You Will Love History American Reconstruction

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Video Questions

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Ch 2 Reconstruction

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Overview

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Civil War, Reconstruction, and Westward Expansion Content Focus

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Plessy v Ferguson

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Sound Smart: Plessy v. Ferguson | History

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30 terms · Sharecropping → After the Civil War former lan…, Debt Peonage → slavery by another name. Work…, Radical Republicans → political party that favored h…, Impeachment → An action by the House of Repr…, Reconstruction → 1865-1877; the attempt to rebu…

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In Baltimore on May 19, 1870, 20,000 participants celebrate the ratification of the 15th Amendment.

The Radical Republicans believed blacks were entitled to the same political rights and opportunities as whites. They also believed that the Confederate leaders should be punished for their roles in the Civil War. Leaders like Pennsylvania Representative Thaddeus Stevens and Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner vigorously opposed Andrew Johnson's lenient policies. A great political battle was about to unfold.

Americans had long been suspicious of the federal government playing too large a role in the affairs of state. But the Radicals felt that extraordinary times called for direct intervention in state affairs and laws designed to protect the emancipated blacks. At the heart of their beliefs was the notion that blacks must be given a chance to compete in a free-labor economy. In 1866, this activist Congress also introduced a bill to extend the life of the Freedmen's Bureau and began work on a Civil Rights Bill.

Hiram Revels of Mississippi was elected Senator and six other African Americans were elected as Congressmen from other southern states during the Reconstruction era.

President Johnson stood in opposition. He vetoed the Freedmen's Bureau Bill, claiming that it would bloat the size of government. He vetoed the Civil Rights Bill rejecting that blacks have the "same rights of property and person" as whites.

Moderate Republicans were appalled at Johnson's racism. They joined with the Radicals to overturn Johnson's Civil Rights Act veto. This marked the first time in history that a major piece of legislation was overturned. The Radicals hoped that the Civil Rights Act would lead to an active federal judiciary with courts enforcing rights.

Congress then turned its attention to amending the Constitution. In 1867 they approved the far-reaching Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibited "states from abridging equality before the law." The second part of the Amendment provided for a reduction of a state's representatives if suffrage was denied. Republicans, in essence, offered the South a choice - accept black enfranchisement or lose congressional representation. A third clause barred ex-Confederates from holding state or national office.

Emboldened by the work of the Fourteenth Amendment and by local political victories in the 1866 elections, the Republicans went on to introduce the Reconstruction Act of 1867. This removed the right to vote and seek office by "leading rebels." Now the Southern Unionists - Southerners who supported the Union during the War - became the new Southern leadership. The Reconstruction Act also divided the South into five military districts under commanders empowered to employ the army to protect black property and citizens.

The first two years of Congressional Reconstruction saw Southern states rewrite their Constitutions and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Congress seemed fully in control. One thing stood in the way - it was President Johnson himself. Radical leaders employed an extraordinary Constitutional remedy to clear the impediment - Presidential impeachment.

Thaddeus Stevens was buried in an African American cemetery under a tombstone reading, "I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR.
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The period following the Civil War is known as the era of Reconstruction. The divisive issue of slavery had torn the nation apart. Rebuilding the nation would be a long struggle full of political battles as fierce as those recently waged with cannon and rifle.

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Documents J-P

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A New Birth of Freedom: The Day of Jubilee

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A New Birth of Freedom: The Day of Jubilee

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Printable Version The North's victory in the Civil War produced a social revolution in the South. Four million slaves were freed and a quarter million southern whites had died, one fifth of the male population. $2.5 billion worth of property had been lost.

Slave emancipation did not come in a single moment. In coastal South Carolina and parts of Louisiana and Florida, some slaves gained their freedom as early as the fall of 1861, when Union generals like John C. Fremont, without presidential or Congressional authorization, proclaimed slaves in their conquered districts to be free. During the war, slaves, by the tens of thousands, abandoned their plantations and flocked to Union lines. Black soldiers in the Union Army and their families automatically gained freedom.

Many slaves in Texas did not formally hear about freedom until June 19, 1865, which is why "Juneteenth" continues to be celebrated as emancipation day throughout the Southwest. Many slaves in the border states that remained in the Union--Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri--were not freed until December 1865, eight months after the end of the Civil War, when the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, was ratified.

For former slaves, emancipation was a moment of exhilaration, fear, and uncertainty. While some greeted the announcement of freedom with jubilation, others reacted with stunned silence. Responses to the news of emancipation ranged from exhilaration and celebration to incredulity and fear.

In Choctaw County, Mississippi, former slaves whipped a planter named Nat Best to retaliate for his cruelties. In Richmond, Virginia, some 1,500 ex-slaves gathered in the Free African church to sing hymns. A parade in Charleston attracted 10,000 spectators and featured a black-draped coffin bearing the words "Slavery is Dead." A northern journalist met an ex-slave in North Carolina who had walked 600 miles searching for his wife and children who had been sold four years before. But many freed men and women felt a deep uncertainty about their status and rights.

Ex-slaves expressed their newly-won freedom in diverse ways. Many couples, forbidden to marry during slavery, took the opportunity to formalize their unions. Others, who had lived apart from their families on separate plantations, were finally free to reside with their spouses and children. As an expression of their freedom, many freedmen dropped their slave names, adopted new surnames, and insisted on being addressed as "mister" or misses." Many black women withdrew from field labor to care for their families.

Many ex-slaves left farms or plantations for towns or cities "where freedom was free-er." Across the South, former slaves left white-dominated churches and formed independent black congregations; founded schools; and set up mutual aid societies. They also held freedmen's conventions to air grievances, discuss pressing issues, and press for equal civil and political rights.

Shocked at seeing former slaves transformed into free women and men, many southern whites complained of "betrayal" and "ingratitude" when freedmen left their plantations. Revealing slaveowners' capacity for self-deception, one former master complained that "those we loved best, and who loved us best--as we thought--were the first to leave us."

In many parts of the South, the end of the war was followed by outbursts of white rage. White mobs whipped, clubbed, and murdered ex-slaves. In contrast, the vast majority of former slaves refrained from vengeance against former masters. Instead they struggled to achieve social and independence by forming separate lodges, newspapers, and political organizations.

Reconstruction was a time of testing, when freedmen probed the boundaries and possibilities of freedom. Every aspect of southern life was subject to redefinition, from forms of racial etiquette to the systems of labor that would replace slavery.

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Printable Version The North's victory in the Civil War produced a social revolution in the South. Four million slaves were freed and a quarter million southern whites had died, one fifth of the male population. $2.5 billion worth of property had been lost. Slave emancipation did not come in a single moment.

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Who Were the Carpetbaggers from Don't Know Much About History

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Political Cartoon #11

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U.S. History 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments

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Reconstruction Worksheet (p 11-12 in the packet)

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Reconstruction Worksheet (p 11-12 in the packet)

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After the Civil War, much of the South lay in ruins. "It passes my comprehension to tell what became of our railroads," one South Carolinian told a northern reporter. "We had passably good roads, on which we could reach almost any part of the State, and the next week they were all gone-not simply broken up, but gone.

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The Civil War and Reconstruction

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Ch 1 Lesson 5 The Civil War and Reconstruction

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Rutherford Hayes and the election of 1876

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Presidential by The Washington Post on Apple Podcasts

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Download past episodes or subscribe to future episodes of Presidential by The Washington Post for free.

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Plessy v Ferguson

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Printable Version In 1890, Louisiana passed a law prohibiting people of different races from traveling together on trains. This law was one of many forms of segregation, formal and informal, that came to be known as Jim Crow (named after a minstrel song). A group of African American educators, lawyers, journalists, and civic leaders in New Orleans decided to test the law in court. At the time, New Orleans had the country's largest African American population. "This act," black leaders declared, "will be a license to the evilly disposed...to insult, humiliate and maltreat...those who have a dark skin."

Homer Plessy, a shoemaker whose great-grandmother was black, challenged the law by sitting in a car reserved for white passengers. Despite the fact that he was seven-eighths white, he was arrested and convicted. Plessy's attorney argued that the state law violated the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

The Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana's favor in 1896. Segregation statutes were constitutional, the court said, as long as equal provisions were made for both races. The court's majority declared:

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

The court's majority distinguished between legal or political equality and social equality. According to the majority opinion, the 14th Amendment only protected legal and political equality.

Justice John Marshall Harlan, the son of a Kentucky slave owner and himself a former Confederate officer, issued the lone dissent, saying it was wrong to separate citizens on the basis of race. "Our Constitution is color blind," he wrote, "...all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful." "What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races," he asked, "than state enactments which...proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior...that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens?"

Harlan, who had a black half-brother 16 years his senior, warned that the Plessy decision "will in time prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case." Harlan's half-brother, Robert Harlan, had purchased his freedom for $500 and gone on to become Ohio's most prominent black Republican.

In the Plessy decision, the court gave its sanction to the "separate but equal doctrine" and gave states permission to legally separate blacks and whites at everything from drinking fountains to schools. Plessy v. Ferguson remained in effect until it was reversed in 1954 by the court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision to integrate public schools.

The implications of the Plessy decision for education became apparent three years later. In 1897, the Richmond County, Ga., school board closed the only African American high school in Georgia, even though state law required that school boards "provide of the same facilities for each race, including schoolhouses and all other matters appertaining to education." At that time, the school board provided two high schools for white children. It also provided sufficient funds to educate all white children in the county, while it provided funding for only half of school-aged African American children.

The Supreme Court upheld the county's decision. In the case of Cumming v. School Board of Richmond County, Ga. (1899), it ruled that African Americans not only had to show that a law or practice discriminated against them, but that it was adopted because of "racial hostility."

The issues raised in the Plessy case are at the heart of a debate about race in America today: Whether race may be taken into account in hiring and promoting in the workplace, admission to schools, and the makeup of legislative districts. Today, it is opponents of affirmative action who quote Justice Harlan, arguing that race should not be used to remedy the effects of past discrimination.

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Printable Version In 1890, Louisiana passed a law prohibiting people of different races from traveling together on trains. This law was one of many forms of segregation, formal and informal, that came to be known as Jim Crow (named after a minstrel song).

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Presidential and Congressional Reconstruction Chart Slide

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Rebuilding the Old Order [ushistory.org]

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1872, P.B.S. Pinchback of Louisiana became the first black governor in America Many Southerners, whether white or black, rich or poor, barely recognized the world in which they now lived. Wealthy whites, long-accustomed to plush plantation life and the perks of political power, now found themselves barred from voting and holding office.

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Worksheet

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Printable Version The American South was the only region in the world, except for Haiti, in which slavery was overthrown by force of arms. It was the only area in which formerly prosperous slaveowners were deprived of the right to hold public office. It was also the only place in which slave owners received no compensation for the loss of their slave property. Altogether, slaveowners lost $2.5 billion in slave property.

Most important of all, the American South was the only region in which former slaves received civil and political rights, including full citizenship rights as well as the right to vote and hold elective office. The South was also the only post-emancipation society in which former slaves formed successful political alliances with whites.

Yet for all of its uniqueness, reconstruction in the South ultimately followed many of the same patterns found elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. In the end, southern planters managed to hold onto their land, which formed the basis of their economic and political power. By 1877, the Democratic Party, the party of white supremacy, had regained political control over each of the former Confederate states.

Throughout the western hemisphere, the end of slavery was followed by a period of reconstruction in which race relations were redefined and new systems of labor emerged. In former slave societies throughout the Americas, ex-slaves sought to free themselves from the gang system of labor on plantations and establish small, self-sufficient farms. Meanwhile, planters and local governments tried to restore the plantation system. The outcome, in almost all former slave societies, was the emergence of a caste system of race relations and a system of involuntary labor such as peonage, debt bondage, apprenticeship, contract labor, tenant farming, and sharecropping.

In every post-emancipation society, the abolition of slavery resulted in acute labor shortages and declining productivity, spurring efforts to restore plantation discipline. Even in Haiti, where black revolution had overthrown slavery, repeated attempts were made to restore the plantation system. On Caribbean islands like Barbados, where land was totally controlled by whites, the plantation system was re-imposed. In other areas like Jamaica, where former slaves were able to squat on unsettled land and set up subsistence farms, staple production fell sharply.

To counteract a sharp decline in sugar production, the British government imported thousands of "coolie" laborers from Asia into the Caribbean. To force former slaves to work on plantations, Caribbean governments imposed heavy taxes and enforced strict vagrancy laws.

Similar efforts to re-impose forced labor under new names also occurred in the post-Civil War South, but with a crucial difference. Having defeated the Confederacy and emancipated the slaves, many northern Republicans were convinced that securing the peace and protecting the civil rights of former slaves required unprecedented extensions of federal power. A titanic struggle took place between President Johnson -- who permitted the establishment in 1865 of all-white governments that restricted the rights of ex-slaves -- and Republican Congress that was determined to protect the basic rights of former slaves.

The Republican commitment to free labor would prevent the planters from re-imposing slavery in a new guise. But if the freedmen were not reduced to servitude, neither would many become independent landowners. Instead, landlords and laborers would compromise their differences by adopting a system of sharecropping that would perpetuate southern poverty for decades.

Reconstruction also had a more positive legacy. It was during this period that African Americans in the South established churches and schools that would provide the institutional basis for later challenges to inequality. And the constitutional amendments ratified during Reconstruction would provide the legal basis for the attack on racial segregation during the 1940s, '50s, and '60s.

Like an earthquake that shakes the ground and then subsides, Reconstruction came and went. But it did fundamentally alter the nation's landscape.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

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Printable Version The American South was the only region in the world, except for Haiti, in which slavery was overthrown by force of arms. It was the only area in which formerly prosperous slaveowners were deprived of the right to hold public office.

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From don't Know Much About History

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What did separate but equal mean  from Don't Know Much About History

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Sound Smart: The 15th Amendment

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worksheet

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Reconstuction Political Cartoons TACOS go with DBQ

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Reconstruction Chapter from Digital History

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Reconstruction Chapter from Digital History

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Visual Summary

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SCOTUS case

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Printable Version The failure of Reconstruction was not inevitable. There were moments of possibility when it seemed imaginable that former slaves might achieve genuine freedom.

Immediately following the war, all-white southern legislatures enacted "black codes," designed to force ex-slaves to work on plantations, where they would be put to work in gangs. These codes denied African Americans the right to purchase or even rent land. Vagrancy laws allowed authorities to arrest blacks "in idleness" (including many children) and assign them to a chain gang or auction them off to a planter for as long as a year. The more stringent black codes also bar ex-slaves from owning weapons, marrying whites, and assembling after sunset. Other statutes required blacks to have written proof of employment and barred them from leaving plantations.

The Freedmen's Bureau, which was established in March 1865 to aid former slaves, helped enforce laws against vagrancy and loitering and refused to allow ex-slaves to keep land that they occupied during the war. It ordered freed slaves to sign labor contracts with former masters and other white landowners. In many instances, these contracts did not require the payment of wages. One black army veteran asked rhetorically: "If you call this Freedom, what did you call Slavery?"

Many African Americans in the South defied these efforts to reduce them to virtual reenslavement by staging strikes and other protests. But lacking land of their own, most ex-slaves were eventually forced to become tenant farmers.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

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Printable Version The failure of Reconstruction was not inevitable. There were moments of possibility when it seemed imaginable that former slaves might achieve genuine freedom. Immediately following the war, all-white southern legislatures enacted "black codes," designed to force ex-slaves to work on plantations, where they would be put to work in gangs.

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From Don't Know Much About History

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Who was Jim Crow from Don't Know Much About History

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Crash Course #22 Reconstruction and 1876

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Crash Course #22 Reconstruction and 1876

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Hi, I'm John Green. This is Crash Course US History and huzzah! The Civil War is over! The slaves are free! Huzzah! Did that one hit me in the head? It's very dangerous, Crash Course. So when they say "Don't aim at a person", that includes myself?! The rollercoaster only goes up from here my friends! Huzzah!

Mr. Green, Mr. Green! What about the epic failure of Reconstruction?

Oh, right, stupid Reconstruction always ruining everything.

(Intro)

So after the Civil War ended, the United States had to reintegrate both a formerly slave population and a formerly rebellious population back into the country, which is a challenge that we might have met except Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and we were left with Andrew-I-Am-The-Third-Worst-President-Ever-Johnson.

I'm sorry, Abe, but you don't get to be in the show anymore.
So Lincoln's whole post-war idea was to facilitate reunion and reconciliation. And Andrew Johnson's guiding Reconstruction principle was that the South never had a right to secede in the first place. Also because he was himself a Southerner, he resented all the elites in the South who had snubbed him, and he was also a racist who didn't think that blacks should have any role in Reconstruction. Trifecta!

So between 1865 and 1867, the so called period of Presidential Reconstruction, Johnson appointed provisional governors and ordered them to call state conventions to establish new all white governments. And in their 100% whiteness and oppression of former slaves, those new governments looked suspiciously like the old Confederate governments they had replaced.

And what was changing for the former slaves? Well in some ways a lot, like Fisk and Howard universities were established as well as many primary and secondary schools, thanks in part to the Freedman's Bureau which only lasted until 1870, but had the power to divide up confiscated and abandoned confederate land for former slaves.

And this was important because to most slaves land ownership was the key to freedom and many felt like they had been promised land by the Union Army, like General Sherman's field order 15 promised to distribute land in 40 acre plots to former slaves.

But that didn't happen, either through the Freedman Bureau or anywhere else. Instead President Johnson ordered all land returned to its former owners so the South remained largely agricultural with the same people owning the same land and in the end, we ended up with sharecropping.

Let's go to the Thought Bubble (Southern Farm 1866.) The system of sharecropping replaced slavery in many places throughout the South. Land owners would provide housing to the sharecroppers--no, Thought Bubble, not quite that nice, there ya go--also tools and seed and then the sharecroppers received, get this, a share of their crop, usually between a third and a half, with the price for that harvest often set by the landowner. Freed blacks got to control their work and plantation owners got a steady workforce that couldn't easily leave because they had little opportunity to save money and make the big capital investments in like land or tools.

By the late 1860's poor white farmers were sharecropping as well, in fact by the great depression most share croppers were white. And while sharecropping certainly wasn't slavery it did result in a quasi-serfdom that tied workers to land they didn't own, more or less the opposite Jefferson's ideal of the small independent farmer.

So the Republicans in congress weren't happy that this reconstructed South looked so much like the pre-civil war South, so they took the lead in reconstruction after 1867.

Radical Republicans thought the war had been fought for equal rights and wanted to see the powers of the national government expanded.

Few were as radical as Thaddeus 'Tommy lee Jones' Stevens who wanted to take away land from the southern planters and give it to the former slaves.

But Rank and File Republicans were radical enough to pass the Civil Rights Bill, which defined persons born in the united states as citizens and established nation wide equality before the law regardless of race.

Andrew Johnson immediately vetoed the law, claiming that trying to protect the rights of African Americans amounted to discrimination against white people. Which so infuriated Republicans that congress did something it had never done before in all of American history: they overrode the presidential veto with a 2/3rds majority and the Civil Rights Act became law.

So then congress really had its dander up and decided to amend the constitution with the 14th Amendment which defines citizenship, guarantees equal protection, and extends the rights in the bill of right to all the states. Sort of. The amendment had almost no Democratic support, but it also didn't need any, because there were almost no Democrats in congress on account of how congress had refused to seat the representatives from the new all white, governments that Johnson supported. And that's how we got the 14th Amendment. Arguably the most important in the whole constitution.

Thanks thought bubble. Oh. Straight to the mystery document today? Alright. The rules here are simple. I guess the author of the mystery document and try not to get shocked. Alright lets see what we've got today.

SEC. 1. Be it ordained by the police jury of the parish of St.Landry, that no negro shall be allowed to pass within the limits of said parish without special permit in writing from his employer.

Section 4. Every Negro is required to be in the regular service of some white person, or former owner, who shall be held responsible for the conduct of said negro.
Section 6. No Negro shall be permitted to preach, exhort, or otherwise declaim to congregations of colored people, without a special permission in writing from the president of the police jury.
Gee, Stan, I wonder if the president of the police jury was white. I actually know this one--it is a black code, which was basically legal codes where they just replaced the word 'slave' with the word 'negro'. And this code shows just how unwilling white governments were to ensure the rights of new, free citizens. I would celebrate not getting shocked, but now I am depressed.

So, okay, in 1867, again over Johnson's veto, congress passed The Reconstruction Act, which divided the South into five military districts, and required each state to create a new government, one that included participation of black men. Those new governments had to ratify the 14th Amendment if they wanted to get back into the Union. Radical reconstruction had begun.

So in 1868, Andrew Johnson was about as electable in the US as Jefferson Davis, and sure enough, he didn't win. Instead, the 1868 election was won by Republican and former Union general, Ulysses S. Grant. But Grant's margin of victory was small enough that Republicans were like, man, we would sure win more elections if black people could vote, which is something you hear Republicans say all the time these days.

So Congressional Republicans pushed through the 15th Amendment, which prohibited states from denying men the right to vote based on race, but not based on gender, or literacy, or whether your grandfather could vote. So states ended up with a lot of leeway when it came to denying the franchise to African-Americans, which, of course, they did. So here we have the federal government dictating who can vote and who is and isn't a citizen of a state, and establishing equality under the law, even local laws, and this is a really big deal in American history, because the national government became, rather than a threat to individual liberty, the custodian of freedom, as radical Republican Charles Sumner put it. So then with this legal protection, former slaves began to emphasize their rights--they participated in the political process by direct action, such as staging sit-ins to integrate street cars, by voting in elections, and by holding office. Most African-Americans were Republicans at the time, and because they could vote and were a large part of the population, the Republican party came to dominate politics in the South, just like today, except totally different.

Now, Southern mythology about the age of radical Reconstruction is exemplified by Gone with the Wind, which of course, tells the story of Northern Republican dominance and corruption by Southern Republicans. Fortune seeking Northern carpetbaggers, seen here, as well as Southern turncoats scalawags dominated politics and all of the African-American elected leaders were either corrupt, or puppets, or both. Yeah, well, like, the rest of Gone with the Wind, that's a bit of an oversimplification.

There were about 2,000 African Americans who held office during reconstruction, and the vast majority of them were not corrupt. Consider, for example, the not-corrupt and amazingly named Pinckney B.S. Pinchback, who, from 1872 to 1873 served very briefly in Louisiana as America's first black governor, and went on to be a senator and a member of the House of Representatives. By the way, America's second African American governor, Douglas Wilder of Virginia, was elected in 1989. Having African American office holders was a huge step forward in terms of ensuring the rights of African Americans, because it meant that there would be black juries and less discrimination in state and local governments when it came to providing basic services. But in the end, Republican governments failed in the South.

There were important achievements, especially a school system that, while segregated, did attempt to educate both black and white children. And even more importantly, they created a functioning government, where both white and African American citizens could participate. According to one white South Carolina lawyer, "We have gone through one of the most remarkably changes in our relations to each other that has been known, perhaps, in the history of the world." That's a little hyperbolic, but we are America, after all.

(America montage)

It's true that corruption was widespread, but it was in the North, too, I mean, we're talking about governments. And that's not why reconstruction really ended, it ended because one, things like schools and road repair cost money, which meant taxes, which made Republican governments very unpopular, because Americans hate taxes. And two, white Southerners could not accept African Americans exercising basic civil rights, holding office, or voting. And for many, the best way to return things to the way they were before reconstruction was through violence.

Especially after 1867, much of the violence directed toward African Americans in the South was politically motivated. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866, and it quickly became a terrorist organization targeting Republicans, both black and white, beating and murdering men and women in order to intimidate them and keep them from voting. The worst act of violence was probably the massacre at Colfax, Louisiana, where hundreds of former slaves were murdered.

And between intimidation and emerging discriminatory voting laws, fewer black men voted, which allowed white Democrats to take control of state governments in the South and returned white Democratic congressional delegations to Washington. These white Southern politicians called themselves "redeemers", because they claimed to have redeemed the South from Northern Republican corruption and black rule. Now, it's likely that the South would have fallen back into Democratic hands eventually, but the process was aided by Northern Republicans losing interest in Reconstruction.

In 1873, the US fell into yet another not quite great economic depression, and Northerners lost the stomach to fight for the rights of black people in the South, which in addition to being hard, was expensive. So by 1876, the supporters of Reconstruction were in full retreat and the Democrats were resurgent, especially in the South, and this set up one of the most contentious elections in American history. The Democrats nominated New York governor and NYU law school graduate Samuel Tilden, the Republicans chose Ohio governor and Kenyon college alumnus, Rutherford B. Hayes. One man who'd gone to CrashCourse writer Raoul Meyer's law school, and another who'd gone to my college, Kenyon. Now, if this election had been based on facial hair, as elections should be, there would have been no controversy, but sadly, we have an electoral college here in the United States, and in 1876, there were disputed electoral votes in South Carolina, Louisiana, and of course, Florida. Now, you might remember that in these situations, there is a constitutional provision that says Congress should decide the winner, but Congress, shockingly, proved unable to accomplish something. So they appointed a 15-man electoral commission, a supercommittee, if you will, and there were 8 Republicans on that committee, and 7 Democrats, so you will never guess who won, Kenyon college's own Rutherford B. Hayes! Go lords and ladies! And, yes, that is our mascot, shut up.

Anyway, in order to get the presidency and win the support of the supercommittee, Hayes's people agreed to cede control of the South to the Democrats and to stop meddling in Southern affairs and also to build a transcontinental railroad through Texas. This is called the bargain of 1877, because historians are so good at naming things, and it basically killed Reconstruction. Without any more troops in Southern states and with control of Southern legislatures firmly in the hands of white Democrats, the states were free to go back to restricting the freedom of black people, which they did. Legislatures passed Jim Crow laws, that limited African Americans' access to public accommodations and legal protections. States passed laws that took away black peoples' right to vote and social and economic mobility among African Americans in the South declined precipitously. However, for a brief moment, the United States was more democratic than it had ever been before, and an entire segment of the population that had no impact on politics before was now allowed to participate, and for the freedmen who'd lived through it, that was a monumental change, and it would echo down to the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes called "the Second Reconstruction".

But we're gonna end this episode on a downer, as we are want to do here at CrashCourse US History, because I wanna point out a lesser known legacy of Reconstruction: the Reconstruction amendments and laws that were passed granted former slaves political freedom and rights, especially the vote and that was critical. But to give them what they really wanted and needed, plots of land that would make them economically independent would have required confiscation, and that violation of property rights was too much for all but the most radical Republicans. And that question of what it really means to be free in a system of free-market capitalism has proven very complicated indeed. I'll see you next week.

CrashCourse is produced and directed by Stan Muller, our script supervisor is Meredith Danko, the associate producer is Danica Johnson, the show is written by my high school history teacher, Raoul Meyer and myself, and our graphics team is Thought Café. Every week there's a new caption for the libertage, you can suggest those in the comments, where you can also ask questions about today's video that will be answered by our team of historians. Thank you for watching CrashCourse, don't forget to subscribe, and as we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome.

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Hi, I'm John Green. This is Crash Course US History and huzzah! The Civil War is over! The slaves are free! Huzzah! Did that one hit me in the head? It's very dangerous, Crash Course. So when they say "Don't aim at a person", that includes myself?!

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Reconstruction Review Worksheet 1 and 2  Student Version

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Benchmark Notecards

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picture and quick bio

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Printable Version After helping to push through the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, the President sought to quickly restore the rebel states to the Union. He considered Reconstruction a "restoration" and wanted to quickly readmit the former Confederate states after they had repudiated their ordinances of secession, accepted the 13th Amendment, repudiated the Confederate debt, and pledged loyalty to the Union.

Johnson's vision of Reconstruction clashed with that of many Republicans. He vetoed a string of Republican-backed measures, including an extension of the Freedman's Bureau and the first Civil Rights bill. He ordered black families evicted from land on which they had been settled by the U.S. Army. He acquiesced in the Black Codes which southern state governments enacted to reduce former slaves to the status of dependent plantation laborers.

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Printable Version After helping to push through the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, the President sought to quickly restore the rebel states to the Union. He considered Reconstruction a "restoration" and wanted to quickly readmit the former Confederate states after they had repudiated their ordinances of secession, accepted the 13th Amendment, repudiated the Confederate debt, and pledged loyalty to the Union.

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Crash Course #22 Reconstruction and 1876

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Crash Course #22 Reconstruction and 1876

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Crash Course #22 Reconstruction and 1876

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Benchmark Skill Activities

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Plessy v Ferguson and Segregation: Crash Course Black American History #21

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Printable Version In early 1866, Congressional Republicans, appalled by mass killing of ex-slaves and adoption of restrictive black codes, seized control of Reconstruction from President Johnson. Congress denied representatives from the former Confederate states their Congressional seats, passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and wrote the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, extending citizenship rights to African Americans and guaranteeing them equal protection of the laws. The 14th Amendment also reduced representation in Congress of any southern state that deprived African Americans of the vote. In 1870, the country went even further by ratifying the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave voting rights to black men. The most radical proposals advanced during Reconstruction--to confiscate plantations and redistribute portions to the freemen--were defeated.

In 1867, Congress overrode a presidential veto in order to pass an act that divided the South into military districts that placed the former Confederate states under martial law pending their adoption of constitutions guaranteeing civil liberties to former slaves. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 gave African American men in the South the right to vote three years before ratification of the 15th Amendment. With the vote came representation. Freedmen served in state legislatures and Hiram Revels became the first African American to sit in the U.S. Senate.

Although the law empowered him to remove recalcitrant southern officeholders, President Johnson refused. He also forbade the Army to try violations of federal law in its courts or to prohibit activities that were not in specific violation of federal or local statutes. Many Republicans regarded the president's actions as a systematic effort to thwart the will of Congress and lend aid and comfort to enemies of the Union. The hot-tempered Johnson labeled the Republicans scoundrels in the treasonous tradition of Benedict Arnold.

To prevent the president from obstructing its reconstruction program, Congress passed several laws restricting presidential powers. These laws prevented him from appointing Supreme Court justices and restricted his authority over the army. The Tenure of Office Act barred him from removing, without Senate approval, officeholders, who had been appointed with the advice and consent of the Senate.

In August 1867, Johnson tested the Tenure of Office Act by removing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. This act prompted Republicans in Congress to seek to impeach and remove the president.

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Printable Version In early 1866, Congressional Republicans, appalled by mass killing of ex-slaves and adoption of restrictive black codes, seized control of Reconstruction from President Johnson. Congress denied representatives from the former Confederate states their Congressional seats, passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and wrote the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, extending citizenship rights to African Americans and guaranteeing them equal protection of the laws.

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Political Cartoon #12

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The Dred Scott Decision: Crash Course Black American History #16

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Printable Version In an event without historical precedent, former slaves joined with white Republicans to govern the South. The freedmen, in alliance with carpetbaggers (Northerners who had migrated South during or after the Civil War) and southern white Republicans derogatorily called scalawags, temporarily gained power in every Confederate state except Virginia. Altogether, over 600 African Americans served as legislators in Reconstruction governments (though blacks comprised a majority only in the lower house of South Carolina's legislature).

The Republican governments were damned for their extravagance, but they gave the South its first public school systems, asylums, and roads. Southern Republicans sought to modernize the South by building railroads and providing free public education and other social services. The Reconstruction governments drew up democratic state constitutions, expanded women's rights, provided debt relief, and established the South's first state-funded schools. Before Reconstruction, there were no statewide, tax supported education systems in the South, except in Tennessee. Freedmen's academies set up by northern philanthropists to educate former slaves provided the framework for state education systems. Meanwhile, the first institutions of higher education for blacks were established in the South. Black colleges founded during Reconstruction included Fisk University in Nashville in 1866, Howard University in Washington in 1867, and Virginia's Hampton Institute in 1868.

To be sure, some of the reconstruction governments were plagued by inexperienced and incompetent leadership and corruption, which disillusioned many northerners. There were a number of examples of flagrant corruption, including one instance in which a state legislature awarded a thousand dollars to a member to cover a lost bet on a horse race. In another example, a New York publisher gave a $30,000 loan to a Georgia official to convince him to adopt a textbook. Nevertheless, the nation's first integrated governments had many substantial achievements.

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Printable Version In an event without historical precedent, former slaves joined with white Republicans to govern the South. The freedmen, in alliance with carpetbaggers (Northerners who had migrated South during or after the Civil War) and southern white Republicans derogatorily called scalawags, temporarily gained power in every Confederate state except Virginia.

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Reconstruction after the Civil War Explained in 10 Minutes

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Mr. Hughes through the 1800's like butta'. Easy to digest, Mr. Hughes covers the basic causes and facts about the role of the government as it related to the war. Specifically designed for the US History and Government regents exam in NY State.

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Printable Version According to myth, unscrupulous carpetbaggers from the North and unprincipled scalawags from the South manipulated the freedmen to gain control of the state governments. Backed by the presence of federal troops, they embarked on an orgy of corruption, humiliating and impoverishing the helpless South and unsettling relations between blacks and whites. At last - the myth continues - the nation grew weary of the corruption and the cost of maintaining troops in the South. The army was withdrawn and the responsible white citizenry regained control of their governments.

According to this stereotype popularized after Reconstruction, the carpetbaggers were dishonest fortune seekers whose possession could be put in a satchel. "They are fellows who crawled down South on the track of our armies...stealing and plundering," said editor Horace Greeley.

Contrary to legend, however, most carpetbaggers were not impoverished opportunists seeking easy money in the South. Rather they were former soldiers who migrated to the South to seek a livelihood. They generated hostility because they supported the Republican Party and defended the civil and political rights of freedmen.

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Printable Version According to myth, unscrupulous carpetbaggers from the North and unprincipled scalawags from the South manipulated the freedmen to gain control of the state governments. Backed by the presence of federal troops, they embarked on an orgy of corruption, humiliating and impoverishing the helpless South and unsettling relations between blacks and whites.

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Reconstruction Period: Goals, Success and Failures

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Reconstruction Period: Goals, Success and Failures

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Reconstruction Period Goals, Successes and Failures

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Printable Version More than any other southern city, New Orleans, La., tested the boundaries of possibility during Reconstruction. With the largest black population of any city in the nation, New Orleans was the first city in the South to integrate its police force and to experiment with school integration. At least 240 blacks in New Orleans were active in Reconstruction politics, and three served as Louisiana's lieutenant governor and one served briefly as acting governor.

Resentful whites in Louisiana organized the White League to terrorize African Americans. Read one call for supporters:

Can you bear it longer, that negro [sic] ignorance, solidified in opposition to white intelligence, and led by carpet-bag and scalawag impudence and villainy, shall continue to hold the State, your fortunes and your honor by the throat, while they perpetuate upon you indignities and crimes unparalleled?

The White League, made up largely of former Confederate soldiers and the white business elite, was dedicated to the reestablishment of white supremacy. In September 1874, the League overwhelmed the state militia seized control of state government offices. The attack left 27 Republican supporters of Reconstruction dead, including 24 African Americans and three whites. President Ulysses S. Grant had to order a squadron of six warships and federal troops in order to force the White League to surrender.

Reconstruction was overthrown by a political movement known as Redemption, which reestablished white supremacy in the South. Some upper class white southern conservatives, such as Wade Hampton, a wealthy South Carolinian, attempted to draw black voters away from the Republican Party. In 1876, when he ran for governor, he told African American voters:

We want your votes; we don't want you to be deprived of them.... if we are elected...we will observe, protect, and defend the rights of the colored man as quickly as any man in South Carolina.

But the main strategy used to overthrow Reconstruction was economic intimidation and physical violence. Secret organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, founded in Tennessee in 1866, and the Knights of the White Camellia were dedicated to ending Republican rule and preventing blacks from voting. Members of these organizations included judges, lawyers, and clergymen as well as yeomen farmers and poor whites.

The Redeemers had no scruples about fraud or terror. "Every Democrat," said a South Carolina Redeemer, "must feel honor bound to control the vote of at least one negro by intimidation, purchase...or as each individual will determine." Hundreds of blacks were beaten and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist groups.

In 1870 and 1871, Congress passed the Force Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act which gave the president the power to use federal troops to prevent the denial of voting rights. Activities of groups like the Ku Klux Klan declined, but the campaign of intimidation was successful in keeping many African Americans from the polls. By 1876, Republican governments had been toppled in all but three states.

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Printable Version More than any other southern city, New Orleans, La., tested the boundaries of possibility during Reconstruction. With the largest black population of any city in the nation, New Orleans was the first city in the South to integrate its police force and to experiment with school integration.

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Slave Codes: Crash Course Black American History #4

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Printable Version On average, the South's bi-racial Republican state governments lasted just four-and-a-half years. During the 1870s, internal divisions within the Republican Party, white terror, and northern apathy allowed southern white Democrats to return to power.

Retirement and death removed from Congress the more outspoken advocates of civil rights, such as Thaddeus Stevens, who died in 1868. Corruption in the Grant administration divided the Republican Party and helped the Democrats win control of the House of Representatives in 1874. Corruption in the South's Republican government also undercut support for Reconstruction. Northern outrage over southern intransigence gave way to helpless resignation or indifference.

As early as 1872, many former abolitionists believed that their aims had been achieved. Slavery had been abolished and citizenship and voting rights had been established by Constitutional Amendment. Democrats denounced "foreign" rule of the South by carpetbaggers and attacked corruption in President Grant's administration. In 1872, "Liberal Republicans," repelled by the supposed corruption of the radical regimes in the South, declared that the North had attained its goals and that Reconstruction should end. Many threw their support to the Democrats. The nationwide economic depression of 1873 further weakened the Republican Party, and Democrats regained the House of Representatives in 1874.

The financial panic of 1873 and the subsequent economic depression helped bring Reconstruction to a formal end. Across the country, but especially in the South business failures, unemployment, and tightening credit heightened class and racial tensions and generated demands for government retrenchment.

Property owners in the South demanded that state budgets be cut and tax rates lowered. Southern penitentiaries were dismantled and convicts were leased to private contractors. Spending on public schools and the care of orphans, the sick, and the insane was sharply reduced. Budgets for schools for blacks were cut especially heavily.

It was the disputed presidential election of 1876 that brought Reconstruction to a formal end.

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Printable Version On average, the South's bi-racial Republican state governments lasted just four-and-a-half years. During the 1870s, internal divisions within the Republican Party, white terror, and northern apathy allowed southern white Democrats to return to power. Retirement and death removed from Congress the more outspoken advocates of civil rights, such as Thaddeus Stevens, who died in 1868.

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Printable Version If a mid-19th century Rip Van Winkle had gone to sleep in 1857, the year of the Dred Scott decision, and awoke in 1877, it would probably take him quite a while before he would believe reports of what had happened during the years he was asleep. He would learn about a four year civil war that had freed four million slaves and destroyed half the South's farm implements and livestock; presidential assassination; ratification of constitutional amendments abolishing slavery, guaranteeing equal rights, and extending the vote to African Americans; presidential impeachment; and a disputed presidential election. But when he looked around him, much would appear unchanged. Southern representatives had returned to Congress, and they were similar to those who had served before the war. In each of the southern states, the Democratic Party was securely in control. The overwhelming majority of African Americans would still be living in the South, working as farm laborers on land that they did not own.

Of course, our latter-day Rip Van Winkle would eventually recognize that despite continuities, fundamental changes had taken place. Chattel slavery had been defeated. The gang system of labor, enforced by the whip, was dead. Incredibly, about 20 percent of African Americans in the South managed to acquire land by 1880. And through the 1880s, sizeable numbers of African American men in the South would continue to vote. Real gains had been won, even though full equality remained an unfulfilled promise.

Like an earthquake, Reconstruction shook southern society's foundations then subsided. But it left the national landscape forever changed. Out of Reconstruction came the first statewide public school systems in the South as well as hospitals, penitentiaries, and asylums. The first black institutions of higher learning were founded. Equally important, it was during Reconstruction that the institutional foundations of the modern black community in the South were laid, including independent black churches and a growing number of black landowners, businessmen, clergymen, and teachers. With the passage of the 14th Amendment, mandating equal rights for all citizens, and the 15th Amendment, forbidding states to deny the right to vote because of race, the possibilities for later attacks on discrimination had been established.

Reconstruction's failure also carried long-term negative consequences. Racism became more deeply embedded in American society. The South's economy became almost entirely dependent on a single crop, cotton, and an increasing number of Southerners were reduced to tenant farming. One political party, the Democratic Party, monopolized political power. Violence kept immigrants from migrating to the region. The roots of half a century of southern poverty had been planted.

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Printable Version If a mid-19th century Rip Van Winkle had gone to sleep in 1857, the year of the Dred Scott decision, and awoke in 1877, it would probably take him quite a while before he would believe reports of what had happened during the years he was asleep.

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From You Will Love History

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Plessy v Ferguson

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Sound Smart: Plessy v. Ferguson | History

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Separate But Equal Explained

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Separate But Equal for Dummies - United States Constitutional Law & Segregation

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Tom Richey

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Reconstruction: Part I (US History EOC Review - USHC 3.3)