Chapter 15 (Reconstruction ) - American YAWP

Introduction

• After the Civil War, the South was largely in ruins emphasizing citizenship's concepts and equality.
• There was an open and widespread discussion of citizenship.
• African Americans and Radical Republicans pushed for equality and "certain unalienable rights."
• White Democrats granted African Americans legal freedom.
• A new fight emerged regarding the legal, political, and social implications of American citizenship.
• Limits on human freedom endured in the South.

Politics of Reconstruction

• Reconstruction aimed to restore southern states to the Union and redefine African Americans' place.
• Planning for reunification began in the fall of 1863.
• A proclamation allowed southerners to take an oath of allegiance.
• When 10% of a state's voting population took the oath loyal Unionists could establish governments.
• Lincoln governments emerged in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas.
• Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation abolished slavery.
• It freed enslaved people in areas of rebellion.
• More than 700,000 remained in bondage in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri.
• Congress passed the 13th Amendment on January 31, 1865, legally abolishing slavery except as punishment for crime.
• Section Two granted Congress the power to enforce the article by appropriate legislation.
• State ratification followed, with the required 3/4 of states approving the amendment.
• 4 million people were freed from slavery.
• Abraham Lincoln's assassination propelled Vice President Andrew Johnson into office in April 1865.
• Johnson: a states' rights, strict-constructionist, unapologetic racist from Tennessee
• Johnson offered southern states quick restoration to the Union.

Johnson's Reconstruction Plan

• Required provisional southern governments to void secession ordinances.
• Southern governments repudiated Confederate debts.
• They ratified the 13th Amendment.
• Conventions could do what they wanted without federal interference on other matters.
• Johnson pardoned all southerners engaged in rebellion, except wealthy planters owning over $20,000.
• Southern aristocracy had to appeal to Johnson for individual pardons.
• Johnson hoped a new class of southerners would replace the extremely wealthy in leadership.

Southern Government Legislation

• South Carolina and Mississippi passed Black Codes to regulate black behavior and impose socio-economic control.
• Granted some rights.
• Rights to own property, marry, or make contracts.
• Denied fundamental rights: White lawmakers forbade black men from serving on juries or in state militias.
• They refused to recognize black testimony against white people.
• They apprenticed orphaned children to former enslavers.
• Mississippi's vagrant law required all freedmen papers proving means of employment.
• No proof = arrested and fined, and inability to pay the fine let the sheriff hire out the prisoner to anyone willing to pay tax.
• These laws and mobs against black southerners led Republicans to call for dramatic reconstruction.
• Republicans refused to seat delegates form the newly reconstructed states.

Republican Congressional Legislation

• They were keen to grant voting rights for freedmen to build a new powerful voting bloc.
• US Congressman Thaddeus Stevens believed in racial equality.
• The majority was motivated primarily by their political party.
• Republicans wanted to protect their interests in the South by giving black men the vote.
• They responded to the codes with the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
• First federal attempt to constitutionally define all American-born residents (not Native peoples) as citizens.
• It also prohibited any curtailment citizens’ 'fundamental rights."

The Fourteenth Amendment

• Developed concurrently with the Civil Rights Act.
• Approved by the House of Representatives June 13, 1866.
• Section One granted citizenship and repealed the Dred Scott decision.
• State laws could not deny due process or discriminate against particular groups.
• Signaled the federal government's willingness to enforce the Bill of Rights over the states.

President Johnson's Obstructionism

• President Johnson opposed the passage of the 14th Amendment and vetoed the Civil Rights Act.
• Republicans overrode the veto and passed the Reconstruction Act.
• Dissolving state governments and dividing the south into 5 military districts.
• States had to ratify the 14th Amendment.
• They had to write new constitutions enfranchising African Americans and abolishing repressive Black Codes before rejoining the Union.
• The House of Representatives issued articles of impeachment against the president.
• Johnson narrowly escaped conviction in the Senate.
• Congress won power to direct a new phase of Reconstruction
• July 9, 1868, states ratified the 14th Amendment.

1868 Presidential Election

• Former Union General Ulysses S. Grant ran on the platform “Let Us Have Peace"
• He was an abolitionist.
• Promised to protect the new status quo.
• Democratic candidate Horatio Seymour promised to repeal reconstruction.
• Black southern voters helped Grant win most of the former Confederacy.

Mass Democratic Participation for African Americans

• In 1867, Congress ordered southern states to eliminate racial discrimination in voting.
• African Americans began to win elections across the South.
• The South was transformed from an all-white, pro-slavery, Democratic majority to a collection of Republican-led states with African American positions of power.
• Black men voted in large numbers.
• They served as delegates to the state constitutional conventions in 1868.
• Black delegates actively participated in revising state constitutions.
• They established a public school system.
• Republican officials opened state institutions: Mental asylums, hospitals, orphanages, and prisons to white and black residents (often segregated).
• They actively sought industrial development, northern investment, and internal improvements.

African Americans Serving in Government

• Federal level: Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce were chosen as US senators from Mississippi.
• 14 men served in the House of Representatives.
• At least 270 African American men served in patronage positions as postmasters, customs officials, assessors, and ambassadors.
• State level: More than 1,000 African American men held offices in the South.
• Almost 800 African American men served as state legislators around the South.
• Many free African Americans (South Carolina, Virginia, and Louisiana) were wealthy and well-educated.
• Most officeholders gained freedom during the war.

The End of Reconstruction in 1877

• More than 2,000 African American men had served in offices.
• Reconstruction's end returned white Democrats to power in the South.
• Few African American officeholders stayed.

The Meaning of Black Freedom

• Land Desires: General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15.
• Land in Georgia and South Carolina was set aside as homestead for freed people, but Sherman lacked authority, so it never took effect.
• The Freedmen's Bureau's main purpose was to redistribute lands to formerly enslaved people which had been abandoned and confiscated by the federal government.
• The promise of land would not be honored.
• Agents coerced formerly enslaved people into signing contracts with former enslavers.
• The Bureau instituted courts where African Americans could seek redress if employers were abusing/not paying them.

Reconstruction of Families

• Newspaper ads sought information about long-lost relatives.
• Freed people sought to gain control over their children or other children apprenticed to white masters.
• Ability to read the Bible induced work-weary men and women to spend the evening or Sunday attending night or Sunday school classes.
• Churches served as schoolhouses.
• Freed black southerners carried well-formed political and organizational skills into freedom.
• They developed anti-racist politics and anti-slavery organizations, turned church associations
• Black churches emerged in rural areas.
• Tensions existed between northerners styles of worship and educational requirements.
• Southern rural black churches preferred worship services with emphasis on inspired preaching.
• Black urban northerners favored orderly worship and educated ministry.
• Women continued to fight for equal treatment and access to the pulpit as preachers that voted in church meetings.
• Black churches provided conflict space over gender roles, cultural values, practices, norms, and political engagement.

Reconstruction and Women

• Strides to Equality: Women also sought to redefine their roles.
• The abolitionist and women's rights movements simultaneously emerged and clashed
• Both black and white women struggled.
• Leading women's rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw an unprecedented opportunity for disenfranchised groups.
• She formed the Women's Loyal National League in 1863, petitioning Congress for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.
• The 13th Amendment proved women's political efficacy and radical change.

The Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention

• Held May 10, 1866, In New York City.
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton presided over the meeting.
• Attendance was prominent.
• The National Women's Rights Convention officially merged with the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1866.
• Formed The American Equal Rights Association (AERA) which was split over Black male suffrage taking precedence over universal suffrage.
• AERA worried that political support for freedmen would be undermined by women's suffrage causing divisions in 1867.
• The AERA organized a campaign in Kansas to determine the fate of black and woman suffrage.
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton and partner Susan B. Anthony allied with white supremacists supporting women's equality.

Eruptions of the tensions between conflicting views of 14th and 13th Amendments

• Women's rights leaders protested the 14th Amendment and introduced the word "male" in the constitution.
• The AERA Dissolved, where Stanton and Anthony formed the National Women Suffrage Association.
• Suffragists supporting the 15th Amendment founded the American Woman Suffrage Association.
• The National Woman Suffrage Association rallied around a new strategy and the New Departure.
• Interpreting the constitution, they saw it guaranteed women the right to vote by nationalizing citizenship and protecting citizens.
• They encouraged women to register which led to Susan B. Anthony's arrest.
• The Supreme court addressed this constitutional argument: Acknowledging women's citizenship but arguing suffrage was not guaranteed to all citizens.
• Defeat caused many suffragists to replace the ideal of universal suffrage with arguments about the virtue of white women in the polls, hinging on racism and declaring white women to keep black men in check.

Advocated for Women's Suffrage

• It was largely confined to the north.
• Southern women also went through social transformations.
• During the war, they had to do traditional men's work.
• Formerly wealthy women hoped to maintain their social status by rebuilding the prewar social hierarchy.

Ladies' Memorial Associations

• Southern women led efforts to bury and memorialize the dead, praising men's masculinity through nationalist speeches/memorials.
• These associations grew out of the Soldiers' Aid Society.
• They turned precursor of the Lost Cause narrative and tried to rewrite antebellum south's history to deemphasize slavery's brutality.
• They created the myth of the Civil war over states' rights and the new holidays.
• Southern women reaffirmed allegiance to the confederacy and opposition to black rights through these activities.

Southern Black Women

• Efforts to control their labor faced opposition from southern white women such as Gertrude Clanton.
• Clanton was a plantation mistress before the war.
• She disliked cooking and washing dishes, so she hired African American women to do work.
• Clanton disliked what they set ages and hours for themselves resulting in taking washing back inside to avoid surveillance and sexual black men.
• White southerners demanded African American women work in the home and instituted apprenticeship systems for African American children in unpaid labor positions.
• African American women combatted this by refusing to work at jobs without fair pay/conditions and clinging to children.
• Like white LMA members, African American women formed clubs/societies.
• They buried their dead, celebrated black masculinity, and aided black communities, but faced racial violence.
• Formation and preservation of black households became a goal for black women.
• Southern women fought for adjustment to separation after the war.

White and Black Southern Women Challenges

• Southern women struggled with adjustment to couple separation after the war.
• Many soldiers returned with physical and mental wounds.
• White families: Suicide and divorce became more acceptable.
• Opposite occurred for black families.
• Many southern families were impoverished and sank into debt.
• All suffered from economic devastation, wartime trauma, and enduring racial tensions.

Racial Violence in Reconstruction

• Democracy Struggles: violence shattered the dream of biracial democracy.
• Those against black free labor used violence to enforce slave labor.
• Violence was used to stifle black advancement and return to the old order.
• Social order rested on a subjugated underclass which required on unfree laborers and black inferiority.
• The 13th Amendment destroyed slavery.
• Southern whites used black codes and racial terrorism to reassert control over their formerly enslaved people.
• Rapid growth in southern cities: they became centers of Republican control.

3 Major Forms of Racial Violence

Black political authority: white conservatives initiated violence against rallies, conventions, or elections where black men were going to vote.

• Southern white men almost never persecuted for violence against black victims.
• Interpersonal fights: Riots in Memphis & New Orleans (1866).
• Organized vigilante groups: Sometimes called bushwhackers; aimed to limit black mobility.
• Ku Klux Klan (KKK): Organized 1866, in TN, reaching nearly every state of former confederacy.
• Drew heavily from antebellum southern elite, or criminal gangs/former gorilla groups.
• Similar groups: , the White Line, Knights of the White Camellia, and the Brotherhood.
• Enforcement Acts: Made it illegal to deprive civil rights, use US troops to freed people.
• Attempts to Leave Slavery's Effects: Many discarded previous slave names, new farms.
• Mound Bayou, MS: Established 1887 by Montgomery and Geen.
• Economy after Civil War: Southerm economy, northern market, civil war effects south.

Economic Development During the Civil War and Reconstruction

• Economy before the civil war: The southern economy relied on slaves to grow cotton and other staple crops.
• The Northern described their region as a land of free labor, populated by farmers, mechants, and wage laborers.
• It had a robust market economy, home to mills, factories, and iron foundries and an expansive railroad.
• The effects of the Civil War included federal action to spur manufacturing.
• A confederate government struggled to find guns, food, and supplies needed to field an army.
• They did make gains indusrial production but not enough.
• The federal congress made paper money, which led to inflation.
• US steps: congress increased taxes and rates and had a new currency called greenbacks.
• Northern Effects included inflation, labor was hard to source, and supplies were stolen.
• States engulfed in debt, lost capital, sold land, had an outcome of sharecropping and new plantations.
• Empowered African Americans in South, form contracts, the North could not keep up in output/product.

Wartime Laws

• Transformed relationship between both, Morrill, accelerated trade, economic gain.
• Reconstruction ended as Northerns gave up the formerly enslaved, Dems recapturing South.
• Econ issues, a violence threated power; fed troops; Dems retreated from reconstruction/economics.
• By 1870 the Republics party had taken over: new departure on econ/trade issues in congress.
• Depression 1873, economic depression in south; 1874 reps lost, Scandals ruined trust.
• Scandals in government caused issues in Mississippi
• Hayes won victory in 1875, nominated by Hayes, Dmes Tilden over the South.
• Democrats conceded presidency to Hayes, Compromise 1877 , no capital to do anything.