Transcript Reconstruction: Its Rise and Fall, 1865–1877

Chapter 16
Reconstruction: Its
Rise and Fall,
1865–1877
Reconstruction: The Second Civil War
During the period after the Civil War a
second “civil war” ensues further dividing
the war torn nation. Southerners will fight
to maintain ante-bellum culture and
tradition, while Radical Republicans and
some leaders in the North will fight to
grant equality to the freedmen –
Tonight’s lectures focuses on the political,
cultural and economic forces of
American Reconstruction.
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Lincoln Re-elected 1864
• Lincoln’s inaugural address closed with these
words:
– “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with
firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right,
let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up
the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have
borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan...to
do all which may achieve and cherish a just and
lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. “
• Lincoln’s 10% Plan
• Wade-Davis Bill
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Lincoln
• Two days after General Robert E. Lee’s
surrender, Lincoln delivered his last public
address in which he made known his
reconstruction policy
• On April 14th, Lincoln was assassinated by John
Wilkes Booth, a Virginian actor upset over the
South’s defeat
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Reconstruction Terms
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Abraham Lincoln
10% Plan
Wade Davis Bill –
aka 50% Plan
Pocket-veto
13th,amendment
14th amendment
15th amendment
Freedman’s Bureau
Bill/Freedman’s
Bureau
Command of the
Army Act
Jim Crow Legislation
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John Wilkes Booth
Andrew Johnson
Black Codes
Civil Rights Act
Radical
Republicans
1st Reconstruction
Act/5 Military
Districts
Tenure of Office Act
Edwin Stanton
Impeachment
Vagrancy Laws
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Sharecropping
Crop lien system
Debt peonage
Carpetbaggers
Scalawags
Black churches
Hiram Revels
The Reedemers
The Ku Klux Klan
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End of the American Civil War
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The aftermath of the
American Civil War
results in an attempt to
reconstruct the United
States
There were two schools
of thought
• Lenient
Reconstruction
• Radical
Reconstruction
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Reconstruction Under
Andrew Johnson, 1865–1867
• Andrew Johnson
• Johnson and the Radicals
• The Reconstruction Act of
1867
• Reconstruction Begins
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson attempted to forge a
new alliance between white Northerners
and white Southerners, callously
abandoning black Southerners in the
process.
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Andrew Johnson’s plan
• Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s Vice President
assumes the Presidency
• Johnson was a Southerner who had remained
loyal to the Union
• His view and Lincoln’s view was that the people
of the Southern states had never legally
seceded, instead they were misled by some
disloyal citizens
• The war was an act of individuals and those
responsible were all who needed to be held
accountable
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Andrew Johnson’s plan, cont.
• Thus, in 1863 Lincoln proclaimed that if in any state 10
percent of the voters of record in 1860 would form a
government loyal to the U.S. Constitution and would
acknowledge obedience to the laws of the Congress and
the proclamations of the president, he would recognize
the government so created as the state's legal
government.
• Johnson agreed
• Congress rejected this plan and challenged Lincoln's
right to deal with the matter without consultation. Some
members of Congress advocated severe punishment for
all the seceded states. Yet even before the war was
wholly over, new governments had been set up in
Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana.
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The Freedman’s Bureau and the
13th Amendment
• Dealt with the
conditions of former
slaves
• Acted as a guardian of
former slaves and a
guide toward selfsupport
• In December 1865,
Congress ratified the
13th Amendment to the
Constitution which
abolished slavery
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Former Confederate States Actions
Based Upon Johnson’s Plan
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Hold conventions to repeal ordinances of secession
Abolish slavery and ratify the 13th Amendment
Repudiate war debt
Draft new state constitutions
Native Unionist appointed Governor in each state
Almost complete by end of 1865
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Black Codes
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Set of laws that differed from state
to state
Purpose to restrict the freedom of
African Americans
Demonstrated that Southerners
intended to preserve slavery as
much as possible
Examples
– Prohibition of interracial marriages
– Vagrancy laws
– Mississippi African Americans could
not own farm lands
– Had to buy special licenses to
practice certain trades
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Carpetbaggers and Scalawags
• White Republicans in top positions in the South
during reconstruction
• Carpetbaggers
– Derogatory term used by southerners
– Moved from the North to the South to obtain top
government positions
– Often Union veterans
• Scalawags
– Derogatory term used by southern
– Native southern White Republicans
– Opposed secession, but after war was declared many
had fought for the Confederate States of America
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Radical Reconstruction
• Congress Led by
Radical Republican
Leader, Thaddeus
Stevens, refused to
allow Senators and
Representative from
former Confederate
States to take their
seats in Congress
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5 Military Districts – Radical
Reconstruction
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The 14th Amendment
• July 1866, Congress passed the 14th
Amendment, "All persons born or naturalized in
the United States and subject to the jurisdiction
thereof, are citizens of the United States and of
the states in which they reside," thus repudiating
the Dred Scott ruling which had denied slaves
their right of citizenship.
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The Reconstruction Act of March
1867
• In response, certain groups in the North advocated
intervention to protect the rights of blacks in the South.
• In the Reconstruction Act of March 1867, Congress,
ignoring the governments that had been established in
the Southern states, divided the South into five districts
and placed them under military rule.
• Escape from permanent military government was open
to those states that established civil governments, took
an oath of allegiance, ratified the 14th Amendment and
adopted black suffrage.
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President Johnson’s Impeachment
• Radical Republicans did not like Johnson’s conciliatory
attitude towards the former Confederates
• Radicals favored punitive legislation that Johnson vetoes
• Radicals tried to impeach Johnson in 1868 based upon the
Tenure of Office Act and failed
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From Johnson to Grant, 1867–1868
• The Election of 1868
• Former General-in-Chief of
the Union Army is elected
President
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Women’s Suffrage Movement
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1867
WE DO NOT demand the right step for
this hour in demanding suffrage for any
class; as a matter of principle I claim it
for all. But in a narrow view of the
question as a feeling between classes,
when Mr. Downing puts the question to
me, are you willing to have the colored
man enfranchised before the woman, I
say no; I would not trust him with all my
rights, degraded, oppressed himself, he
would be more despotic with the
governing power than even our Saxon
rulers are.
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Fredrick Douglas, Champion of
Freedmen’s Rights
Frederick Douglas, 1867s
I champion the right of the Negro to
vote. It is with us a matter of life and
death, and therefore cannot be
postponed. I have always championed
woman’s right to vote; but it will be seen
that the present claim for the Negro is
one of the most urgent necessity. The
assertion of the right of women to vote
meets nothing but ridicule; there is no
deep seated malignity in the hearts of
the people against her; but name the
right of the Negro to vote, all hell is
turned loose and the Ku-Klux and the
Regulators hunt and slay the
unoffending black man. The
government of this country loves
women. They are sisters, mothers,
wives and daughters of our rulers; but
the Negro is loathed.
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The Fifteenth Amendment
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The amendment was ratified
in 1868.
The 15th Amendment,
passed by Congress the
following year and ratified in
1870 by state legislatures,
provided that "The rights of
citizens of the United States
to vote shall not be denied or
abridged by the United
States or any state on
account of race, color or
previous condition of
servitude."
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Hiram Revels
• Hiram Revels, senator
from Mississippi, was
one of the African
American politicians
whose national career,
though brief, was one of
the fruits of
Reconstruction.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
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Grant’s Troubled Administration
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Grant and Congress
Grant and His Party
The Rise of the Klan
Issues with Native
Americans
• The Transcontinental
Railroad
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Rise of the Klan
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The Rise of the Klan
Breaking the Power of the Klan
A Cartoonist Attacks the Ku Klux
Klan
The use of political cartoons to convey ideas about
contemporary issues became more sophisticated
after the Civil War. One of the great popular artists of
the day was Thomas Nast. In the 1870s, his images
attacked the refusal of southerners to grant real
freedom to African Americans and the increasing
reliance in the South on such terror organizations as
the Ku Klux Klan and the White Leagues. Nash
dramatized for his audience that southern whites, in
or out of a hood, had the same goal: “a white man’s
government.” These striking pictures helped sustain
the Republican Party during the presidency of
Ulysses S. Grant. Unfortunately for blacks in the
South, neither Nast nor the white political leadership
in the North persisted in their commitment to equal
rights. By the end of the decade, other cartoons
depicted blacks in a degrading manner in order to
justify white dominance and paved the way in time for
racial segregation...
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Lynching in the American South
Over 5,000 lynchings were reported in the American South between
1865 and 1930
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Farmers and Railroads
• Farmers and Railroads
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Grant’s Indian Policies
• The Peace
Policy Pressures on
the Indians
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Slaughter of the American Buffalo
Aids in Defeating Native Americans
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Indian Reservations
Indian Reservations in the West
Following the end of the Civil War and with the adoption of the peace policy of
President Ulysses S. Grant, a network of Indian reservations spread across the West.
This map shows how extensive the reservation system was.
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Women in the 1870s
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The Rise of Voluntary Associations
Women at Work
The War Against Drink
The temperance crusades of the 1870s
against alcohol and its evils brought women
into politics in an era when they could not
vote in most of the nation. This cartoon links
the campaign of the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union (WCTU) to the chivalry of
the Middle Ages as the mounted women,
armored in a righteous cause, destroy whisky,
gin, brandy, and rum. The connection of
reform with religion and patriotism gave the
anti-alcohol crusade a powerful claim on
middle-class sentiments. For groups whose
religious creed did not bar the use of liquor,
the WCTU was an intrusive force seeking to
interfere with personal rights. This cartoon
thus reveals how long what are now called
“social issues” have affected the nation’s
politics and how they grow out of cultural and
economic divisions within American society.
In fact, controlling the use of alcohol has been
one of the most persistent sources of social
contention in the nation’s history...
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Grant and the 1872 Election
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Grant’s Second Administration
• A Surge of Scandals
• Consequences of the Panic of 1873
– The Plight of the Unemployed
– Distress and Protest Among the Farmers
– Inflationary Solutions
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The Centennial Year Election, 1876
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End of Reconstruction
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Became more and more
obvious that the problems of
the South were not being
solved by harsh laws and
continuing rancor against
former Confederates.
In May 1872, Congress
passed a general Amnesty
Act, restoring full political
rights to all but about 500
Confederate sympathizers.
1877 President Rutherford
B. Hayes removed the
remaining government
troops from the South
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The Failure of
Reconstruction, 1875–1876
• The Stigma of Corruption
• The Resurgence of the Democrats
• Why Reconstruction Failed
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Galveston, TX Reconstruction
Monument
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