Chapter 15-Reconstruction and the New South Flashcards
(39 cards)
“Lost Cause”
White Southerners began to romanticize the “Lost Cause” and its leaders, and to look back nostalgically at the South as it had existed before the disruptions of war.
R.E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis were all treated as almost religious figures.
Communities built elaborate monuments in war dead in town squares.
Sense of loss reinforced the determination of many whites to protect what remained of their now vanished world.
conceptions of freedom
former slaves and the defeated whites had very different conceptions of what freedom meant.
For African Americans, freedom meant above all and end to slavery and humiliation/injustice associated with it. Also meant getting rights and protections so they could live free the same way as whites.
Some African Americans demanded a redistribution of economic resources. Others asked simply for legal equality.
All wanted independence from white control. Freed from slavery, blacks throughout the South began almost immediately to create autonomous African American communities. They pulled out of white-controlled churches and established their own. They created fraternal, benevolent, and mutual-aid societies. When they could, they began their own schools.
many white planters wanted to continue slavery in an altered form by keeping black workers legally tied to the plantations. When many white Southerners fought for what they considered freedom, they were fighting above all to preserve local and regional autonomy and white supremacy.
Thirteenth Amendment
December 1865- abolished slavery everywhere where it was not already abolished from the emancipation proclamation.
Freedmen’s Bureau
In March 1865, Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency of the army directed by General Oliver O. Howard.
Distributed food to millions of former slaves.
Established schools staffed by missionaries and teachers who had been sent to the South by Freedmen’s Aid Societies and other private and church groups in the North. BIGGEST SUCCESS WAS EDUCATION.
Made modest efforts to settle blacks on lands of their own. (The bureau also offered considerable assistance to poor whites, many of whom were similarly destitute and homeless after the war.)
The Freedmen’s Bureau was not a permanent solution. By the time the war ended, other proposals for reconstruction were emerging
Conservative Republicans
Conservatives insisted that the South accept the abolition of slavery, but proposed few other conditions for the readmission of the seceded states.
Radical Republicans
The Radicals, led by Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, urged that the civil and military leaders of the
Confederacy be punished, that large numbers of Southern whites
be disenfranchised, that the legal rights of former slaves be protected, and that the property of wealthy white Southerners who
had aided the Confederacy be confiscated and distributed among the freedmen. Some Radicals favored granting suffrage to the former slaves. Others hesitated, since few Northern states permitted
blacks to vote.
10% Plan
Lincoln’s Reconstruction plan, which he announced in 1863, offered a general amnesty to white Southerners—other than high officials of the Confederacy—who would pledge loyalty to the government and accept the elimination of slavery.
Whenever 10 percent of the number of voters in 1860 took the oath in any state, those loyal voters could set up a state government.
Lincoln also hoped to extend suffrage to African Americans who were educated, owned property, and had served in the Union army. Three Southern states—Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, all under Union occupation—reestablished loyal governments under the Lincoln formula in 1864.
Wade-Davis Bill
The Radical Republicans were upset by the mildness of
Lincoln’s 10% plan.
Radicals’ first effort to resolve that question was the Wade-Davis Bill, passed by Congress in July1864.
Said that when a majority (not Lincoln’s 10 percent) of the white males of the state pledged their allegiance to the Union, the governor could summon a state constitutional convention, whose delegates were to be elected by those who would swear (through the so called IRONCLAD OATH) that they had never borne arms against the United States—another departure from Lincoln’s plan.
The new state constitutions would have to abolish slavery, disenfranchise Confederate civil and military leaders, and repudiate debts accumulated by the state governments during the war. After a state had met these conditions, Congress would readmit it to the Union. Like the president’s proposal, the Wade-Davis Bill left up to the states the question of political rights for blacks. Congress passed the bill a few days before it adjourned in 1864, and Lincoln disposed of it with a POCKET VETO.
John Wilkes Booth
April 14 1865, Lincoln is shot from behind in the head by John Wilkes Booth a member of a distinguished family of actors and a zealous advocate of the Southern cause. The play he was watching was a comedy called Our American Cousin
The president was carried unconscious to a house across the street, where early the next morning, surrounded by family, friends, and political associates (among them a tearful Charles Sumner), he died.
The circumstances of Lincoln’s death earned him immediate martyrdom and produced hysteria in the North.
Many conspiracy theories emerged since Booth worked with associates, one of whom stabbed and wounded Secretary of State Seward the night of the assassination, another of whom abandoned at the last moment
a plan to murder Vice President Johnson.
Booth himself escaped on horseback into the Virginia countryside, where, on April 26, he was cornered by Union troops and shot to death in a blazing barn.
A military tribunal convicted eight other people of participating in the conspiracy (at least two of them on the basis of virtually no evidence). Four were hanged.
Many Northerners thought it was a Southern plot to slow Lincoln’s plans.
Presidential Reconstruction (Restoration)
Johnson revealed his plan for Reconstruction—or “Restoration,” as he preferred to call it—soon after he took office, and he implemented it during the summer of 1865, when Congress was in recess. Like Lincoln, he offered amnesty to those Southerners who would take an oath of allegiance.
In most other respects, however, his plan resembled that of the Wade-Davis Bill. For each state, the president appointed a provisional governor, who was to invite qualified voters to elect delegates to a constitutional convention. Johnson did not specify how many qualified voters were necessary, but he implied that he would require a majority (as had the Wade-Davis Bill). In order to win readmission to Congress, a state had to revoke its ordinance of secession, abolish slavery, ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, and repudiate the Confederate and state war debts. The final procedure before restoration was for a state to elect a state government and send representatives to Congress.
By the end of 1865, all the seceded states had formed new governments—some under Lincoln’s plan, some under Johnson’s—and were prepared to rejoin the Union as soon as Congress recognized them. But Radical Republicans vowed not to recognize the Johnson governments, just as they had previously refused to recognize the Lincoln regimes; for by now, Northern opinion had hardened and become more hostile toward the South than it had been a year earlier when Congress passed the Wade-Davis Bill. Many Northerners were disturbed by the apparent reluctance of some delegates to the Southern conventions to abolish slavery, and by the refusal of all the conventions to grant suffrage to any blacks. They were astounded that states claiming to be “loyal” should elect prominent leaders of the recent Confederacy as state officials and representatives to Congress. Particularly hard to accept was Georgia’s choice of Alexander H. Stephens, former
Confederate vice president, as a United States senator.
Radical/Congressional Reconstruction
Presidential Reconstruction continued only until Congress reconvened in December 1865. At that point, Congress refused to seat the representatives of the “restored” states and created a new Joint Committee on Reconstruction to frame a Reconstruction policy of its own. The period of “congressional,” or “Radical,” Reconstruction had begun.
Throughout the South in 1865 and early 1866, state legislatures were enacting sets of laws known as the Black Codes, designed to give whites substantial control over former slaves. The codes authorized local officials to apprehend unemployed African Americans, fine them for vagrancy, and hire them out to private employers to satisfy the fine. Some of the codes forbade blacks to own or lease farms or to take any jobs other than as plantation workers or domestic servants.
Congress first responded to the Black Codes by passing an act extending the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and widening its powers so that it could nullify work agreements forced on freedmen under the Black Codes. Then, in April 1866, Congress passed the first Civil
Rights Act, which declared African Americans to be citizens of the United States and gave the federal government power to intervene in state affairs to protect the rights of citizens. Johnson vetoed both bills, but Congress overrode him on each of them.
Fourteenth Amendment
April 1866-granted citizenship to those born in the US and guaranteed “privileges and immunities” of the constitution
Would reduce representation in Congress if a state denied suffrage to adult males
Former Confederates could NOT hold office
provided the first clear definition of citizenship and did not exclude african americans
Fifteenth Amendment
Passed in 1869, ratified in 1870-forbade the states and the federal government to deny suffrage to any citizen on account of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” (right to vote for all male citizens)
Wasn’t necessarily entirely successful (still sometimes made them go through literacy tests etc)
Tenure of Office Act
Law passed by congressional radicals to stop the president from interfering with their plans. Had doubtful constitutionality passed in 1867. Tenure of Office Act, forbade the president from removing civil officials, including members of his own cabinet, without the consent of the Senate. The principal purpose of the law was to protect the job of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who was cooperating with the Radicals.
Johnson dismissed him anyway, which led the Radicals to impeach him. Radicals were did not win in court and dropped the impeachment effort.
scalawags
Southerners that favored Reconstruction (mostly for economic reasons)
carpetbaggers
Northerners that moved South during Reconstruction
Term conveyed an image of penniless adventurers who arrived with all their possessions in a carpetbag. In fact, most of the so called carpetbaggers were well-educated people of middle-class origin, many of them doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Most were veterans of the Union army who looked on the South as a new frontier, more promising than the West. They had settled there at war’s end as hopeful planters or as business and professional people.
B. Bruce & H. Revels
Two African Americans that served in the Mississippi Senate.
sharecropping
Renting land and paying via crops
most blacks, and a growing minority of whites, did not own their own land during Reconstruction; and some who acquired land in the 1860s had lost it by the 1890s. These people worked for others in one form or another. Many African American agricultural laborers—perhaps 25 percent of the total—simply worked for wages. Most, however, became tenants of white landowners—working their own plots of land and paying their landlords either a fixed rent or a share of their crop
The new system represented a repudiation by former slaves of the gang-labor system of the antebellum plantation, in which slaves had lived and worked together under the direction of a master. As tenants and sharecroppers, African Americans enjoyed at least a physical independence from their landlords and had the sense of working their own land, even if in most cases they could never hope to buy it. But tenantry also benefited landlords in some ways, relieving them of any responsibility for the physical well-being of their workers.
crop-lien system
Receiving credit from a local store and given credit at a very high rate (50-60 percent) led to debt for borrowers and were often unable to pay it off.
Horace Greeley/Liberal Republicans
By the end of Grant’s first term members of a
substantial faction of the party—who referred to themselves as Liberal Republicans—had come to oppose what they called “Grantism.” In 1872, hoping to prevent Grant’s reelection, they bolted the party and nominated their own presidential candidate: Horace Greeley, veteran editor and publisher of the New York Tribune. The Democrats, somewhat reluctantly, named Greeley their candidate as well, hoping that the alliance with the Liberals would enable them to defeat Grant. But the effort was in vain. Grant won a substantial victory, polling 286 electoral votes to Greeley’s 66, and nearly 56 percent of the popular total.
Grant scandals
Credit Mobilier:
- Union Pacific Railroad company created bogus contracts to make $
- members of Congress and Grant’s VP accepted bribes/stock from Union Pacific Railroad
Whiskey Ring:
- Government officials were creating false tax reports
- Secretary of War William W. Belknap accepted bribes to retain an Indian post-trader in office
Although Grant was never proven to be directly involved with or to have personally profited from the scandals or frauds, his acceptance of personal gifts and his associations with men of questionable character severely damaged his own presidential legacy and reputation.
Panic of 1873
began with the failure of a leading investment banking firm, Jay Cooke and Company, which had invested too heavily in postwar railroad building.
worse than any earlier economic crisis. The depression it produced lasted four years.
Debtors now pressured the government to redeem federal war bonds with greenbacks, paper currency of the sort printed during the Civil war, which would increase money in circulation and allow debt to be payed. But most republicans did not want that
National Greenback party
In 1875, the “greenbackers,” as the inflationists in the panic of 1873 were called, formed their own political organization: the National Greenback Party. It was active in the next three presidential elections, but it failed to gain widespread support. It did, however, keep the money issue alive. The question of the proper composition of the currency was to remain one of the most controversial and enduring issues in late-nineteenth-century American politics.
“Seward’s Icebox”
also called Seward’s Folly
1867-purchase of Alaska
William H. Seward who has served Lincoln accepted a Russian offer to sell Alaska to the US for 7.2 million despite criticism from many Americans who considered Alaska a frozen wasteland adn derided it as “Seward’s Folly” (they didn’t know about the oil yet)
