Unit 5 Princeton Review Pt. 3 Flashcards
(25 cards)
Wade-Davis Bill, July 1864
This act provided that former Confederate states be ruled by a military governor and required 50 percent of the electorate to swear an oath of allegiance to the United States.
A state convention would then be organized to repeal their ordinance of secession and abolish slavery within their state.
It should be noted that neither Lincoln’s Ten-Percent Plan nor the Wade-Davis Bill made any provisions for Black suffrage.
Lincoln pocket-vetoed the Wade-Davis Bill, effectively destroying it.
Lincoln Dies, Johnson Takes Over
Lincoln was assassinated the following year.
With Lincoln’s assassination, Vice President Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency. Johnson, a Southern Democrat, had opposed secession and strongly supported Lincoln during his first term.
In return, Lincoln rewarded Johnson with the vice presidency.
When the war ended, Congress was in recess and would not reconvene for eight months.
That left the early stages of Reconstruction entirely in Johnson’s hands.
Johnson had lifted himself from poverty and held no great love for the South’s elite planters, and at first he seemed intent on taking power away from the old aristocracy and giving it to the yeomen.
Johnson’s Reconstruction Plan
which was based on a plan approved by Lincoln, called for the creation of provisional military governments to run the states until they were readmitted to the Union.
It also required all southern citizens to swear a loyalty oath before receiving amnesty for the rebellion.
However, it barred many of the former southern elite (including plantation owners, Confederate officers, and government officials) from taking that vow, thus prohibiting their participation in the new governments.
According to this plan, the provisional governments would hold state constitutional conventions, at which time the states would have to write new constitutions eliminating slavery and renouncing secession.
Johnson did not require the states to enfranchise Black people by giving them the vote.
Johnson’s Reconstruction Fails
The plan did not work, mostly because Johnson pardoned many of the southern elite who were supposed to have been excluded from the reunification process.
After the states drafted new constitutions and elected new governments, former Confederate officials were again in positions of great power.
Furthermore, many of their new constitutions were only slight revisions of previous constitutions.
Southern legislators also passed new Black codes limiting freedman’s rights to assemble and travel, instituting curfews, and requiring Black people to carry special passes.
Many of them required Black people in the South to sign lengthy labor contracts. In the most egregious instances, state legislatures simply took their old slave codes and replaced the word slaves with freedmen.
When Congress reconvened, northern congressmentdidn’t seat new southern delegations, reexamined Jonhnson’s Reconstruciton plan
Division of Congress
Congress was divided among conservative Republicans, who generally agreed with Johnson’s plan; moderates, who were a large enough contingent to swing a vote in one or the other direction; and Radical Republicans.
The Radical Republicans wanted to extend democracy in the South. Following the Civil War, most important political positions were held by appointees; very few officials were directly elected. (Of course, women could not vote and Black men could vote only in a few northern states at this time.)
The most radical among the Radical Republicans advocated a reconstruction program that punished the South for seceding.
General Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15
land seized from the Confederates was to be redistributed among the new freedmen, but President Andrew Johnson rescinded Sherman’s order, and the idea of giving freedmen 40 acres and a mule never regained much ground.
All Republicans agreed that Johnson’s Reconstruction needed some modification, but Johnson refused to compromise.
Instead, he declared Reconstruction over and done with, vetoing a compromise package that would have extended the life of the Freedman’s Bureau and enforced a uniform civil rights code on the South.
Congress overrode Johnson’s vetoes, which only increased tension between the two branches of the federal government.
In response, the radicals drew up the plan that came to be known as Congressional Reconstruction.
Congressional Reconstruction Includes:
Fourteenth Amendment
The radicals hoped to force states to either extend suffrage to Black men or lose power in Congress.
In the Swing Around the Circle public speaking tour Johnson campaigned against the amendment and lost.
In the congressional election of 1866, the North voted for a Congress more heavily weighted toward the radical end of the political spectrum.
Military Reconstruction Act of 1867
Fifteenth Amendment
Fourteenth Amendment
The amendment (1) stated that if you are born in the United States, you are a citizen of the United States and you are a citizen of the state where you reside;
(2) prohibited states from depriving any citizen of “life, liberty, or property without due process of law”;
(3) prevented states from denying any citizen “equal protection of the law”;
(4) gave states the choice either to give freedmen the right to vote or to stop counting them among their voting population for the purpose of congressional apportionment;
(5) barred prominent Confederates from holding political office
(6) excused the Confederacy’s war debt.
the Fourteenth Amendment protects you from the state government.
The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to clarify the status of newly freed enslaved people, address the issue of citizenship raised by the Dred Scott decision, and limit the effects of the Black codes.
Military Reconstruction Act of 1867
new Congress quickly passed the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867.
It imposed martial law on the South; it also called for new state constitutional conventions and forced the states to allow Black people to vote for convention delegates.
The act required each state to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and to send its new constitution to Congress for approval.
Congress vs. Johnson
Aware that Johnson would oppose the new Reconstruction, Congress then passed a number of laws designed to limit the president’s power.
As expected, Johnson did everything in his power to counteract the congressional plan.
Conflict reached its climax when the House Judiciary Committee initiated impeachment proceedings against Johnson, ostensibly for violating the Tenure of Office Act (which stated that the president had to secure the consent of the Senate before removing his appointees once they’d been approved by that body; Johnson had fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Radical Republican) but really because he was getting in the way of Reconstruction.
Johnson was acquitted by one vote in the Senate, but the trial rendered Johnson politically impotent, and he served the last few months of his presidency with no hope of re-election.
Ulysses S. Grant, 15th Amendment
With a new president, Ulysses S. Grant, in office, Congress forged ahead in its efforts to remake the South.
The Fifteenth Amendment, proposed in 1869, finally required states to enfranchise Black men. (Women’s suffrage would have to wait another half-century.)
In fact, Grant’s win was mainly due to Black votes.
One of the reasons the Republicans created the Fifteenth Amendment was the hope that their party would continue to flourish with the addition of new Black voters.
Ironically, the Fifteenth Amendment passed only because southern states were required to ratify it as a condition of reentry into the Union; a number of northern states opposed the amendment.
Successes of Reconstruction
Reconstruction had its share of successes while the North occupied the South.
New state constitutions officially allowed all southern men to vote (previous constitutions had required voters to own property) and replaced many appointed government positions with elected positions.
New southern governments, directed mostly by transplanted northern Republicans, Black people, and southern moderates, created public schools and those social institutions such as orphanages popularized in the North during the reform movement of the 1830s.
The new governments also stimulated industrial and rail development in the South through loans, grants, and tax exemptions.
The fact that Black people were serving in southern governments represented a huge step forward, given the seemingly insurmountable restrictions placed on Black people only a few years earlier, though it would prove to be only a temporary victory.
Reconstruction ultimately a failure
However, ultimately, Reconstruction failed.
Although government industrialization plans helped rebuild the southern economy, these plans also cost a lot of money.
High tax rates turned public opinion, already antagonistic to Reconstruction, even more hostile.
Opponents waged a propaganda war against Reconstruction, calling Southerners who cooperated scalawags and Northerners who ran the programs carpetbaggers.
Many who participated in Reconstruction were indeed corrupt, selling their votes for money and favors.
Corruption in Reconstruction
It should be noted that Northerners were just as guilty as Southerners of corruption. Political scandal was not new at the time, and in fact, Grant’s administration was wracked with political scandals and intrigue
Grant himself was supposedly innocent and oblivious to the goings on in his administration.
Grant had no political experience when he became president; in fact, he was elected because he was a popular war hero, not an experienced political leader.
Like Jackson, Grant appointed his friends and supporters to governmental positions, not necessarily those men most qualified, let alone those with the most integrity.
Unfortunately, although Grant was honest, his friends were not. A series of scandals broke out in the early 1870s
These scandals diverted the public’s attention away from the postwar conditions in the South.
Intimidation During Reconstruction
Though the Civil War was officially over, a war of intimidation began, spear-headed by insurgent groups ranging from secretive terrorist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, who focused on murdering freedmen, to openly operating paramilitary forces, such as the White League, who focused on murdering Republicans.
“These combinations amount to war,” declared attorney general Amos Akerman, who had been posted to the Carolinas to try to speed trials of Klansmen along—a problem because local judges tended to be Klansmen as well. In some towns, the entire adult male population was engaged in battle against Reconstruction.
Southern officials explained their failure to do anything to protect Black people and Republicans by complaining that if they obeyed their orders to round up insurgents, there would be mass starvation because nobody would be left to work.
Grant and the Republicans in Congress got the Enforcement Acts passed, which allowed Grant to send in federal troops to oppose the Klan, and were successful in limiting the Klan’s violence.
Reconstruction didn’t alter basic power structure of region, North didn’t persist
Also, because Reconstruction did nothing to redistribute the South’s wealth or guarantee that the freedmen would own property, it did very little to alter the basic power structure of the region.
Southerners knew that when the Northerners left, as they inevitably would, things would return to a condition much closer to the way they were before Reconstruction.
As early as 1869, the federal government began sending signals that it would soon ease up restrictions.
President Grant enforced the law loosely, hoping to lessen tensions and thereby hasten an amicable reunion.
Worse, throughout the 1860s and 1870s, the Supreme Court consistently restricted the scope of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
In the Slaughter- House cases
court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to the federal government, not to state governments, an opinion the court strengthened in United States v. Cruikshank.
In United States v. Reese,
court cleared the way for “grandfather clauses,” poll taxes, literary tests, property requirements, and other restrictions on voting privileges.
Soon, nearly all southern states had restrictive laws that effectively prevented Black people from voting.
Move away from Reconstruction pre election of 1876
Finally, because Grant’s administration was so thoroughly corrupt, it tainted everything with which it was associated, including Reconstruction.
During the 1872 election, moderates calling themselves Liberal Republicans abandoned the coalition that supported Reconstruction.
Angered by widespread corruption, this group hoped to end federal control of the South. Although their candidate, Horace Greeley, did not defeat Grant, they made gains in congressional and state elections.
As a result, Grant moved further away from the radical position and closer to conciliation. Several congressional acts, among them the Amnesty Act of 1872, pardoned many of the rebels, thus allowing them to reenter public life.
Other crises, such as the financial Panic of 1873, drew the nation’s attention away from Reconstruction.
By 1876, Southern Democrats had regained control of most of the region’s state legislatures.
These Democrats called themselves Redeemers, and their use of the word redemption suggested they intended to reverse Republican reconstruction policies as they returned to power.
Election of 1876, official end of Reconstruction
he election of 1876 was one of the more infamously contested elections in American history, with both political parties accusing the other of fraud.
Samuel J. Tilden, then governor of New York and a political reformer who had gone after “Boss” Tweed, the most notorious among the political bosses of the time, won the popular vote by a small margin but needed to win the electoral vote to gain the presidency. (Remember that according to the Constitution, if no one candidate receives a majority of electoral votes, the election is thrown into the House of Representatives. You should remember, for example, that Andrew Jackson lost the presidency to John Quincy Adams through a “corrupt bargain” in 1824.)
Republicans challenged the election returns that favored Tilden in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida.
Congress eventually stepped in to resolve the disputed election and created a special bipartisan electoral commission consisting of senators, representatives, and Supreme Court justices.
Through a series of informal negotiations, a deal was struck that has come to be known as the Compromise of 1877.
Comrpomise of 1877
It was agreed that if Rutherford B. Hayes won the presidential election, he would end military reconstruction and pull federal troops out of South Carolina and Louisiana, thereby enabling Democrats to regain control of those states.
Military reconstruction was thus ended, and it was business as usual in the South.
Federal gov failed with Reconstruction, New South
Many historians feel that the federal government dropped the ball in 1877, for in many ways, life for Black people became worse, and it would take almost another 100 years for the federal government to live up to the ideal expressed in the Declaration of Independence: “that all men are created equal.”
After the Compromise of 1877, many southern leaders sought to emulate the industrialization of the North, coining the term “New South.” Despite these aspirations, though, sharecropping and tenant farming would continue to dominate the region for many years.
The Freedman’s Bureau
The Freedman’s Bureau helped them find new jobs and housing, and provided money and food to those in need.
The Freedman’s Bureau also helped establish schools at all levels for Black people, among them Fisk University and Howard University.
Unfortunately, the Freedman’s Bureau was terribly underfunded and had little impact once military reconstruction came to an end.
When it became evident that the government would not redistribute land, Black people looked for other ways to work their own farms.
The Freedman’s Bureau attempted to establish a system in which Blacks contracted their labor to whites, but the system failed.
Many became sharecroppers
At the end of the Civil War, the former enslaved people were thrust into an ambiguous state of freedom.
Most reacted cautiously, remaining on plantations as sharecroppers where they had been relatively well treated but fleeing from those with cruel overseers.
Instead, Black people preferred sharecropping, in which they traded a portion of their crop in return for the right to work someone else’s land.
The system worked at first, but unscrupulous landowners eventually used the system as a means of keeping poor farmers in a state of near slavery and debt.
Abuses of the sharecropping system grew more widespread at the end of Reconstruction, at which point no court would fairly try the case of a sharecropper against a landowner.
Sharecropping existed well into the middle of the 20th century and actually included more whites than Blacks.
