Chapter 16: Southern Reconstruction

• After the surrender of the Confederacy, people started wondering about the future of the southern states.

• Christmas jubilee: confiscation of plantations and division into small farms, being given to people of color.

• Grapevine telegraph: informal communication network for enslaved people, how the “Christmas Jubilee” rumor spread.

• Jubilee Insurrection: rumors in the south cited that armed mobs of freed slaves would seize old slave plantations. A second civil war occurs in the south, between white and black people.

• Neither jubilee occurs. Some land is distributed, but no large-scale operation is started. Lands were not forcibly seized by freed people, but rumors were still significant.

• For freed people, the Civil War was fought for freedom and against slavery, so the federal government should land from their old masters as a symbol of economic independence and freedom.

  • Able to reunite and sustain families

  • Lead independent lives

  • Build strong communities

  • Weakening plantation owners (political, economic, and social power decreasing)

• Christmas insurrection fuels discrimination and distrust, plantation owners still want to keep their land and power.

• Reconstruction: federal policies to reintegrate previously seceded states. Also refers to the political, cultural, and economic Southern cultural changes

  • Wartime reconstruction: Lincoln and Congress debate how to unite South and North, starting before the war ends.

  • Presidential reconstruction: Andrew Johnson stops land distribution, previous slave masters try to return enslaved people to labor in plantation

  • Congressional reconstruction: Republicans in Congress reject Johnson’s plan, first path into an inclusive democracy. Black people start seeing themselves included in society (churches, schools, government, juries, judiciary, police)

• Reconstruction government falls by 1877

• The Supreme Court limits key civil rights legislation by 1883, stopping democratic experiment.

  • This doesn’t stop African American culture expanding. Inspires, protects, and energizes

Wartime Reconstruction

• National reconstruction: legal terms and conditions COnfederates would agree after surrendering. Includes joining the Union, etc.

• As enslaved people escape and join the Union, slavery is brought into the war as a moral issue and is confronted.

• Lincoln debates with Congress about the South’s future. The longer the war goes on and the harsher the casualties, post war recovery becomes harder to reach.

• Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan

  • The Constitution didn’t say whether Confederate states should be punished, or what role the federal government would play in reconstruction. Therefore, two different view points emerge.

  • Lincoln argues that uniting the nation lies to the president, and harsh punishment was not necessary. The Confederate could claim they seceded, but they did not according to law. Southern state governments were legitimate. Punishing the South would be counterproductive: help the South recover instead and only puns men who were leaders.

  • Ten Percent Plan: Also the “proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction”,  seceded states accept the banning of slavery. If 10% of voters take a loyalty oath to the union, that specific state could rejoin the US and hold elections. Leaders of the Confederacy would be blacklisted from office, but other white southern men could regain their power.

• Early Congressional Initiatives

  • Ten Percent Plan requires Congress to consent. Some Democrats and conservative Republicans supported it, but it disappointed Radical Republicans and moderate republicans.

  • Radical Republicans: A congressional faction, mostly abolitionists, believing that freed slaves may not be protected if reconstruction was hurried. Believed that Confederates left the union illegally, so could only rejoin as new states under the authority of Congress.

  • Wade-Davis Bill of 1864: If a majority of a state’s voters pledged allegiance to the union, the president could appoint a governor and call an election for a state constitution. Only men who swore the oath that they did not take any action to support the Confederacy could be in the convention, disqualifying most of the prewar southern electorate.

  • Lincoln thinks Wade-Davis is a direct challenge to his authority and refuses to sign it.  Radical Republicans and more moderates enact new laws ensuring emancipation of slaves.

  • Thirteenth Amenment: Passed by Congress on January 1865, prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude in all forms except as punishment for crime. Lincoln supported this law.

  • General Oliver O. Howard directs the Buraeu to feed millions of former slaves and poor southerners facing starvation in the winter. Special Field Order No. 15 ordered 40 hundred thousand acres of land to ex-slaves. Lincoln supported this, even giving black men owning property the right to vote.

• Licoln’s Assassination and Northern Sentiment

  • Lincoln and Congress agree that the main condition for South readmission would be acceptance of emancipation.

  • John Wilke Booth assassinated Lincoln, altering political power. Although Booth acted alone with only a few associates, rumors spread they were part of the Confederacy to overthrow the Union federal government, strengthening northern antipathy.

  • Seven million mourners lined the route of Lincoln's body, which would carry him to Springfield, IL.

  • Radical Republicans stepped up their campaign.

Claiming the Future

• Emancipation destroyed slavery in the South.

• Freedpeople claim their freedom

  • Half of four million ex slaves escaped to freedom, and were vulnerable to diseases. Many died in a smallpox epidemic.

  • Faced poverty and a major medical crisis.

  • Tried to find loved ones sold and scattered around the country, gathering in abandoned shelters.

  • Black southerners in cities celebrated freedom via street processions.

  • Overcome hunger, built roads, and used money to reunite families, schools, and churches

  • Freed slave no longer wanted to pluck cotton even for a wage, getting their own farms with livestock and produce.

  • Many claimed pay and tools, stock, seed, and capital from old plantation owners.

    • ““I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. . . . Please send the money by Adams Express.”

  • Family hierarchy begins forming, mostly for welfare of wives and children but withheld certain rights especially from women.

  • Black heads of the household should have the right to hold public office: protecting newfound rights

• Rural Worlds Lost: White Farmers

  • Yeomen farmers in the south opposed secession but were conscripted against the union. Farmers returned and didn’t want minimum wage jobs, yet many who were physically injured had no other choice. They wanted to make their own farms and become self-sufficient.

  • Southern chapters of Republicans begin forming. Tried to limit the political and social power of the aristocracy.

• Planters and Power

  • Wealthy class tries to restore power.

  • Freed people refuse to continue working, even for wages. Outraged, called it “recklessness and ingratitude”

• The Freedmen’s Bureau

  • Freedmen's Bureau: extended federal presence in the south for Reconstruction. Complex and contradictory.

  • Needed to get food, also identify and track the population

  • Many African Americans did not use a surname. Persuades ex-slaves to keep a family name and records it

  • Prepare for a peaceful transition to freedom

  • Drew on abolitionist belief, especially labor and marriage contracts

Paths Toward Reconstruction

• Andrew Johnson is inaugurated after Lincoln’s death. Self-made man, wanted disempowerment of southern planter elite.

• Andrew Johnson and Presidential Reconstruction:

  • Supported 13th amendment

  • Still thought white people should manage the south

  • Moved Reconstruction without congressional approval (appointed provincial governors, called constitutional conventions, mandated white property rights,, disqualified Confederate leaders, disqualified those who owned more than 20K worth of property).

  • Johnson abandoned the plan after planters would not surrender land. Issued thousands of pardons and then allowed militias. Blocked confiscation and division of plantations. Agreed to request that Union troops withdrawn from the south

• Black Codes

  • Black Codes: harsh set of laws giving black southerners the right to make contracts and use courts, but attempted to turn them into a willing labor force. Denied right to personal farms, prohibited from hunted and fishing, refused access to money and credit

  • More extreme codes required year long labor contracts, banned labor other than plantation or domestic service.

  • Those who quit code be returned to their original employer

  • Limited legal ability by making costly licenses mandatory

  • New category of racial crime = discrimination

  • Tried to resist codes with division of land, but Johnson said there would be none. People started signing agreements.

  • Confirmed Republican belief that planters were reintroducing slavery

• Congress Takes Control

  • Congressional Reconstruction: aggressive republican plan ensuring certain rights, against Presidential Reconstruction

  • Congress exercised Constitutional right to refuse to seat southern Congressmen elected by Johnson.

  • Joint House and Senate Committee established, held public hearings about Black Codes and mistreatment

  • Series of groundbreaking laws follows

  • Freedmen’s Bureau Bill: renewed Bureau for another year, widened powers, granted authority to cancel labor contracts

  • First civil rights bill that recognized all people born in the US (excluding Native Americans) as national citizens. President vetos, Congress overrides and enacts law

• The Fourteenth Amendment, Violent Backlash, and Impeachment

  • 14th amendment passed by Congress and sent to states

  • Fourteenth amendment: birth on US soil established American citizenship (except for Native Americans)

  • States could not deprive citizens of legal rights without them being able to defend themselves in court

  • Changed electoral system

    • Counted all people (except for Native Americans)

    • Any state that purposely miscounted would face penalization by a reduction in representatives and presidential electors

    • Amendment did not penalize states that withheld right to vote from women

  • ¾ of votes necessary for adoption. Any state that ratified the amendment would be readmitted to the union.

    • Johnson opposed the amendment, but his home state Tennessee was the only state out of all the Confederacy to vote for the amendment

  • Race riots break out in southern cities: beatings, murder, and backlash of anti-black violence

  • Mob violence mostly started by planters and merchants losing money from freedom of black people

  • Violent opposition only strengthened Radical Republicans, convincing that moderate legal reform was not enough and the federal government was too slow.

  • Congress takes complete control of Reconstruction in 1866

    • Establish universal male suffrage

    • Reconstruction act of 1867 declares that, except Tennessee, no Confederate state government under President Johnson’s Reconstruction policy were legal

  • Divided South into five military districts under federal control and protect citizens’ property and lives

  • Southern states supposed to call conventions to rewrite constitutions to include universal male suffrage

  • Southern states could only reenter the union once Confederate leaders were removed from office and freedmen had the vote.

  • Radicals somewhat confident that the army would cooperate.

  • Secretary of War = Edwin Stanton, and believed in what Congress was doing, but answered to the president.

  • Tenure of Office Act: prohibited president from sacking cabinet members whose appointment requires Senate approval

  • Johnson tries to fire Stanton anyway, Stanton refuses to leave and waits for three years. The House of Representatives votes to impeach Johnson, but the Senate falls one short of acquitted. Johnson, scared, still is president but stops directing Stanton

  • Stanton halts withdrawal of federal troops

  • Next election sees General Ulysses S. Grant won, by a large margin in the electoral vote but a small margin in the popular vote.

  • Republicans stick to protecting black suffrage, Democrats want to limit it

  • Grant backs Radical Reconstruction, so Congress pushes the final Reconstruction amendment

  • Fifteenth Amendment: passed in 1869 and ratified in 1870. a citizen’s right to vote could not be denied or altered based on race or color or past bondage in slavery. Aimed primarily at South, but applied to entire country

• Toward a Radically Inclusive Democracy

  • Freedpeople begin to enjoy new freedom

    • Defy unfair contracts

    • Desegregate streetcars

    • Refuse to sit in the back of the bus

    • Insisted on paying the same price as others

  • Carried news to countryside

  • Black laborers walk off plantations, attend political rallies, join Republican Union Leagues

  • Initiating hundreds of thousands into political life

  • Rural blacks used conventions to put education, labor and land reform on Republican political agenda

  • The US army starts registering adult black men, etc. Helps execute biggest government-led voter registration drive

  • Fall 1867, black men and white men sat side by side to rewrite state constitutions

  • Repealed Black Codes, guaranteed men civil and political rights regardless of race

  • Reduced capital crimes

  • Did NOT mandate systemic redistribution of land

  • Republicans were anxious that confiscation of planters would increase tensions and violence

• Reconstruction Governments

  • Republicans drew large amounts of blacks and whites. Black churches and Union Leagues mobilized Republicans

  • Black candidates drawn to office. Few candidates were from the impoverished freedpeople. Black representatives who were literate and more wealthy were favored because they would be seen as higher

  • Scalawags: useless farm animals, derogatory term to Republicans

    • Republican party mostly upcountry yeomen

    • Small number of planters and former Democratic leaders

    • Some elite southerners “believed” in the Republican because Democrats would reduce in power

  • Carpetbaggers: impoverished and ill-educated, derogatory term to White Northern Republicans going to the south

  • Reconstruction governments: Republican dominated legislatures in the south which acted on principles in new state Constitutions, where universal women suffrage first seen in three states

  • Health, education, and welfare programs, establishing South's first public schools. Directed construction of hospitals and asylums

  • New racially inclusive legal cultures. African Americans serve in juries and some as judges

  • Black women assumed that men>women, but still thought domestic violence be treated as a crime rather than culturally accepted

  • These policies pushed aside land distribution

  • Freedpeople still supported their newfound rights and new government

Reconstructing Southern Society

• Patterns of Work

  • Landless people struggle with independence from landholders (sharecropping)

  • Task systems included a set pay per tax, and contract systems included sharecropping.

  • Sharecropping was when a person rented a part of a plantation, and in return, gave the landowner a portion of crop. This was usually under tight restrictions and supervision.

  • This was not as independent as hoped, but still helped freedpeople hold hope.

  • Railroads were also developed

  • Across the Cotton Belt, more stores were developed to meet consumer demand

  • Sharecroppers usually only planted cotton (lack of diversification)

  • Depletion of soil, lost plant resistance to pests, rot, and disease

  • Reliance on cotton makes them more dependent on other sources of supplies

• The Heart of the Community: The Church

  • Some of the only black institutions not connected to white authority

  • Fostered political and spiritual independence

  • Included missionary drives, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches

  • Committed to teaching reading and writing to freedpeople

  • Political centers: religion and politics considered intertwined

  • Women take control of missionary societies, literacy programs, and general church activities

  • Distinctive theology stemming from old folk religion

• Schools and Aid Societies

  • Symbols of freedom and a central institution.

  • Taught and put pride on literacy

  • Founded and staffed many schools

  • Religious and reform organizations also play an important role

  • States try to establish integrated schools, but white reject them

  • Learning to read and write still dangerous

  • White people destroyed books or assaulted black students. Black children were resilient (changed routes and hid books).

  • Mutual aid societies included organizations like hospitals, saving banks, firefighter stations

Challenges to Reconstruction

• The Ailing Southern Economy

  • Federal government does not help southern rebuilding effort, and preferred to work with western private corporations

  • Northern investment for reconstruction never happened, crippled south

  • Legislators raised taxes even when southern states were in debt

  • Planters found new allies in poorer white farmers

  • White southerners blamed Reconstruction for the loss of land, freedom, and autonomy

• The Making of White Supremacy

  • Sometimes slow, sometimes quick

  • Racial segregation further develops

  • Ex-Confederate militias develop into secret societies which threaten and terrorize African Americans

  • Ku Klux Klan was the largest such organization, rituals of humiliation meant to diminish African American voices

  • Federal government sent troops into counties to arrest and exile Klansmen.

  • Enforcement Act of 1870: prohibited force or threat of force against anyone trying to register to vote or attempting to vote

  • Klan forged new culture of white supremacy

• Republicans Divided

  • Liberal Republican Party forms, and critical of Klan enforcement acts

  • Said racially inclusive democracy gave poor to much power

  • Republican Party weakens with division

  • Agreed with the necessity of equal civil and political rights, disagreed on political and economic issues.

  • Some white REpublicans asked black officeholders to resign to retain some white votes

  • Some states Black REpublicans force white leaders out

The Death of Reconstruction

• Southern Militias Mobilize

  • Violence increase in 1873

  • White League paramilitary attempt to unseat Republican udgeBlack regiment defends the building, but league fires a cannon and set the courthouse on fire

  • Next year, league armed men and marched on LA capital, fought state militia, overthrew the Republican government, and put a Democrat

  • Federal troops put down the rebellion

  • White League grows steadily

  • U.S. v Cruikshank: Court overturns convictions from Enforcement Act of 1870 because the original charge did not identify race as the massacre motivation.

  • the 14 and 15 amendments did not authorize the Fed to punish white supremacist private organizations.

• Remembering the War, Forgetting Slavery

  • After 1873, war no longer alludes to slavery. Underlines forgiving the south

  • Memorial Day helps forget Civil War

  • Few remember emancipation was the main achievement

  • Decoration Day became a celebration of Confederate heroes

• Reconstruction’s Day in Court

  • Radical REpublican Charles Sumner tries outlawing racial discrimination as a last attempt to save Construction

  • Federal government did little to enforce the law

  • Slaughterhouse Cases ruling says that 14th amendment only protects right to citizenship

  • US v Cruikshank: Court overturns convictions of Colfax massacre. 14th amendments protects an individual’s rights, but not a private individual/mob

• Election of 1876

  • Southern Democrats announce the Mississippi plan calling on partisans to carry the election by force if necessary

  • Discourages republican votes

  • President Grant slowly withdrew federal support for the Republicans

  • Grant fails. Financial scandals from some of his cabinet members associates himself with southern republicans.

  • Rutherford B Hayes was a mild-mannered conservative who had a good reputation to reunite the party

  • Democrats nominated Samuel Tilden who earned a reputation as the buster of the Tweed Administration

  • Hayes was declared the winner, but Democrats resisted. Eventually agreed

  • Republicans had to consent to a new southern policy that allowed white southerners to run politics themselves. “”Compromise of 1887” or the “Corrupt Bargain of 187”

• Burying Reconstruction

  • 1878 passed Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting federal government from using the army to enforce the law

  • 1833 Civil Rights Cases ruled that the 14th amendment did not pertain to racial discrimination in private businesses

  • Ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional because the authority to protect from discrimination was in the states, not the federal government.

  • Reconstruction was one of the nation’s most important periods. African Americans played an important role in shaping their and the South’s destiny.