RECONSTRUCTION

Who won the Rebellion?

March 4, 1865

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Speech (March 4, 1865)

• “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.”

The President VS Congress

• The USA split on reconstructing the CSA

• White House seeks fast Reconstruction with minimum changes in the South

• Congress wants slower Reconstruction, demands protection for freedmen

Wartime Reconstruction

• Lincoln announces lenient policy in 1863

• Congress resents Lincoln’s effort to control

• Congressmen seek to condition readmission to Union on black suffrage

• Congress mistrusts white Southerners

Andrew Johnson Becomes Pres (1/2)

• Republicans initially support Southern Democrat Johnson as enemy of planter class

• Johnson, Republicans split on Reconstruction

• Johnson instructs Southern conventions to• declare secession illegal• repudiate Confederate debt • ratify the 13th Amendment (prohibits slavery)

Andrew Johnson Becomes Pres (2/2)

• Southern conventions carry out Johnson’s orders

• Conventions pass “Black Codes” (?)

• Johnson approves state conventions’ actions

• Congress condemns conventions

Congress Takes the Initiative (1/2)

• Congress insists on black suffrage

• Mixed motives• Republicans expect to get black vote• fear that South would fall under great

planter control without black suffrage

The Freedmen’s Bureau

Its main focus was to:

1. provide food and medical care

2. help the freedmen to resettle

3. ensure justice for them

4. manage abandoned/confiscated property

5. regulate labor

6. establish schools

Congress Takes the Initiative (2/2)

• 1866--Johnson vetoes two bills • extension of Freedmen’s Bureau • civil rights bill to overturn Black Codes

• Republicans pass 14th Amendment (citizenship, equal protection under law)

• Elections of 1866 strengthen Republicans

Congressional Reconstruction Plan Enacted

• South under military rule until black suffrage fully secured

• Split over duration of federal protection• Radicals recognize need for long period• most wish military occupation to be short

• Assumption: black suffrage sufficient to empower freedmen to protect themselves

Reconstruction

The Impeachment Crisis

• Johnson moves to obstruct Reconstruction

• 1868—Impeached by House, acquitted after Senate trial

• Radical Republicans seen as subversive of Constitution, lose public support

Reconstructing Southern Society

• 3 contending interests in South • Southern whites seek to keep newly-freed

blacks inferior• Northern whites seek to make money or to

"civilize" the region• blacks seek equality

• Decline of federal interest in Reconstruction permits triumph of reaction and racism

Reorganizing Land and Labor

• Ex-slaves wish to work their own land

• Federal government sometimes grants land

• Land reverts to white owners under Johnson

• Slaveowners try to impose contract labor

• Blacks insist on sharecropping

• Sharecropping soon becomes peonage

Black Codes: A New Name for Slavery? (1/2)

• The South increasingly segregated after War

• Black Codes (unofficial laws to limit the basic human rights and civil liberties of blacks)• codes overturned by Congress

• Violence and discrimination continued on a large scale

Black Codes (2/2)

• Legislation passed by Southern states at the end of the Civil War to control the labor, migration and other activities of newly-freed slaves. They were designed to return blacks to quasi-slavery

Retreat from Reconstruction

• Enormous problems 1868-1876

• US Grant’s weak principles contribute to failure

Final Efforts of Reconstruction (1/2)

• 1869--15th Amendment passed. It

prohibited each government in the US from denying a citizen suffrage based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude" (i.e., slavery).

• Also enfranchised Northern blacks

Final Efforts of Reconstruction (2/2)

• Women’s rights group were upset that they were not granted the vote

• Northern support for black citizenship diminished

A Reign of Terror Against Blacks

• Secret societies sought to keep blacks out of the political process

• 1870s--Congress tries to suppress Ku Klux Klan, other Southern terrorist groups

US Grant’s presidency

• Rumors of corruption during General Grant's first term discredit Republicans

• 1872—US Grant wins reelection

• US Grant’s second term rocked by scandal

Reunion and the New South

• North and South reconcile after 1877

• Terms of reconciliation• African Americans stripped of political

gains• big business interests favored over small

farmer

The Compromise of 1877

• Election of 1876 disputed

• Special Congressional commission gives disputed vote to Rutherford B. Hayes

• Southern Democrats accept on two conditions:• guarantee of federal aid to the South• removal of all remaining federal troops

• Hayes’ agreement ends Reconstruction

The Rise of Jim Crow (1/2)

• Black voters excluded

• Jim Crow laws legalize segregation and restrict black civil rights

• By 1910 the process was complete

• The North and the federal government did little or nothing to prevent it

The Rise of Jim Crow (2/2)

• Lynching—187 blacks lynched yearly 1889-1899

• “Reunion” accomplished as North acquiesces in Southern discrimination