chapter 15 study guide

Lucero Castaneda AP US History Ms.Lampley

Chapter 15:Reconstruction, 1865-1877

I. The Struggle for National Reconstruction

A. Presidential Approaches: From Lincoln To Johnson

B. Congress Versus The President

1. Radical Republicans And The Fourteen Amendment

C. Radical Reconstruction

1. The Impeachment Of Andrew Johnson

2. The Election Of 1868 And The Fifteen Amendment

D. Woman Suffrage Denied

II. The Meaning of Freedom

A. The Quest For Land

1. Freed Slaves And Northerners Conflicting Goals

2. Wage Labor And Sharecropping

B. Republican Government In The South

C. Building Black Communities

III. The Undoing of Reconstruction

A. The Republican Unrevealing

1. The Disillusioned Liberals

B. Counterrevolution In The South

1. The Supreme Court Rejection Of Equal Rights

C. The Political Crisis On 1877

D. Lasing Legacies

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I. The Struggle for National ReconstructionBased on a separation of powers, the Constitution did not address the question of secession or any procedure for Reconstruction, so it did not say which branch of government was to handle the readmission of rebellious states.

A. Presidential Approaches: From Lincoln To Johnsona) Abraham Lincoln had a Ten percent Plan, but the Confederate rejected it and

proposed a substitute.

b) The Wade-Davis Bill passed on July 2, 1864 required a promise of loyalty to the Union by a majority of each state’s adult white men, new government formed only by those who had never taken up arms against the North, and permanent disenfranchisement of Confederate leaders. Since, Lincolns didn’t like the Wade-Davis Bill, he used a pocket veto by leaving unsigned when Congress suspended, while initiating talks with congressional leaders aimed at a compromise.

c) Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 15, 1865, at Penn Quarter, Washington, D.C. by John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor and Confederate sympathizer.

d) Andrew Johnson became the President. He was trained as a tailor and built a career on the support of farmer and laborers. Johnson was loyal to the Union and he refused to leave the US Senate when Tennessee seceded and was appointed by Lincoln as Tennessee’s military governor when federal forces captured Nashville in 1862.

e) In May 1865, with Congress out of session for months to come, Johnson advanced his own version of Reconstruction. He appointed provisional governors for the Southern states and required only that they revoke secession, repudiate Confederate debts, and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment.

f) Northerners were discussed by Johnson and the Southern enacted a Black Codes Law to force forms slaves back to plantation labor.

B. Congress Versus The PresidentIn December 1865, congress effectively blocked Johnson’s programs. Hoping to mollify the Congress, some Southern states dropped the most objectionable provisions from the Black Codes. But at the same time, anti-Black violence erupted in various parts of the South. Back in March 1865, Congress had established the Freedmen’s Bureau to aid former slaves. Now, in early 1866, Congress voted to extend the Bureau, gave it direct funding for the first time, and authorized its agent to investigate mistreatment to Blacks.

1. Radical Republicans And The Fourteen Amendment a) The Fourteenth Amendment established national citizenship for persons born or

naturalized in the United States and it prohibited he states from depriving citizens’ form their civil rights or equal protection under the law.

b) In August 1866, Johnson embarked on a disastrous speaking tour in which he made matters worse by shouting at hecklers and insulting hostile crowds.

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c) The Radicals’ leader in the Senate was Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the fiery abolitionists who in 1856 had been nearly beaten to death by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks.

C. Radical ReconstructionThe reconstruction Act of 1867, enacted in March, divided the conquered South into five military districts, each under the command of a US general

1. The Impeachment Of Andrew Johnsona) After Congress adjourned in August 1867, Johnson “suspended” a Radical Secretary

of war Edwin M. Stanton and replaced him with Union general Ulysses S. Grant because he thought that Grant would be a good soldier and follow orders. Johnson however had misjudged Grant, who publicly objected to the president’s machinations.

b) On February 21, 1868, Johnson formally dismissed Stanton.

c) For the first time in US History, legislators in the House of Representatives introduced articles of Impeachment against the president.

d) After an eleven-week trial in the Senate, thirty-five senators voted for conviction. The congress disliked Johnson very much and wanted to show as much power as they could even though he was the president.

2. The Election Of 1868 And The Fifteen Amendment a) The impeachment controversy made Grant a Republican idol, the Unions hero, and

he easily won the party’s presidential nomination in 1868.

b) Horatio Seymour, governor of New York, almost declined nomination because he understood that Democrats could not yet overcome the stain of disloyalty.

c) Despite Radical Republicans protest, the Amendment left room for a Poll Tax when voting and literacy requirements, both required concessions to Northern and Western states that already relied on such provisions to keep immigrants and the unworthy poor from the polls.

D. Woman Suffrage Denieda) Northern women fought for slavery and for the women. Women’s rights leaders had

the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the campaign at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 to try to win their rights and slavery freedom.

b) Majority of men opposed women’s enfranchisements

c) At the May 1869 convention of the Equal Rights Association, black abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Frederick Douglas pleaded for white women to understand the plight in which former slaves found themselves, and to allow black male suffrage to take priority.

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d) Organized into the NWSA, Lucy stone and Julia Ward Howe, reconciled to disappointment, and remained loyal to the Republican Party in hopes that once Reconstruction had been settled, it would be woman’s turn.

e) In 1873, the NWSA members decided to test the limits of the New Constitutional Amendments.

f) In Minor V. Happersett (1875), the Supreme Court sunk suffragists’ hopes. It rules that suffrage rights were not essential in citizenship; women were not citizens, but in state legislatures could deny women ballot if they wished.

g) When Wyoming Territory gave women the vote in 1869, its governor received telegrams of congratulation from as far away as Europe.

II. The Meaning of FreedomA. The Quest For Land

In Georgia and South Carolina, General William Tecumseh Sherman had reserved large coastal tracts for liberated slaves and settled them on Forty-Acre plots. Johnson’s amnesty plan, enabling pardoned Confederate to recover property seized during the war, blasted freedmen’s hopes. In October 1865, Johnson ordered General Oliver O. Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, to restore plantations on the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast to their white owners.

1. Freed Slaves And Northerners Conflicting Goalsa) The economic revolution of the antebellum period had transformed New England

and the Mid-Atlantic states.

b) Only a handful of Radicals, like Thaddeus Stevens, argued that freed slaves had already earned a right to the land, through what Lincoln once referred to as “four hundred years of unrequited toil”.

c) In 1869, South Carolina established a land commission to buy property and resell it to easy term to the landless: about 14,000 black families acquired farm through the program.

2. Wage Labor And Sharecroppinga) Landowners wanted to retain the old Gang-Labor System, with wages replacing the

food, clothing and shelter that slaves had once received.

b) For many freedwomen and freedmen, the opportunity for a stable family life was one of the greatest achievements of emancipation and many people enthusiastically accepted the Northern ideal of Domesticity.

c) Like their Northern allies, many Southern African Americans believed domesticity was the key to civilization and progress. Also, in rural areas, former slaves refused to work under the conditions of slavery. All across the South, planters who needed labor were forced to harvest to what one planter termed.

d) Sharecropping was a distinctive labor system for cotton agriculture in which the freedmen worked as tenant farmers, exchanging their labor for the use of land. Sharecropping was an unequal relationship, since the sharecropper had no way of making it through the first growing season without borrowing for food and supplies.

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e) Storekeepers “furnished” the sharecropper and took as collateral a lien on the crop; as cotton prices declined during the 1870s, many sharecroppers fell into permanent debt. If the merchant was also the landowner, the debt became a pretext for peonage, or forced labor. Sharecropping did mobilize black husbands and wives in common enterprise and shielded both from personal subordination to whites.

f) By the end of Reconstruction, about 1/4 of sharecropping families saved enough to rent with cash, and eventually black farmers owned about a third of the land they farmed.

g) The battle over the South’s land was exceptional because of the politics involved. Elsewhere, emancipation rarely meant civil or political equality for freed slaves, but in the United States, the civil rights, suffrage, and measure of political power for freedmen allowed the development of sharecropping.

h) For ex-slaves, sharecropping was preferable over laboring for their former owners, but it was devastating to southern agriculture; it committed the South inflexibly to cotton because it was a cash crop and limited incentives for agricultural improvements.

B. Republican Government In The Southa) Between 1868 and 1871 all the Southern states met the congressional stipulations

and rejoined the Union. Southern white Republicans were called “scalawags” by Democratic ex-Confederates and white Northerners who moved to the South were called “carpetbaggers”.

b) Some scalawags were former slave owners who wanted to attract Northern capital, but most were yeoman farmers who wanted to rid the South of its slaveholding aristocracy. Also, some carpetbaggers were motivated by personal profit and brought capital and skills with them, while others were attracted to the South’s climate, people, and economic opportunities.

c) Black officeholders were noticeable in the South, even though there weren’t a lot.

d) Republicans modernized state constitutions, eliminated property qualifications for voting, got rid of the Black Codes, and expanded the rights of married women.

e) Reconstruction social programs called for hospitals, more humane penitentiaries, and asylums. Reconstruction governments built roads and revived the railroad network. To pay for their programs, Republicans introduced property taxes that applied to personal wealth as well as to real estate, somewhat like the taxes the Jacksonians had used in the North.

f) In many plantation counties, former slaves served as tax assessors and collectors, administering the taxation of their onetime owners.

g) Reconstruction governments’ debts mounted rapidly, and public credit collapsed. Many of the spending was wasted or ended up in the pockets of state officials.

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h) Republican state governments viewed education as the foundation of a democratic order and had to make up for lost time since the South had almost no public education.

i) New African American churches served as schools, social centers, and political meeting halls as well as places of worship. Black ministers were community leaders and often political officeholders. They provide a powerful religious support for the Republican politics of their congregations.

C. Building Black Communitiesa) Southern blacks could engage in open community building and could cooperate with

Northern missionaries and teachers who came to help in the great work of freedom.

b) There was black churches built and joined their counterparts in the North to become national denominations, including the National Baptist Convention and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The flowering of Southern Black Churches, school, newspaper, and civic groups was one of the most enduring initiatives of the Reconstruction Era. The issue of Desegregation was amazing!!!

III. The Undoing of Reconstruction The undoing of Reconstruction was as much about northern acquiescence as it was about southern resistance. Democrats worked hard to get the vote restored to ex-Confederates, appealing to racial solidarity and southern patriotism and attacking black suffrage as a threat to white supremacy.

A. The Republican UnrevealingSympathy for the freedmen began to wane, as the North was flooded with one sided, often racist reports describing extravagant, corrupt Republican rule and a South in the grip of a “massive black barbarism.” The Civil Rights bill introduced by Charles Sumner in 1870 was a remarkable application of federal power against discrimination, but by its passage in 1875 it had been stripped of its key provisions. The Supreme Court finished its demolition when it declared the remnant Civil Rights Act unconstitutional in 1883. The political cynicism that overtook the Civil Rights Act signaled the Republican Party’s reversion to the practical politics of earlier days.

1. The Disillusioned Liberalsa) Some Republicans had little enthusiasm for Reconstruction, except as it benefited

their party, and as the party lost headway in the South, they abandoned any interest in the battle for black rights. They repudiated the wartime expansion of federal power and refashioned themselves as liberals, believers in free trade, market competition, and limited government.

b) Grant won a second term overwhelmingly in 1872 against Horace Greeley in the 1872 election

B. Counterrevolution In The SouthThe Ku Klux Klan first appeared in Tennessee in 1866 under Nathan Bedford Forrest and by 1870 the Klan was operating almost everywhere in the South as an armed force whose terrorist tactics served the Democratic Party. The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 authorized federal prosecutions, military force, and martial law to defeat conspiracies that deprived citizens of the right to vote, hold office, serve on juries, and enjoy equal protection of the law. The Grant administration’s assault on the Klan illustrated how dependent African Americans and the

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Southern Republicans were on the federal government. But Northern Republicans were growing weary of Reconstruction and the bloodshed it seemed to produce. Prosecuting Klansmen was an uphill battle with U.S. attorneys, who usually faced all-white juries and lacked the resources to handle the cases. Then, after 1872 prosecutions began to drop off. In the meantime, Texas fell to the Democrats in 1873 and Alabama and Arkansas in 1874. Republican governments that were denied federal help found themselves overwhelmed by the massive resistance of their ex-Confederate enemies. Then, between 1873 and 1875, Democrats overthrew Republican governments in Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi. In Mississippi, local Democrats walked armed, kept assassination lists of blacks called “dead books,” and provoked rioting that killed hundreds of African Americans. By 1876 Republican governments remained in only Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida.

1. The Supreme Court Rejection Of Equal Rightsa) Democrats had won control over the House and ex-Confederates had seized power

in Southern states, new landmark constitutional amendments and federal laws remained in force.

b) As early as 1873, in a group of decisions known collectively as the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Court began to undercut the power of the Fourteenth Amendment. So the Fourteenth Amendment did not protect Citizens from armed vigilantes, even in those vigilantes seized political power.

c) In the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the justice also struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

C. The Political Crisis On 1877a) Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes as their presidential candidate, and his

Democratic opponent was Samuel J. Tilden and both favored “home rule” for the South.

b) When Congress met in early 1877, it was faced with both Republican and Democratic electoral votes from Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana.

c) The Constitution declares that Congress regulates its own elections, so Congress appointed an electoral commission and the commission awarded the disputed votes to Hayes by a vote of 8 to 7.

d) Democrats controlled the House and set about delaying a final count of the electoral votes, but on March 1 they suddenly ended their delaying tactics and Hayes was inaugurated.

e) Reconstruction had ended.

f) By 1877, however, three rights-defining amendments had been added to the Constitution, there was room for blacks to advance economically, and they had confidence that they could lift themselves up.

D. Lasing Legaciesa) There was a slow decline of radical Republican power from the early 1870s through

the mid-1880s, and the corresponding ex-Confederate power in the South and Democrats on the National stage.

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b) In 1884, when Democrats elected their first post-Civil War president, Grover Cleveland, man people feared that he would seek to repeal the Thirteenth Amendment and reinstate slavery.

c) Sharecropping was not slavery even it was somewhat injustice and had many flaws. Freedmen and freedwoman managed to resist gang labor and work on their own terms.

d) Parents’ sacrifices to send their children to school, and a few of them graduated from college.

e) Meanwhile, legal cases brought by Asian immigrants, Mexicans in the Southwest, and American born women would show that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had transformed the nature of American Citizenship.

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chapter 15 study guide

Education