APUSH
Chapter 15 notes
Mr. Dunn                                 Chapter 15: Reconstruction and the New South

• The Problems of Peacemaking

1. The Aftermath of War and Emancipation

• Devastated South: Towns had been gutted, plantations burned, fields neglected and bridges & roads destroyed
• More than 258,000 Confederate soldiers died in the war- more than 20% of the adult white male population
• Confederate heroes as Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and (later) Jefferson Davis were treated with extraordinary reverence, almost as religious figures
• In 1865, Southern society was in disarray; blacks and whites, men and women faced a future of great uncertainty
• Reconstruction became a struggle to define the meaning of freedom

2. Competing Notions of Freedom

• Virtually all former slaves were united in their desire for independence from white control
• Slavery had been demolished in the former Confederacy by the Emancipation Proclamation, and where else (as of December 1865) by the 13th Amendment
• Congress established the Freedom’s Bureau, an agency of the army directed by Gen. Oliver O. Howard

• Distributed food to millions of former slaves
• Established schools staffed by missionaries and teachers
• Made modest efforts to settle blacks on lands of their own
• Offered assistance to poor whites who were similarly destitute & homeless after the war
• Had authority to operate for one year, was far too small to deal with problems facing southern society

3. Issues of Reconstruction

• Many northerners believed the South should be punished for the suffering and sacrificing its rebellion had caused
• Conservatives insisted that the South accept the abolition of slavery, but proposed few other conditions for the readmission of the seceded states
• Radicals, led by Thaddeus Stevens of P.A. and Charles Sumner of M.A., urged that the civil and military leaders of the Confederacy should be punished
• Legal rights of blacks should be protected and property of wealthy white Southerners be confiscated and distributed among the freedmen

• Some radicals favored granting suffrage to the former slaves

4. Plans for Reconstruction

• Lincoln’s Reconstruction plan, which he announced in Dec. 1863, offered a general amnesty to white southerners, who would pledge loyalty to the govt. and accept the elimination of slavery
• Whenever 10% of the voters in 1860 took oath in any state, those loyal voters could set up a state govt.
• Hoped to extend suffrage to blacks who were educated, owned property, and had served in the Union army
•  Radicals first effort to resolve that question was the Wade-Davis Bill, passed by Congress in July 1864

• Authorized the president to appoint a provisional governor for each conquered state
• When a majority of the white males of the state [;edged their allegiance to the Union, the governor

     could summon a state constitutional convention

• New state constitutions would have to abolish slavery, disfranchise Confederate civil and military

     leaders, and repudiate debts

• Congress passed the bill and Lincoln disposed of it with a pocket veto

5. The Death of Lincoln

• On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln and his wife attended a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington
• John Wilkes Booth, obsessed with aiding the Southern cause, entered the box from the rear and shot Lincoln in the head
• Booth had acted as a part of a great conspiracy- Booth did have associates, one shot and wounded Secretary of State Seward, another abandoned at the last moment a scheme to murder V.P. President Johnson
• On April 26, he was cornered by Union troops and shot to death in a blazing barn
• Militants Republicans ensured that Lincoln’s death would help doom his plans for a relatively easy peace

6. Johnson and “Restoration”

• Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, was not well suited, either by circumstance or personality for the task
• He was openly hostile to the freed slaves and unwilling and support any plans that guarantee them civil equality or enfranchisement “White men alone must manage the South.”
• Johnson revealed his plan for “Restoration” as he preferred to call it- soon after he took office
• In order to win readmission to Congress, a state had to revoke its ordinance of secession, abolish slavery, ratify the 13th Amendment and repudiate the Confederate and state war debts
• 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

• Radical Republicans vowed not to recognize the Johnson governments

• Particularly hard to accept was Georgia’s first choice of Alexander H. Stephens, former Confederate vice president, as a US senator

• Radical Reconstruction
• The Black Codes

• State legislatures were enacting sets of laws known as the Black Codes, designed to give whites substantial control over the former slaves
• Authorized local officials to apprehend unemployed blacks, fine them for vagrancy, and hire them out to private employers to satisfy the fine
• Forbade blacks to own or lease farms or to take any jobs other than as plantation workers or domestic servants

• Congress responded by passing an act extending the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and widening its powers
• In April 1866, Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act, which declared blacks 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
B. The Fourteenth Amendment

• The 14th Amendment offered the first constitutional definition of American citizenship
• Everyone born in the US, and everyone naturalized, was automatically a citizen and entitled to all “privileges and immunities” guaranteed by the Constitution, including equal protection of the law
• Congressional Radicals offered to readmit any state whose legislature ratified the 14th Amendment (only TN)
• In 1866 Congressional elections, voters returned a majority of Republicans, most Radicals, to Congress
• Congressional Republicans were strong enough to enact their plan even over the president’s objections

C. The Congressional Plan

• Under the Congressional plan, Tennessee, which had ratified the 14th Amendment, was promptly readmitted
• The other ten Confederate states were combined into five military districts.
• Congress had to approve a state’s constitution and the state legislature had to ratify the 14th Amendment
• Once enough states ratified the amendment to make it part of the Constitution, then the former Confederate states could be restored to the Union
• By 1868, 7 of the 10 former Confederate states had fulfilled these conditions & were readmitted to the Union
• The 15th Amendment and the federal govt. to deny suffrage to any citizen on account of race, color, or previous condition in servitude
• Congressional Radicals took action to stop the Supreme Court from interfering w/ their plans
• The Court refused to accept jurisdiction in any cases involving Reconstruction

D. The Impeachment of the President

• President Johnson dismissed Sec. of War Stanton despite Congress’s refusal to agree, thus deliberately violating the Tenure of Office Act
• The vote was 35 to 19, one short of the constitutionally required two-thirds majority

• The South In Reconstruction

A. The Reconstruction Governments

• Critics called Southern white Republicans “scalawags”; many were former Whigs who had never felt comfortable in the Democratic Party
• Despite their diverse social positions, scalawags shared a belief that the Republican Party would serve their economic interests better than the Democrats
• White men from the North also served as Republican leaders in the South; Critics of Reconstruction referred to them as “carpetbaggers”
• Most carpetbaggers were well-educated people of middle-class origin, many of them doctors, lawyers, and teachers
• Most numerous Republicans in the South were the black freedmen
• African Americans played a significant role on the politics of the reconstruction of the South
• Served as delegates to the constitutional conventions
• Held public offices of practically every kind
• Between 1869 and 1901, twenty blacks served in the U.S. House of Reps and two in the Senate
• African Americans served in the legislatures and in various other state offices
• In the South as a whole, the percentage of black office holders was always far lower than the percentage of blacks in the population
• Corruption was the result of the same thing: a rapid economic expansion of government services, put strains on elected offices everywhere
• Effort to provide the South was desperately needed services: public education, public works program, poor relief, and other new commitments

• Education

• Impetus for educational reform in the South came from outside groups- Freedmen’s Bureau, Northern private philanthropic organizations, Northern women, black and white- and from southern blacks themselves
• Education would give blacks “false notions of equality”
• Southern education was becoming divided into two separate systems, one black and one white

• Landownership and Tenancy

• Most ambitious goal of the Freedmen’s Bureau was fundamental reform of landownership in the South; the effort failed
• Congress never had much stomach for the idea of land redistribution
• Very few Northern Republicans believed that the federal govt. had the right to confiscate property
• Among whites, there was a striking decline in landownership, from 80 percent to 67 percent
• Among blacks, the proportion who owned land rose from virtually none to more than 20 percent
• Most became tenants of white landowners- working their own plots of land and  paying their landlords either a fixed rent or share of their crop
• As tenants and sharecroppers, blacks enjoyed at least a physical independence from their landlords and had the sense of working their own land

• The Crop-Lien System

• Per capita income of southern blacks rose 46 percent between 1857 and 1879
• Per capita income of southern whites declined 35 percent
• Few of the traditional institutions of credit in the South- the “factors” and banks- returned after the war
• Many local stores had no competition; as a result, they were able to set interest rates as high as 50 or 60 %
• Farmers had to give the merchants a lien on the crops as collateral for the loans
• Farmers often could become trapped in a cycle of debt from which they could never escape
• This burdensome credit system had a number of effects on the region, almost all of them unhealthy

• Blacks who had acquired land gradually lost it as they fell into debt
• Southern farmers became almost wholly dependent on cash crops; most of all on cotton
• Southern agriculture never sufficiently diversified even in the best of times

• Crop-lien system impoverished small farmers and contributed to a decline in Southern agricultural economy

• The African-American Family in Freedom

• A major reason for the departure of so many blacks from plantations was the desire to find lost relatives and reunite families
• Economic necessity required many black women to engage in income-producing activities

• The Grant Administration

1. The Soldier President

• Grant entered the White House with no political experience, and his performance was clumsy and ineffectual from the start
• Most members of the cabinet were ill-equipped for their tasks
• In 1872, Grant won polling 286 electoral votes to Greeley’s 66, and nearly 56 % of the popular total

2. The Grant Scandals

• French-owned Credit Mobilier construction company, which had helped build the Union Pacific Railroad steer large fraudulent contracts to their construction company, thus bilking UP and federal govt. of millions

3. The Greenback Question

• The 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
• This was the worst one yet; the depression it produced lasted four years
• Debtors now pressured the government to redeem federal war bonds with greenbacks, which would increase the amount of money in circulation
• Grant and most Republicans wanted a “sound” currency- based solidly on gold reserves- which would favor the interests of banks and other creditors
• In 1875, Republican leaders in Congress, in an effort to crush the greenback movement for good, passed the Specie Resumption Act
• After Jan. 1, 1879, the greenback dollars would be redeemed and replaced with new certificates firmly pegged to the price of gold
• “Resumption” made things more difficult for debtors, because the gold-based money supply could not easily expand
• National Greenback Party was active in the next three presidential elections, but it failed to gain widespread support
• Kept money issue alive; proper composition of the currency was to remain one of the most controversial and enduring issues in late-nineteenth-century American politics

4. Republican Diplomacy

• Johnson and Grant administrators achieved their greatest success in foreign affairs
• Accomplishments were the work not of the presidents themselves, who displayed little aptitude for diplomacy, but of two outstanding secretaries of state: William H. Seward and Hamilton Fish
• Seward accepted a Russian offer to sell Alaska to the U.S. for 7.2 million
• In 1867, Seward also engineered the American annexation of the tiny Midway Islands, west of Hawaii
• In 1871, Fish forged an agreement, the Treaty of Washington, which provided for international arbitration and in which Britain expressed regret for the escape of the Alabama from England

• The Abandonment of Reconstruction

• Democrats had taken back the governments of seven of the eleven former Confederate states.
• For SC, LA, and FL - end of Reconstruction had to wait for withdrawal of last federal troops in 1876

1. The Southern States “Redeemed”

• In states where blacks were a majority, whites used intimidation & violence to undermine Reconstruction regimes
• The Ku Klux Klan was the largest and most effective organization
• Worked to advance interests of those with the most to gain from a restoration of white supremacy- above all the planter class and the Southern Democratic Party

2. The Ku Klux Klan Acts

• The Enforcement Acts prohibited states from discriminating against voters on the basis of race and gave the federal government power to supersede the courts and prosecute violations of the law
• The new laws also authorized the president to use the military to protect civil rights and suspend the right of habeas corpus
• In 1872, Klan violence against blacks was in decline throughout the region

3. Waning Northern Commitment

• The Panic of 1873 further undermined support for Reconstruction, spurred Northern industrialists and their allies to find an explanation for the poverty and instability
• “Social Darwinism”, harsh theory that argued that individuals who failed did so because of their own weakness

4. The Compromise of 1877

• Republican leaders settled on Rutherford B. Hayes; Democrats united behind Samuel J. Tilden
• Tilden had undisputed claim to 184 electoral votes, only one short of a majority, but Hayes could still win if he managed to receive all 20 disputed votes
• Jan. 1877, Congress tried to break the deadlock by creating a special electoral commission to judge the disputed votes
• Commission voted along straight party lines, 8 to 7, awarding every disputed vote to Hayes
• “Compromise of 1877” was complex; Hayes was already on record favoring withdrawal of the troops
• The real agreement exacted several pledges from the Republicans in addition to withdrawal of the troops: the appointment of at least one Southerner to the Hayes cabinet, control of federal patronage in their areas, generous internal improvements, and federal aid for the Texas and  Pacific Railroad
• The president and his party had hoped to build up a “new Republican” organization in the South, but all such efforts failed
• Withdrawal of federal troops signaled that the national government was giving up its attempts to control Southern politics and to improve the lot of blacks in Southern society

5. The Legacies of Reconstruction

• Reconstruction was in the end largely a failure; the U.S. failed in its first serious effort to resolve its oldest and deepest social problem- the problem of race
• A pervasive belief among many of even the most liberal whites that African Americans were inherently inferior served as an obstacle to equality
• Future generations had reason for gratitude for two great charters of freedom- the 14th  and 15th Amendments

• The New South

1.  The “Redeemers”

• Constituted a new ruling class; they were merchants, industrialists, railroad developers & financiers
• They combined a commitment to “home rule” & social conservatism w/ a commitment to economic development
• In VA, a vigorous “Readjuster” movement emerged, demanding more money available for state services
• By mid-1880s, conservative southerners had effectively eliminated most of the dissenting movements

B. Industrialization and the “New South”

• Promoted virtues of thrift, industry & progress
• Textile factories appeared in the South due to cheap labor, low taxes & accommodating conservative govts.
• By 1890, southern iron and steel industry represented nearly a fifth of the nation’s total capacity
• Railroad development increased substantially; trackage in the South more than doubled
• From the beginning, a high percentage of factory workers in the South were women
• Through the “convict-lease” system, southern states leased gangs of convicted criminals to private interests as cheap-labor supply

C.  Tenants and Sharecroppers

• During Reconstruction, nearly 1/3 of farmers in the South were tenants, but that figure increased to 70%
• “Sharecropping” – landlords supplied land, housing, tools & seed in exchange for a large share of the crop
• People of the backcountry were among the most important constituents for Populist protests of 1880s & 90s

D.  African Americans and the New South

• Some blacks elevated themselves into a distinct middle class, but economically inferior to white middle class
• Former slaves acquired property, established small businesses or entered professions
• Maggie Lena became the first female bank president in the US
• Chief spokesperson for commitment to education and for his race as a whole was Booker T. Washington
• Founder and president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama
• Worked his way out of poverty after acquiring an education; urged other blacks to follow same road
• Attend school, learn skills & establish solid footing in agriculture and the trades
• Industrial, not classical, education should be their goal
• Blacks should refine their speech & improve their dress; in short, adopt standards of white middle class
• Only thus, could they win respect of whites, the prerequisite for any larger social gains
• Washington outlined a philosophy of race relations that became widely known as the Atlanta Compromise
• Helped awaken the interests of a new generation for self-advancement through self-improvement

E.  The Birth of Jim Crow

• Supreme Court effectively stripped the 14th and 15th Amendments of mush of their significance
• In so-called civil rights cases of 1883, Court ruled 14th Amendment prohibited state govts. from discrimination based on race, but did not restrict private organizations or businesses from doing so
• Thus railroads, hotels, theaters and the like could legally practice segregation
• In Plessy v. Ferguson, the court held that separate accommodations did not deprive blacks of equal rights if the accommodations were equal
• Decision survived for years as a part of the legal basis of segregated schools
• Southern states had to find ways to evade the 15th Amendment; prohibited states form denying anyone the right to vote
• Two devices emerged to accomplish this goal: One was the poll tax or property qualification; another was the literacy test…even African Americans who could read had trouble passing the difficult test
• Laws restricting the franchise and segregating schools were only part of the Jim Crow laws
• Blacks and whites could not ride together in the same railroad cars, sit in the same waiting rooms, use the same washrooms, eat in the same restaurants or sit in the same theaters
• Jim Crow laws also stripped blacks of many of the modest gains they hade made in the late 19th century
• The 1890s witnessed a dramatic increase in white violence against blacks
• Lynching of blacks by white mobs reached appalling levels
• Black men who made sexual advances towards white women were particularly vulnerable to lynchings
• Fear of black sexuality was an important part of the belief system that supported segregation
• In 1892, Ida B. Wells launched an international anti-lynching movement
• Its goal was a federal anti-lynching law, which would allow the national govt. to punish those responsible for lynchings
• Economic issues played a secondary role to race in southern politics, distracting people from the glaring social inequalities that afflicted blacks and whites alike