Reconstruction Slideshow Chapter 16

THE AMERICAN JOURNEY
A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Brief Sixth Edition

Chapter

16

Reconstruction
1865-1877

The American Journey: A History of the United States, Brief Sixth Edition
Goldfield • Abbott • Argersinger • DeJohn Anderson • Barney • Weir • Argersinger

Copyright ©2011, ©2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Reconstruction
1865-1877
•
•
•
•
•
•

White Southerners and the Ghosts of the Conf
More Than Freedom: African American Aspira
Federal Reconstruction, 1865–1870
Counter-Reconstruction, 1870–1874
Redemption, 1874–1877
Conclusion



“A Hunger to Learn.” This 1863 watercolor by
Henry L. Stephens depicts an elderly African
American, probably a former slave, learning to
read.



Learning Objectives
• How did Southerners remember the war?
• How did it shape their response to
Reconstruction?
• What were African Americans’ hopes for
Reconstruction?
• How did Presidential Reconstruction differ
from Congressional Reconstruction?



Learning Objectives (cont'd)
• What role did violence play in CounterReconstruction?
• Why did the federal government abandon
African Americans after 1872?
• How and why did Reconstruction end?



White Southerners and the Ghosts of
the Confederacy 1865



the Confederacy, 1865
• Confederate soldiers returned to
devastated homes that they could hardly
recognize.
• Southerners lived surrounded by ghosts of
lost loved ones, happy and prosperous
times, slavery, and self confidence.



the Confederacy, 1865 (cont'd)
• Southerners viewed the war as the lost
cause that existed not just in memory but
as a three-dimensional picture of Southern
history celebrated in rituals and as the
educational foundation for future
generations.
• Equally important, white Southerners were
determined to maintain strict racial
boundaries.


the Confederacy, 1865 (cont'd)
 Lost Cause
- The phrase many white southerners applied to
their Civil War defeat. They viewed the war as a
noble cause but only a temporary setback in the
South’s ultimate vindication.



This engraving shows southerners decorating the
graves of rebel soldiers at Hollywood Memorial
Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia in 1867.



More Than Freedom:
African American Aspirations in
1865



More Than Freedom: African
American Aspirations in 1865
• Black Southerners viewed the war as a
victory for freedom and Reconstruction as
a time of possibilities that were helped by
the establishment of the Freedmen’s
Bureau.
• The Freedmen’s Bureau helped establish
more than 3,000 schools serving 150,000
men, women, and children.


More Than Freedom: African
American Aspirations in 1865 (cont'd)
 Freedmen’s Bureau
- Agency established by Congress in March 1865
to provide social, educational, and economic
services, advice, and protection to former slaves
and destitute whites; lasted seven years.



Education
• At the end of the Civil War, about 10
percent of black Southerners were literate.
Within a decade, that percentage had
grown to 30 percent.
• Black colleges were also established.



The Freedmen’s Bureau, northern churches, and
missionary societies established more than 3,000
schools, attended by some 150,000 men, women, and
children



“Forty Acres and a Mule”
• Land ownership offered ex-slaves the
prospect of economic independence.
• During the war, General Sherman had set
aside abandoned land for African
Americans. In 1866, the Southern
Homestead Act gave African Americans
preferential access to public land in the
southern states.


“Forty Acres and a Mule” (cont’d)
• By 1890, one out of thee black farmers in
the Upper South owned land, compared to
one in five for the entire South.
 Field Order No. 15
- Order by General William T. Sherman in January
1865 to set aside abandoned land along the
southern Atlantic coast for forty-acre grants to
freedmen; rescinded by President Andrew
Johnson later that year.



“Forty Acres and a Mule” (cont’d)
 Southern Homestead Act
- Largely unsuccessful law passed in 1866 that
gave black people preferential access to public
lands in five southern states.

 Sharecropping
- Labor system that evolved during and after
Reconstruction whereby landowners furnished
laborers with a house, farm animals, and tools
and advanced credit in exchange for a share of
the laborers’ crop.



Freed women washing laundry along a creek near
Circleville, Texas, circa 1866.



Migration to Cities
• Between 1860 and 1870, the African
American population rose in every major
southern city.
• Most black migrants in the city worked at
unskilled jobs.



Faith and Freedom
• The church became a primary focus of
African American life, providing an
opportunity to develop skills in selfgovernment and administration.
• The church and the congregation were a
cohesive force in black communities.



The black church was the center of African
American life in the postwar urban South.



Federal Reconstruction
1865–1870



Presidential Reconstruction, 1865–1867
• Because Congress was not in session,
President Johnson developed a
Reconstruction plan that extended
pardons and restored property rights to
most Southerners swearing an oath of
allegiance to the Union and the
Constitution.



Presidential Reconstruction, 1865–
1867(cont'd)
• Northerners initially supported the
Johnson plan but southerners opposed it.
They enacted black codes that turned
northern opinion against Johnson.
• The Republican-dominated Congress
passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and
the Fourteenth Amendment.



1867(cont'd)
 Black codes
- Laws passed by states and municipalities denying
many rights of citizenship to free blacks before the
Civil War. Also, during the Reconstruction era,
laws passed by newly elected southern state
legislatures to control black labor, mobility, and
employment.



1867(cont'd)
 Fourteenth Amendment
- Constitutional amendment passed by Congress in
April 1866 incorporating some of the features of
the Civil Rights Act of 1866. It prohibited states
from violating the civil rights of its citizens and
offered states the choice of allowing black people
to vote or losing representation in Congress.



This 1867 engraving shows how the black codes of
the early Reconstruction era reduced former slaves to
virtually their pre–Civil War status.



Congressional Reconstruction,
1867–1870
• Radical Republicans began taking control
of Reconstruction and divided the South
into five military districts.
• Other acts secured the right to vote for
freedmen, made it likely that Republicans
would run southern states, and set harsh
standards for southern readmission.



1867–1870 (cont’d)
• The Tenure of Office Act prohibited the
president from removing certain
officeholders without the Senate’s
consent. Johnson violated the Act and
was impeached but not convicted.



1867–1870 (cont’d)
• Republicans passed the Fifteenth
Amendment.
 Congressional Reconstruction
- Name given to the period 1867–1870 when the
Republican-dominated Congress controlled
Reconstruction era policy. It is sometimes known
as Radical Reconstruction, after the radical
faction in the Republican Party.



1867–1870 (cont’d)
 Tenure of Office Act
- Passed by the Republican controlled Congress in
1867 to limit presidential interference with its
policies, the act prohibited the president from
removing certain officeholders without the
Senate’s consent. President Andrew Johnson,
angered at which he believed as an
unconstitutional attack on presidential authority,
deliberately violated the act by firing Secretary of
War Edwin M. Stanton. The House responded by
approving articles of impeachment against a
president for the first time in American history.


1867–1870 (cont’d)
 Fifteenth Amendment
- Passed by Congress in 1869, guaranteed the
right of American men to vote, regardless of race.



MAP 16–1 Congressional Reconstruction,
1865–1877



This pro- Republican drawing by
noted cartoonist Thomas Nast
includes three Democratic
constituencies



Southern Republican Governments,
1867–1870
• The Republican regimes in the southern
states passed constitutions that promoted
vigorous state governments and the
protection of civil and voting rights.



1867–1870 (cont’d)
• Southern Republicans consisted of three
groups; white yeoman farmers, former
Whigs were called scalawags by
opponents and Northern transplants were
called carpetbaggers. The largest
constituency was African Americans.



1867–1870 (cont’d)
• Southern African Americans served in
government positions including the U. S.
Congress and state legislatures.
• Republican state governments were
criticized for waste and corruption.



1867–1870 (cont’d)
 Scalawags
- Southern whites, mainly small landowning farmers
and well-off merchants and planters, who
supported the southern Republican Party during
Reconstruction for diverse reasons; a disparaging
term.

 Carpetbaggers
- Pejorative term to describe northern transplants to
the South, many of whom were Union soldiers
who stayed in the South after the war.



1867–1870 (cont’d)
 Union League
- A Republican Party organization in northern cities
that became an important organizing device
among freedmen in southern cities after 1865.



Contrasting Views of Reconstruction:
President and Congress



Official photograph Congressional Black Caucus,
106th Congress.



Southern black men during Reconstruction



“Time Works Wonders.” This
Thomas Nast cartoon has
Jefferson Davis, former President
of the Confederacy, dressed as
Iago in William Shakespeare’s
play Othello



Counter-Reconstruction
1870–1874



The Uses of Violence
• Racial violence was widespread before
Republican rule.
• The Ku Klux Klan unleashed a wave of
terror throughout the South and often had
political objectives.
• The federal government sought to combat
violence by passing the Fifteenth
Amendment, the Enforcement Act of
1870, and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.


The Uses of Violence (cont'd)
 Ku Klux Klan
- Perhaps the most prominent of the vigilante
groups that terrorized black people in the South
during Reconstruction Era, founded by
Confederate veterans in 1866.



Here, a black man, John Campbell, vainly begs for
mercy in Moore County, North Carolina, in August
1871.



Northern Indifference
• After 1871, political violence succeeded in
showing the lack of northern Republican
will to follow through on commitments to
southern Republicans.
• Northern support for Congressional
Reconstruction began eroding in 1868.
• At local and federal levels, political
corruption was widespread in the 1870s.


Northern Indifference (cont’d)
• African Americans and immigrants were
targets of racial theory that saw them as
inferior.
• A reform movement arose to address the
ills of government.



Liberal Republicans and
the Election of 1872
• Liberal Republican reformers advocated
civil service reform to reduce the abuses
of patronage. They also supported tariff
reduction and an end to federal land
grants to railroads.
• The Democrats forged an alliance with the
Liberal Republicans nominating Horace
Greeley for president in 1872.


Liberal Republicans and
the Election of 1872 (cont'd)
• Grant won re-election in 1872.



Economic Transformation
• Despite the suffering caused by the Panic
of 1873, the nation underwent a
remarkable economic transformation and
moved toward a national industrial
economy.



Economic Transformation (cont’d)
• The economy grew extremely quickly
during the 1870s, fueled by increased
consumption and the rapid expansion of
new industries, as well as the application
of technology in iron and steel production.



Redemption
1874–1877



Redemption, 1874–1877
• The elections of 1876 confirmed the
triumph of white southerners, who had
accomplished their political goals by a
surge in violence.
• Most Americans had become increasingly
indifferent to African American aspirations
and looked the other way.



Redemption, 1874–1877 (cont'd)
 Redeemers
- Southern Democrats who wrested control of
governments in the former Confederacy, often
through electoral fraud and violence, from
Republicans beginning in 1870.



The Democrats’ Violent Resurgence
• Violence between 1874 and 1876 was
directly and openly connected to the
Democratic Party. It aimed to stop Africa
Americans from voting.
• Backed by violence, Democrats
throughout the South swept to political
power in 1874.



The Weak Federal Response
• Congress responded to the violence in the
South with the Civil Rights Act of 1875 but
it failed to fulfill this purpose.



Declaration of Equality: Justice:
“Five More Wanted”



The Election of 1876 and the
Compromise of 1877
• Reconstruction officially ended with the
election of 1876.
• The Democratic candidate Samuel J.
Tilden won a majority of the popular vote
but disputed returns in three southern
states led to a compromise that gave the
election to Republican candidate
Rutherford B. Hayes.


Redemption, 1874–1877 (cont'd)
• The Compromise of 1877 gave control of
the southern state governments to
Democrats.
 Compromise of 1877
- The congressional settling of the 1876 election
which installed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in
the White House and gave Democrats control of
all state governments in the South.



MAP 16–2 The Election of 1876



The Memory of Reconstruction
• Southern Democrats used the memory of
Reconstruction to maintain themselves in
power. Reconstruction became the
Redemption.
• For white Southerners, it represented a
horrible time that ended with the rescue of
the South from black rule and federal
government oppression.


The Memory of Reconstruction
(cont’d)
• The southern view of Reconstruction was
perpetuated in textbooks, films, and some
histories of the period.



Constitutional Amendments and
Federal Legislation of the
Reconstruction Era



“The Ignorant Vote” By the time Thomas Nast
drew this cartoon in 1876



Modest Gains
• The overthrow of Reconstruction
frustrated black southerners and reversed
the economic and political gains they had
made, as well as deprived them of most of
the civil rights they had enjoyed.
• Still, the former slaves were better off in
1877 than in 1865 and continued to
experience social, educational, and
economic advances, if slowly.


Modest Gains (cont'd)
• The Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments are among the few bright
spots in Reconstruction’s otherwise dismal
legacy.
 Slaughterhouse cases
- Group of cases resulting in one sweeping
decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1873 that
contradicted the intent of the Fourteenth
Amendment by decreeing that most citizenship
rights remained under state, not federal, control.


Modest Gains (cont'd)
 United States v. Cruikshank
- Supreme Court ruling of 1876 that overturned the
convictions of some of those responsible for the
Colfax Massacre, ruling that the Enforcement Act
applied only to violations of black rights by states,
not individuals.



Conclusion



Conclusion
• White Southerners robbed black
Southerners of their gains and tried to
return them to a dependent servitude.
• By 1877, the southern question no longer
captured the attention of the public.



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