Chapter 15.2 Apush Foner

Abby Kelley and Lucy Stone

"Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic," declared Stanton, had no right to be "making laws for [feminist leader] Lucretia Mott." But other abolitionist-feminists, like..., insisted that despite their limitations, the Reconstruction amendments represented steps in the direction of truly universal suffrage and should be supported.

commitment to equality

"The contest with the South that destroyed slavery," wrote the Philadelphia lawyer Sidney George Fisher in his diary, "has caused an immense increase in the popular passion for liberty and equality." But advocates of women's rights encountered the limits of the Reconstruction...

Alone

... among the nations that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century, the United States, within a few years of emancipation, clothed its former slaves with citizenship rights equal to those of whites. "We have cut loose from the whole dead past," wrote Timothy Howe, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, "and have cast our anchor out a hundred years" into the future.

Seven Republicans

... had joined the Democrats in voting to acquit the president.

Myra Bradwell

... invoked the idea of free labor in challenging an Illinois statute limiting the practice of law to men, but the Supreme Court in 1873 rebuffed her claim.

Lines of exclusion

... that limited the privileges of citizenship to white men had long been central to the practice of American democracy.

Ulysses S. Grant

A few days after the vote, Republicans nominated..., the Union's most prominent military hero, as their candidate for president.

Reconstruction Act of 1867

A variety of motives combined to produce Radical Reconstruction— demands by former slaves for the right to vote, the Radicals' commitment to the idea of equality, widespread disgust with Johnson's policies, the desire to fortify the Republican Party in the South, and the determination to keep ex-Confederates from office. But the conflict between President Johnson and Congress did not end with the passage of the....

literacy tests, property qualifications, and poll taxes

Although the Fifteenth Amendment opened the door to suffrage restrictions not explicitly based on race—...—and did not extend the right to vote to women, it marked the culmination of four decades of abolitionist agitation.

naturalization requirements

America's destiny, he declared, was to transcend race by serving as an asylum for people "gathered here from all corners of the globe by a common aspiration for national liberty." A year later, Charles Sumner moved to strike the word "white" from... Senators from the western states objected.

eight northern states

As late as 1868, even after Congress had enfranchised black men in the South, only... allowed African-American men to vote.

Reconstruction

Democrats denounced... as unconstitutional and condemned black suffrage as a violation of America's political traditions. They appealed openly to racism. Seymour's running mate, Francis P. Blair Jr., charged Republicans with placing the South under the rule of "a semi-barbarous race" who longed to "subject the white women to their unbridled lust."

assassinate him

Denouncing his critics, the president made wild accusations that the Radicals were plotting to... His behavior further undermined public support for his policies, as did riots that broke out in Memphis and New Orleans, in which white policemen and citizens killed dozens of blacks.

American and world history

Despite their limitations, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 marked a radical departure in...

Edwin M. Stanton

In February 1868, he removed Secretary of War..., an ally of the Radicals. The House of Representatives responded by approving articles of impeachment—that is, it presented charges against Johnson to the Senate, which had to decide whether to remove him from office.

1870

In February 1869, it approved the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited the federal and state governments from denying any citizen the right to vote because of race. Bitterly opposed by the Democratic Party, it was ratified in...

Tenure of Office Act

In March 1867, Congress adopted the..., barring the president from removing certain officeholders, including cabinet members, without the consent of the Senate. Johnson considered this an unconstitutional restriction on his authority.

five military districts

In March 1867, over Johnson's veto, Congress adopted the Reconstruction Act, which temporarily divided the South into... and called for the creation of new state governments, with black men given the right to vote.

China

In his remarkable "Composite Nation" speech of 1869, Frederick Douglass condemned prejudice against immigrants from...

sweeping victory

In the northern congressional elections that fall, Republicans opposed to Johnson's policies won a... Nonetheless, at the president's urging, every southern state but Tennessee refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.

Fourteenth Amendment

In the twentieth century, many of the Supreme Court's most important decisions expanding the rights of American citizens were based on the..., perhaps most notably the 1954 Brown ruling that outlawed school segregation.

Bill of Rights

Nonetheless, by writing into the Constitution the principle that equality before the law regardless of race is a fundamental right of all American citizens, the amendment made the most important change in that document since the adoption of the...

non-whites and immigrants

On occasion, they appealed to racial and ethnic prejudices, arguing that native born white women deserved the vote more than...

black suffrage

Radicals, to be sure, expressed their disappointment that the amendment did not guarantee... (It was far from perfect, Stevens told the House, but he intended to vote for it, "because I live among men and not among angels.")

universal rights

Reconstruction Republicans' belief in... also had its limits.

redrew

Reconstruction... the boundaries of American freedom.

secession and treason

Republicans identified their opponents with..., a tactic known as "waving the bloody shirt."

autonomy of the states

The Bill of Rights had linked civil liberties to the... Its language—"Congress shall make no law"—reflected the belief that concentrated national power posed the greatest threat to freedom. The authors of the Reconstruction amendments assumed that rights required national power to enforce them. Rather than a threat to liberty, the federal government, in Charles Sumner's words, had become "the custodian of freedom."

outlawed discrimination in voting based on race

The Fifteenth Amendment... but not gender. These measures produced a bitter split both between feminists and Radical Republicans, and within feminist circles.

political campaign of 1866

The Fourteenth Amendment became the central issue of the...

right to vote

The Fourteenth Amendment for the first time introduced the word "male" into the Constitution, in its clause penalizing a state for denying any group of men the...

intense division

The Fourteenth Amendment produced an.. between the parties. Not a single Democrat in Congress voted in its favor, and only 4 of 175 Republicans were opposed.

interracial democracy

The Reconstruction Act of 1867 inaugurated America's first real experiment in...

ineligible

At their insistence, the naturalization law was amended to make Africans eligible to obtain citizenship when migrating from abroad. But Asians remained...

linked to race

Before the CivilWar, American citizenship had been closely...

failure as president

By this point, virtually all Republicans considered Johnson a... But some moderates disliked Benjamin F. Wade, a Radical who, as temporary president of the Senate, would become president if Johnson were removed.

The Agitator

Every issue of the new women's rights journal,..., edited by Mary Livermore, who had led fund-raising efforts for aid to Union soldiers during the war, carried stories complaining of the limited job opportunities and unequal pay for females who entered the labor market.

women

Free labor principles, the justices declared, did not apply to..., since "the law of the Creator" had assigned them to "the domestic sphere."

300,000

Grant won the election of 1868, although by a margin—.... of 6 million votes cast—that many Republicans found uncomfortably slim. The result led Congress to adopt the era's third and final amendment to the Constitution.

1868 campaign

Grant's Democratic opponent was Horatio Seymour, the former governor of New York. Reconstruction became the central issue of the bitterly fought...

veto messages

It is not difficult to understand why Andrew Johnson, in one of his..., claimed that federal protection of blacks' civil rights violated "all our experience as a people."

swing around the circle

Johnson embarked on a speaking tour of the North, called by journalists the "...," to urge voters to elect members of Congress committed to his own Reconstruction program.

35-19

Johnson's lawyers assured moderate Republicans that, if acquitted, he would stop interfering with Reconstruction policy. The final tally was... to convict Johnson, one vote short of the two-thirds necessary to remove him.

unparalleled crisis

Only in an... could they have been replaced, even temporarily, by the vision of a republic of equals embracing black Americans as well as white. That the United States was a "white man's government" had been a widespread belief before the Civil War.

divorce laws

Other feminists debated how to achieve "liberty for married women." Demands for liberalizing... (which generally required evidence of adultery, desertion, or extreme abuse to terminate a marriage) and for recognizing "woman's control over her own body" (including protection against domestic violence and access to what later generations would call birth control) moved to the center of many feminists' concerns. "Our rotten marriage institution," one Ohio woman wrote, "is the main obstacle in the way of woman's freedom."

separation of powers

Others feared that conviction would damage the constitutional... between Congress and the executive.

enfranchise women

Some leaders, like Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because it did nothing to... They denounced their former abolitionist allies and moved to sever the women's rights movement from its earlier moorings in the antislavery tradition.

woman suffrage and redesigning marriage

Talk of... found few sympathetic male listeners. Even Radical Republicans insisted that Reconstruction was the "Negro's hour" (the hour, that is, of the black male).

high crimes and misdemeanors

That spring, for the first time in American history, a president was placed on trial before the Senate for "..."

stake a claim to freedom

The Reconstruction amendments transformed the Constitution from a document primarily concerned with federal-state relations and the rights of property into a vehicle through which members of vulnerable minorities could... and seek protection against misconduct by all levels of government.

basis of race

The Reconstruction amendments voided many northern laws discriminating on the... And, as one congressman noted, the amendments expanded the liberty of whites as well as blacks, including "the millions of people of foreign birth who will flock to our shores."

Dred Scott decision of 1857

The first Congress, in 1790, had limited to whites the right to become a naturalized citizen when immigrating from abroad. No black person, free or slave, the Supreme Court had declared in the..., could be a citizen of the United States.

the Radicals

The intransigence of Johnson and the bulk of the white South pushed moderate Republicans toward...

Asian-American community

The juxtaposition of the amended naturalization law and the Fourteenth Amendment created a significant division in the.... Well into the twentieth century, Asian immigrants could not become citizens, but their native-born children automatically did so.

equality before the law

The laws and amendments of Reconstruction reflected the intersection of two products of the Civil War era—a newly empowered national state, and the idea of a national citizenry enjoying...

entitlement of whites alone

The laws and amendments of Reconstruction repudiated the idea that citizenship was an...

federal government and the states

The new amendments also transformed the relationship between the...

the South

The principle of equality before the law, moreover, did not apply only to...

eliminated

The racial boundaries of nationality had been redrawn, but not...

National Woman Suffrage Association and American Woman Suffrage Association

The result was a split in the movement and the creation in 1869 of two hostile women's rights organizations—the...., led by Stanton, and the..., with Lucy Stone as president. They would not reunite until the 1890s.

Olympia Brown

The rewriting of the Constitution, declared suffrage leader..., offered the opportunity to sever the blessings of freedom from sex as well as race and to "bury the black man and the woman in the citizen."

destruction of slavery

The... led feminists to search for ways to make the promise of free labor real for women.

1877

Thus began the period of Radical Reconstruction, which lasted until...

rejected

Thus, even as it... the racial definition of freedom that had emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, Reconstruction left the gender boundary largely intact.

federal system

What Republican leader Carl Schurz called the "great Constitutional revolution" of Reconstruction transformed the... and with it, the language of freedom so central to American political culture.

equal rights

When women tried to use the rewritten legal code and Constitution to claim..., they found the courts unreceptive.

American Anti-Slavery Society

With the Fifteenth Amendment, the... disbanded, its work, its members believed, now complete. "Nothing in all history," exclaimed veteran abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, equaled "this wonderful, quiet, sudden transformation of four millions of human beings from . . . the auction-block to the ballot-box."

emancipation

Women activists saw Reconstruction as the moment to claim their own... No less than blacks, proclaimed Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women had arrived at a "transition period, from slavery to freedom."