Ch 22: The Ordeal of Reconstruction (short answer)

Define the major problems facing the South and the nation after the Civil War

The biggest problem for both sides was that there was a huge population of freed slaves and no good ideas on how to integrate them into society, since they were often unskilled and illiterate. The Freedmen's Bureau was set up as a sort of welfare agency to help them. The original idea was that a few freemen could be helped and integrated into society and they would turn around and help other freedmen. This failed because they were not enough jobs in the north for the freed slaves and so they stopped trying. The South had been completely and totally destroyed during the Civil War and had to face the daunting task of rebuilding. Their age-old socioeconomic structure had collapsed along with slavery, something the white southerners were particularly bitter about. They managed to find a way to legally reinstate slavery under a new name through sharecropping and Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan developed to prevent free blacks from voting. The Reconstruction failed to help freedmen gain footing in the nation, and in some ways, set the stage for the civil rights movement that was to come in the sixties.

Explain how the mistakes of President Johnson and the white southerners led to more radical polices

Johnson's presidential Reconstruction Andrew Johnson's presidency would be known primarily for the non enforcement and defiance of Reconstruction laws passed by the U.S. Congress and would be in constant conflict constitutionally with the Radicals in Congress over the status of freedmen and whites in the defeated South. Although resigned to the abolition of slavery, many former Confederates were not willing to accept the social changes nor political domination by former slaves. The defeated were unwilling to acknowledge that their society had changed.

Describe the actual effects of congressional Reconstruction in the South.

The Radical Republican Congress sought to safeguard the rights and liberties of African-Americans, and for a time, it succeeded at least in part. Black men held public office at the local, state, and federal levels. Black communities established their own churches, schools, and associations. The South as a whole received some of its first public hospitals and public schools. Reconstruction did not last longer than a decade in most places, but it was a critically important time that would be remembered for generations by blacks and whites alike (though usually in very different ways).

Explain why the radical Republicans impeached Johnson but failed to convict him

The Radical Republicans wanted to impeach Tennessee-native President Andrew Johnson because they perceived him to be a Southern sympathizer who wanted to allow the Southern states that had seceded back into the Union immediately and almost unconditionally. They saw Johnson as a threat to their Reconstruction plans. The conflict over Reconstruction was the underlying reason for Johnson's impeachment; the stated reason for impeachment was that he violated the 1867 Tenure of Office Act by (attempting to) fire Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, among other things. In February 1868, the US House of Representatives voted to bring eleven articles of impeachment against Johnson. He was later acquitted at his senate trial

Explain why the legacy of Reconstruction and assess its successes and failures

The Reconstruction implemented by Congress, which lasted from 1866 to 1877, was aimed at reorganizing the Southern states after the Civil War, providing the means for readmitting them into the Union, and defining the means by which whites and blacks could live together in a nonslave society. The South, however, saw Reconstruction as a humiliating, even vengeful imposition and did not welcome it. During the years after the war, black and white teachers from the North and South, missionary organizations, churches and schools worked tirelessly to give the emancipated population the opportunity to learn. Former slaves of every age took advantage of the opportunity to become literate. Grandfathers and their grandchildren sat together in classrooms seeking to obtain the tools of freedom. After the Civil War, with the protection of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, African Americans enjoyed a period when they were allowed to vote, actively participate in the political process, acquire the land of former owners, seek their own employment, and use public accommodations. Opponents of this progress, however, soon rallied against the former slaves' freedom and began to find means for eroding the gains for which many had shed their blood. The constitutional amendments and legislative reforms that laid the foundation for the most radical phase of Reconstruction were enacted from 1865 until 1870. By the 1870s Reconstruction had made some progress to provide the former slaves with equal rights under the law, including the right to vote, and with education to achieve literacy. During Reconstruction, most states in the South established public education, although funding was variable. However, much of the initial progress towards equal rights was rolled back between 1873 and 1877, when conservative whites (calling themselves "Redeemers") took power throughout the former Confederacy. In 1877 President Rutherford Hayes withdrew federal troops, causing the collapse of the remaining three Republican state governments. Through the enactment of Jim Crow laws and through extralegal means, the Redeemers subsequently enforced a system of racial segregation which stayed in place throughout the South into the 1960s. During the Civil War, Republican leaders agreed that slavery and the Slave Power had to be permanently destroyed, and that all forms of Confederate nationalism had to be suppressed. Moderates said this could be easily accomplished as soon as Confederate armies surrendered and the Southern states repealed secession and ratified the 13th Amendment—all of which happened by September 1865. President Abraham Lincoln was the leader of the moderate Republicans and wanted to speed up Reconstruction and reunite the nation as painlessly and as quickly as possible. Lincoln formally began Reconstruction in late 1863 with his Ten percent plan, which went into operation in several states but which Radicals opposed. Lincoln pocket vetoed the Radical plan, the Wade-Davis Bill of 1864, which was much more strict than the Ten-Percent Plan. The opposing faction of Radical Republicans were skeptical of Southern intentions and demanded more stringent federal action. Congressman Thaddeus Stevens and Senator Charles Sumner led the Radical Republicans. Radical Republican Charles Sumner argued that secession had destroyed statehood alone but the Constitution still extended its authority and its protection over individuals, as in the territories. Thaddeus Stevens and his followers viewed secession as having left the states in a status like newly conquered territory. The election of 1866 decisively changed the balance of power, giving the Radicals control of Congress and enough votes to overcome Johnson's vetoes and even to impeach him. Johnson was acquitted by one vote, but he remained almost powerless regarding Reconstruction policy. Radicals used the Army to take over the South and give the vote to black men, and they took the vote away from an estimated 10,000 or 15,000 white men who had been Confederate officials or senior officers. The Radical stage lasted for varying lengths in the different states, where a Republican coalition of freedmen, scalawags, and carpetbaggers took control and promoted modernization through railroads and public schools. They were charged with corruption by their opponents, the conservative-Democratic coalition, who called themselves "Redeemers" after 1870. Violence sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan was occasionally overcome by federal intervention. The Republicans believed that the best way for men to get political experience was to be able to vote and to participate in the political system. They passed laws allowing all male freedmen to vote. In 1867, black men voted for the first time. Over the course of Reconstruction, more than 1,500 African Americans held public office in the South. They did not hold office in numbers representative of their proportion in the population, but often elected whites to represent them. (The question of women's suffrage was also debated but was rejected.) The South's white leaders, who regained power in the immediate postwar era before the vote was granted to the freedmen, renounced secession and slavery, but not white supremacy. People who had previously held power were angered in 1867 when their state governments were ousted by federal military forces and replaced by Republican lawmakers elected by blacks, scalawags and carpetbaggers, but there were leaders in the South who tried to accommodate new conditions. Every Southern state subsidized railroads, which modernizers felt could haul the South out of isolation and poverty. Millions of dollars in bonds and subsidies were fraudulently pocketed. One ring in North Carolina spent $200,000 in bribing the legislature and obtained millions in state money for its railroads. Instead of building new track, however, it used the funds to speculate in bonds, reward friends with extravagant fees, and enjoy lavish trips to Europe.[31] Taxes were quadrupled across the South to pay off the railroad bonds and the school costs. There were complaints among taxpayers, because taxes had historically been very low, since there was so little commitment to public works or public education. Taxes historically had been much lower than in the North, reflecting a lack of public investment in the communities.[32] Nevertheless thousands of miles of lines were built as the Southern system expanded from 11,000 miles (17,700 km) in 1870 to 29,000 miles (46,700 km) in 1890. The lines were owned and directed overwhelmingly by Northerners. Railroads helped create a mechanically skilled group of craftsmen and indeed broke the isolation of much of the region. Passengers were few, however, and apart from hauling the cotton crop when it was harvested, there was little freight traffic. As Franklin explains, "numerous railroads fed at the public trough by bribing legislators...and through the use and misuse of state funds." The effect, according to one businessman, "was to drive capital from the State, paralyze industry, and demoralize labor." Reconstruction changed the tax structure of the South. In the U.S. from the earliest days until today, a major source of state revenue was the property tax. In the South, wealthy landowners were allowed to assess the value of their own land. These assessments were almost valueless and the pre-war tax rate was almost nothing. Pre-war southern states did not educate their citizens or build and maintain any infrastructure. State revenues came from fees and from sales taxes on slave auctions. Some states assessed property owners by a combination of land value and a capitation tax, a tax on each worker employed. This tax was often assessed in a way to discourage a free labor market, where a slave was assessed at 75 cents, while a free white was assessed at a dollar or more, and a free African American at $3 or more. Some revenue also came from poll taxes. These taxes were more than poor people could pay, with the designed and inevitable consequence that they did not vote. During Reconstruction, new spending on schools and infrastructure, combined with fraudulent spending and a collapse in state credit because of huge deficits, forced the states to dramatically increase property tax rates. In places, the rate went up to ten times higher—despite the poverty of the region. The infrastructure of much of the South--roads, bridges, and railroads--scarce and deficient as it was--had been destroyed during the war. In part, the new tax system was designed to force owners of large estates with huge tracts of uncultivated land either to sell or to have it confiscated for failure to pay taxes. The taxes would serve as a market-based system for redistributing the land to the landless freedmen and white poor. By 1872, President Grant had alienated large numbers of leading Republicans, including many Radicals by the wanton corruption of his administration and his use of federal soldiers to prop up Radical state regimes in the south

Describe the responses of both whites and African Americans to the end of slavery.

The freed slaves would be very pleased to see the end of slavery and to be free men/women. However a lot of them did not know what to do, where to go etc all they had known all their lives was slavery. They might have been free, but for some of them they had no homes, no job and worse no money! The Northern Whites would have been pleased to hear about the freedom of the slaves. For the Southern Whites it meant an end to cheap labor and many lost their homes and land because they could not afford to pay people to do the work.

Explain how militant white opposition gradually undermined the Republican attempt to empower Southern African Americans

They had laws restricting blacks the right to vote, one such law was the grandfather clause. If your grandfather was considered a slave then you did not have the right to vote. There was also a convict system in which white corporations or just rich whites would hire current convicts (mainly blacks) to work for them for no pay and horrible hours.them for no pay and horrible hours. Of course there was attacks by the KKK and other ex confederate organizations that kept the blacks in constant fear and convinced them to not speak out.