Ch. 16 Questions

Why did Johnson urge the southern states to reject the Fourteenth Amendment?

"Johnson felt the Amendment was unconstitutional. He wanted the southerners to rely on him to trounce the republicans in the next election."

Why did Congress object to Lincoln's wartime plan for reconstruction?

"Congress thought Lincoln was being too soft on the former Confederate states. Congress was dominated by Radical Republicans, who wanted the South punished for secession.They also wanted to use a harsh Reconstruction program to seize political and economic control of these states for themselves." Phillips and other northern radicals called instead for a thorough overhaul of southern society. Their ideas proved to be too drastic for most Republicans during the war years, but Congress agreed that LIncoln's plan was inadequate.

What brought the elements of the South's Republican coalition together?

"Opposition to slavery's expansion in the western territories." "In American politics, the Southern strategy refers to a Republican Party strategy of gaining political support for certain candidates in the Southern United States by appealing to racism against African Americans."

How did the Supreme court undermine the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments?

"The 14th and 15th Amendments were undermined by the Supreme Court because the court ruled that Congress was not able to punish a state or states that violated the civil rights of African-Americans. The purpose of the amendments was to correct injustices that had resulted from slavery." "In the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Supreme Court decided that the 14th Amendment didn't mean what it plainly DOES mean. Instead, the Court decided that the 14th Amendment protects only "privileges or immunities" of citizenship of the United States and not citizenship of a state. The result is that the states are free to do what the 14th Amendment seems to prohibit - discriminate against classes of citizens based on their rights as citizens of the state, such as the right to work and the right to equal protection writ large. This bad decision has made a mess of the 14th Amendment and rendered what should've been a new landmark in civil rights a mere dead letter."

How did the North respond to the passage of black codes in the southern states?

"With indifference. After Reconstruction, the South was left largely on its own to do as it wished. Not until the 1950s did the federal government seriously begin to pass and enforce laws providing Black Americans with equal rights, over the objections of the Southern states."