Period 5

Racist Stereotyping (pre-Civil War)

-Blacks were painted in negative fashion in radio shows and other performances -Includes white actors doing black face and then acting dumb to be blacks -Stereotype of blacks being unintelligent and stupid

National leaders made a variety of proposals to resolve the issue of slavery in the territories, including the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but these ultimately failed to reduce sectional conflict.

-1854 -Unlike the lands taken from Mexico, Kansas and Nebraska lay in the nation's heartland, directly in the path of western migration -Slavery was prohibited under the terms of the Missouri Compromise, which Douglas's bill repealed -Kansas-Nebraska Act helped to convince millions of northerners that southern leaders aimed at nothing less than extending their particular institution throughout the West -Allowed Kansas and Nebraska to decide to be either a slave or free state -Became law and shattered the unity of the Democratic Party -Caused the collapse of the Whig Party

Asian, African American and white peoples sought new economic opportunities or religious refuge in the West, efforts that were boosted during and after the Civil War with the passage of new legislation promoting national economic development.

-A bit more equality as they were considered men as well -Debate over how much rights they should hold

Abolitionists, although a minority in the North, mounted a highly visible campaign against slavery, adopting strategies of resistance ranging from fierce argument against the institution and assistance in helping slaves escape to willingness to use violence to achieve their goals.

-Abolitionists continued to increase in power -Spoke out in public and stood up for what they believed in -Helped slaves -States' rights, nullification, and racist stereotyping provided the foundation for the Southern defense of slavery as a positive good.

The women's rights movement was both emboldened and divided over the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution.

-Advocates of women's rights encountered the limits of the Reconstruction commitment to equality -Women activists saw the Reconstruction as their time to claim their own emancipation -The destruction of slavery led feminists to search for new ways to make the promise of free labor real for women -Demands for liberalizing divorce laws and for recognizing "women's control over her own body" -Radical Republicans insisted the Reconstruction was the "Negro's hour" -The 14th Amendment introduced the word "male" into the Constitution -The 15th Amendment outlawed discrimination in voting based on race but not gender -Some leaders, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, opposed the 15th amendment because it didn't help women -In order to gain support, they appealed to racial and ethic prejudices, stating that native-born white women deserved the vote more than non-white and immigrants -Other abolitionist-feminists, like Abby Kelley and Lucy Stone, the Reconstruction amendments represented steps in the direction of truly universal suffrage and should be supported -A spilt in feminism occurred and in 1869, two separate women's rights organizations were formed, the National Woman Suffrage Association (Stanton) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (Stone) -Even as Reconstruction rejected the racial definition of freedom that existed in the first half of the 19th century, it left the gender boundary largely intact

U.S. interest in expanding trade led to economic, diplomatic, and cultural initiatives westward to Asia.

-Asia= very good trading partner -U.S. wanted to grow closer to utilize that -Push west and then developing stronger economics and diplomatic strategies

National leaders made a variety of proposals to resolve the issue of slavery in the territories, including the Compromise of 1850, but these ultimately failed to reduce sectional conflict.

-California would enter the Union as a free state -The slave trade, not slavery itself, would be abolished in Washington D.C. -A stringent new law would allow southerners to reclaim runaway slaves -The status of slavery in the remaining territories acquired from Mexico would be left to the decision of the local white inhabitants -The U.S. would pay off the massive debt Texas has accumulated while independent

Civil Rights Bill

-Defined all persons born in the United States as citizens and spelled out the rights they were to enjoy without regard to race -States could not enact Black Codes and no state could deprive any citizen of the right to make contracts, bring lawsuits, or enjoy equal protection of one's person and property -No mention of blacks's right to vote -Represented the first attempt to give concrete meaning to the 13th Amendment -Made law in April 1866, despite Johnson's veto

The second party system ended when the issues of slavery and anti-immigrant nativism weakened loyalties to the two major parties and fostered the emergence of sectional parties, most notably the Republican Party in the North and Midwest.

-Divide over slavery and territory -Whig Party collapsed over the Kansas-Nebraska Act -Several groups formed and it was very divided

The Civil War Amendments established judicial principles that were stalled for many decades but eventually became the basis for court decisions upholding civil rights

-Due to actions in the South, the government established several new bills and amendments to the Constitution that upheld civil rights in the courts -Civil Rights Bill- defined all persons born in the United States as citizens and spelled out the rights they were to enjoy without regard to race -14th Amendment -15th Amendment -Black's rights were protected in the law

National leaders made a variety of proposals to resolve the issue of slavery in the territories, including the Dred Scott decision, but these ultimately failed to reduce sectional conflict.

-During the 1830s, Scott had accompanied his owner to Illinois, where slavery was illegal, and to the Wisconsin Territory. After returning to Missouri, he sued for his freedom, claiming that his residence on free soil made him free -Announced in March 1857 -Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that only white persons could be citizens of the U.S., therefore Scott had no right to sue -Declared Scott to still be a slave as Illinois law had no effect on him after he returned to Missouri. As for his residence in Wisconsin, Congress had no power under the Constitution to bar slavery from a territory -Scott's owner freed him and his wife -But caused Republicans to believe the Court as controlled by the Slave Power

Although Confederate leadership showed initiative and daring early in the war, the Union ultimately succeeded due to improved military leadership, more effective strategies, key victories, greater resources, and the wartime destruction of the South's environment and infrastructure.

-Each side tried to find ways to maximize its advantages -The Confederacy adopted a defensive strategy, with occasional thrusts into the North -The Confederacy's leading commander, Robert E. Lee, was a brilliant battlefield tactician who felt confident in his ability to fend off attacks from the much larger Northern armies and hoped that a series of defeats would weaken the North's resolve, so the North would eventually abandon the conflict and recognize Southern independence -Lincoln's early generals found it impossible to bring the Union's advantages in manpower and technology to bear on the battlefield -April 1861- the regular army= 15,000 men, most were stationed west of the Mississippi -North- narrowness of military vision -Wanted to capture the Southern capital, Richmond, so they attacked sporadically and withdrew after battle -Lincoln realized that simply capturing and occupying territory wouldn't win the war and that defeating the South's armies had to be the North's battlefield objective -Slavery= cornerstone of the Confederacy so the North turned that into a military target -Battle of Bull Run- July 21, 1801 -George B. McClellan

Why didn't the Emancipation Proclamation liberate all the slaves?

-Exempted areas firmly under Union control -Didn't apply to the loyal border slave states that never seceded or to areas of the Confederacy occupied by Union soldiers, such as Tennessee and parts of V.A. and Louisiana

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery, bringing about the war's most dramatic social and economic change, but the exploitative and soil intensive sharecropping system endured for several generations.

-Former slaves's ideas of freedom were directly related to landownership -Many former slaves insisted that through their unpaid labor as slaves they had acquired a right to the land as "joint heirs" to the estate -Former slaves's definition of freedom resembled that of white Americans- self-ownership, family stability, religious liberty, political participation, and economic autonomy -Planters had a difficult time understanding the freedom of their former slaves -The Freedmen's Bureau was established to help with race relations -Planters wanted their former slaves to return to work but the former slaves wanted land of their own -Because no land distribution occurred, the vast majority of rural freed-people remained poor and property-less during Reconstruction -They had no choice but to work on white-owned plantations, sometimes for their former owners -Black men were largely confined to farm work, unskilled labor, and service jobs, and black women to positions in private homes as cooks and maids -Sharecropping initially arose a compromise between blacks's desire for land and planters's demand for labor discipline -The system allowed each black family to rent a part of a plantation, with the crop divided between worker and owner at the end of the year -Sharecropping, however, became more and more oppressive

Substantial numbers of new international migrants — who often lived in ethnic communities and retained their religion, language and customs — entered the country prior to the Civil War, giving rise to a major, often violent nativist movement that was strongly anti-Catholic and aimed at limiting immigrants' cultural influence and political and economic power.

-General population was very nativist and anti-Catholic -Didn't like immigrants yet immigrants continued to come in search of opportunities

Lincoln's election on a free soil platform in the election of 1860 led various Southern leaders to conclude that their states must secede from the Union, precipitating civil war.

-In effect, 2 Elections occurred in 1860 -In the North, Lincoln and Douglas were the combatants while in the South, the Republicans had no presence and 3 candidates contested the election- Douglas, Breckinridge, and John Bell of Tennessee, a candidate of the hastily organized Constitutional Union Party -Lincoln carried all of the North except N.J. with 1.8 million popular votes and 180 electoral votes -Douglas= the only candidate with significant support in all parts of the country -Lincoln was elected -In the eyes of many white Southerners, Lincoln's victory placed their future at the mercy of a party avowedly hostile to their region's values and interests -Slaveowners feared Republican efforts to extend their party into the South by appealing to non-slaveholders -S.C. was the 1st to secede on December 20, 1860 -The South rebelled not merely against a particular government but against the erroneous modern idea of freedom based on "human equality" and "nature liberty" -Struggle on what to do -Crittenden's proposal -Before Lincoln officially became president, 7 states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America with an constitution and had Jefferson Davis as their president

States' rights (pre-Civil War)

-Increase in federal power threatened the states

The desire for access to western resources led to the environmental transformation of the region, new economic activities, and increased settlement in areas forcibly taken from American Indians.

-Jackson excluded Indians from the nationalism experienced during this time period -1832- The last Indian resistance, federal troops and local militiamen routed the Sauk leader Black Hawk, who, with about 1,000 followers, attempted to reclaim ancestral land in Illinois -In slave states, the onward march of cotton cultivation placed enormous pressure on the remaining Indian landholdings -"Extending the area of slavery" required "converting Indian soil into slave soil" -1820s- Missouri forced Indians to leave the state -Indian Removal Act of 1830- provided funds for uprooting the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole) with a population around 60,000 living in NC, GA, FL, AL, and Mississippi -Reputed the idea that "civilized" Indians could be assimilated into the American population -Tribes had taken efforts to become everything republican citizens should be -Johnson v. M'Intosh- Supreme Court ruled that Indians weren't owners of their lands but merely had a "right of occupancy" -Worcester v. Georgia- Indians had the right to maintain a separate political identity -Trail of Tears -Indian resistance

Nullification (pre-Civil War)

-Wasn't a purely sectional issue -South Carolina stood alone during the crisis and several southern states condemned it -The elaboration of the compact theory of the Constitution gave the South a well-developed political philosophy to which it would turn when sectional conflict intensified -Calhoun denied that it would lead to disunion, rather it assured that national actions would never trample on the rights or vital interests of the states, "concurrent majority" -To Jackson- Nullification was nothing less than disunion -Issue came to a head in 1832 with the tariff -South Carolina declared that the tax on important goods null and void the following February and Jackson convinced Congress to enact a Force Bill, having the army and navy collect taxes -After a new tariff that reduced duties was enacted, SC rescinded the nullification but nullified the Force Act

The idea of Manifest Destiny, which asserted U.S. power in the Western Hemisphere and supported U.S. expansion westward, built on a belief in white racial superiority and a sense of American cultural superiority, and helped to shape the era's political debates.

-Manifest destiny= the U.S. was destined to spread all of the continent -Linkage between westward expansion and freedom -Idea that the U.S. had been selected by God for the greatest experiment in human history, the achievement of liberty, and that westward expansion was part and parcel of this destiny -The settlement and economic exploitation of the West promised to prevent the U.S. from following down the path of Europe and becoming a society with fixed social classes and a large group of wage-earning poor -The West still held out the chance to achieve economic independence, the social condition of freedom -Argument of if slavery should expand into the West as well The acquisition of new territory in the West and the U.S. victory in the Mexican-American War were accompanied by heated controversy over allowing or forbidding slavery in newly acquired territories. -New territories lead to greater dispute -Argument whether these states should be free or slave -Missouri Controversy

Efforts by Radical and Moderate Republicans to reconstruct the defeated South changed the balance of power between Congress and the presidency and yielded some short-term successes, reuniting the union, opening up political opportunities and other leadership roles to former slaves, and temporarily rearranging the relationships between white and black people in the South.

-May 1865- Johnson outlined his plan for reuniting the nation -Johnson issued a series of proclamations that began the period of Presidential Reconstruction -Johnson offered a pardon to nearly all white southerners who took an oath of allegiance, excluding Confederate leaders and wealthy planters -This exemption suggested that initially Johnson may have planned a more punitive Reconstruction than Lincoln had intended -Also appointed provisional governors and ordered them to call state conventions, elected by whites only, that would establish loyal governments in the South -Apart from the requirement that they abolish slavery, repudiate secession, and refuse to pay the Confederate debt, Johnson granted the new governments a free hand in managing local affairs -The conduct of southern governments elected under his program turned most of the Republican North against Johnson -White voters returned prominent Confederates and members of the old elite to power in the South -The Black Codes

The United States in 1861

-No national railroad gauge (the distance separating the 2 tracks) so trains built for one line couldn't run on another -No national banking system -No tax system capable of raising the enormous funds to finance the war -No accurate maps of the southern states

15th Amendment

-Opened the door to suffrage restrictions not explicitly based on race -Marked the culmination of 4 decades of abolitionist agitation

Both the Union and the Confederacy mobilized their economies and societies to wage the war even while facing considerable home front opposition.

-Propaganda boosted the morale of the people and the war effort -Both sides unprepared for war -Lincoln imposed a naval blockade on the South, but it didn't become effective until later in the war -Problem of purchasing and distributing the food, weapons, and other supplies required by the soldiers -Union army= best-fed and best supplied military force in history while the southern armies suffered from acute shortages of food, uniforms, and clothes -Josiah Gorgas proved brilliantly resourceful in arming southern troops -Under his direction, the Confederate government imported weapons from abroad and established arsenals of its own to turn out rifles, artillery, and ammunition

As the territorial boundaries of the United States expanded and the migrant population increased, U.S. government interaction and conflict with Hispanics and American Indians increased, altering these groups' cultures and ways of life and raising questions about their status and legal rights.

-Pushed into their native lands during western expansion -Non-white, and Hispanics were often Catholic. Should they be allowed to be citizens?

Radical Republicans' efforts to change southern racial attitudes and culture and establish a base for their party in the South ultimately failed, due both to determined southern resistance and to the North's waning resolve.

-Radical Republicans attempted to establish a base in the South -Many Reconstruction officials were northerners who for one reason or another made their homes in the South after the war (carpetbaggers) -Large majority were former Union soldiers who decided to stay in the South when the war ended, before there was any prospect of going into politics -Others were investors in land and railroads who saw in the postwar South an opportunity to combine personal economic advancement with a role in helping to substitute "the civilizations of freedom for that of slavery" -Most white Republicans were born in the South (scalawags) -Scalawags cooperated with the Republicans in order to prevent "rebels" from returning to power -Others hoped Republican governments would help them recover from wartime economic losses by suspending the collection of debts and enacting laws protecting small property holders from losing their homes to creditors -Even in the Deep South, the small white Republican vote was important, because the population was almost evenly divided between blacks (who voted for Lincoln's party) and whites (Democrats) -Reconstruction governments in many respects failed in the South, but they did manage to accomplish a lot -Establishment of the South's first state-supported public schools -These schools were generally segregated -By the 1870s, in a region whose prewar leaders had made it illegal for slaves to learn and had to done little to provide education for poorer whites, more than half the children, black and white, were attending schools -The new governments pioneered civil rights legislation, making it illegal for railroads, hotels, and other institutions to discriminate based on race -Republican governments took steps to strengthen the position of rural laborers and promote the South's economic recovery -They passed laws to ensure that agricultural laborers and sharecroppers had the first claim on harvested crops -SC's state Land Commission -The South's traditional leaders bitterly opposed the new governments

Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation changed the purpose of the war, enabling many African Americans to fight in the Union Army, and helping prevent the Confederacy from gaining full diplomatic support from European powers.

-Signed on January 1, 1863 -But the majority of the South's slaves were declared "henceforward shall be free" -Since most of these slaves were behind Confederate lines, their liberation would have to await Union victories -It set off scenes off jubilation among free blacks and abolitionists in the North and "contrabands" and slaves in the South -By making the Union army an agent of emancipation and wedding the goals of the Union and abolition, the Proclamation sounded the eventual death knell of slavery -Represented a turning point in Lincoln's own thinking -Contained no reference to slaveholding or to colonization of the freed people -Government enlisted black soldiers in the Union army -Lincoln= The Great Emancipator -Lincoln later refuses suggestions to change the document in the interest of peace -The Civil War now portended a far reaching transformation in southern life and a redefinition of American freedom -Freed slaves would become part of American life -The evolution of Lincoln's emancipation policy displayed the hallmarks of his wartime leadership

The North's expanding economy and its increasing reliance on a free-labor, manufacturing economy contrasted with the South's dependence on an economic system characterized by slave-based agriculture and slow population growth.

-Slavery affected the lives of all Americans, both white and black -Money earned in the cotton trade helped to finance the industrial developments and internal improvements in the North -Northern ships carried cotton to NY and Europe, northern bankers financed cotton plantations, northern companies insured slave property, and northern factories turned cotton into cloth -Slavery led the South down a very different path of economic growth of industry, discouraging immigrants from entering the region, and inhibiting technological progress -The South didn't share in the urban growth experienced by the rest of the country -Only city in the Cotton Kingdom of significant size= New Orleans -1860- South produced less than 10% of the nation's manufactured goods -The South depended on slave labor to produce cotton and the inter-continental slave trade to produce revenue

Although citizenship, equal protection of the laws and voting rights were granted to African Americans in the 14th and 15th Amendments, these rights were progressively stripped away through segregation, violence, Supreme Court decisions and local political tactics.

-The Civil War ended in 1865, but violence remained widespread in large parts of the postwar South -In the early years of Reconstruction, violence was mostly local and unorganized -The violence that greeted the advent of Republican governments after 1867 was far more pervasive and more directly motivated by politics -Secret societies sprang up with the aim of preventing blacks from voting and destroying the organization of the Republican Party by assassinating local leaders and public officials -Ku Klux Klan -Military arm of the Democratic Party in the South -Founded in 1866 in Tennessee -Terrorist organization -Led by planters, merchants, and Democratic politicians -Committed some of the most brutal criminal acts in American history -"reign of terror" -Victims included white Republicans, among them wartime Unionists and local officeholders, teachers, and party organizers -In York county, SC, nearly all the white male population joined the Klan -Meridian, Mississippi -1871 -Some 30 blacks were murdered in cold blood, along with a white Republican judge -Colfax, Louisiana -1873 -Armed whites assaulted the town with a small cannon -Hundreds of former slaves were murdered, including 50 members of a black militia unit after they surrendered -1870 and 1871- Congress adopted 3 Enforcement Acts, outlawing terrorist societies and allowing president to use the army against them

14th Amendment

States couldn't deny the right to vote without a penalty