Chapter 17: Reconstruction: North and South

• Reconstruction

• From 1865 - 1877

• Period of complexity and social turbulence

The War’s Aftermath

• North

• Passed Morrill Tariff → doubled the average level of import duties

• The National Banking Act → uniform baking system

• 1st transcontinental railroad from Omaha, Nebraska to Sacramento, California

• Homestead Act of 1862 → Congress provided free federal homesteads of 160 acres to settlers to live in for 5 years to gain title

• Morrill Land Grant Act → 30,000 acres of federal land per member of Congress from the state

• Economy of post-war South

• Property values collapsed

• Bonds and confederate money ⇒ worthless

• Railroads ⇒ destroyed

• Emancipation = south loses $4 Billion invested in human labor

• Cotton market ⇒ over

• Emotional loss → lost son, husbands, and body parts

• Freedmen’s Bureau

• 1865 by General Oliver O. Howard

• “Freed slaves ‘must be free to choose their own employers, and be paid for their labor’”

• Had agents to oversee negotiations

The Battle Over Political Reconstructions

• Lincoln’s Reconstruction Plan

• Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction → any former rebel state could form a union government whenever a number equal to 10% of those who voted in 1860, took an oath of allegiance to the constitution and the union, and received presidential pardon

• Must support laws and proclamations dealing with emancipation

• Certain groups were excluded from pardon

• Radical Republicans

• Favored a sweeping transformation of southern society based upon granting freed slaves full-fledged citizenship

• Reconstructed the south

• Talented and earnest legislators

• Congress to control reconstruction

• Wade-Davis Bill

• Senator Benjamin Franklin Wade and Representative Henry Winter Davis

• Require majority of white male citizens declare their allegiance and that those who could take an “ironclad” oath attesting to past loyalty could vote or serve in the state constitutional convention

• Vetoed by Lincoln

• John Wilkes Booth

• Crazed actor and confederate

• Kills Lincoln with a pistol

• Stabs Lincoln with a knife, jumps and breaks leg, and rides a horse away from the Ford’s theatre

• Andrew Johnson

• Vice president of Lincoln

• Combative

• Lacked presidential virtues

• Pro-Union Democrat

• Johnson’s reconstruction plan

•  New Proclamation of Amnesty (May 1865) → excluded those who Lincoln barred from pardon and those with taxable property worth $20,000

• Readmitting former confederate states

• Unionists became provisional government

• Invalidated secession ordinances, abolish slavery, and repudiate all debt incurred to aid the confederacy

• All states had to ratify the 13th Amendment

• Black suffrage

• Black codes: all-white southern state legislatures passed “black codes” to restrict freedom to African Americans

• Thaddeus Stevens

• Part of Joint Committee on Reconstruction

• Radical Republican

• From Pennsylvania 

• “Confederate states should be considered conquered territory”

• Civil Rights Acts:

• (Illinois) Senator Lyman Trumball

• Response to black codes and new-slavery system

• “‘All persons born in the US and not subject to foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed,’ were citizens entitled to ‘full and equal benefits of all laws.’”

• 14th Amendment: guarantee of basic citizenship for All Americans including African Americans

Reconstructing the South

• 1866 midterm election: Republicans win ⅔ + majority in each house

• Congressional Reconstruction

• 3 crucial laws 

• 1. The Military Reconstruction Act

• 2. Command of the Army Act

• 3. Tenure of Office Act

• Designed to prevent white southerners from manipulating the reconstruction process

• Impeachment of Andrew Johnson

• Republicans unsuccessful in early 1867

• Johnson gives a reason for impeachment when he deliberately violated the Tenure of Office ACts → tried to remove Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to General Ulysses S. Grant

• Did not pass either

• Damaged Radical Republican morale and support

• 15th Amendment

• Submitted 1869 → ratified in 1870

• Forbids the states to deny any person the vote on grounds of race, colour, and previous condition of servitude

• Union League

• Pennsylvania 1862

• Enrolled African Americans and loyal whites, to secrets and rituals in the order, and instruct them their rights and duties

The Reconstructed South

• African American life during reconstruction

• Freedom but not protection against exploitation or abuse

• Union Army → leadership training

• Nationalism

• Churches → baptists

• Organized fraternal, benevolent, and mutual aid societies

• Clubs, lodges, and associations

• Reestablished their families

• Sharecropping: crops produced are shared between tenant farmer and landowner → wives/mothers could contribute to family’s income

• Mary McLeod Bethune

• Walked 5 miles to school

• Earned scholarship to college

• First black woman to found a school (4-year college) → Bethune-Cookman (Daytona Beach, Florida)

• African-Americans and Politics

• Beverly Nash → African American delegate to South Carolina, “give a man a tool.. He will learn a trade”

• Represented northern presence

• Whites, “Political equality ≠ social equality”

• Carpetbagger: Northerners that went south to grab political spoils and economic opportunity

• Scalawag

• Native white republicans

• Reviled and misrepresented

• Opposed succession, unionist majority in mountain counties of Georgia and Alabama and hills of Eastern Tennessee

• Legacies of Radical Reconstruction

• Allowing black voting and civil rights

• Expansive railroad network

• Established state-supported public school systems

• Gave attention to the poor, orphanages, asylums, and institutions for the deaf and blind of both races

• Public roads, bridges, and buildings were rebuilt/repaired

• African Americans achieved rights → equality before law and right to own property, carry on business, enter professions, attend schools, and learn to read and write

• Corrupt practices → high bids for government contracts and rewarding public money to privates, especially railroads

• Religion and Reconstruction

• Christian principals to challenge the theological and “scientific” jurisdiction for racial inferiority

• Protestant dominant

• “Apostles of forgiveness” prized white unity over racial equality

The Grant Years

• Ulysses S. Grant

• Served as president during the collapse of Republicans

• Great military leader and youngest president (46 years old)

• Blind to political forces and influence peddlers around him

• Followed wealthy men and unaccountably loyal to betrayers

• Passively followed congress

• Hard Money

• Gold

• Sound money

• Soft Money: greenbacks

• Jay Gould and James Fisk

• Connived with president’s brother-in-law to purchase gold like crazy in hopes of getting rich quick

• Treasury selling gold lowers golds value

• Crédit Mobilier: a sham construction company run by directors of the Pacific Railroad who charged fees for personal gain

• Whiskey Ring: bribed tax collectors to bilk the government out of millions of dollars in revenue

• KKK: white supremacy group that harmed many blacks and prominent republican leaders

• Enforcement Acts (1870-1871): a series of 3 acts

• 1. Interfering with any citizens' vote

• 2. Elections need to be supervised

• 3. KKK activity outlawed

• Liberal Republicans: faction that favored free trade over tariffs, greenbacks plus gold, a stable currency, end to Federal Reconstruction in the South, restored rights to former confederates, and civil service reform

• Horace Greenley

• Editor of New York Tribune

• Candidate for presidency in 1872

• Vegetarianism, socialism, and spiritualism

• Republican control in the south

• Upper south leaned democrat

• Deep south = clan violence

• Clan violence = less republican morale ⇒ north has less desire to reconstruct south

• Panic of 1873

• Nations money supply (greenbacks) goes to railroad companies

• John Cooke and Company bank bankrupts (later other banks do too)

• Specie Resumption Act

• Greenback value equal gold value

• “Good as gold”

• Mulligan Letters

• James Mulligan of Boston has letters linked to Blaine to some dubious (sus, sketchy, questionable) railroad dealings

• Made to print

• Rutherford B. Hayes

• Presidential candidate for republicans

• Pro-gold

• Civil service reformer

• Offended no one

• Samuel J. Tilden

• Wealthy corporation lawyer and reform governor of New York

• Directed campaign to overthrow Tweed ring controlling New York City’s politics

• Election of 1876

• Generated the most votes in American history

• Hayes’s wins after having to do an election with selected members of each house

• Compromise of 1877: ends reconstruction

Chapter 18