Chapter 15-Reconstruction and the New South

Question 1

“Lost Cause”

Answer 1

White Southerners began to romanticize the “Lost Cause” and its leaders, and to look back nostalgically at the South as it had existed before the disruptions of war.

R.E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis were all treated as almost religious figures.

Communities built elaborate monuments in war dead in town squares.

Sense of loss reinforced the determination of many whites to protect what remained of their now vanished world.

Question 2

conceptions of freedom

Answer 2

former slaves and the defeated whites had very different conceptions of what freedom meant.

For African Americans, freedom meant above all and end to slavery and humiliation/injustice associated with it. Also meant getting rights and protections so they could live free the same way as whites.

Some African Americans demanded a redistribution of economic resources. Others asked simply for legal equality.

All wanted independence from white control. Freed from slavery, blacks throughout the South began almost immediately to create autonomous African American communities. They pulled out of white-controlled churches and established their own. They created fraternal, benevolent, and mutual-aid societies. When they could, they began their own schools.

many white planters wanted to continue slavery in an altered form by keeping black workers legally tied to the plantations. When many white Southerners fought for what they considered freedom, they were fighting above all to preserve local and regional autonomy and white supremacy.

Question 3

Thirteenth Amendment

Answer 3

December 1865- abolished slavery everywhere where it was not already abolished from the emancipation proclamation.

Question 4

Freedmen’s Bureau

Answer 4

In March 1865, Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency of the army directed by General Oliver O. Howard.

Distributed food to millions of former slaves.

Established schools staffed by missionaries and teachers who had been sent to the South by Freedmen’s Aid Societies and other private and church groups in the North. BIGGEST SUCCESS WAS EDUCATION.

Made modest efforts to settle blacks on lands of their own. (The bureau also offered considerable assistance to poor whites, many of whom were similarly destitute and homeless after the war.)

The Freedmen’s Bureau was not a permanent solution. By the time the war ended, other proposals for reconstruction were emerging

Question 5

Conservative Republicans

Answer 5

Conservatives insisted that the South accept the abolition of slavery, but proposed few other conditions for the readmission of the seceded states.

Question 6

Radical Republicans

Answer 6

The Radicals, led by Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, urged that the civil and military leaders of the
Confederacy be punished, that large numbers of Southern whites
be disenfranchised, that the legal rights of former slaves be protected, and that the property of wealthy white Southerners who
had aided the Confederacy be confiscated and distributed among the freedmen. Some Radicals favored granting suffrage to the former slaves. Others hesitated, since few Northern states permitted
blacks to vote.

Question 7

10% Plan

Answer 7

Lincoln’s Reconstruction plan, which he announced in 1863, offered a general amnesty to white Southerners—other than high officials of the Confederacy—who would pledge loyalty to the government and accept the elimination of slavery.

Whenever 10 percent of the number of voters in 1860 took the oath in any state, those loyal voters could set up a state government.

Lincoln also hoped to extend suffrage to African Americans who were educated, owned property, and had served in the Union army. Three Southern states—Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, all under Union occupation—reestablished loyal governments under the Lincoln formula in 1864.

Question 8

Wade-Davis Bill

Answer 8

The Radical Republicans were upset by the mildness of
Lincoln’s 10% plan.

Radicals’ first effort to resolve that question was the Wade-Davis Bill, passed by Congress in July1864.

Said that when a majority (not Lincoln’s 10 percent) of the white males of the state pledged their allegiance to the Union, the governor could summon a state constitutional convention, whose delegates were to be elected by those who would swear (through the so called IRONCLAD OATH) that they had never borne arms against the United States—another departure from Lincoln’s plan.

The new state constitutions would have to abolish slavery, disenfranchise Confederate civil and military leaders, and repudiate debts accumulated by the state governments during the war. After a state had met these conditions, Congress would readmit it to the Union. Like the president’s proposal, the Wade-Davis Bill left up to the states the question of political rights for blacks. Congress passed the bill a few days before it adjourned in 1864, and Lincoln disposed of it with a POCKET VETO.

Question 9

John Wilkes Booth

Answer 9

April 14 1865, Lincoln is shot from behind in the head by John Wilkes Booth a member of a distinguished family of actors and a zealous advocate of the Southern cause. The play he was watching was a comedy called Our American Cousin

The president was carried unconscious to a house across the street, where early the next morning, surrounded by family, friends, and political associates (among them a tearful Charles Sumner), he died.

The circumstances of Lincoln’s death earned him immediate martyrdom and produced hysteria in the North.

Many conspiracy theories emerged since Booth worked with associates, one of whom stabbed and wounded Secretary of State Seward the night of the assassination, another of whom abandoned at the last moment
a plan to murder Vice President Johnson.

Booth himself escaped on horseback into the Virginia countryside, where, on April 26, he was cornered by Union troops and shot to death in a blazing barn.

A military tribunal convicted eight other people of participating in the conspiracy (at least two of them on the basis of virtually no evidence). Four were hanged.

Many Northerners thought it was a Southern plot to slow Lincoln’s plans.

Question 10

Presidential Reconstruction (Restoration)

Answer 10

Johnson revealed his plan for Reconstruction—or “Restoration,” as he preferred to call it—soon after he took office, and he implemented it during the summer of 1865, when Congress was in recess. Like Lincoln, he offered amnesty to those Southerners who would take an oath of allegiance.

In most other respects, however, his plan resembled that of the Wade-Davis Bill. For each state, the president appointed a provisional governor, who was to invite qualified voters to elect delegates to a constitutional convention. Johnson did not specify how many qualified voters were necessary, but he implied that he would require a majority (as had the Wade-Davis Bill). In order to win readmission to Congress, a state had to revoke its ordinance of secession, abolish slavery, ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, and repudiate the Confederate and state war debts. The final procedure before restoration was for a state to elect a state government and send representatives to Congress.

By the end of 1865, all the seceded states had formed new governments—some under Lincoln’s plan, some under Johnson’s—and were prepared to rejoin the Union as soon as Congress recognized them. But Radical Republicans vowed not to recognize the Johnson governments, just as they had previously refused to recognize the Lincoln regimes; for by now, Northern opinion had hardened and become more hostile toward the South than it had been a year earlier when Congress passed the Wade-Davis Bill. Many Northerners were disturbed by the apparent reluctance of some delegates to the Southern conventions to abolish slavery, and by the refusal of all the conventions to grant suffrage to any blacks. They were astounded that states claiming to be “loyal” should elect prominent leaders of the recent Confederacy as state officials and representatives to Congress. Particularly hard to accept was Georgia’s choice of Alexander H. Stephens, former
Confederate vice president, as a United States senator.

Question 11

Radical/Congressional Reconstruction

Answer 11

Presidential Reconstruction continued only until Congress reconvened in December 1865. At that point, Congress refused to seat the representatives of the “restored” states and created a new Joint Committee on Reconstruction to frame a Reconstruction policy of its own. The period of “congressional,” or “Radical,” Reconstruction had begun.

Throughout the South in 1865 and early 1866, state legislatures were enacting sets of laws known as the Black Codes, designed to give whites substantial control over former slaves. The codes authorized local officials to apprehend unemployed African Americans, fine them for vagrancy, and hire them out to private employers to satisfy the fine. Some of the codes forbade blacks to own or lease farms or to take any jobs other than as plantation workers or domestic servants.

Congress first responded to the Black Codes by passing an act extending the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and widening its powers so that it could nullify work agreements forced on freedmen under the Black Codes. Then, in April 1866, Congress passed the first Civil
Rights Act, which declared African Americans to be citizens of the United States and gave the federal government power to intervene in state affairs to protect the rights of citizens. Johnson vetoed both bills, but Congress overrode him on each of them.

Question 12

Fourteenth Amendment

Answer 12

April 1866-granted citizenship to those born in the US and guaranteed “privileges and immunities” of the constitution

Would reduce representation in Congress if a state denied suffrage to adult males

Former Confederates could NOT hold office

provided the first clear definition of citizenship and did not exclude african americans

Question 13

Fifteenth Amendment

Answer 13

Passed in 1869, ratified in 1870-forbade the states and the federal government to deny suffrage to any citizen on account of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” (right to vote for all male citizens)

Wasn’t necessarily entirely successful (still sometimes made them go through literacy tests etc)

Question 14

Tenure of Office Act

Answer 14

Law passed by congressional radicals to stop the president from interfering with their plans. Had doubtful constitutionality passed in 1867. Tenure of Office Act, forbade the president from removing civil officials, including members of his own cabinet, without the consent of the Senate. The principal purpose of the law was to protect the job of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who was cooperating with the Radicals.

Johnson dismissed him anyway, which led the Radicals to impeach him. Radicals were did not win in court and dropped the impeachment effort.

Question 15

scalawags

Answer 15

Southerners that favored Reconstruction (mostly for economic reasons)

Question 16

carpetbaggers

Answer 16

Northerners that moved South during Reconstruction

Term conveyed an image of penniless adventurers who arrived with all their possessions in a carpetbag. In fact, most of the so called carpetbaggers were well-educated people of middle-class origin, many of them doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Most were veterans of the Union army who looked on the South as a new frontier, more promising than the West. They had settled there at war’s end as hopeful planters or as business and professional people.

Question 17

B. Bruce & H. Revels

Answer 17

Two African Americans that served in the Mississippi Senate.

Question 18

sharecropping

Answer 18

Renting land and paying via crops

most blacks, and a growing minority of whites, did not own their own land during Reconstruction; and some who acquired land in the 1860s had lost it by the 1890s. These people worked for others in one form or another. Many African American agricultural laborers—perhaps 25 percent of the total—simply worked for wages. Most, however, became tenants of white landowners—working their own plots of land and paying their landlords either a fixed rent or a share of their crop

The new system represented a repudiation by former slaves of the gang-labor system of the antebellum plantation, in which slaves had lived and worked together under the direction of a master. As tenants and sharecroppers, African Americans enjoyed at least a physical independence from their landlords and had the sense of working their own land, even if in most cases they could never hope to buy it. But tenantry also benefited landlords in some ways, relieving them of any responsibility for the physical well-being of their workers.

Question 19

crop-lien system

Answer 19

Receiving credit from a local store and given credit at a very high rate (50-60 percent) led to debt for borrowers and were often unable to pay it off.

Question 20

Horace Greeley/Liberal Republicans

Answer 20

By the end of Grant’s first term members of a
substantial faction of the party—who referred to themselves as Liberal Republicans—had come to oppose what they called “Grantism.” In 1872, hoping to prevent Grant’s reelection, they bolted the party and nominated their own presidential candidate: Horace Greeley, veteran editor and publisher of the New York Tribune. The Democrats, somewhat reluctantly, named Greeley their candidate as well, hoping that the alliance with the Liberals would enable them to defeat Grant. But the effort was in vain. Grant won a substantial victory, polling 286 electoral votes to Greeley’s 66, and nearly 56 percent of the popular total.

Question 21

Grant scandals

Answer 21

Credit Mobilier:

• Union Pacific Railroad company created bogus contracts to make $
• members of Congress and Grant’s VP accepted bribes/stock from Union Pacific Railroad

Whiskey Ring:

• Government officials were creating false tax reports
• Secretary of War William W. Belknap accepted bribes to retain an Indian post-trader in office

Although Grant was never proven to be directly involved with or to have personally profited from the scandals or frauds, his acceptance of personal gifts and his associations with men of questionable character severely damaged his own presidential legacy and reputation.

Question 22

Panic of 1873

Answer 22

began with the failure of a leading investment banking firm, Jay Cooke and Company, which had invested too heavily in postwar railroad building.

worse than any earlier economic crisis. The depression it produced lasted four years.

Debtors now pressured the government to redeem federal war bonds with greenbacks, paper currency of the sort printed during the Civil war, which would increase money in circulation and allow debt to be payed. But most republicans did not want that

Question 23

National Greenback party

Answer 23

In 1875, the “greenbackers,” as the inflationists in the panic of 1873 were called, formed their own political organization: the National Greenback Party. It was active in the next three presidential elections, but it failed to gain widespread support. It did, however, keep the money issue alive. The question of the proper composition of the currency was to remain one of the most controversial and enduring issues in late-nineteenth-century American politics.

Question 24

“Seward’s Icebox”

Answer 24

also called Seward’s Folly
1867-purchase of Alaska
William H. Seward who has served Lincoln accepted a Russian offer to sell Alaska to the US for 7.2 million despite criticism from many Americans who considered Alaska a frozen wasteland adn derided it as “Seward’s Folly” (they didn’t know about the oil yet)

Question 25

“Redeemer” governments

Answer 25

The Redeemers were an eclectic group of individuals comprised of wealthy businessmen, farmers and merchants. This was an all-white, pro-Democratic Party group, and they shared a general disdain for Republicanism as well as for the rights of African Americans.

The collective goal of the group was to destroy the political institutions and race relations that were formed during Reconstruction. This meant that the Redeemers sought to end Republican controlled state governments as well as remove African Americans from political positions and restrict their overall right to equality.

for example, state support for public school systems was reduced or eliminated. “Schools are not a necessity,” an economy-conscious governor of Virginia commented. By the late 1870s, significant dissenting groups were challenging the Bourbons: protesting the cuts in services and denouncing the commitment of the Redeemer governments to paying off the prewar and Reconstruction
debts in full, at the original (usually high) rates of interest.

Question 26

Ku Klux Klan

Answer 26

Formed in 1866 and led by former Confederate general NATHAN BEDFORD FOREST, it gradually absorbed many of the smaller terrorist organizations in the South. Its leaders devised rituals, costumes, secret languages, and other airs of mystery to create a bond among its members and make the organization seem even more terrifying to those it was attempting to intimidate. The Klan’s “midnight rides”—bands of men clad in white sheets and masks, their horses covered with white robes and with hooves muffled—created terror in black communities throughout the South.

Many white Southerners considered the Klan and the other secret societies and paramilitary groups proud, patriotic societies. Together such groups served, in effect, as a military force (even if a decentralized and poorly organized one) continuing the battle against Northern rule. They worked in particular to advance the interests of those with the most to gain from a restoration of white supremacy—above all the planter class and the Southern Democratic Party. Even stronger than the Klan in discouraging black political power, however, was the simple weapon of economic pressure. Some planters refused to rent land to Republican blacks; storekeepers refused to extend them credit; employers refused to give them work.

Question 27

Enforcement Acts

Answer 27

In 1870 and 1871, Republican Congress passed two Enforcement Acts, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Acts, which were in many ways the most radical measures of the era. The Enforcement Acts prohibited the states from discriminating against voters on the basis of race and gave the federal government power to supersede the state courts and prosecute violations of the law.

It was the first time the federal government had ever claimed the power to prosecute crimes by individuals under federal law. Federal district attorneys were now empowered to take action against conspiracies to deny African Americans such rights as voting, holding office, and serving on juries.

The new laws also authorized the president to use the military to protect civil rights and to SUSPEND THE RIGHTS OF HABEUS CORPUS when violations of the rights seemed particularly egregious.

Hundreds of suspected Klan members were arrested; some were held for long periods without trial; some were eventually convicted under the law and sent to jail.

The Enforcement Acts were seldom used as severely as they were in South Carolina, but they were effective in the effort by blacks and Northern whites to weaken the Klan. By 1872, Klan violence against blacks was in decline throughout the region.

Question 28

“Social Darwinism”

Answer 28

The economic crisis spurred Northern industrialists and their allies to find an explanation for the poverty and instability around them. They found it in a new idea known as “Social Darwinism” a harsh theory that argued that individuals who failed did so because of their own weakness and “unfitness.”

Those influenced by Social Darwinism came to view the large number of unemployed vagrants in the North—and poor African Americans in the South—as irredeemable misfits. Social Darwinism also encouraged a broad critique of government intervention in social and economic life, which further weakened commitment to the Reconstruction program. Support for land redistribution, never great, and willingness to spend money from the depleted federal treasury to aid the freedmen, waned quickly after 1873. State and local governments also found
themselves short of funds, and rushed to cut back on social services—which in the South meant the end of almost all services to the former slaves.

Question 29

Compromise of 1877

Answer 29

Hayes (Republican) v. Tilden (Democrat)

Tilden received 184 electoral votes to Hayes 165; 185 needed to win
20 votes were in dispute
Eventually all 20 were given to
Hayes

Democrats were outraged and threatened to filibuster the results and send the election to the House of Representatives which they controlled. An informal deal was worked out–Hayes would become president if 1. he ended federal support for the Republicans in the south and 2. support the building of a Southern transcontinental railroad. Shortly after his inauguration, President Hayes fulfilled his part in the compromise. He withdrew the last of the federal troops protecting blacks and other Republican, effectively contributing to the end of reconstruction.

Question 30

Dunning school

Answer 30

Dunning portrayed Reconstruction as a corrupt outrage perpetrated on the prostrate South by a vicious and vindictive group of Northern Republican Radicals. Unscrupulous carpetbaggers flooded the South to profit from the misery of the defeated region. Ignorant, illiterate blacks were thrust into positions of power for which they were entirely unfit.

Question 31

W.E.B. Du Bois

Answer 31

among the first to challenge the Dunning view. In Black Reconstruction (1935), Du Bois argued that Reconstruction politics in the Southern states had been an effort on the part of the masses, black and white, to create a more democratic society. The misdeeds of the Reconstruction governments, he claimed, had been greatly exaggerated, and their achievements overlooked.

Question 32

Reconstruction legacies

Answer 32

Reconstruction was largely a failure although it made some small strides. Essentially the US abandoned its effort to resolve the race problem.

Deep respect for constitution limited willingness of leaders to infringe on states rights

strong belief that whites were superior

Question 33

Readjusters

Answer 33

By the late 1870s, significant dissenting groups were challenging the Bourbons (redeemers): protesting the cuts in services and denouncing the commitment of the Redeemer governments to paying off the prewar and Reconstruction
debts in full, at the original (usually high) rates of interest. In Virginia, for example, a vigorous “Readjuster” movement emerged, demanding that the state revise its debt payment procedures so as to make more money available for state services.

Question 34

“New South” characteristics

Answer 34

All Southern States had been “redeemed” by democrats

Education decreased

Industrialization came slowly at first

Question 35

Booker T. Washington

Answer 35

The chief spokesman for this commitment to education,
and for a time the major spokesman for African Americans in the South (and beyond), was Booker T. Washington, founder and president of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Born into slavery, Washington had worked his way out of poverty after acquiring an education (at Virginia’s famous Hampton Institute). He urged other blacks to follow the same road to self-improvement.

Washington’s message was both cautious and hopeful. African Americans should attend school, learn skills, and establish a solid footing in agriculture and the trades. Industrial, not classical, education should be their goal. They should, moreover, refine their speech, improve their dress, and adopt habits of thrift and personal cleanliness; they should, in short, adopt the standards of the white middle class. Only thus, he claimed, could they win the respect of the white population, the prerequisite for any
larger social gains. African Americans should forgo agitating for political rights, he said, and concentrate on self-improvement and preparation for equality.

Question 36

Atlanta Compromise

Answer 36

In a famous speech in Georgia in 1895, Washington outlined a philosophy of race relations that became widely known as the Atlanta Compromise. Said that If African Americans were ever to win the rights and privileges of citizenship, they must first show that they were “prepared for the exercise of these privileges.”

Washington offered a powerful challenge to those whites who wanted to discourage African Americans from acquiring an education or winning any economic gains. He helped awaken the interest of a new generation to the possibilities for self-advancement through self-improvement. But his message was also an implicit promise that African Americans would not overtly challenge the system of segregation that whites were then in the process of erecting.

Question 37

Plessy v. Ferguson

Answer 37

1896-Eventually, the Court also validated state legislation that institutionalized the separation of the races. In Plessy v. Ferguson a case involving a Louisiana law that required separate seating arrangements for the races on railroads, the Court held that separate accommodations did not deprive blacks of equal rights if the accommodations were equal, a decision that survived for years as part of the legal basis for segregated schools.

Question 38

Jim Crow (voting, laws, social practices)

Answer 38

segregated public facilities and supported idea of “separate but equal”
enforced between 1876 and 1965
Upheld by Plessy v. Ferguson

Question 39

Ida B. Wells

Answer 39

In 1892 Ida B. Wells, a committed black journalist,
launched what became an international anti-lynching movement with a series of impassioned articles after the lynching of three of her friends in Memphis, Tennessee, her home. The movement gradually gathered strength in the first years of the twentieth century, attracting substantial support from whites (particularly white women) in both the North and South. Its goal was a federal anti-lynching law, which would allow the national government to do what state and local governments in the \
South were generally unwilling to do: punish those responsible for lynchings.

But the substantial white opposition to lynchings stood as an exception to the general white support for suppression of African Americans.