Chapter 22 Flashcards
Freedmen’s Bureau
A welfare agency that would provide food, clothing, medical care, and education both to freedmen and poor whites. Created in March 1865 and expired in 1872. Led by former Union General Oliver O. Howard.
Greatest success was in education: 200k learned to read and write
Problems: Black people didn’t receive the promised “40 acres and a mule” and were often forced into signing labor contracts with former masters— Sharecropping!
Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty & Reconstruction
Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, aka the 10 percent plan (1683) would allow a state to reintegrate into the Union when 10 percent of votes had taken an oath of allegiance to the US and pledged to honor emancipation.
Radical Republicans (Sumner, Stevens)
The minority of the Republican Party (Radicals) wanted the South to atone for its sins by uprooting the social structure and upholding rights and equality for Black people.
Radical leadership:
Senate: Charles Sumner (MA) labored for freedom for Black people and racial equality
House: Thaddeus Stevens (PA) hated rebellious white Southerners and was devoted to Black people. When he died, he wanted to be buried in an integrated cemetery in PA. On this stone, it wanted it to say, “I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life, Equality of Man before his Creator.”
Wade-Davis Bill
Radical Republicans in Congress countered Lincoln’s 10% plan with the Wade-Davis Bill (1864), which required 50 percent of a state’s voters to take an oath of allegiance to the government and demanded stronger safeguards for emancipation. Lincoln killed this bill with a pocket veto.
Johnson’s 1865 Reconstruction Proclamation
Johnson’s 1865 Reconstruction Proclamation was similar to Lincoln’s. It also called for disenfranchising wealthy ex-Confederates (who held taxable property over 20k dollars, and a special state conventions to repeal the ordinances of secession and ratify the 13th Amendment
Radical Republicans were surprised: they thought that Johnson would side with them, as he also hated the planter class.
Military Reconstruction (Reconstruction Act of 1867)
The Reconstruction Act of 1867 divided the South into five military districts, each commanded by a Union general and policed by soldiers. States were required to ratify the 14th amendment
Exodusters
“Exodusters (Black people who left the South for the west)” left for Kansas between 1878-80.
Black Codes
Passed by many Southern states, these were aimed at regulating the affairs of the emancipated Black people to ensure a stable and subservient labor force. Examples:
- Penalties were enforced for Black people who jumped labor contracts.
- “Negro-catchers” could forcibly drag Black people back to work
- Black people could not vote, sit on a jury, rent or lease land
- Black people could be forced to work on chain gangs if found “idle”
- Black people could be punished the same way a parent might punish a child.
- Thousands of Black people and poor whites began sharecropping, farming a plot of land owned by another person and giving up 2.3 of the crop to the owner
KKK
Formed in 1866 in TN, the KKK members dressed as ghosts to scare “upstart” Black people away from the polls
Congress passed the Force Acts in 1870-71 in an effort to curtail the Klan, making it a crime to interfere with registration, voting, office holding, or jury service of Black people but the Klan continued to intimidate
The KKK Act of 1781 labeled the Klan as a terrorist organization. These acts were poorly enforced
The white South openly disobeyed the 14th and 15th Amendments by denying black people the right to vote through intimidation, fraud, and trickery (like literacy tests)
Force Acts
Congress passed the Force Acts in 1870-71 in an effort to curtail the Klan, making it a crime to interfere with registration, voting, office holding, or jury service of Black people
Scalawags
Freedmen’s white allies were labeled “scalawags” (traitors)
Carpetbaggers
Freedmen’s white allies were labeled “carpetbaggers” (northerners who profited off the South)
1866 congressional elections
In the 1866 congressional election campaign, Democratic Johnson’s “soft on the South policy” helped to inadvertently win votes for the Republicans, since Johnson falsely accused Radical Republicans of having planned large-scale riots in the South (like Memphis and New Orleans Riots.)
The Republicans gained a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress. Moderates prevailed.
“New South”
At its core were the following principles:
Diversified crops: cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar
Industrialization: cotton mills, coal production, hydroelectricity, more railway lines to move fresh food to the North
Healthy growth over time
A “separate but equal” philosophy. Segregation became common and state laws (Jom Crow laws) legalized it
Andrew Johnson
Humble beginnings: an orphan and tailor’s apprentice, Johnson never attended school and taught himself to read and his wife later taught them arithmetic
Active in TN politics and a minor slaveholder, he championed the cause of poor whites
Served in Congress and as war governor of TN after Union occupation (while in Congress, he refused to secede with his own state)
Championed state’s rights and the Constitution ( a copy was buried with him)
