Reconstruction Era Flashcards
The Freedmen’s Bureau
The Freedmen’s Bureau, was established in the War Department by an act of Congress on March 3, 1865. The Bureau was responsible for the supervision and management of all matters relating to the refugees and freedmen and lands abandoned or seized during the Civil War, duties previously shared by military commanders and US Treasury Department officials. While a major part of the Bureau’s early activities included the supervision of abandoned and confiscated property, its mission was to provide relief and help formerly enslaved people become self-sufficient.
10% Plan
Released in Dec 1863
pardoned most former Confederates
if 10% of the voters from 1860 signed loyalty oaths -> the state could form a new government
Andrew Johnson
Johnson argued that, since he believed secession was illegal, the rebellious states had never truly left the Union.
Therefore, their relationship to the federal government ought to be restored as expediently as possible, and white supremacy, the political and social order that prevailed before the war, ought to continue, absent slavery.
Announced in May 1865 while Congress was in recess (Congress would not reconvene until December), Johnson’s plan granted amnesty, including the restoration of property, to the vast majority of Southern whites who supported the Confederacy as long as they were willing to take an oath of loyalty to the Union.
Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln believed in the justice of a merciful policy, but he also recognized that a swift procedure for reconstruction—taking place, in effect, as Union victories gradually spread throughout the South—would aid in the effort to bring the war to a speedy end.
Since Lincoln believed that the purpose of the war was to bring the Southern states back into their former relationship with the Union, he saw little distinction between good war policy and wise reconstruction policy.
Indeed, he preferred the term “Restoration” over “Reconstruction” because he did not wish to imply that something new was being constructed. Reconstruction, he believed, should re-establish the authority of the Constitution.
Radical Republicans
Radical Republicans, a progressive minority of the Republican Party, believed that Johnson’s approach was wholly unacceptable, and the Radicals’ position gained support from moderate Republicans as conflict between the president and Congress erupted in 1865 and 1866.
Wade-Davis Bill
Senator Benjamin F. Wade and Representative Henry Winter Davis in February 1864
50 percent of a state’s white males take a loyalty oath to be readmitted to the Union
States were required to give blacks the right to vote.
40 Acres and a Mule
Sherman issued Special Field Order 15 on January 16, 1865, which ordered 400,000 acres of land along the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida to be divided into 40-acre plots and provided to freedpeople and their families.
Black Codes
these laws required all blacks, whether free or slave before the Civil War, to sign annual labor contracts with white employers.
If they did not, or if they did not fulfill the terms of these contracts, they would be deemed vagrants and fined or imprisoned.
Literacy Tests
After the Civil War, many states enacted literacy tests as a voting requirement. The purpose was to exclude persons with minimal literacy, in particular, poor African Americans in the South, from voting.
Sharecropping
Many Southern blacks, therefore, had no choice but to negotiate labor or sharecropping contracts with planters—sometimes the very planters who had enslaved them.
Fairness in these negotiations was largely dependent on the goodwill of the landowner.
The Freedmen’s Bureau, charged with helping to facilitate fair labor contracts between planters and freedpeople, reported widespread acrimony over these agreements.
Congressional Reconstruction
The committee’s second legislative accomplishment was the Reconstruction Act of 1867. The first of several bills to define the terms of congressional Reconstruction, it divided former Confederate states other than Tennessee into five military districts and placed them under the command of former Union generals.
Civil Rights Bill
It declared all persons born in the United States to be national citizens (except American Indians, because tribes were considered “sovereign dependent nations” with their own governments).
It declared all citizens equal before the law. Historian Eric Foner writes: “No longer could states enact laws such as the Black Codes declaring certain actions crimes for black persons but not white.”
It declared for all citizens the rights of free labor, including the rights to make contracts, bring lawsuits, and have protection of their persons and property.
14th Amendment
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
New Orleans Massacre
In July, local whites attacked about 200 African Americans who were marching in support of black voting rights.
Thirty-four blacks and three white supporters were killed, more than 100 were injured, and the violence ended only when federal troops intervened.
Reconstruction Act
On March 3, 1865, Congress passed “An Act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees” to provide food, shelter, clothing, medical services, and land to displaced Southerners, including newly freed African Americans.
