5.10 & 5.11: Reconstruction
5.10: Explain the effects of government policy during Reconstruction on society from 1865 to 1877.
5.11: Explain how and why Reconstruction resulted in continuity and change in regional and national understandings of what it meant to be American.
Welcome to the last set of notes for Unit 5! In the last set of notes, we talked about the Civil War and now, we’re going to be talking about Reconstruction, the time period in which the country worked to put itself back together.
10% Plan For Reconstruction
After the Civil War, there were many debates on what to do about the former Confederate states. Abraham Lincoln wanted to forgive the Confederacy because he believed that the South had never truly left the Union. He also feared that if the South was punished too harshly, there might be another civil war. As a result, he introduced the 10% Plan for Reconstruction. This allowed southern states to rejoin the Union and have their state governments re-established if at least 10% of their voters pledged loyalty to the Union. The South would also need to ratify the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery. Unfortunately, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford Theater before he could implement this plan.
Radical Republicans
The Radical Republicans were a group of individuals who were against Johnson's policies, believing that the nation suffered greatly from the war, and therefore, the South deserved severe punishment. Because they believed Johnson was doing nothing to punish the South, they wanted Reconstruction to be carried out through Congress and legislation, not by the president. Through Congress, they passed various laws to grant rights to black people. For example, the Freedman’s Bureau was created to provide aid to newly freed black people, including food, shelter, medical care, and clothing. This also created schools and colleges for them. They also passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. This act granted citizenship and equal protection under the law to all people born in the U.S. However, Johnson vetoed both pieces of legislation. In response, the Radical Republicans got a two-thirds majority in Congress to override his veto and pass the laws. They also turned the Civil Rights Act into a Constitutional amendment to make it permanent, creating the 14th Amendment.
President Andrew Johnson and Black Codes
After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson became the 17th president. Although he tried to implement Lincoln’s plan, he was not interested in emancipation or racial equality due to being a southerner from Tennessee. Because of this, the South remained mostly unchanged after the war. Southern states were free to continue discrimination and this led to them enacting Black Codes. These were laws that were designed to limit the freedoms of black people and force them to work for low wages. Some of these limitations included:
African Americans could not borrow money to buy or rent land, making them vulnerable to the sharecropping system
African Americans could not testify against white people in court, preventing violence against blacks from ever being heard in the justice system
African Americans without a home or a job could be arrested and forced to work hard labor under a white employer (vagrancy law)
African Americans could not own firearms
In some areas, African Americans could only work as servants or laborers
Another piece of legislation passed was the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which, again, was passed over Johnson’s veto. These acts divided the South into five districts. Each district was put under federal military occupation in order to enforce the new laws. They also increased the requirement for southern states rejoining the Union to include the ratification of the 14th Amendment. Lastly, they passed a guarantee to the right to vote to all males, regardless of race. This helped lead to the first black people in Congress such as Senators Blanche K. Bruce and Hiram Revels.
Impeachment
Due to Johnson’s vetoes, the Republicans passed the Tenure of Office Act in 1867, which made it illegal for a president to fire a member of his cabinet without Senate approval. Johnson, in response, fired his Secretary of War. This led to the House voting to impeach Johnson in February of 1868. Although the Senate failed to remove him by only one vote, the trial made him powerless to influence Reconstruction any further.
Women’s Rights
The 13th Amendment outlawed slavery. The 14th Amendment granted citizenship and equal protection under the law to anyone born in America. The 15th Amendment gave all men in America the right to vote, regardless of their race. However, none of these amendments gave women the right to vote. This angered many women's rights advocates such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. As a result, the women’s rights movement split into two separate groups. Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) to continue the fight for women's voting rights. On the other hand, others like Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell believed that focusing on Reconstruction was more important. They believed that the fight for women’s suffrage should be focused on the states first instead of getting an amendment passed. Their supporters established the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA).
Failure of Reconstruction
And now we get to the tragic end of Reconstruction: its failures. So why did Reconstruction fail?
Well, one of the main reasons was that there were many loopholes to counteract the amendments created.
The 13th Amendment abolished slavery, but a new farming system called sharecropping was created to replace it, where black workers would sign contracts to work in the fields and be bound to the plantation they worked on. This system was similar to slavery and allowed the South to maintain an agricultural labor force. But over time though, this system did grow less extreme and was replaced by land owners giving workers seed and farm supplies in exchange for part of the harvest for free. And also, poor white people eventually came to be targeted by this sharecropping system too. This system kept sharecroppers in debt because they couldn’t sell their own crops, forcing them to keep working. There was also convict leasing, where blacks convicted of crimes had to work for companies for free.
The 14th Amendment granted citizenship and equal rights to all born in the US but was undermined by Black Codes and Supreme Court decisions such as the Slaughterhouse Cases and Cruikshank Case. In the Slaughterhouse Cases, they ruled that the amendment only applied to federal citizenship and not state citizenship. In the Cruikshank Case, they ruled that equal rights only affected the federal government, not individuals or states.
The 15th Amendment granted voting rights to all men, but African Americans were lynched and killed to prevent them from having political power. After 1877, they were also required to pay poll taxes and take literacy tests to vote.
Scandals of Ulysses S. Grant
During the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant from 1869 to 1877, several scandals occurred. Many corrupt businessmen and political bosses engaged in illegal activities to benefit themselves. In 1869, Jay Gould and James Fisk, aided by Grant's brother-in-law, cornered the gold market in the Black Friday gold panic of 1869. This caused the gold market to collapse. In the Credit Mobilier Scandal, railroad executives created a fake company to bribe politicians and conduct fraud against the U.S. government. In the Whiskey Ring from 1871 to 1876, whiskey distillers bribed members of the Treasury to avoid taxes. In 1876, Grant's Secretary of War was impeached for accepting kickback bribes from a tradership in the Oklahoma Territory.
Additionally, the idea of white supremacy continued to exist in the South. While black people were now constitutionally equal to the rest of the population, they weren’t societally equal and white southerners definitely did not treat them equally. For example, a secret society known as the Ku Klux Klan was formed in 1865 to terrorize black people and perpetuate the idea of white supremacy. Members of the Klan would burn buildings, control local politics, and even held public and private lynchings of black people.
Rutherford B. Hayes and the Compromise of 1877
Rutherford B. Hayes became the 19th president of the United States in the Election of 1876. However, neither he nor his opponent, Samuel Tilden, received enough electoral votes to win the election. Because of this, a special electoral commission was created to settle the election. However, it had a Republican majority and ruled in favor of Hayes. This angered the Democrats, who threatened to prevent his inauguration. To stop tensions from rising again just like before the Civil War, Hayes agreed to withdraw all federal troops from the South in the Compromise of 1877. This ended Reconstruction. By this time, however, Reconstruction was already unsustainable. Northerners were mostly already tired of dealing with Southern problems. They cared more about industrial and manufacturing growth in their own states rather than racial issues. As a result, this gave the South the opportunity to freely dominate regional politics and continue discrimination against the black population.
