Reconstruction
Chapter 15
Presidential Reconstruction
• How should the Southern states be re-admitted into the Union?
• Lincoln’s “10 Percent Plan”
 Southerners could be reinstated as citizens by taking a oath of
loyalty
 When a number equal to 10 percent of those who had voted in
1860 had done so they could set up a state government
 That government must be a republican form, must recognize
freedom of slaves, and provide for education of freed slaves
Presidential Reconstruction
• Radicals against 10 percent plan – too moderate and gave
Lincoln too much power to determine policy in South
• Radicals passed Wade-Davis Bill
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Constitutional conventions in states had to have a majority
Those who bore arms against Union were barred from voting
States had to repudiate Confederate debt
Bill vetoed by Lincoln (just prior to assassination)
Lincoln Presidency
Lincoln Dead!
• After Lee’s surrender, John Wilkes Booth’s plot to kidnap
Lincoln changed to assassination
• Lincoln was not the only one targeted- General Grant,
Vice-President Johnson, and Secretary of State Seward
were also to be killed
Lincoln Dead!
Lincoln Dead!
Lincoln Dead!
Lincoln Dead!
Lincoln Dead!
Lincoln Dead!
Lincoln Dead!
Lincoln Dead!
Lincoln
Johnson
John Wilkes Booth
George Atzerodt
Seward
Lewis Powell
Grant
Lincoln Dead!
Mary Surratt was the first woman to be
executed by the US government
Lincoln Dead!
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Major Rathbone, who, with his fiance Clara
Harris, had accompanied the Lincolns to Fords
theater, was appointed counsel to Hannover,
Germany in 1882
While there, he killed his wife, almost killed his
three children, and attempted suicide
Rathbone spent the rest of his life in a German
insane asylum
It is said that Rathbone’s insanity was caused
by his sense of failure in stopping Booth
In the 1950’s, the bodies of Rathbone and his
wife were disposed of by the German cemetery
Lincoln Dead!
• Robert Lincoln
 Only Lincoln son to reach
adulthood (Edward, Willie, and
Tad all died in childhood)
 Had his mother committed to an
insane asylum (she escaped)
 Was present at the
assassination of President
Garfield
 Was present at the McKinley
assassination
Robert Lincoln
Lincoln Dead!
 Some weeks before his father’s
assassination, Robert Lincoln was at
the train station
 A large crowd jostled him and he fell
from the platform onto the tracks into
the path of an oncoming train
 Just before he would have been hit and
probably killed, a hand reached down
and grabbed him, pulling him to safety
 The man that saved Robert Lincoln
was Edwin Booth, older brother of
Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John
Wilkes Booth
Edwin Booth
Presidential Reconstruction
• Lincoln succeeded by Andrew Johnson
 Tennessee Unionist Democrat
 Champion of the small farmer
 Hated Southern aristocrats which endeared him to Republican
radicals thinking he was anti-South
 Johnson shared South’s views on states’ rights and contempt
for blacks
 Enacted an amnesty program only slightly more rigorous than
Lincoln’s
 By 1865, all Southern states had governments, had ratified the
13th Amendment, and were ready to re-join the Union
Republican Radicals
• Southern states provoked North by electing
representatives from former Confederacy
• South provoked North by enacting Black Codes
• Johnsonian Reconstruction therefore rejected
Congress versus Johnson
• Johnson vetoed legislation
expanding the Freedmen’s Bureau
• Congress passed Civil Rights Act
putting teeth in 13th Amendment
• Johnson’s veto was overridden –
Congress was now in control
• Radicals demanded extra rights to
protect blacks – faced increasing
opposition
President Andrew Johnson
Fourteenth Amendment
• Supplied a broad definition of American
citizenship
• Struck at discriminatory state laws such
as Black Codes
• If states refused the vote to any adult
male, its representation was to be
reduced
• Former federal officials who had served
in the Confederacy were barred from
holding state or federal office
• The Confederate debt was repudiated
The Reconstruction Acts
• South unwilling to ratify 14th Amendment
• Furious North enacted coercive measures known as the
Reconstruction Acts
• Divided South into military districts each controlled by a
general with near-dictatorial powers
• Military rule would end only with ratification of the 14th
Amendment
The Reconstruction Acts
• First Reconstruction Act too vague to be workable –
South made no effort to follow laws
• A Second Reconstruction Act required military to register
voters and supervise election of delegates to
constitutional conventions
• Southerners refused to go to the polls
• Georgia last to ratify in 1870
Congress Supreme
• Southern resistance to even the mildest forms of
reconstruction goaded the North to apply increasingly
harsher measures
• Johnson’s stubbornness also influenced Republicans
• Congress exerted more authority over army, cabinet
members, and even Supreme Court (size reduced and
jurisdiction limited)
Congress Supreme
• Johnson refused to submit to
Congress reducing executive
powers
• Johnson violated “Tenure of Office
Act of 1867” by removing Sec. War
Stanton
• Johnson was impeached but
escaped conviction by 1 vote
• Kept Congress from permanently
damaging the power of the
executive
President Andrew Johnson
The Fifteenth Amendment
• Grant elected president in 1868
• Radicals wanted to give right of
vote to all blacks in all states
• Republicans saw black vote as
advantageous – 15th Amendment
sent to states in 1869 and ratified in
1870
• Amendment to give suffrage to all
men regardless of color – women
outraged
• Suffrage restricted through literacy
tests and other measures
“Black Republican” Reconstruction
• Within five years of emancipation, blacks were exerting
real political influence
• Real winners were “scalawags” – white Southerners
willing to cooperate with Republicans
• “Carpetbaggers” – Northerners who went to South to help
blacks, serve in federal system, or take advantage of the
destitute South
Confederate General
James Longstreet
Hillary Clinton
Carpetbagger
Scalawag
“Black Republican” Reconstruction
• Blacks failed to dominate Southern politics
• Most of those who held office were house servants or
artisans
• Mulattos also fared better politically and socially
• Black officials were usually competent and conscientious
though there were examples of corruption
“Black Republican” Reconstruction
• Biggest thieves were white
• Despite wasted money,
Southern infrastructure was
rebuilt
• Major contribution made by
the Freedmen’s Bureau
• Programs enacted under
Black Republicans as well as
corruption continued under
white rule that came later
The Ravaged Land
• South was never as wealthy as the North – now it was
desperately poor due to the destruction of war
• Radical Republicans wanted to confiscate plantations and
divide land between freed slaves
• Land without seed and tools useless
• Blacks had to either strike out on their own or work for
former masters
The Ravaged Land
• Black productivity dropped
after emancipation
• Whites assumed blacks “lazy”
• Black family dynamics
changed- male authority
increased and women moved
to child-rearing roles
Sharecropping and Crop-Liens
• After the war, Southern planters
tried farming through gang-labor –
failed due to scarce money and
black dislike of working under
whites
• Sharecropping system emergedplanter supplied land, seed,
equipment in return for half the crop
• Sharecropping gave blacks more
control over their lives
• Poor whites also sharecroppers
White Backlash
• Dissident Southerners powerless to
oppose the League openly
• Secret terrorist societies
established such as KKK, White
Camelia, and Pale Faces
 KKK began as social club in 1866 but
by 1868 it was taken over by vigilantes
trying to drive blacks out of politics
 Claimed to be ghosts of dead
Confederate soldiers
 When intimidation failed they used
violence
White Backlash
• KKK eroded will of white
Republicans and Black voters
• Open intimidation and violence
erupted with the Red Shirts in
Mississippi beginning 1874
• Terrorism against blacks increased
white fears of black retaliation
• Blacks learned to stay home on
election day
White Backlash
• Northern anger at South diminished over time and
“conservative” white governments took over in South
• North had little interest in racial equality
• Southern idea of the need for the workforce to be
disciplined gained ground in the North
Johnson Presidency
Grant as President
• Stock market crash of 1873
created economic problems
for a decade
• Controversies over
“greenbacks” versus “sound”
money
• Used US troops to crush KKK
– wanted to attack KKK in
second term but Congress
refused funds
• Corruption
President Ulysses Grant
Grant Presidency
Election of 1876
• Republican: Rutherford B. Hayes /
Democrat: Samuel J. Tilden
• Tilden carried enough states to win
– Republicans controlling Southern
states threw out Democratic ballots
so that Hayes “won”
• BUT many blacks kept from voting
• An electoral commission organized
by Congress to judge the election
was corrupted by both sides
• Commission voted for Hayes 8 to 7
President Rutherford B. Hayes
Compromise of 1877
• Southern Democrats ready to accept
Hayes if military occupation of South
ended
• Hayes elected - troops removed
• Efforts made by Republicans to find
niche in South but South remained
solidly Democratic
• Compromise ended Reconstruction
and began new political order in the
South
• Blacks returned to second-class status
as North & courts forgot about them
Hayes Presidency