Do Now
•If you were in charge of Reconstruction,
how would you treat the returning South?
(harsh, nice,etc.)
•What would they have to do to rejoin the
Union?
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“War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. We
are not only fighting hostile armies, but a
hostile people, and must make young and old,
rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war!”
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Rebuild infrastructure
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Towns/railroads/farms/factories etc.
Re-organize political system
What to do with the 4 million former slaves?
What to do with the Confederate leadership?
(Soldiers, generals, government?)
Who should be in charge of the
Reconstruction? (South, President, Congress?)
How to rebuild the economy of the South?
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Lincoln’s Plan
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10% plan- oath!
 VERY EASY
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Andrew Johnson’s Plan
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13TH AMENDMENT/ TOUGHER THAN LINCOLN
Radical Republican Congress Plan
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CONGRESS RUNS SHOW
HARDEST BY FAR/ THE ONE USED
9 YR MILITARY OCCUPATION
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Food/clothing/shelter
$$ for transportation to move or to help find
family members that were shipped away
Education/jobs
Lawyers to legalize slave marriages
Problems faced by Freedmen’s Bureau
Lack of $$$
 Few volunteers/ low paying
 Resistance by southern whites
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80% eligible freedmen joined Republican party
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Carpetbaggers
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7 blacks in 1870 Congress (Hiram Revels- 1st black Senator, took
Jefferson Davis old seat in Senate
90% eligible freedmen voted (at first)
Northerners who moved to the South to “help” in
Reconstruction
Scalawags
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Ancient Irish term for a runty, worthless animal
Southerners who joined Republican Party/aided
Reconstruction
General Longstreet
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If you were now a former freed slave, would you a) try to
go back to Africa b) move to the North c) stay in the South
Why??????
97% stayed in the South (500 freedmen from Virginia
moved North) Why so few??
 No $$ to move North
 Low paying jobs in the North
 The only skill they had was farming, factory work
foreign to them
 Almost all were born in the US by now, so Africa was
not their home
 Families in the South
By 1910, only 10% of blacks lived in the North or West of
the US
WWI- “Great Migration” to the North
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Most former slaves took part in the labor system of
sharecropping
 Freedmen rented land from former slave owner
 Gave ½ to 2/3 of their crop yield to the landowner
Fair System?
Positives
 Kind of their own land
 Personal stake in the outcome
 Not wage labor/share with landowner risk/reward
system
Negatives
 Borrowing $ until crop yields for basic
necessities/permanent debt
 Never owning their own land/similar to serf system in
Middle Ages
Lasted for almost 100 years
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Washington
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Du Bois
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“Up From Slavery”
Basically self-educated, born into slavery
Tuskegee Institute (Alabama)
Gradual equality- accept discrimination now….get education,
skills, earn good living, then equal rights will come
Founded NAACP
Wanted equal rights immediately
Whites will never treat us equal, so we must fight thru courts to
get it or return to Africa
1st to graduate from Harvard
“Talented Tenth”
Which guy do you agree with more and why?
•How
could Southern state governments deny
African-Americans their rights of voting and
equality?
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Literacy Tests
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Poll Taxes
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You had to know how to read in order to vote
Is this a good idea?
Overturned by Voting Rights Act 1965
You had to pay to vote
Is this fair?
Overturned 24th amendment 1964
Grandfather Clauses
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Various ways to exclude poor whites from literacy test/poll taxes, etc.
 If your grandfather was eligible to vote
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Jim Crow Laws
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Segregation of the races in public places
How was this allowed to exist as laws?
Upheld by Plessy vs. Ferguson
Overturned by lots of cases, laws during Civil Rights movement, Brown vs.
Board of Ed was main thrust