U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Murrin et al ., Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People 5/e (Thomson, 2008)
Ch. 17 “Reconstruction, 1863-1877”
IA: Chapter Outline . The following is a basic outline for the chapter, based on section headings in/of the chapter. Your task is to expand upon/amend/add to/enhance this basic foundation with details, examples and supporting evidence for each component of the outline. That is, flesh out the outline in a way that communicates your understanding of the substantive material in the chapter. In the class notes section of your notebook, write out your expanded outline at the beginning of each new respective unit or section so that it serves as the organizational concept map for subsequent class (lecture/discussion) notes on related material.
I. Wartime Reconstruction
A. Radical Republicans and Reconstruction
II. Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction
A. Johnson’s Policy
B. Southern Defiance
C. The Black Codes
D. Land and Labor in the Postwar South
E. The Freedmen’s Bureau
F. Land for the Landless
G. Education
III. The Advent of Congressional Reconstruction
A. Schism between President and Congress
B. The Fourteenth Amendment
C. The 1866 Elections
D. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867
IV. The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson
A. The Completion of Formal Reconstruction
B. The Fifteenth Amendment
C. The Election of 1868
V. The Grant Administration
A. Civil Service Reform
B. Foreign Policy Issues
C. Reconstruction in the South
D. Blacks in Office
E. “Carpetbaggers”
F. “Scalawags”
G. The Ku Klux Klan
H. The Election of 1872
I. The Panic of 1873
VI. The Retreat from Reconstruction
A. The Mississippi Election of 1875
B. The Supreme Court and Reconstruction
C. The Election of 1876
D. Disputed Results
E. The Compromise of 1877
F. The End of Reconstruction
VII. Conclusion

IB: IDs . For the following key terms—people, events, concepts, places, titles
— first, identify and place each in historical time and place and context by answering the “Who? What? When? Where?” questions, and second, analyze the “Why-is-this-important-and/or-significant?” question. Each component—identifying the term and analyzing its significance—is an essential aspect for understanding, and these should be incorporated into your chapter notes/outline.
Credit Mobilier
Andrew Johnson
Jay Cooke
Whiskey Ring universal male suffrage
Carpetbaggers
Black Codes
Freedmen’s Bureau
Liberal Republicans
Compromise of 1877
II: Chapter Learning Outcomes (LOs) .
U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
Winslow Homer, “A Visit from the Old Mistress”

Question to consider:
1. From where might the mixture of emotions in this painting come?
1. Why do you think that relationships between slaves their owners weren't so simple to terminate?
Painting-W.Homer-Meeting after the War
1. From where might the mixture of emotions in this painting come?
Even though slavery had come to an end, the next steps were uncertain ones for everyone, not just former slaves. The relationships between the slave masters and their slaves were often complicated and when the ownership was over, the relationships and the changes in the world resulted in a mixture of emotion from elation to fear.
2. Why do you think that relationships between slaves their owners weren't so simple to terminate?
For years, owners and their slaves led intertwined lives, with many African Americans living in close proximity with their owners. Once this was over, it wasn't always to simple to walk away to a life of unknowns.

U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“Campaign Badge: ‘New South’ Democratic Party”

Questions to consider:
1. What does this campaign badge/poster make clear?
2. Analyze the meaning of the slogan on the campaign badge
Campaign Badge-New South Democratic Party
1. What does this campaign badge/poster make clear?

White Democrats came to power as support for Reconstruction and the power of the Radical Republicans started to wane. They asserted that they were going to swing all white voters to the Democratic party, and basically "shut down" the voting power of the African American Republicans. They did this by force and violence.
2. Analyze the meaning of the slogan on the campaign badge
White supremacists in the Democratic party felt that whites and ONLY whites should have the right to affect an election. Also, Democrats felt that as a mostly "white" party, they would have the lives of the whites as a priority. These feelings showed how racism clung to every thought and decision made, politically or otherwise, after emancipation, during Reconstruction, and after Reconstruction failed.
U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“Equality and the Vote in Reconstruction”

Debate swirled around not only the conditions southern states needed to fulfill to return to the Union but also the rights of citizenship granted to former slaves. At war's end, African Americans held a number of conventions to set forth their views (Document 1). Andrew
Johnson privately conveyed to white southern leaders his idea of how they should act (Document 2). And Representative Thaddeus
Stevens of Pennsylvania spoke for Radical Republicans (Document 3).
DOCUMENT 1
African Americans Seek the Vote
We, the delegates of the colored people of the State of Virginia … solemnly [declare] that we desire to live upon the most friendly and agreeable terms with all men; we feel no ill-will or prejudice towards our former oppressors … and that we believe that in this State we have still many warm and solid friends among the white people….
We must, on the other hand, be allowed to aver and assert that we believe that we have among the white people of this State, many who are our most inveterate enemies … who despise us simply because we are black, and more especially, because we have been made free by the power of the United States Government; and that they—the class last mentioned—will not, in our estimation, be willing to accord to us, as freemen, that protection which all freemen must contend for, if they would be worthy of freedom….
We claim, then, as citizens of this State, the laws of the Commonwealth shall give to all men equal protection; that each and every man may appeal to the law for his equal rights without regard to the color of his skin; and we believe this can only be done by extending to us the elective franchise, which we believe to be our inalienable right as freemen, and which the Declaration of Independence guarantees to all free citizens of this
Government and which is the privilege of the nation.
Source: Proceedings of the Convention of the Colored People of Virginia … in Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, eds.,
Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865 (Philadelphia, 1980), II, 262–264.
DOCUMENT 2
President Johnson Advises Southern Leaders
I hope that without delay your convention will amend your State constitution … [to] adopt the amendment to the Constitution of the United States abolishing slavery. If you could extend the elective franchise to all persons of color who can read the Constitution of the United States in English and write their names, and to all persons of color who own real estate valued at not less than two hundred and fifty dollars and pay taxes thereon, you would completely disarm the adversary and set an example the other States will follow. This you can do with perfect safety, and you would thus place Southern States in reference to the free persons of color upon the same basis with the free States…. And as a consequence the radicals, who are wild upon negro franchise, will be completely foiled in their attempts to keep the Southern States from renewing their relations to the Union by not accepting their Senators and Representatives.
Source: Walter L. Fleming, ed., Documentary History of Reconstruction (Cleveland, 1906–1907), I, 177.
DOCUMENT 3
Representative Stevens on Equal Privileges

But this is not all that we ought to do before these inveterate rebels are invited to participate in our legislation.
We have turned, or are about to turn, loose four million slaves without a hut to shelter them or a cent in their pockets. The infernal laws of slavery have prevented them from acquiring an education, understanding the commonest laws of contract, or of managing the ordinary business of life. This Congress is bound to provide for them until they can take care of themselves. If we do not furnish them with homesteads, and hedge them around with protective laws; if we leave them to the legislation of their late masters, we had better have left them in bondage … equal rights to all the privileges of the Government is innate to every immortal being, no matter what the shape or color of the tabernacle which it inhabits….
If equal privileges were granted to all, I should not expect to any but white men to be elected to office for long ages to come…. But it would still be beneficial to the weaker races. In a country where political divisions will always exist, their power, joined with just white men, would greatly modify, if it did not entirely prevent, the injustice of majorities. Without the right of suffrage in the late slave States, (I do not speak of the free States,) I believe the slaves had far better been left in bondage….
[Men of influence] proclaim, “This is a white man's Government,” and the whole coil of copperheads echo the same sentiment, and upstart, jealous Republicans join the cry. Is it any wonder ignorant foreigners and illiterate natives should learn this doctrine, and be led to despise and maltreat a whole race of their fellow men?
Source: Congressional Globe, 39 th Congress, 1 st Session, 1865, 72–73.
Questions to consider:
Each of the writers recommends that African Americans receive the vote in some way. Which document is the most radical? Which the least so? Who does President Johnson refer to as “the adversary”? How does he intend to “foil” the Radicals? And what does Thaddeus Steven not speak about? Why?
U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis

T
HE
B
LACK
S
HARECROPPER
'
S
C
ABIN
On the plantations of the Old South slaves had lived in cabins along a central path in the shadow of the white master's “big house.” These quarters were the center of their community, where marriages and other festivals were celebrated and family life went on. But with the coming of emancipation, freedpeople looked to leave the old quarters, which stood as a symbol of bondage and of close white supervision. African Americans either built new housing or dismantled their old cabins and hauled them to the plots of land they rented as tenants or sharecroppers. Moving enabled them to live on the land they farmed, just as white farmers and tenants did.
Like slave cabins, most sharecroppers' dwellings were one story high, about 16 feet square, and usually built of logs chinked with mud. The few windows had shutters to protect against the weather; glass was rare. Though the inside walls normally lacked plaster or sheeting, they were given a coat of whitewash annually to brighten the dark interior.
The main room served as kitchen and dining room, parlor, bathing area, and the parents' bedroom. To one side might be a homemade drop-leaf table (essential because of cramped space), which served as a kitchen work counter and a dining table. The other side of the room had a few plain beds, their slats or rope bottoms supporting corn shuck or straw mattresses. The social center of the room was the fireplace, the only source of heat and the main source of light after dark. Pots and pans were hung on the wall near the fireplace, and the mother and daughters did the cooking stooped over an open fire. In the summer, cooking was done outdoors.
Like slave cabins, most sharecroppers' dwellings were one story high, about 16 feet square, and usually built of logs chinked with mud. The few windows had shutters to protect against the weather; glass was rare. Though the inside walls normally lacked plaster or sheeting, they were given a coat of whitewash annually to brighten the dark interior.
The main room served as kitchen and dining room, parlor, bathing area, and the parents' bedroom. To one side might be a homemade drop-leaf table (essential because of cramped space), which served as a kitchen work counter and a dining table. The other side of the room had a few plain beds, their slats or rope bottoms supporting corn shuck or straw mattresses. The social center of the room was the fireplace, the only source of heat and the main source of light after dark. Pots and pans were hung on the wall near the fireplace, and the mother and daughters did the cooking stooped over an open fire. In the summer, cooking was done outdoors.
The cabin's chimney was made of small logs notched together and covered with several layers of clay to protect it from the heat. Sometimes its height was extended by empty flour barrels. A taller chimney drew better, which

kept smoke from blowing back down into the house and kept sparks away from the roof. After the evening meal the family gathered around the fireplace, the children to play with homemade dolls and toys, the mother to sew, and the father perhaps to play the fiddle. At bedtime a trapdoor in the ceiling offered access up a ladder to the loft beneath the gabled roof, where older children slept, usually on pallets on the floor, as had been the case in slavery.
Gradually, as black sharecroppers scraped together some savings, they improved their homes. By the end of the century, frame dwellings were more common, and many older log cabins had been covered with wood siding.
The newer homes were generally larger, with wood floors, and often had attached rooms such as a porch or kitchen. In addition, windows had glass panes, roofs were covered with shingles instead of planking, and stone and brick chimneys were less unusual.
Without question, the cabins of black sharecroppers provided more space than the slave quarters had, and certainly more freedom and privacy. Still, they lacked many of the comforts that most white Americans took for granted. Such housing reflected the continuing status of black sharecroppers as poverty-stricken laborers in a caste system based on race.
U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“D
RESSED TO
K
ILL
”

The costumes of Ku Klux Klan night riders—pointed hoods and white sheets—have become a staple of history books. But why use such outlandish disguises? To hide the identity of members, according to some accounts, or to terrorize freedpeople into thinking they were being menaced by Confederate ghosts. One historian has suggested that KKK performances took their cues from American popular culture: the costumes of Mardi Gras and similar carnivals, as well as minstrel shows. In behaving like carnival revelers, KKK members may have hoped to lull Northern authorities into viewing the night rides as humorous pranks, not a threat to Radical rule.
For southern white Democrats the theatrical night rides helped overturn the social order of Reconstruction, just as carousers at carnivals disrupted the night. The ritual garb provided seemingly innocent cover for a campaign of intimidation that often turned deadly.
Questions to consider:
In what ways does the advertisement speak of experiences both frightening and humorous? In terms of popular culture, do modern horror films sometimes combine both terror and humor? Assess how this dynamic of horror and jest might have worked in terms of the different groups—white northerners, white southerners, African
Americans—perceiving the Klan's activities.
U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis

U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“Debating the Past: Reconstruction”

Debate over the nature of Reconstruction has created so much controversy over the decades that one scholar, writing in 1959, described the issue as a “dark and bloody ground.” For many years, a relatively uniform and highly critical view of Reconstruction prevailed among historians. William A. Dunning offered the principal scholarly expression of this view in Reconstruction, Political and Economic (1907), the first major historical interpretation of Reconstruction. Dunning portrayed Reconstruction as a corrupt outrage perpetrated on the prostrate South by a vicious and vindictive group of Northern Republican Radicals. Unscrupulous carpetbaggers flooded the South to profit from the misery of the defeated region. Ignorant, illiterate blacks were thrust into positions of power for which they were entirely unfit. The Reconstruction experiment survived only because of the determination of the Republican Party to keep itself in power. Some later writers, notably Howard K. Beale, added an economic motive—to protect Northern business interests
Dunning's interpretation shaped the views of several generations of historians and helped shape popular depictions of Reconstruction such as those expressed in the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and then the 1936 book and 1939 movie Gone with the Wind.
The great African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois was among the first to challenge the Dunning view. In
Black Reconstruction (1935), Du Bois argued that Reconstruction politics in the Southern states had been an effort on the part of the masses, black and white, to create a more democratic society. The misdeeds of the
Reconstruction governments, he claimed, had been greatly exaggerated, and their achievements overlooked. In the 1940s, the historians C. Vann Woodward, David Herbert Donald, Thomas B. Alexander, and others began to reexamine the Reconstruction governments in the South and to suggest that their records were not nearly as bad as most historians had previously assumed.
By the early 1960s, a new view of Reconstruction was emerging. The revisionist approach was summarized by
John Hope Franklin in Reconstruction After the Civil War (1961) and Kenneth Stampp in The Era of
Reconstruction (1965), who claimed that the postwar Republicans had been engaged in a genuine, if flawed, effort to solve the problem of race in the South by providing much-needed protection to the freedmen. The
Reconstruction governments, for all their faults, had been bold experiments in interracial politics. The congressional Radicals were not saints, but they had displayed a genuine concern for the rights of slaves.
Andrew Johnson was not a martyred defender of the Constitution, but an inept, racist politician who resisted reasonable compromise and brought the government to a crisis. African Americans had played only a small part in Reconstruction governments and had generally acquitted themselves well. The Reconstruction regimes had, in fact, brought important progress to the South, establishing the region's first public school system and other important social changes. Corruption in the South had been no worse than corruption in the North at that time.

What was tragic about Reconstruction, the revisionist view claimed, was not what it did to Southern whites but, rather, what it did not do for Southern blacks. By stopping short of the reforms necessary to ensure blacks genuine equality, Reconstruction had consigned them to more than a century of injustice and discrimination.
In later years, scholars began to question the revisionist view in an attempt to draw attention to the achievements of Reconstruction. Eric Foner, in Nothing but Freedom (1983) and Reconstruction: America's
Unfinished Revolution (1988), emphasized how far the former slaves moved toward freedom and independence in a short time and how large a role African Americans themselves played in shaping Reconstruction. During
Reconstruction, blacks won a certain amount of legal and political power in the South; even though they held that power only temporarily, they used it to strengthen their economic and social positions and to win a position of limited but genuine independence. Though they failed to achieve equality, they won a measure of individual and community autonomy that they used as building blocks of the freedom that emancipation alone had not guaranteed. Leon Litwack argued similarly in Been in the Storm So Long (1979) that former slaves used the relative latitude they enjoyed under Reconstruction to build a certain independence for themselves within
Southern society. They strengthened their churches; they reunited their families; by refusing to work in the
“gang-labor” system of the plantations, they forced the creation of a new labor system in which they had more control over their own lives. Writing from the perspective of women's history, Amy Dru Stanley and Jacqueline
Jones have both argued that the freed slaves displayed considerable independence in constructing their households on their own terms and asserting their control over family life, reproduction, and work. According to Jones in Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (1985), women in particular sought the opportunity “to labor on behalf of their own families and kin within the protected spheres of household and community.”
Some historians have begun to argue that Reconstruction was not restricted to the South alone. Heather
Richardson, in West from Appomattox (2007) and The Death of Reconstruction (2001), shows how the entire nation changed during and as a result of the Civil War and Reconstruction—with the South, perhaps, changing least of all. The age of Reconstruction was also the age of western expansion and industrialization.
Questions to consider:
1. According to the essay, the 1915 film Birth of a Nation and the 1930s book and film Gone with the Wind are popular depictions of Reconstruction that reflect Dunning’s interpretation of the era. Can you find other popular depictions that reflect other interpretations of Reconstruction?
2. A new view of Reconstruction began to emerge in the 1960s, the era of the civil rights movement. Why do you think the civil rights movement might have encouraged historians and others to reexamine Reconstruction?
3. Which view of Reconstruction do you find more persuasive—the view of Reconstruction as a tragic era of exploitation of the South by the North, or the view that sees Reconstruction as an era of achievement and progress?
Debating the Past-Reconstruction

1. According to the essay, the 1915 film Birth of a Nation and the 1930s book and film Gone with the Wind are popular depictions of Reconstruction that reflect Dunning’s interpretation of the era. Can you find other popular depictions that reflect other interpretations of Reconstruction?
Your answers will vary based on your analysis, but you should include:
• In a similar but opposing vein to the perspectives espoused in Birth of a Nation , the 1970s TV miniseries
Roots, and its sequel Roots: The Next Generations , by Alex Haley which were based on his historical novel about his family, presented an equally powerful fictional account of the American past during
Reconstruction.
2. A new view of Reconstruction began to emerge in the 1960s, the era of the civil rights movement. Why do you think the civil rights movement might have encouraged historians and others to reexamine Reconstruction?
Your answers will vary based on your analysis, but you should include:
• The civil rights movement’s success in ending segregation and criminalizing racial discrimination inspired many scholars (Franklin, Stampp) to revisit Reconstruction and to highlight its successes in achieving limited but real political, legal, and economic gains for southern African Americans after the Civil War.
3. Which view of Reconstruction do you find more persuasive—the view of Reconstruction as a tragic era of exploitation of the South by the North, or the view that sees Reconstruction as an era of achievement and progress?
Your answers will vary based on your analysis—and will probably also depend on factors such as your regional location and which interpretation of these events you have been taught—but you should include:
• It is possible to see aspects of both experiences in Reconstruction. Undoubtedly, some Northerners did take advantage of the South’s weakness to enrich themselves. At the same time, at least temporarily, southern African Americans did gain access to some measure of political and social influence that led to considerable achievement and progress for their communities, although this would be extremely shortlived.
U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis

“The Minstrel Show”
The minstrel show was one of the most popular forms of entertainment in America in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was also a testament to the high awareness of race (and the high level of racism) in
American society both before and after the Civil War. Minstrel performers were mostly white, usually disguised as black. But African American performers also formed their own minstrel shows and transformed them, at least to a degree, into vehicles for training black entertainers and developing new forms of music and dance.
Before and during the Civil War, when minstrel shows consisted almost entirely of white performers, performers blackened their faces with cork and presented grotesque stereotypes of the slave culture of the
American South. Among the most popular of the stumbling, ridiculously ignorant characters invented for these shows were such figures as “Zip Coon” and “Jim Crow” (whose name later resurfaced as a label for latenineteenth-century segregation laws). A typical minstrel show presented a group of seventeen or more men seated in a semicircle facing the audience. The man in the center ran the show, played the straight man for the jokes of others, and led the music—lively dances and sentimental ballads played on banjos, castanets, and other instruments and sung by soloists or the entire group.
After the Civil War, white minstrels began to expand their repertoire. Drawing from the famous and successful freak shows of P. T. Barnum and other entertainment entrepreneurs, some began to include Siamese twins, bearded ladies, and even a supposedly 8-foot 2-inch “Chinese giant” in their shows. They also incorporated sex, both by including women in some shows and, even more popularly, by recruiting female impersonators. One of the most successful minstrel performers of the 1870s was Francis Leon, who delighted crowds with his female portrayal of a flamboyant “prima donna.”
One reason white minstrels began to move in these new directions was that they were now facing competition from black performers, who could provide more authentic versions of black music, dance, and humor, and usually bring more talent to the task than white performers. The Georgia Minstrels, organized in 1865, was one of the first all-black minstrel troupes, and it had great success in attracting white audiences in the Northeast for several years. By the 1870s, touring African American minstrel groups were numerous. The black minstrels used many of the conventions of the white shows. There were dances, music, comic routines, and sentimental recitations. Some black performers even chalked their faces to make themselves look as dark as the white blackface performers with whom they were competing. Black minstrels sometimes denounced slavery (at least indirectly) and did not often speak demeaningly of the capacities of their race. But they could not entirely escape caricaturing African American life as they struggled to meet the expectations of their white audiences.

While the black minstrel shows had few openly political aims, they did help develop some important forms of
African American entertainment and transform them into a part of the national culture. Black minstrels introduced new forms of dance, derived from the informal traditions of slavery and black community life: the
“buck and wing,” the “stop time,” and the “Virginia essence,” which established the foundations for the tap and jazz dancing of the early twentieth century. They also improvised musically and began experimenting with forms that over time contributed to the growth of ragtime, jazz, and rhythm and blues.
Eventually, black minstrelsy—like its white counterpart—evolved into other forms of theater, including the beginnings of serious black drama. At Ambrose Park in Brooklyn in the 1890s, for example, the celebrated black comedian Sam Lucas (a veteran of the minstrel circuit) starred in the play Darkest America, which one black newspaper later described as a “delineation of Negro life, carrying the race through all their historical phases from the plantation, into reconstruction days and finally painting our people as they are today, cultured and accomplished in the social graces, [holding] the mirror faithfully up to nature.”
But interest in the minstrel show did not die altogether. In 1927, Hollywood released The Jazz Singer, the first feature film with sound. It was about the career of a white minstrel performer, and its star was one of the most popular singers of the twentieth century: Al Jolson, whose career had begun on the blackface minstrel circuit years before.
Questions to consider:
1. How did minstrel shows performed by white minstrels reinforce prevailing attitudes toward African
Americans?
2. Minstrel shows performed by black minstrels often conformed to existing stereotypes of African Americans.
Why?
3. Can you think of any popular entertainments today that carry remnants of the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century?
The Minstrel Show

1. How did minstrel shows performed by white minstrels reinforce prevailing attitudes toward African
Americans?
Your answers will vary based on your analysis, but you should include: These shows, with their depictions of
African Americans as coarse, uneducated, and ignorant, helped reinforce prevailing racist attitudes of whites, who dominated the audience, toward African Americans.
2. Minstrel shows performed by black minstrels often conformed to existing stereotypes of African Americans.
Why?
Your answers will vary based on your analysis, but you should include: Given the overwhelmingly white audiences that attended minstrel shows, and the expectations these audiences carried into the performance, it is not surprising that black minstrel performers adopted their white counterparts' routines and features into their acts.
3. Can you think of any popular entertainments today that carry remnants of the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century?
Your answers will vary based on your analysis, but you should include: Today, modern television programs that comedically portray minority groups, such as The Cleveland Show (Fox) and George Lopez (ABC), often emphasize traditional minority stereotypes in the same way minstrel shows did in the nineteenth century.
U.S. History
Mr. Detjen

Source Analysis
“Debating the Past: The Origins of Segregation”
Not until after World War II, when the emergence of the civil rights movement forced white Americans to confront the issue of racial segregation, did historians pay much attention to the origins of the institution. Most had assumed that the separation of the races had emerged naturally and even inevitably out of the abolition of slavery. It had been a response to the failure of Reconstruction, the weakness and poverty of the African
American community, and the pervasiveness of white racism. It was, as W. J. Cash argued in The Mind of the
South (1941), the way things had always been.
The first major challenge to these assumptions, indeed the first serious scholarly effort to explain the origins of segregation, was C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1956), which not only reshaped scholarship, but also had a significant political impact. As a southern liberal, Woodward wanted to convince both scholars and the larger public that the racial institutions they considered part of a long, unbroken tradition were in fact the product of a particular set of historical circumstances.
In the aftermath of emancipation, and indeed for two decades after Reconstruction, Woodward argued, race relations in the South had remained relatively fluid. Blacks and whites did not often interact as equals, but black southerners enjoyed a degree of latitude in social and even political affairs. Blacks and whites often rode together in the same railroad cars, ate in the same restaurants, and used the same public facilities. African
Americans voted in significant numbers. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, a great wave of racist legislation—the Jim Crow laws, which established the basis of segregation—had hardened race relations and destroyed the alternatives that many whites and blacks had considered viable only a few years before. The principal reason, Woodward argued, was the Populist political insurgency of the 1890s, which frightened many white southerners into thinking that African Americans might soon be a major political power in the region.
Southern conservatives, in particular, used the issue of white supremacy to attack the Populists and to prevent
African Americans from forming an alliance with them. The result was segregation and the disenfranchisement of African Americans (along with many poor whites).

Woodward's argument suggested that laws are important in shaping social behavior—that laws had made segregation and, by implication, other laws could unmake it. Historian Joel Williamson disagreed and in After
Slavery (1965), his study of South Carolina, he argued that the laws of the 1890s simply ratified a set of conditions that had been firmly established by the end of Reconstruction. As early as the mid-1870s,
Williamson claimed, the races had already begun to live in two separate societies, and by the end of the decade, segregation was largely in place, continuing in a different form a pattern of racial separation established under slavery. The laws of the 1890s did little more than codify an already established system.
With the publication of North of Slavery in 1965, Leon Litwack exposed the existence of widespread segregation, supported by an early version of Jim Crow laws, in the North before the Civil War. In almost every northern state, he revealed, free blacks experienced a kind of segregation not very different from what freed slaves would experience in the South after the Civil War. A few years later, Ira Berlin argued in Slaves Without
Masters (1974) that in the antebellum South, white people had created a wide range of discriminatory laws aimed at free blacks and ensuring segregation. The Jim Crow regime, such works suggested, emerged naturally out of precedents established before the Civil War, in both the North and the South.
Other scholars challenged these interpretations by attempting to link the rise of legal segregation to changing social and economic circumstances in the South. Howard Rabinowitz's Race Relations in the Urban South
(1978) linked the rise of segregation to the new challenge of devising a form of race relations suitable to life in the growing southern cities, into which rural blacks were moving in substantial numbers. The creation of separate public facilities—schools, parks, waiting rooms, etc.—was not so much an effort to drive blacks out of white facilities as it was an attempt to create a set of facilities where none had previously existed for a black community. The alternative to segregation, Rabinowitz suggested, was not integration, but exclusion.
In the early 1980s, a number of scholars began examining segregation anew in light of the rising American interest in South Africa, whose system of apartheid seemed to them to be similar in many ways to the by-then largely dismantled Jim Crow system in the South. John Cell's The Highest Stage of White Supremacy (1982) used the comparison to construct a revised explanation of how segregation emerged in the American South. The segregation laws, Cell argued, were a continuation of southern whites' unchanging determination to retain control over the African American population.
The emergence of large black communities in urban areas and of a significant black labor force in factories presented a new challenge to white southerners. In the city, blacks and whites were in more direct competition than they had been in the countryside. There was more danger of social mixing. The city therefore required different, and more rigidly institutionalized, systems of control. The Jim Crow laws were a response not just to an enduring commitment to white supremacy, but also to a new urban reality that required a rigid legal and institutional basis for white supremacy.
Questions to consider:
1. Do laws shape social behavior, or is social behavior codified into law? What examples support your view?
2. How have historians linked segregation to urbanization?
3. Was segregation, whether emerging naturally or imposed by law, inevitable?

Debating the Past-Segregation
1. Do laws shape social behavior, or is social behavior codified into law? What examples support your view?
Your answers will vary based on your analysis, but you should include:
• Some scholars (Cash, Litwack, Williamson, Berlin, Rabinowitz) contend that in the case of segregation, social behavior came first, leading to codified law.
• Others (Woodward) argue precisely the opposite, claiming that only the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s hardened race relations and destroyed other options.
2. How have historians linked segregation to urbanization?
Your answers will vary based on your analysis, but you should include:
• Some scholars (Rabinowitz) argue that growing urbanization in both the North and the South led to the development of segregated facilities and infrastructure.
• This argument proposes that segregation, though regrettable, was an inevitable development of municipal attempts to deal with rapidly increasing urban populations and provide them with infrastructure where none previously existed.
3. Was segregation, whether emerging naturally or imposed by law, inevitable?
Your answers will vary based on your analysis—and will also probably depend on factors such as your regional location and which interpretation of these events you have been taught—but you should include:
• It is possible to see aspects of both sides of this issue. Nothing in history is inevitable; however, given the dominance of racist thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is difficult to envision radically different contingent historical outcomes, in the North as well as in the South. Indeed, segregation persists today in many forms.

U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“Waving the Bloody Shirt”
Question to consider:
1. In the decades following the Civil War, how might Republican politicians used the people and events of the
Civil War to garner election votes?

U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“The Barrow Plantation, 1860 and 1881”
Question to consider:
1. Compare and contrast the two maps. Explain the shift from slavery to sharecropping as expressed in the above geography.

U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“The Grant Administration”
Grant swings from a trapeze while supporting a number of associates accused of corruption. Among those holding on are Secretary of the Navy George M. Robeson (top center), who was accused of accepting bribes for awarding navy contracts; Secretary of War
William W. Belknap (top right), who was forced to resign for selling Indian post traderships; and the president's private secretary,
Orville Babcock (bottom right), who was implicated in the Whiskey Ring scandal. Although not personally involved in the scandals during his administration, Grant was reluctant to dismiss supporters accused of wrongdoing from office.
Question to consider:
1. How does this political cartoon illuminate issues in President Grant’s administration?

U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“Reconstruction, 1866-1877”
RECONSTRUCTION, 1866–1877 This map shows the former Confederate states and provides the date when each was readmitted to the Union as well as a subsequent date when each state managed to return political power to traditional white, conservative elites—a process white Southerners liked to call “redemption.”
Questions to consider:
1. What had to happen for a state to be re-admitted to the Union?
2. What had to happen for a state to be “redeemed?”

U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“The Burdened South”
Questions to consider:
1. What do you see? Describe the details of the political cartoon.
2. What is the message and its meaning? For whom is the cartoon intended?
3. How do the elements of the cartoon arouse your emotions?

U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“The Crop-Lien System”
THE CROP-LIEN SYSTEM IN 1880 In the years after the Civil War, more and more southern farmers—white and black—became tenants or sharecroppers on land owned by others. This map shows the percentage of farms that were within the so-called crop-lien system, the system by which people worked their lands for someone else, who had a claim (or “lien”) on a part of the farmers' crops.
Note the high density of sharecropping and tenant farming in the most fertile areas of the Deep South, the same areas where slaveholding had been most dominant before the Civil War.
Question to consider:
1. Explain how the crop-lien system contributed to the shift in postwar southern agriculture toward one-crop farming.