AP US History Document Based Question
It is clear that all the lives that were lost in the American Civil War to insure a “new birth of
freedom” were in vain. By 1880, the South had defeated the weak Northern efforts in behalf of the
freedmen, and had re-enslaved the Negro.” Assess the validity of this statement using the documents
and your knowledge of U S History.
Document A
AMENDMENT XIII (1865.) Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime
whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject
to their jurisdiction.
Document B
AMENDMENT XIV (1868.) All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the
jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. 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.
Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective
numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the
right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States,
Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the
Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age,
and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other
crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male
citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice
President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having
previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of
any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the
United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to
the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred
for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be
questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred
in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any
slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Document C
AMENDMENT XV (1870.)
Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United
States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Document D
“It is a question of grave doubt whether the 15th Amendment was wise or expedient. The practical
result has been that the wise provisions of the 14th Amendment have been modified by the Fifteenth
Amendment. . . . If the principle of the 14th Amendment had remained in full force, Congress could have
reduced the representation of any State, in the proportion which the number of the male inhabitants of such
State, denied the right of suffrage, might bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of
age, in such State. This simple remedy, easily enforced by Congress, would have secured the right of all
persons, without distinction of race or color, to vote at all elections. The reduction of the representation
would have deterred every State from excluding the vote of any portion of the male population above
twenty-one years of age. As the result of the Fifteenth Amendment, the political power of the States lately
in rebellion has been increased. . . . Black legislatures abused their power, becoming instruments of
carpetbag leaders and rings in robbing white property-holders. Only doctrinaires or the stupid could have
expected that the whites would long submit. So soon as Federal bayonets were gone, fair means or foul
were certain to remove the scepter from colored hands. Precisely this happened. Without the slightest
formal change of constitution or of statute the Southern States one by one passed into the control of their
white inhabitants.” John Sherman, Salmon Chase, and Benjamin Andrews, Why Reconstruction Failed,
Great Epochs, Vol.9, Pg.191.
Document E
Document F
“The sweeping revolution of the entire labor system of a large portion of our country and the
advance of 4,000,000 people from a condition of servitude to that of citizenship, upon an equal footing with
their former masters, could not occur without presenting problems of the gravest moment, to be dealt with
by the emancipated race, by their former masters, and by the General Government, the author of the act of
emancipation. That it was a wise, just, and providential act, fraught with good for all concerned, is not
generally conceded throughout the country. That a moral obligation rests upon the National Government to
employ its constitutional power and influence to establish the rights of the people it has emancipated, and
to protect them in the enjoyment of those rights when they are infringed or assailed, is also generally
admitted. . . . .” Rutherford B. Hayes, Inaugural Address, March 5, 1877.
Document G
“Lacking capital, and with little to offer but their labor, thousands of impoverished former slaves
slipped into the status of sharecropper farmers, as did many landless whites. Luckless sharecroppers
gradually sank into a morass of virtual peonage and remained there for generations. Formerly slaves to
masters, countless blacks as well as poorer whites in effect became slaves to the soil and to their creditors.
Yet the dethroned planter aristocracy resented even this pitiful concession to freedom. Sharecropping was
the "wrong policy," said one planter. "It makes the laborer too independent; he becomes a partner, and has a
right to be consulted.” Thomas A. Bailey, The American Pageant.
Document H
“A prominent Democratic politician, describing a reconstruction governor of his State, whom he
had done his best to overthrow, said: "I regard him as a thoroughly honest man and opposed to corruption
and extravagance in office. . . . but the want of sympathy between him and the white people of the State,
and his failure to appreciate the relations and prejudices of the two races, made it next to impossible for
him to succeed . . . . The good carpet-baggers and the bad alike somehow exerted an influence which had
the effect of morbidly inflaming the negro's sense of independence and of engaging him in politics. The
negro was too apt a pupil, not in the higher politics of principle, but in the politics of office and "swag." In
1872 the National Colored Republican Convention adopted a resolution "earnestly praying that the colored
Republicans of States where no Federal positions were given to colored men might no longer be ignored,
but be stimulated by some recognition of Federal patron-age." "The reformers complain of taxes being too
high," said Beverly Nash in 1874, after he had become State Senator; "I tell you that they are not high
enough. . . . . In their days of serfdom the negroes' besetting sin had been thievery. Now that the
opportunities for this were multiplied, the fear of punishment gone, and many a carpet-bagger at hand to
encourage it, the prevalence of public and private stealing was not strange . . . . There were said to be in
South Carolina alone, in November, 1874, two hundred negro trial justices who could neither read nor
write, also negro school commissioners equally ignorant, receiving a thousand a year each, while negro
juries, deciding delicate points of legal evidence, settled questions involving lives and property.” Benjamin
Andrews on the Evils of Reconstruction, Great Epochs, Vol.9, Pg.69.
Document I
“I heard about freedom in September and they were picking cotton and a white man rode up to
master's house on a big, white horse and the houseboy told master a man wanted to see him and he
hollered, "Light, stranger." It was a government man and he had the big book and a bunch of papers and
said why hadn't master turned the niggers loose. Master said he was trying to get the crop out and he told
master to have the slaves in. Uncle Steven blew the cow horn that they used to call to eat and all the niggers
came running, because that horn meant, "Come to the big house, quick." The man read the paper telling us
we were free, but master made us work several months after that. He said we would get 20 acres of land
and a mule but we didn't get it. . . . Lots of niggers were killed after freedom, because the slaves in Harrison
County were turned loose right at freedom and those in Rusk County weren't. But they heard about it and
ran away to freedom in Harrison County and their owners had them bushwhacked, then shot down. You
could see lots of niggers hanging from trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom, because they caught
them swimming across Sabine River and shot them. There sure are going to be lots of souls crying against
them in judgment!” George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, p. 78.
Document J
“The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was in a sense the last feeble gasp of the congressional radical
Republicans. The act supposedly guaranteed equal accommodations in public places and prohibited racial
discrimination in jury selection, but the law was born toothless and stayed that way for nearly a century.
The Supreme Court pronounced much of the act unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases (1883). The
Court declared that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited only government violations of civil rights, not
the denial of civil rights by individuals, unaided by government authority. Hayes clinched the bargain soon
after his inauguration, when he appointed a former Confederate officer as postmaster general.” Thomas A.
Bailey, The American Pageant.
Document K
“Among the first acts of the new Southern regimes sanctioned by Johnson was the passage of the
iron-toothed Black Codes. These laws were designed to regulate the affairs of the emancipated blacks,
much as the slave statutes had done in pre-Civil War days. Mississippi passed the first such law in
November 1865, and other Southern states soon followed suit. The Black Codes varied in severity from
state to state (Mississippi's was the harshest and Georgia's the most lenient), but they had much in common.
The Black Codes aimed, first of all, to ensure a stable labor supply. The crushed Cotton Kingdom could not
rise from its weeds until the fields were once again put under hoe and plow--and many whites feared that
black field hands and plow drivers would not work unless forced to do so.
Severe penalties were therefore imposed by the codes on blacks who "jumped" their labor contracts,
which usually committed them to work for the same employer for one year, and generally at pittance
wages. Violators could be made to forfeit back wages or could be forcibly dragged back to work by a paid
"Negro-catcher." In Mississippi the captured freedmen could be fined and then hired out to pay their fines-an arrangement that closely resembled slavery itself. . . . The codes also sought to restore as nearly as
possible the pre-emancipation system of race relations. Freedom was legally recognized, as were some
other privileges, such as the right to marry. But all the codes forbade a black to serve on a jury; some even
barred blacks from renting or leasing land. A black could be punished for "idleness" by being sentenced to
work on a chain gang. Nowhere were blacks allowed to vote.” Ken Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction.
Document L
“Against a backdrop of vicious and bloody race riots that had erupted in several Southern cities,
Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act on March 2, 1867. Supplemented by later measures, this
drastic legislation divided the South into five military districts, each commanded by a Union general and
policed by blue-clad soldiers, about twenty thousand all told. The act also temporarily disfranchised tens of
thousands of former Confederates. . . . Congress additionally laid down stringent conditions for the
readmission of the seceded states. The wayward states were required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment,
giving the former slaves their rights as citizens. The bitterest pill of all to white Southerners was the
stipulation that they guarantee in their state constitutions full suffrage for their former adult male slaves.”
Thomas A. Bailey, The American Pageant.
Document M
Document M
“FOURSCORE and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,
conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged
in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long
endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a
final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that the nation might live. It is altogether fitting and
proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot
hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our
poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can
never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work
which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the
great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for
which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have
died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the
people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address, Harvard Classics (1910), Vol.43, Pg.441.
Document N