Reconstruction
Reconstruction
Definition: Reunite the country and to build a
Southern society not based on slavery
Major questions:
1. What should be done to Southerners who
rebelled?
2. What should Southern states be required to
do to be re-admitted into the Union?
3. What should be done for the Freedmen?
Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan
1. When 10% of the state’s voters took an
oath of loyalty to the Union, the state could
form a new government and constitution –
one than banned slavery
2. Offered amnesty to white Southerners, but
not Confederate leaders
3. Grant the right to vote African Americans
who were educated or had served in the
Union army
*Would not force Southern states to grant
equal rights to African Americans
Radical Republicans
• Opposed Lincoln’s Plan
• Felt Lincoln’s plan was too mild –
Confederates needed to be punished
• Felt Congress should control the
Reconstruction policy
Wade-Davis Bill
• Harsher than the Ten Percent Plan
• Majority of white males in a state had to
swear loyalty to the Union
• Only white males who didn’t take up arms
could vote at the state constitutional
convention – former Confederates could not
hold office
• Both plans abolished slavery
Lincoln refused to sign the bill!
Freedman’s Bureau
• Government agency (part of the War
Department) created at the end of the Civil
War to help former enslaved persons
•Distributed food and clothing and provided
medical care
•Established schools, provided
transportation, and helped to acquire land
Backlash
Lincoln Assassinated
• April 14, 1865
• Ford’s Theatre in
Washington D.C.
• John Wilkes Booth
captured and shot to death
Andrew Johnson’s Restoration Plan
“White men alone must manage the South”
•Only southern Senator to
support the Union during the
war
•Supported state rights and
had no desire to help African
Americans
•First part of plan: Most
Southerners granted amnesty
once they swore an oath of
loyalty to the Union
•Second part of plan:
Wealthy landowners and
Confederate officials could
only be pardoned by Johnson
• Third part of plan: Johnson
appointed governors and
required states to hold
elections for state
constitutional conventions
(African Americans not
allowed to vote); states must
ratified the 13th Amendment
Reaction to Johnson’s Plan
• Radical Republicans opposed the plan!!!!
• Congress refused to seat new Southern
representatives – thus not admitting the
states back into the Union
• Passed the 14th Amendment
• Passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867
• Impeached Johnson
Black Codes
•Passed in 1865-1866 by
Southern state legislatures
•Aimed to control freed men
and women and to enable
plantation owners to exploit
African American workers
•To Northerners, codes
reestablished slavery in disguise
13th Amendment
•Passed in January, 1865
•Amendment abolished
slavery in all parts of the
Union
14th Amendment
•Passed in June, 1866
•Congress wanted to ensure that African
Americans would not lose the rights that the
Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted (act ended
the Black Codes and contradicted the 1857
Dred Scott decision)
•Amendment granted full citizenship to all
individuals born in the USA
14th Amendment
•No state could take away a citizen’s life,
liberty, and property “without due process
of law,” and that every citizen was entitled
to “equal protection of the laws”
Note: The term citizen did not include
Native Americans
First and Second Reconstruction
Acts of 1867
• Congress took control of the Reconstruction
process
• 10 Southern states divided into five districts
controlled by the military
• States now had to ratify the 14th
Amendment to be readmitted into the
Union
• African American males permitted to vote
in state elections
• Former Confederate leaders could not hold
office
Impeachment of Andrew Johnson
•Radical Republicans
opposed Johnson’s
plan -- too lenient
•Passed the Tenure of
Office Act -- limited
Johnson’s power
•Trial began March,
1868 -- one vote short
of the 2/3 majority
needed for removal
Election of 1868
• Most Southern states rejoined the Union by
1868
• Ulysses S. Grant, a
Republican, won the
election gaining 214 of
294 electoral votes
15th Amendment
•Passed in February, 1869
•Amendment prohibited the state and federal
governments from denying the right to vote
to any male citizen because of “race, color, or
previous condition of servitude
Note: Women were not granted to vote until
the 19th Amendment (1920)
African Americans in Government
Some African Americans (Southern
Republicans) begin to hold office in the House
of Representatives and the Senate
Blanche K. Bruce
Hiram Revels
Scalawags and Carpetbaggers
• Scalawags – Southern whites who
supported Republican policies during
Reconstruction
• Carpetbaggers – name given to Northern
whites who moved to the South after the
Civil War and supported the Republicans
Jim Crow Laws
•Freedom does not mean equality
•Laws created to keep races apart -Called segregation
Plessy v. Fergusion
•1896 court case that upheld Jim Crow laws
and segregation
•“Separate, but equal
legal”
Jim Crow Laws
Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan is the name of a number of
past and present fraternal organizations
in the United States that have advocated
white supremacy and anti-Semitism; and
in the past century, anti-Catholicism, and
nativism.
• The Klan's first incarnation was in 1866
• Founded by veterans of the Confederate
Army, its main purpose was to resist
Congressional Reconstruction, and it
focused as much on intimidating
"carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" as on
putting down the freed slaves
• It quickly adopted violent methods, and was
involved in a wave of 1,300 murders of
Republican voters in 1868
• A rapid reaction set in, with the Klan's
leadership disowning it, and Southern elites
seeing the Klan as an excuse for federal
troops to continue their activities in the
South
• The organization was in decline from 1868
to 1870, and was destroyed in the early
1870s by President Ulysses S. Grant's
vigorous action under the Civil Rights Act
of 1871 (also known as the Ku Klux Klan
Act).
Some Improvements as a Result of
Reconstruction
• By 1870 about 4,000 schools were
established with approximately 200,000
students -- but, most schools segregated by
race
• Some African Americans were able to buy
land and farm; most turned to
sharecropping -- rented land, housing, and
materials from a landowner in return for a
percentage of their crop; for most,
sharecropping was little better than slavery
Reconstruction Ends
• Election of 1876 marked the end to
Reconstruction; Why?
– Radical leaders disappeared
– Racial prejudice throughout the country
was accepted
– Corruption in Grant’s administration
weakened the Republicans
– Congress passed the Amnesty Act -- Act
pardoned most former Confederates, thus
now allowed to vote; now more support
for the Democratic Party
• Election of 1876 disputed; Compromise of
1877 -- Hayes (Republican) won by narrow
margin, but compromise included various
favors to the South including ending
Reconstruction by the federal government
• Reconstruction officially ends in 1877 when
U.S. federal troops were removed from the
South
Reconstruction
• Success:
– Helped the South recover from the war and
begin rebuilding its economy
– African Americans gained greater equality
• Failure:
– South still a rural economy and most people
still poor
– U.S., especially the South, created a segregated
society
“The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the
sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
-W.E.B. DuBois