Three (?) Versions of Reconstruction
1. Presidential Reconstruction (Abe)
–Declaration of Amnesty and
Reconstruction
–“10% Plan”
–“Lincoln governments”
–Quick, lenient, and Presidential
Three (?) Versions of Reconstruction
2. Congressional/RADICAL Reps
–Sumner and Stevens
–Wade/Davis Bill/Manifesto:
7/4/1864
–“Ironclad Oath” 50%
Lincoln and Congressional Reps
Successful Compromises
• Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and
Abandoned Lands: March 3, 1865
(Freedmen’s Bureau)
• 13th Amendment: ratified Dec 1865
The Thirteenth Amendment
Section 1. 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.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to
enforce this article by appropriate
legislation.
Three (?) Versions of Reconstruction
3. Pres. Reconstruction under AJ
• “The Constitution as it is and the Union
as it was”
• “amazing leniency”
• “that portion…who are loyal”
• “Johnson governments”
• $20,000 exemption
“Government by veto”
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Joint Committee on Reconstruction
1866 Civil Rights Act
Freedmen’s Bureau renewed
Reconstruction Amendments (13th,
14th, 15th)
• Reconstruction Acts (1st-4th)
Fourteenth Amendment
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Birthright citizenship
Confederate war debt
Confederate disfranchisement
Black suffrage?
Equal protection of civil rights?
Slave seats?
14th Amendment - Section 1.
“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.”
14th Amendment - 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.”
14th Amendment - 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 twothirds of each House, remove such disability.”
14th Amendment – 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.”
Johnson vs. the Radicals
• Black Codes
• 1866 Memphis/New Orleans race
riots
• Campaign/Election of 1866
• Johnson’s “swing around the circle”
• “Waving the Bloody Shirt(s)”
1st Reconstruction Act
“Whereas no legal State governments
or adequate protection for life and
property now exists in the rebel
States…”
1st Reconstruction Act, Sec. 1
AJ Impeached, Feb-May 1868
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11 articles of impeachment
Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton
Tenure of Office Act
Command of the Army Act
Senate President Pro Tempore
Benjamin Wade, R-OH
“I stand on
the
Constitution”
Election of 1868
Republican ticket
• “Unconditional Surrender” Grant
• “I shall have no policy of my own to
interfere against the will of the
people.”
• “Let us have peace.”
Election of 1868
Democratic ticket
• Pres: Horatio Seymour, fmr NY gov
–Peace Democrat
–Pro NY draft rioters, 1863
–McClellan backer 1864
• VP: Francis Blair, MO white supremacist
• …and the Klan
Results
Fifteenth Amendment
“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.”
Fifteenth Amendment
• Does not prevent states from
disfranchising voters on other
grounds, such as through
–Literacy tests
–Poll taxes
–Grandfather clause
• Does nothing for the ladies!
The Economics of Land and Labor
“The emancipated slaves own nothing
because nothing but freedom has been
given to them”
-Confederate Brig. Gen. Robert V.
Richardson, American Cotton Planters
Association meeting, Dec 1865
“It’s owed before it’s growed”
The southern economy
1. No “freedom dues”
2. Cash- and credit-starved economy
3. White hostility to black economic
independence
Reconstruction on the ground
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Tenant farming
Sharecropping
Crop-lien system
Furnishing merchants
Debt peonage
Experiments in economic rights
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Freedman’s Bank 1865-1874
Sherman’s Land: 400,000 acres
South Carolina Land Commission
1st southern public schools
The Southern Republican coalition
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Freedmen
268 delegates to state const conventions
680 state reps, 112 state senators
41 sherriffs
5 mayors
Sen. Hiram Revels, R-MS
Rep. John Roy Lynch, R-MS (and 15 others)
Scalawags
Gen. James Longstreet
Carpetbaggers
Republican rule in the south
Myths
•Lost Cause
•bayonet rule
•black rule
•carpetbag rule
The white counterrevolution
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Memphis police riot, May 1866
New Orleans riot, July 1866
Colfax Massacre, Easter 1873
Mississippi Plan/Shotgun Policy
April 14, 1873
•Colfax, LA
•Grant Parish
•Calhoun’s Landing
•80-150+ killed?
•James Beckwith, US
Attorney
•William Cruikshank,
defendant
Enforcing Reconstruction?
Ku Klux Klan Acts/Enforcement Acts
• Criminalize interference with voting
rights
• Federal supervision of elections
• Military force and suspension of
habeas corpus
Judicial retreat from Reconstruction
• Slaughterhouse cases
–National vs. state citizenship
–9/14/1873
• US v. Cruikshank
–March 1876
–“Due process” and “equal protection”
for state actions only
Grant and the money question
• Coinage Act/Crime of ’73
–de facto gold standard for $
• Panic/Depression of 1873
• Specie Resumption Act 1875
Grantism = graft
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Black Friday/Gold Scandal
Whiskey Ring
Salary grab
Crédit Mobilier of America
Reconstruction fatigue
• Deaths/retirement of original
Radicals
• Election of 1874
• Election of 1876
• Compromise of 1877
Leftovers…sorry!
• Henry W. Grady and the New South…
how new did it get?
• Jim Crow and “separate but equal”
• Plessy v. Ferguson 1896