Radical Reconstruction

10 Key excerpts on "Radical Reconstruction"

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  A People and a Nation, Volume I: to 1877

  • Jane Kamensky, Carol Sheriff, David W. Blight, Howard Chudacoff(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Reconstruction would bring revolutionary circum- stances, but revolutions can also go backward. The Civil War and its aftermath wrought unprecedented changes in American society, law, and politics, but the underlying realities of economic power, racism, and judicial conserva- tism limited Reconstruction’s revolutionary potential. As never before, the nation had to determine the nature of federal-state relations, whether confiscated land could be redistributed, and how to bring justice to both freedpeople and aggrieved white southerners whose property and lives had been devastated. Americans were about to try to re- define citizenship, fundamental civil and political rights, and equality before law against unrelenting opposition. A disunited country faced the harrowing challenge of psycho- logical healing from a bloody and fratricidal war. How they would negotiate the tangled relationship between healing and justice would determine the fate of Reconstruction. Nowhere was the turmoil of Reconstruction more evi- dent than in national politics. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, fought bitterly with Congress over the shaping of Reconstruction policies. Although a southerner, Johnson had always been a foe of the South’s wealthy planters, and his first acts as president suggested that he would be tough on “traitors.” Before the end of 1865, however, Johnson’s policies changed direction, and he became the protector of white southern interests. Johnson imagined a lenient and rapid “restoration” of the South to the Union rather than the funda- mental “reconstruction” that Republican congressmen favored. Between 1866 and 1868, the president and the Republican leadership in Congress engaged in a bitter power struggle over how to put the United States back together again. Before the struggle ceased, Con- gress had impeached the president, enfranchised freed- men, and given them a role in reconstructing the South.

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  U. S. History

  • P. Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, Paul Vickery, Sylvie Waskiewicz(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Openstax

    (Publisher)

  The South, which had experienced catastrophic losses during the conflict, was reduced to political dependence and economic destitution. This humiliating condition led many southern whites to vigorously contest Union efforts to transform the South’s racial, economic, and social landscape. Supporters of equality grew increasingly dismayed at Reconstruction’s failure to undo the old system, which further compounded the staggering regional and racial inequalities in the United States. Chapter 16 | The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 451 16.1 Restoring the Union By the end of this section, you will be able to: • Describe Lincoln’s plan to restore the Union at the end of the Civil War • Discuss the tenets of Radical Republicanism • Analyze the success or failure of the Thirteenth Amendment The end of the Civil War saw the beginning of the Reconstruction era, when former rebel Southern states were integrated back into the Union. President Lincoln moved quickly to achieve the war’s ultimate goal: reunification of the country. He proposed a generous and non-punitive plan to return the former Confederate states speedily to the United States, but some Republicans in Congress protested, considering the president’s plan too lenient to the rebel states that had torn the country apart. The greatest flaw of Lincoln’s plan, according to this view, was that it appeared to forgive traitors instead of guaranteeing civil rights to former slaves. President Lincoln oversaw the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, but he did not live to see its ratification. THE PRESIDENT’S PLAN From the outset of the rebellion in 1861, Lincoln’s overriding goal had been to bring the Southern states quickly back into the fold in order to restore the Union (Figure 16.3). In early December 1863, the president began the process of reunification by unveiling a three-part proposal known as the ten percent plan that outlined how the states would return.

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  Interpreting American History: Reconstruction

  • John David Smith(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • The Kent State University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER THREE

  Radical Reconstruction

  SHEPHERD W. MCKINLEY

  The historiography of Congressional, or as it is more popularly known, Radical, Reconstruction, has been a “dark and bloody ground” paralleling the arcs of race relations and politics in the United States.1 After Reconstruction’s end, the so-called Dunning School of historians, the students of Columbia University’s William A. Dunning, adopted the white South’s victimized voice, hanging (this time in effigy rather than by ropes) the Radical Republicans, providing the dominant historical interpretation of the period 1867–1877 for most of the twentieth century.

  Revisionist historians began attacking the Dunning interpretation in the 1930s and within three decades had rehabilitated Radical Reconstruction generally and the Radicals in particular. Federal intervention in racial questions and the civil rights laws of the 1960s seemed, to these historians, to justify Congressional Reconstruction. In fact, historians often label the modern civil rights movement as the Second Reconstruction. As the optimism of the civil rights movement faded in the 1970s and all but disappeared during Reagan’s America, a breed of so-called postrevisionist scholars discovered that the Radicals had not been so radical after all, that Radical Reconstruction had been a rather conservative affair. In 1988, historian Eric Foner reconciled the revisionist and postrevisionist viewpoints and ended the century-long debate over whether the era was a lost revolutionary moment (as described by liberals and progressives) or a chamber of horrors (as defined by conservatives and reactionaries). Although no post-postrevisionist historiographic school has yet emerged, recent historians have generally followed Foner’s lead, exploring previously neglected aspects of Radical Reconstruction. They underscore the Reconstruction Era’s essential complexity, again suggesting how historiography tends to mirror political and social thought at any given time. Today’s scholars argue that although Reconstruction defies facile conclusions, even an overall synthesis, close study of the topic nevertheless improves our understanding of this most wrenching period in American history.

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  Reconstruction in the United States

  An Annotated Bibliography

  • David Lincove(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  He explains that the forced changes implemented in the South by congressional Radicals were responsible for violence and contributed to postwar sectional animosity that remained for decades. 115. Killian, Lewis M. "The Ambivalent Position of the Negro in the South 1867-1900." Negro History Bulletin 23 (January 1960): 81-86. The stmggle of the freedmen for racial equality in Reconstmction is compared without he same stmggle in the mid-20 th century. He hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court's rejection of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, a symbol of the federal governments turn away focusing on equality, will not be repeated. 22 Reconstruction in the United States 116. Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery 1619-1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. Bibl. 304p. In the last chapter Kolchin provides a brief review of the course of Reconstmction with emphasis on its revolutionary nature and positive progress despite the disappointment that reforms did not go far enough or were reversed by Southern whites. 117. Koussar, J. Morgan and James M. McPherson (eds.). Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C Vann Woodward. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. 463p. The third section of this festschrift includes 5 articles on Reconstmction written by former students of Woodward. (See # 593, 751, 953, 983, 1010) In the introduction the editors' discuss Woodward's tremendous influence, style of writing, and major themes of research in Southern history and race relations. The book includes a bibliography of Woodward's writings. 118. Lindley, Lester G. "Restoration v. Reconstmction: Eliminating Slavery Through Contract Reform in Post-Civil War America." In Contract, Economic Change, and the Search For Order in Industrializing America. By Lester G. Lindley. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993. Pp. 265-280. Lindley discusses the different approaches of President Johnson and the congressional Republicans to the restoration of peace.

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  Thinking Through the Past

  A Critical Thinking Approach to U.S. History, Volume 1

  • John Hollitz(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  In the view of these postrevisionists, Reconstruction was limited by pervasive racism, by the conservativism of Republican leaders, and by the failure to distribute land to blacks. In other words, postrevision-ists disagreed with both the Dunning and revisionist historians, who had at least agreed that Reconstruction had brought radical change. They questioned whether Reconstruction had wrought any lasting change at all. Rather than being too radical, it had actually been too conservative. Blacks had failed to achieve equality because the government had done too little and had failed to carry through on the promise of civil rights. Thus the postrevisionist interpreta-tion taught an important lesson about the relationship between government action and social change. In our own time, the historical reconstruction of Reconstruction is not fin-ished. In the twenty-first century, such historians as Eric Foner and Michael Fitzgerald have placed the experience of former slaves rather than national political leaders and federal policy at the center of Reconstruction history. Others, such as Laura Edwards and Nina Silber, have done much the same for women during the period, placing issues relating to gender in the center of the Reconstruction story. These historians have shown that African Americans were not just passive objects manipulated by whites. They also demonstrated the roles that women families, churches, political organizations, and other black institutions played in the quest for independence and equal citizenship. At the same time the social, economic, and political experiences of African Americans have revealed dramatic changes in the period. Once again, histori-ans have begun to see some revolutionary aspects to Reconstruction. Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

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  A People and a Nation

  A History of the United States

  • Jane Kamensky, Carol Sheriff, David W. Blight, Howard Chudacoff(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  The ideology of free labor dictated that property should be respected and that individuals should be self-reliant. Racism endured and transformed into the even more virulent forms of Klan terror and theories of black degeneration. Concern for the human rights of African Americans and other reforms frequently had less appeal than moneymaking in an individualistic, industrializing society. New challenges began to overwhelm the aims of Reconstruction. How would the country develop its immense resources in an increasingly interconnected national econ- omy? Could farmers, industrial workers, immigrants, and capitalists coexist? Industrialization not only promised prosperity but also wrought increased exploitation of labor. Moreover, industry increased the nation’s power and laid the foundation for an enlarged American role in international affairs. In the wake of the Civil War, Americans faced two pro- found tasks—the achievement of healing and the dispens- ing of justice. Both had to occur, but they never developed in historical balance. Making sectional reunion compatible with black freedom and equality overwhelmed the imagination in American political culture, and the nation still faced much of this dilemma more than a century later. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 439 Suggestions for Further Reading Suggestions for Further Reading David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) Gregory P. Downs, Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861–1908 (2011) W.

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  Decades of Reconstruction

  Postwar Societies, State-Building, and International Relations from the Seven Years' War to the Cold War

  • Ute Planert, James Retallack(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Blacks became officeholders in every southern state. 19 They helped govern the nation by sending sixteen congressmen to participate in the federal government during the 1870s and 1880s. 20 Reconstruction was, as Eric Foner has written, a “stunning experiment in the nineteenth- century world, the only attempt by an outside power in league with the emancipated slaves to fashion an interracial democracy from the ashes of slavery.” 21 Reconstruction represented a radical revolution in US political institu- tions, but it depended upon an even more sweeping ideological transfor- mation in the minds of Republicans. In the 1850s, many Republicans favored “whites-only nationalism,” 22 but by the late 1860s, the Republican Party endorsed a civic nationalism that sought to create a united American people defined by racially egalitarian republicanism. Membership in that nation depended not on race but loyalty and senti- ment. This civic nationalism included African Americans. 23 To defend 18 Foner, Reconstruction, 119–136, 176–216, 261–264. 19 Ibid., 228–333. 20 Philip Dray, Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen (New York, 2008), 380. 21 Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge, LA, 1983), 40. 22 Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970), 261–300. 23 Charles Calhoun, Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869–1900 (Lawrence, KS, 2006), 7–21; CG, 40th Congress, 3rd Session, 708–709; CG, 39th Congress, 1st Session, 293, 303–305. This racially egalitarian nationalism had limits. In the West, many Republicans adopted virulently anti-Asian views, objected to citizenship for Chinese immigrants, and had a similarly negative out- look concerning Native Americans.

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  The Enduring Vision

  A History of the American People, Volume 1: To 1877

  • Paul Boyer, Clifford Clark, Karen Halttunen, Joseph Kett(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  After the Democrats won the House in 1874, support for Reconstruction became a political liability. By 1875, the Radical Republicans, so prominent in the 1860s, had vanished. Stevens and Sumner were dead. Other Radicals had lost office or conviction. “Waving the Bloody Shirt”—defaming Democratic opponents by reviving wartime animosity—now seemed counterproductive. Republican leaders reported that voters were “sick of carpetbag gov-ernment” and tiring of both the “southern ques-tion” and the “Negro question.” It seemed pointless to continue the unpopular and expensive policy of Table 16.4 The Duration of Republican Rule in the Ex-Confederate States Former Confederate States Readmission to the Union Under Congressional Reconstruction Democrats (Conservatives) Gain Control Duration of Republican Rule Alabama June 25, 1868 November 14, 1874 6½ years Arkansas June 22, 1868 November 10, 1874 6½ years Florida June 25, 1868 January 2, 1877 8½ years Georgia July 15, 1870 November 1, 1871 1 year Louisiana June 25, 1868 January 2, 1877 6½ years Mississippi February 23, 1870 November 3, 1875 6½ years North Carolina June 25, 1868 November 3, 1870 2 years South Carolina June 25, 1868 November 12, 1876 8 years Tennessee July 24, 1866 1 October 4, 1869 3 years Texas March 30, 1870 January 14, 1873 3 years Virginia January 26, 1870 October 5, 1869 2 0 years Source: John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 231. 1 Admitted before start of congressional Reconstruction. 2 Democrats gained control before readmission. Copyright 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-300 462 “Redemption,” the word Democrats used to describe their return to power, brought sweeping changes. Some states called constitutional conven-tions to reverse Republican policies.

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  Booker T. Washington and the Struggle against White Supremacy

  The Southern Educational Tours, 1908–1912

  • D. Jackson(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R 2 The Three R’s: Reconstruction, Redemption, and Racism During the holocaust of African enslavement, black people had very little control over their minds and bodies. The rapes, sadistic beatings, separating and selling of families, along with other features of the system, worked to dehumanize African people and break their spirit. 1 The notion of blacks one day controlling their own lives economi- cally, socially, spiritually, and politically became an idea many whites could not conceive. Because of their exclusion from the political system, blacks had no influence in terms of decision making in Congress. However, as the abolitionist movement gained momentum and tension between the North and South came to a head, the voice of American blacks became heard. After the Civil War, which lasted only a few years, white Southerners’ reality was turned upside down. Many of the things they never imagined they would see in their life- times concerning black people happened right before their eyes. After the abolition of chattel slavery, Reconstruction set the tone of race relations in the country for years to come. During that era, black people participated in America’s political system impressively and with much vigor. The political arena became the most immediate avenue blacks took to exercise their citizenship. No doubt, pursuing political over economic power appeared to be the most reasonable approach for blacks to take as they experienced their new freedom. In the immedi- ate aftermath of chattel slavery, blacks remained on the plantations and began to sharecrop with very little opportunity for economic advance- ment. By contrast, African Americans all over the South won elected office with calculated Republican support.

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  Race and Reunion

  The Civil War in American Memory

  • David W. Blight, David W. BLIGHT(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  The bitter experiences of Reconstruction, and the impossibility of a postwar con-sensus on the war’s causes, all but guaranteed the irresolution deep at the heart of Civil War memory. As military Reconstruction neared its end, and as most ex-Confederate states were restored to the Union, many radicals acquiesced in the limited character of the Fifteenth Amendment (its lack of restrictions against voter qualiªcation tests, and its avoidance of black suffrage rights in the North). With its ratiªcation in spring 1870, the voting rights amendment absorbed a quick reputation as the ªnal act of Reconstruction. Even Wendell Phillips re-joiced in April that blacks were now “panoplied in all the rights of citizen-ship.” Republicans had provided blacks with an “ample shield” for their po-litical security, even if more had to be done for their economic security. “Ploughing its laborious, but no longer doubtful, course through heavy seas,” Phillips concluded, “the bark of that race nears a safe harbor.” 20 Such opti-mism from radicals soon seemed strangely out of place as violence and fraud began to crush black political liberty in much of the South. African American spokesmen uttered many warnings during these years about declining radicalism, the ascendant white counter-revolution in the South, and the need for black forbearance. In a public letter to the “National Convention of Colored Citizens of the United States,” held in Washington, D.C., in 1869, AME bishop Daniel Alexander Payne called blacks to political vigilance and moral and material uplift all at once. “In no portion of the Southern States where the whites are in majority,” wrote Payne, “is the life of a colored person safe, unless he or she exhibits both in word, and deed, the spirit of a slave . . . the heel of the oppressor is still upon the neck of the col-ored American.” A few months earlier, Benjamin Tanner had answered his — 1 0 7 — reconstruction and reconciliation

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