Reconstruction Period

9 Key excerpts on "Reconstruction Period"

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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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  A People and a Nation, Volume II: Since 1865

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

    (Publisher)

  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. The nation also adopted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, ushering in equal protection of the law, a definition of birthright citizenship, and universal man- hood suffrage into the Constitution. By 1868–1869, the Ku Klux Klan employed extensive violence and terror to thwart Reconstruction and under- mine black freedom. As white Democrats in the South took control of state governments in the 1870s, they encountered little opposition from the North. Moreover, the wartime industrial boom had created new opportunities and priori- ties. The West, with its seemingly limitless potential and its wars against Native peoples, drew American resources and consciousness like never before. Americans moved in huge numbers and sought new “homes” in the trans-Mississippi West and the homes of Native Americans were displaced or destroyed. Political corruption became a nationwide scandal, and bribery a way of doing business. Thus, Reconstruction became a revolution eclipsed. The white South’s desire to reclaim control of its states and of race relations overwhelmed the national interest in stopping it. But Reconstruction left enduring legacies from which the nation has benefited and with which it has struggled ever since. In every succeeding racial or constitutional reckoning, we often return to Reconstruction as a means of understand- ing ourselves anew. ■ Should the Reconstruction era be considered the Second American Revolution? By what criteria should we make such a judgment? ■ What were the origins and meanings of the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1860s? What is its significance today? ■ Reconstruction is judged to have “ended” in 1877.

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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)

  Congressional Reconstruction The process by which the Republican-controlled Congress sought to make the Reconstruction of the ex-Confederate states longer, harsher, and under greater congressional control. Table 14.1 Plans for Reconstruction Compared Johnson’s Plan Radicals’ Plan Fourteenth Amendment Reconstruction Act of 1867 Voting Whites only; high- ranking Confederate leaders must seek pardons Give vote to black males Southern whites may decide but can lose representation if they deny black suffrage Black men gain vote; whites barred from office by Fourteenth Amendment cannot vote while new state governments are being formed Office holding Many prominent Confederates regain power Only loyal white and black males eligible Confederate leaders barred until Congress votes amnesty Fourteenth Amendment in effect Time out of Union Brief Several years; until South is thoroughly democratized Brief 3–5 years after war Other change in southern society Little; gain of power by yeomen not real- ized; emancipation grudgingly accept- ed, but no black civil or political rights Expand education; confiscate land and provide farms for freedmen; expansion of activist federal government Probably slight, depending on enforcement Considerable, depend- ing on action of new state governments 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. CHAPTER 14 Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution | 1865–1877 426 until in 1874 there were only 4,000 in the southern states out- side Texas.

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  Liberty, Equality, Power

  A History of the American People, Concise Edition

  • John Murrin, Paul Johnson, James McPherson, Alice Fahs(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R 17 reconstruction, 1863 – 1877 WARTIME RECONSTRUCTION Radical Republicans and Reconstruction ANDREW JOHNSON AND RECONSTRUCTION Johnson ’ s Policy Southern Defiance The Black Codes Land and Labor in the Postwar South The Freedmen ’ s Bureau Land for the Landless Education THE ADVENT OF CONGRESSIONAL RECONSTRUCTION Schism between President and Congress The Fourteenth Amendment The 1866 Elections The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 THE IMPEACHMENT OF ANDREW JOHNSON The Completion of Formal Reconstruction The Fifteenth Amendment The Election of 1868 THE GRANT ADMINISTRATION Civil Service Reform and Foreign Policy Issues Reconstruction in the South Blacks in Office “ Carpetbaggers ” “ Scalawags ” The Ku Klux Klan The Election of 1872 The Panic of 1873 THE RETREAT FROM RECONSTRUCTION The Mississippi Election of 1875 The Supreme Court and Reconstruction The Election of 1876 Disputed Results The Compromise of 1877 The End of Reconstruction F rom the beginning of the Civil War, the North fought to “ reconstruct ” the Union. Lincoln at first attempted to restore the Union as it had existed before 1861, but once the abolition of slavery became a northern war aim, the Union could never be reconstructed on its old foundations. Instead, it must experience a “ new birth of freedom, ” as Lincoln had said at the dedication of the military cemetery at Gettysburg. But precisely what did “ a new birth of freedom ” mean? At the very least it meant the end of slavery. But what would liberty look like for the four million freed slaves? Would they become citizens equal to their former masters in the eyes of the law? And on what terms should the Confederate states return to the Union? What would be the powers of the states and of the national government in a reconstructed Union? 385 Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-300

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  Major Problems in American History, Volume I

  • Elizabeth Cobbs, Edward Blum, Jon Gjerde, , Elizabeth Cobbs, Edward Blum, Jon Gjerde(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 15 Reconstruction Many nations that have a civil war end up having more civil wars. The reasons for the originating conflict are often unresolved. In the case of the United States, the epic strug-gle from 1861 to 1865 did not lead to another full-blown military encounter. Instead, the states that had seceded were quickly reincorporated into the legal fold of the nation; Confederate leaders and civilians were reconstituted as citizens; and the key political problems that caused the war — slavery and its future in the territories and states — were resolved. Three new constitutional amendments transformed the nation ’ s founding document to make certain of this final point. The questions for Reconstruction were many, but the central ones were how would the United States avoid another violent war? What would be the status of people formerly owned by other people? What would be the status of those who had committed treason against the government? How would the nation develop economically and territorially into the West now that slavery was not an option? Even before the Civil War ended, President Lincoln and congressional leaders puz-zled over how best to reintegrate the people of the South into the Union. Before he was assassinated, President Lincoln proposed a “ 10 percent plan, ” which would have allowed a state government to reestablish itself once one-tenth of those who had voted in 1860 took an oath of loyalty to the United States. Radicals in Congress were appalled by the seem-ingly lenient plan and pushed through their own bill, which increased the proportion to one-half of the voters who were required to swear that they had never supported secession. Lincoln ’ s assassination cut short this increasingly scathing debate and drastically altered the mood of Reconstruction. Political disagreements over Reconstruction policy were vast, and the strategies advo-cated were so varied that Reconstruction took a crooked road.

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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)

  Anthony (1820–1906), c.1880 (b/w photo)/American Photographer, (19th century)/SCHLESINGER LIBRARY, RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE, HARVARD/ Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University/Bridgeman Images) Table 16.2 The Reconstruction Amendments Amendment and Date of Congressional Passage Provisions Ratification Thirteenth (January 1865) Prohibited slavery in the United States. December 1865 Fourteenth (June 1866) Defined citizenship to include all persons born or naturalized in the United States. Provided proportional loss of congressional representation for any state that denied suffrage to any of its male citizens. Disqualified prewar officeholders who supported the Confederacy from state or national office. Repudiated the Confederate debt. July 1868, after Congress made ratification a prerequisite for readmission of ex-Confederate states to the Union Fifteenth (February 1869) Prohibited the denial of suffrage because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. March 1870; ratification required of Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia for readmission to the Union Copyright 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-300 446 16-2.1 A New Electorate The Reconstruction laws of 1867–1868 transformed the southern electorate by temporarily disfranchising 10–15 percent of potential white voters and by enfran-chising more than seven hundred thousand freed-men. Outnumbering white voters by one hundred thousand, blacks held voting majorities in five states. The new electorate provided a base for the Republican Party, which had never existed in the South.

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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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  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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  Reconstruction in the United States

  An Annotated Bibliography

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

    (Publisher)

  Edited by Kermit L. Hall and James W. Ely, Jr. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989. Pp. 225-249. The Reconstmction behavior of the governments in the South illustrates that a constitution does not have much meaning unless a large majority of the population is committed to it. Congressional Republicans and many Southern state Republicans sought to devise state governments to provide civil equality for black citizens, but most white Southerners felt left out of the system, either because they were legally National Politics of Reconstruction 121 excluded or because the constitution did not represent their beliefs. Benedict explains that Republican actions were clearly contradictory from the perspective of a majority of the population in most Southern states who were also stmggling for liberty and democracy. By the middle of the 1870s Southern whites had ideological allies in the North who helped to bring down Republican mle in the South. 640. Benedict, Michael Les. "Reconstmction: The Civil War Amendments." In The Supreme Court and the Civil War. Edited by Jennifer Lowe. Washington: Supreme Court Historical Society, 1996. Pp. 89-97. Ills. The response of the U.S. Supreme Court to cases filed under the Reconstmction amendments was to preserve federalism at the expense of protecting individual civil rights. This response was consistent with the court's decisions prior to the Civil War. The court recognized federal power in protecting some basic rights, but it severely weakened federal powers provided by the 14th Amendment. Although the language of the amendment is unclear, the intent of the Republicans in Congress was disallowed, thus establishing a precedent for future cases until the mid-20th century. 641. Berger, Raoul. "Constitutional Interpretation and Activist Fantasies." Kentucky Law Journal 82 (1993-94): 1-28. Berger emphasizes that it is wrong for the Supreme Court to extend constitutional interpretations beyond the intent of the Congress.

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