The Challenge of Reconstruction
History 103
Dec. 11, 1998
The Experience of Emancipation
Seizing freedom
Deliverance and defiance
Presidential Reconstruction
Andrew Johnson’s plan
Southern response to Johnson’s plan
Black Codes
Conflict between Congress and Johnson
Congressional Reconstruction
Civil Rights Act of 1866
Congress passes Fourteenth Amendment
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States…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." --Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1
- Congressional elections of 1866 as referendum on Reconstruction
- Reconstruction Act of 1867
Impeachment and Trial of President Johnson
Johnson’s resistance to Radical Reconstruction
Firing of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton
House votes impeachment (Feb. 24, 1868)
Senate fails to convict by one vote, 35-19 (May 16, 1868)
Struggle over Suffrage
Provision for black male suffrage in new southern state constitutions
Congresses passes Fifteenth Amendment (Feb. 1868) -- ratified by states in 1870
"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."
Struggle over Land and Labor
William Tecumseh Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 (Jan. 1865)
Freedmen’s Bureau established (Mar. 1865)
Limits of free labor ideology: Congress declines to redistribute southern land
Emergence of sharecropping
Impact of sharecropping
Short-term gains
Long-term stagnation
Struggle for Political Control in the Postwar South
Political empowerment of freedmen
Republican coalition in the South
African Americans
Northern "carpetbaggers"
"Scalawags" (white southerners)
Black power: African Americans elected to office
Programs of Reconstruction governments
Education
Equal access to public facilities
Encouragement of economic development