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