Regents Review Reconstruction Key Questions How did the approaches to Reconstruction differ? How did Radical Republicans use the freedmen to punish the South? Why does Andrew Johnson get impeached? What does it mean to be impeached? How did southerners keep formerly enslaved people dependent? What policies were implemented to keep African Americans from voting? How did the Southern economy change after the Civil War? What effect does the Plessy v Ferguson case have on Civil Rights? Key Terms Lincoln Plan/Johnson Plan/Radical Republicans Reconstruction Amendments Carpetbaggers/Scalawags Sectionalism Ku Klux Klan Black Codes Sharecroppers/Tenant Farming
RECONSTRUCTION is the term applied to the restoration of the seceded states and the integration of the freedmen into American society during and especially after the Civil War. Presidential Reconstruction The president viewed the process of wartime reconstruction as a weapon to detach Southerners from their allegiance to the Confederacy and thus shorten the war. Consequently, on 8 December 1863, he issued a proclamation of amnesty that promised full pardon to all disloyal citizens except a few leaders of the rebellion, former officers of the United States, and perpetrators of unlawful acts against prisoners of war. Whenever 10 percent of the voters of 1860 had taken the oath of allegiance, they were authorized to inaugurate new governments. All Lincoln required was their submission to the Union and their acceptance of the Emancipation Proclamation. 1. Why did President Lincoln issue a proclamation of amnesty? 2. What did Lincoln want southern states to do in order to rejoin the United States? With the end of the war, the problem of Reconstruction both the restoration of the states and the integration of the freedmen became more acute. If the seceded states were to be restored without any conditions, local whites would soon reestablish rule by the Democratic Party. They would seek to reverse the verdict of the sword and, by combining with their Northern associates, challenge Republican supremacy. Moreover, before long, because of the end of slavery and the lapse of the Three-Fifths Compromise, the South would obtain a larger influence in the councils of the nation than before the war. 3. What would happen if the Southern States were able to reestablish their older forms of government? 4. Why is the 3/5 Compromise from the Constitution an issue at the end of the Civil War? The easiest way of solving this problem would have been to extend the suffrage to the freedmen. But in spite of an increasing radical commitment to votes for blacks, the majority of the party hesitated. Popular prejudice, not all of it in the South, was too strong, and many doubted the feasibility of enfranchising newly liberated slaves. Nevertheless, the integration of the blacks into American life now became one of the principal issues of Reconstruction. 5. What does suffrage mean? 6. Where were there prejudices? 7. More than rebuilding what is the main focus of Reconstruction? Johnson's plan, published on 29 May 1865, called for the speedy restoration of Southern governments based on the (white) electorate of 1861. His proclamation of amnesty offered pardons to all insurgents swearing an oath of allegiance to the United States except for certain exempted classes, including high officers of the Confederacy and those owning property valued at more than $20,000, but even they were eligible for individual pardons. Appointing provisional governors executives who were to call constitutional conventions first for North Carolina and then for the other states, Johnson expected the restored states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, nullify the secession ordinances, and repudiate the Confederate debt, although he did not even insist on these conditions. 8. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, who was the President through Reconstruction? 9. Who could not have amnesty under his plan? Congressional Reconstruction Congress then developed a Reconstruction plan of its own: the Fourteenth Amendment. Moderate in tone, it neither conferred suffrage upon the blacks nor exacted heavy penalties from Southern whites. Clearly defining citizenship, it made African Americans part of the body politic, sought to protect them from state interference, and provided for reduced
representation for states disfranchising prospective voters. If Johnson had been willing to accept it, the struggle over Reconstruction might have ended. But the president was wholly opposed to the measure. Believing the amendment subversive of the Constitution and of white supremacy, he used his influence to procure its defeat in the Southern states, an effort that succeeded everywhere except in Tennessee, which was readmitted on 24 July 1866. At the same time, he sought to build up a new party consisting of conservative Republicans and moderate Democrats. 10. What did the 14 th Amendment do? 11. Why didn t Johnson approve of the 14 th Amendment? The first two Reconstruction Acts divided the South (except for Tennessee) into five military districts, enfranchised male African Americans, and required Southern states to draw up constitutions safeguarding black suffrage. The new legislatures were expected to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, and certain Confederate officeholders were for a time barred from voting and holding office. 12. How did the government ensure that the states enforced the Reconstruction Amendments? The end of Reconstruction came at different times in several states. Despite the passage during 1870 and 1871 of three Force Acts seeking to protect black voting rights and to outlaw the Ku Klux Klan, the gradual collapse of the regimes imposed by Congress could not be arrested. In some cases terror instigated by the Klan and its violent successors overthrew Republican administrations; in others, conservatives regained control by more conventional means. By 1876 Republican administrators survived only in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, all of which returned disputed election results in the fall. After a series of economic and political bargains enabled Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate, to be inaugurated president, he promptly withdrew remaining federal troops from the Southern statehouses, and Reconstruction in those states, already weakened by Northern unwillingness to interfere further, also came to an end. For a time, African Americans continued to vote, although in decreasing numbers, but by the turn of the century they had been almost completely eliminated from Southern politics. 13. The election of what President caused the end of reconstruction? 14. How did he end Reconstruction?
After the Civil War 2 approaches to the South s future emerged. The New South recognized a need to change, primarily industrially. The Solid South was an attempt to recreate the situation in the south that existed before the Civil War New South Features Populists Solid South Features Tenant Farming Temperance Sharecropping- Carpetbaggers Scalawags - Jim Crow Laws - Poll Tax Lynching
Why will the cars have different signs? How much will it cost to create the separate cars? Why have multiple signs in each car? Source: http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourcesets/civil-rights/ (modified)
Homer Plessy 1/8 African American (Octoroon) Introduction This 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case upheld the constitutionality of segregation under the separate but equal doctrine. It stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African-American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a Jim Crow car, breaking a Louisiana law. Rejecting Plessy s argument that his constitutional rights were violated, the Court ruled that a state law that implies merely a legal distinction between whites and blacks did not conflict with the 13th and14th Amendments. Restrictive legislation based on race continued following the Plessy decision, its reasoning not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. The case came from Louisiana, which in 1890 adopted a law providing for equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races on its railroads. In 1892, passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a Jim Crow car. He was brought before Judge John H. Ferguson of the Criminal Court for New Orleans, who upheld the state law. The law was challenged in the Supreme Court on grounds that it conflicted with the 13th and 14th Amendments. By a 7-1 vote, the Court said that a state law that implies merely a legal distinction between the two races did not conflict with the 13th Amendment forbidding involuntary servitude, nor did it tend to reestablish such a condition. The Court avoided discussion of the protection granted by the clause in the 14th Amendment that forbids the states to make laws depriving citizens of their privileges or immunities, but instead cited
such laws in other states as a reasonable exercise of their authority under the police power. The purpose of the 14th Amendment, the Court said, was to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law. Laws requiring their separation do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race. The argument against segregation laws was false because of the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it. The lone dissenter, Kentuckian and former slave owner Justice John Marshall Harlan, denied that a legislature could differentiate on the basis of race with regard to civil rights. He wrote: The white race deems itself to be the dominant race, but the Constitution recognizes no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. Harlan continued: Our Constitution is color-blind. In respect of civil rights all citizens are equal before the law. The Court s majority opinion, he pointed out, gave power to the states to place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens. Following the Plessy decision, restrictive legislation based on race continued and expanded steadily, and its reasoning was not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. The Reader s Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 1. This case creates the legality of what segregation policy? 2. What year was this case? 3. What year did another case overturn this ruling? 4. Why was Homer Plessy arrested? 5. Why was it determined that segregation did not violate the 13 th Amendment? 6. Why did the court rule that segregation was in line with the 14 th Amendment? 7. What did Justice Harlan say legal segregation would create? Sources: http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/plessy-v-ferguson