1. APUSH Out of Many, Chapter 17 “Reconstruction, 1863-1877” David A. Lawson, M. Ed. Faragher, et. al. Upper Saddle River, NJ ©2011

2. The Politics of Reconstruction  The Civil war ended with 620,000 soldiers dead (360,000 Union and 260,000 Confederate). There were an additional 275,000 wounded Union troops and 190,000 for the Confederacy.  Four million slaves were now free.  The national government was stronger than it ever had been, and the term “United States” became understood as a singular noun instead of a plural noun.

3.  The South went from having 25% of the nation’s wealth in 1860 to only possessing 12% by the war’s end.  The South reacted with bitterness at defeat and at having to redefine their relationship with former slaves.  Abraham Lincoln had a reconstruction plan as early as 1863 called the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction giving full pardon and restoration of property (excluding slaves) to Southerners swearing an oath of allegiance to the Union. If 10% of the number a Confederate state’s 1860 voters swore allegiance, Lincoln would recognize their state government.  Radical Republicans opposed this. Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Henry Davis of Maryland sponsored the harsher Wade-Davis bill, requiring 50% of white males to swear allegiance to the Union before drafting a new state constitution. They also insisted on former slaves’ equality before the law. Lincoln pocket-vetoed it because he was trying to build some support in the South

4.  In 1862, General Benjamin Butler started paying slave to keep working on confiscated sugar plantations in Louisiana. General Nathaniel Banks continued this practice so that by 1864 50,000 African-Americans were wage laborers throughout the state.  In January 1865, General Sherman issued Special Field Order 15, setting aside the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and part of South Carolina’s rice fields for freed people with each family receiving forty acres of land and the use of mules. By that summer 40,000 freed people settled on 400,000 acres of confiscated or abandoned land.  In March 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau was created to distribute food and clothing as well as managing abandoned southern land.  Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery in January 1865 and the states ratified it in December.  Lincoln was assassinated in April, so his outline for Reconstruction was incomplete. The new president Andrew Johnson thus had to continue what Lincoln started.

5.  Former Senator Johnson grew up a poor southerner loyal to the Union. His wife taught him how to read. He was a Democrat who was sympathetic to the South in general with the exception of the plantation owners.  Lincoln had chosen him as a running mate in 1864 to maintain support from the border states, the War Democrats, and to try to build Union support in the South as he had while military governor of Tennessee.  Since Johnson blamed plantation owners for the war, he was lenient with the state governments. This infuriated the Radical Republicans.  In the spring of 1865, he granted amnesty and pardon to all Confederates (with the exception of fourteen classes of Confederate officials and wealthy landowners) who pledged loyalty to the Union. He signed hundreds of pardons a day when Congress was not in session.  Johnson referred to this era as “restoration” instead of Reconstruction, and quickly tried to bring the Confederate states back into the Union.

7.  The Radical Republicans had an attitude typified by Representative George Julian of Indiana, calling for the elimination in the South of “large estates, widely scattered settlements, wasteful agriculture, popular ignorance, social degradation, the decline of manufactures, contempt for honest labor, and a pampered oligarchy.” They were in favor of equal political rights and economic opportunity.  Radical Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania called for the confiscation of 400 million acres from the wealthiest 10 percent of Southerners to be redistributed to black and white yeomen and northern land buyers.  Radical Republicans resented “black codes” in Southern states restricting the freedom of the black labor force and prohibiting civil rights. They passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to establish African American citizenship (later made permanent through the 14 th Amendment in 1868).  Johnson vetoed this bill, but the Congress overrode the veto.  In the 1866 elections, Republicans increased their numbers in the House of Representatives and Senate.  Republicans passed the First Reconstruction Act and Tenure of Offices Act and impeached Johnson when he violated the latter (Johnson was acquitted in the Senate by a single vote).

9.  By 1868, all but four Confederate states had been readmitted to the Union.  The Republicans nominated Ulysses S. Grant who had not really wanted to run for president, but did so for fear that the gains of the costly Union victory might be lost if he did not.  At the time, Northern states were largely refusing to allow black suffrage. The Democrats, seeking to reverse Reconstruction policies even further, nominated former New York governor Horatio Seymour, foe of emancipation and supporter of states’ rights.  The Ku Klux Klan was formed in 1866 in Tennessee to terrorize African Americans so that they wouldn’t vote. This terrorism helped Seymour to win in Georgia and Louisiana, but cost him Northern states.  Grant defeated Seymour by slightly over 300,000 votes. Five hundred thousand African Americans had voted for Grant, and more would have certainly done so if not for the intimidation in the South.  The Republicans retained large majorities in both houses and passed the 15 th Amendment allowing men of all races to vote in February 1869.  The remaining states were required to ratify the 14 th and 15 th Amendments as a prerequisite for readmission, and the 15 th Amendment was ratified in February 1870.

16.  As black suffrage was proposed, the women’s suffrage movement became divided. Some supported black suffrage; others complained about black suffrage while ignoring women’s suffrage.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone founded the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 to advocate the removal of voting restrictions by race and gender.  However, the movement split into a radical branch called the National Woman Suffrage Association (with Stanton and Anthony) who opposed the Fifteenth Amendment since it only removed race as a restriction. They also supported a broad platform of other gender equality issues. The moderate group (with Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Henry Blackwell) founded the American Woman Suffrage Association supported the 15 th Amendment and worked for women’s voting rights at the state level.  Women’s suffrage was not achieved at this time not because of division within the movement so much as backlash against Radical Reconstructionism itself.

18. The Meaning of Freedom  Although the economic status of African Americans hadn’t changed much with freedom, the self-determination that came with Union victory caused many former slaves to move.  Family reunions became more common.  Freedom disrupted the equality of relationships for African Americans.  African American churches grew, spread, and provided numerous services for its parishioners.  The American Missionary Association was instrumental in establishing black colleges.

19.  African Americans wanted land they had been promised by General Sherman’s Special Field Order 15 and by the Freedmen’s Bureau Act. However, the government was pulling back at breaking up the large plantations by the end of the 1860s.  Many African Americans began sharecropping – living and working on another owner’s land in exchange for a portion of the crops.  Three quarters of black southerners were sharecroppers.  The First Reconstruction Act (mentioned earlier) encouraged political activity by helping African Americans by the hundreds of thousands register to vote. The Union League (the Republican party’s organization in the South) was formed to prevent intimidation.  Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina had black electoral majorities.

20. Southern Politics and Society  Establishing Republican control in the South was difficult since the South had never had any Republican influence before.  Some Republicans were African American (>50% of SC, MS, LA; 40-50% of VA, NC, AL, FL, GA; 25% of TX, TN, AR). Some were white northerners (“carpetbaggers”) hoping to capitalize on southern wealth. Some were white southerners (“scalawags”) who felt the best future lay in Republican policies.  Hiram Revels and Blanch K. Bruce were elected to the Senate from Mississippi.

23.  Republicans tried to balance their demand for reform in the South with the need for acceptance in that region.  The KKK in various southern states terrorized Republican governments and African Americans between 1870-1873. Congress passed the Enforcement Acts of 1870-1871 to counter the Klan’s lawless intimidation.  The Civil Rights Act of 1875 outlawed racial discrimination in public places, but enforcement was weak due to the cost of taking cases to court.  In the 1870s, Democrats gradually began to win majorities in both state governments as well as in Congress.  The Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873 tested the Fourteenth Amendment with a ruling by the Supreme Court that the federal government did not have the power to deny state’s regulatory powers.  U.S. v. Reese (1876) and U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876) restricted congressional power to enforce the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. They also established that prohibition of discrimination by states did not prohibit discrimination by individuals and that the 15 th Amendment didn’t actually guarantee voting rights. The 1883 Civil Rights Cases rule the 1875 Civil rights Act as unconstitutional.

24.  Although railroad mileage saw an increase of 3,000 (40%) between 1868-1872, Northern and European investment in the South was minimal and capital was low.  Growers, especially poor whites, were forced from subsistence crops to growing cotton for market.  The lack of banks made local and merchants the chief source of credit, and they took advantage of (often illiterate black) tenant farmers and sharecroppers by raising interest rates and demanding a lien (a claim on the following year’s crop).  Expanding production of cotton decreased its value, and the South faced global competition.  By 1880, 1/3 of white farmers and ¾ of black farmers were sharecroppers, representing over 300,000 of a million farms.

25. Reconstructing the North  Republicans like Lincoln pointed to the possibility of (and their own success in) advancement by hired hands in the “free labor” system.  Class conflicts still broke out, as in the railroad strike of 1877, broken up by federal troops.  Industrial production had increased 75% by 1873 since the end of the Civil War.  Congressional legislation supported the growth of railroads and subsidized expansion by railroad companies like the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific to complete the transcontinental route (completed on May 10, 1869).

26.  The mutual relationship between government and railroads became extensive to the point of scandal in the Grant administration. Union Pacific stockholders created a fake construction company called Crédit Mobilier, which diverted funds for constructing the railroad and paying bribes to politicians such as Vice President Schuyler Colfax and several congressmen.  Government policies (National Mineral Act, 1866) also favored enterprises that extracted natural resources from the ground, so that oil producers like John D. Rockefeller, who controlled 90% of the oil industry, received millions of acres of free public land.  The Democrats caused political scandal as well, typified by the “Tweed Ring” of Tammany Hall in New York. Thus, political scandal didn’t necessarily make either party look better or worse as the 1872 election approached.  Liberal Republicans like Charles Francis Adams, Jr., favored laissez-faire capitalism and distrusted increased democracy and suffrage.

27.  Horace Greeley was the choice of both Liberal Republicans and Democrats, both of whom wanted Reconstruction in the South to end.  Most Republicans were unwilling to abandon the regular party, and Grant won in 1872 with 56% of the popular vote. The Liberal Republicans disappeared, but their ideas became increasingly prevalent in the regular Republican party.  Economic panic broke out in 1873 when Jay Cooke and Co. couldn’t market millions in Northern Pacific Railroad bonds. Other banks failed and the New York Stock Exchange ground to a halt. A hundred banks closed and 18,000 businesses failed.  Labor leaders called for relief from the government, but to no avail. Hostility between labor and capital ensued.  More corruption in the Grant Administration surfaced, including indictments against 200 members of the so-called “Whiskey Ring” who conspired with corrupt government officials to cheat the government out of millions of taxpayer dollars.  The Democrats criticized Grant and nominated New York governor Samuel J. Tilden, who had successfully broken up the “Tweed Ring.”

33.  The Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, a civil war general, who promised to clean up government and offer free universal education.  Tilden finished with 250,000 more popular votes, but disputes in 4 different states left him 1 electoral vote shy of victory.  An Electoral Commission appointed by Congress to resolve the deadlock was composed of 8 Republicans and 7 Democrats, who voted unsurprisingly to award all disputed electoral votes to Hayes.  When Democrats threatened with a filibuster to block Hayes’ inauguration, Republicans compromised by agreeing to give the South more money for improvements, to appoint a southerner to his cabinet, and withdrawing federal troops from the South and allowing “home rule” through noninterference – effectively ending Reconstruction.

36. Conclusion  The Compromise of 1877 essentially meant that all the gains of Reconstruction would not be enforced for almost a century.  The struggle between capital and labor, as seen in the Railroad Strike of 1877, would become the new struggle of focus to the Union.