1. The Meaning of Freedom: The Promise of Reconstruction 1865–186812
The Meaning of Freedom: The Promise of Reconstruction
1865–1868
Slaves, some quick to reveal inner feelings
Others, especially elderly, fearful about leaving
Many left in search of family members
Slave owners dismayed when freedmen left
Confused servants’ affection with support for slavery

2. Students assembled in front of James Plantation School in North Carolina shortly after the Civil War ended in 1865.
Students assembled in front of James Plantation School in North Carolina shortly after the Civil War ended in Compared to many such schools, this one was exceptionally well constructed. Notice the students' clothes and lack of shoes.

3. Land Economic security Special Field Order #15
Self sufficiency, independence
Not possible without federal help
Special Field Order #15
General William Tecumseh Sherman issued this military directive in January It set aside lands along the coast from Charleston, South Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida, for former slaves. President Andrew Johnson revoked the order six months later
Southern Homestead Act: Provide land for freedmen, 1865 (set aside over 3 million acres of land)
Much of the land swampy, unsuitable for farming
Many blacks purchased land
Lacked financial resources
Failed

4. The Freedmen’s Bureau Federal agency to help ex-slaves, est. 1865
Negotiate labor contracts with white planters
Settle legal and criminal disputes
Provide food, medical care, and transportation
Helped thousands of white and black southerners
to assist black and white Southerners left destitute by the Civil War

5. Freedmen’s Bureau agents often found themselves in the middle of angry disputes over land and labor that erupted between black and white southerners.
Freedmen’s Bureau agents often found themselves in the middle of angry disputes over land and labor that erupted between black and white southerners. Too often the Bureau officers sided with the white landowners in these disagreements with former slaves.
Harper’s Weekly, July 25, 1868

6. The Black Church After slavery, organized their own churches
Black ministers
Most founded Baptist or Methodist churches
Autonomy, simple and direct theology
Black churches, clergymen, and parishioners
Vital role in Reconstruction

7. Education Freedom and education inseparable Schools Freedmen’s Bureau
Work all day, attend school at night
3,000 schools and 150,000 students, 1869
Northern religious organizations and churches
Established colleges and universities
Considered blacks efforts to learn absurd
Many schools burned, teacher lynched
Most whites refused to attend schools with blacks

8. Violence White southerners embittered, couldn’t embrace end of slavery
Widespread, large-scale violence and brutality
Little redress
500 white Texans indicted for killing blacks
Not one conviction

9. Black Codes Black codes
Laws that were passed in each of the former Confederate states following the Civil War that applied only to black people. While conceding such rights as the right to marry, to contract a debt, or to own property, the codes severely restricted the rights and opportunities of former slaves in terms of labor and mobility
Black children (2 to 21-years-old) apprenticed
Corporal punishment was legal
Prohibited vagrancy, using alcohol or firearms

10. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868)
Guarantee rights as citizens
Guaranteed citizenship to every person born in U.S.
Threatened to deprive states of representation in Congress
Three-fifths clause abolished
Reduce representation if not permitted to vote

11. The Reaction of White Southerners
Outrage
Black people inferior
Manipulate black suffrage for white advantage
Control freedmen as they did enslaved people

12. Chapter 12 Questions: Choose 1
What is the impact of the Reconstruction? Or
Was Reconstruction a failure? If so, how? If not, why not?
Video: Slavery and the Making of America: Disc 4 The Challenge of Freedom: “Lost Friends” and “Election of 1876”
Discuss Black politics, KKK, the Black vote (men only) and the Black church