Wartime Reconstruction

1. Wartime Reconstruction • Lincoln’s 10% Plan • Goal: Shorten the War • December 8, 1863: Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction offered full pardon and restoration of rights upon aoth of loyalty and acceptance of abolition. When 10% of the electorate had taken the oath, the minority could convene to establish new state government.

2. Wartime Reconstruction • Issue: Linking emancipation to reconstruction created a conundrum for loyal border states. Even Lincoln’s wartime reconstruction had revolutionary implications. • Most resistance: Kentucky with some 65,000 blacks in bondage. • Less in Missouri, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware

3. Wartime Experiments • Louisiana: a political model • Gen. Benjamin Butler, Gen. Nathaniel Banks • New Orleans: large city (144k), 25k Blacks, Northern connections, nearly half foreign-born, sugar planters close to Union (tariff beneficiaries). • 1862 Free State Association sent members to Congress • Problems: factions in Louisiana; political competition among national Republicans

4. Wartime Experiments • S.C. Sea Islands • General Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 (Forty acres and a mule) • An economic model • The crux: the definition of “free labor” • To northern businessmen it meant wage labor, to freedmen it meant working your own land. • The Confiscation Act of 1862 raised the theoretical possibility of wholesale forfeiture of Confederate lands, but Lincoln and Republicans were cool to pressing the theoretical limits.

5. Radical Republicans (Congress) • Objected to limited scope of Lincoln’s plan. • Wendell Phillips: It “frees the slave and ignores the negro.” Phillips insisted reconstruction reuired guaranteed education, access to land, and the ballot. • (Ben)Wade-(Henry)Davis Act (July 1864) • Majority of voters take an “Ironclad Oath” • Equality before the law • Lincoln pocket-vetoed the bill, fearing it would repudiate progress in Louisisana

6. Radical Republicans • “I hold that the south is to be annihilated. I mean the intellectual, social, aristocratic South—the thing that represented itself by slavery and the bowie-knife, by bullying and lynch law, by ignorance and idleness…I mean a society which holds for its cardinal principle of faith that one-third of the race is born booted and spurred and the other two thirds saddled for the first to ride…That South is to be annihilated.”

7. March 1865: Congress established the Freedman’s Bureau Official name: “Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands” Distribute clothing, food, fuel and oversee conditions of destitute freedmen; authorized to divide abandoned land into 40 acre plots for rental to freedmen and loyal refugees, and eventual sale. Thirteenth Amendment Radical Republicans (Congress)

8. Surrender

9. Surrender: General Order No 9 (April 10, 1865) • After four years of arduous service, marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources. • I need not tell the brave survivors of so many hard fought battles who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have consented to this result from no distrust of them, But feeling that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that could compensate for the loss that would have attended the continuance of the contest, I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen. • By the terms of the agreement, Officers and men can return to their homes and remain until exchanged. You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed and I earnestly pray that a merciful God will extend to you His blessing and protection. • With an unceasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your country, and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous consideration of myself, I bid you all an affectionate farewell.

10. Reconstruction • Lincoln’s assassination April 14, 1865 • Convicted of President Lincoln's Assassination, Surratt, David Herold, George Atzerodt and Paine were hanged  on the grounds of present-day Fort McNair.

11. Johnson’s Presidential Reconstruction • Axes of contention: • African Americans versus Southern Whites • President versus Congress • North versus South • Johnson’s early view as Military Governor of Tenn.: “Treason must be made odious and traitors punished”

12. Presidential Reconstruction • Governor Johnson on issue of bonds people: “Damn the Negroes, I am fighting those traitorous aristocrats, their masters” • States rights: Johnson was a believer in limited government and a strict construction of the Constitution. Where Republicans believed that Black suffrage should be a requirement for readmission of the Southern states, Johnson believed the national government had to respect states rights to set policies. Johnson insisted that Blacks possessed “less capacity for government than any other race of people…White men alone must manage the South.” • Actual: Pardons for all (some 7,000 in 1865—maybe 15k alltogether)

13. Black Codes • Black Codes mandated long-term labor contracts, coercive apprenticeships, criminal penalties for breach of contract, harsh penalties for vagrancy, etc. This directly contradicted the Northern belief in the mobility of the worker, the principles of Free Labor. One reason behind the Black Codes: A Gender dimension: as male ex-slaves began to exercise their authority as heads-of-household, freed from the personal tyranny of the master-slave system, they often wished to keep their wives out of the fields. The Black Codes refuted the notions of free labor so thoroughly that they alarmed many Republicans who were not social idealists: One New Yorker asked about the future of freedmen, “Will the United States give them freedom or its shadow?”

14. Freedmen’s Visions • Freedmen and Women: Visions • Mobility • Family • Work • Personal freedoms

15. Visions 2

16. Visions 3 • Independent Black Churches

17. Visions 4 • Schools

18. Congressional Initiatives(Radical Republican Reconstruction) • Expand Freedmen’s Bureau • Civil Rights Act (1866) • President’s response: Vetoes Civil Rights Act of 1866 and funding for the Freedmen’s Bureau • Johnson Campaign “Swinging ‘Round the Circle” (1866)

19. Resistance • “The law which freed the negro also freed the master from all obligations springing out of the relations of master and slave”

20. Congressional Reconstruction (Radical) • Political coalition for Reconstruction: • Scalawags (Southern Unionists, e.g. James Longstreet) • Carpetbaggers: not only opportunists (there were many who went southward with federal appointments, etc, to organize industry, serve as lawyers, etc) but also school teachers, missionaries, medical workers, political organizers, social welfare professionals…the majority were veterans, tended to be middle class and reasonably well educated. • Black activists and politicians (advantage Republicans)

21. Congressional Reconstruction (Radical) • Congress: • Reconstruction Acts (1867) • XIVth Amendment • Impeachment (1868)

22. Congressional Reconstruction Survival/Compromise Sharecropping Pros: independence (who works, where to live, when to work, how fast, etc, etc) Cons: dependence on planters for supplies, goods, equipment, and prices

23. Labor relations • The meanings of free labor: Economic rationality (supply and demand) Internal self-discipline Responsiveness to the market Social mobility Keys: control of labor depends on control of land, access to the courts, and control of political processes. Control of policy sustains white dominance.

24. Congressional Reconstruction • New State Constitutional Conventions • Black political activism • Election to office • P.B.S. Pinchback (Gov. LA) • Robert Smalls, Robert Elliot (Congressmen SC) • Benjamin Turner (Congress, AL) • Blanche Bruce (Senator, MS) • John Lynch (Congress, MS) • Councilmen, customs, boards of supervisors, post masters, etc. • 1868-1870 Radical Republican governments in the South (Politics as a way to make a living).

25. Reconstruction Challenges • Challenges faced by Radical Reconstruction governments in the South: • Revenues (Taxes) v. Responsibilities • Limited Tax Base: shift to land taxes. • Demand for Services: schools, hospitals and health services, orphanages, penitentiaries, rebuilding roads, etc, etc. • “Overexuberant” investments: state subsidies for railroads, mills, etc.

26. Backlash • Redeemers

27. KKK: “The object is to kill out the leading men of the Republican party.” KKK

28. 15th Amendment (ratified 1870): “The crowning act of a Republican conspiracy to promote black equality” Unfortunate omission: no specific repudiation of restrictions other than race (literacy, property, education, gender) The Vote

29. Last go ‘round • Force Act (1870) • Ku Klux Klan Act (1871) • Benjamin Butler • Still, Colfax riot (1873), 280 dead Succeeds in dismantling the Klan, but fails to undermine commitment to white supremacy

30. Reconstruction • 1870s: Klan broken, but Reconstruction runs out of steam: • Falling cotton prices • Rise of “Liberalism”: free trade, supply and demand, market driven relations • Scandals: Credit Mobilier, Boss Tweed • Greeley: “Root, Hog, or Die” • National Recession, Panic of 1873 • Class trumps race • The death of slavery did not mean the birth of freedom