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Reconstruction and Segregation. 1865 - 1910. How did the assassination of Abraham Lincoln affect Reconstruction?.
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Reconstruction and Segregation 1865 - 1910
How did the assassination of Abraham Lincoln affect Reconstruction? • At the end of the Civil War two very different plans for reconstructing the nation were offered. Had Lincoln lived perhaps history would have different. The assassination of Lincoln, however, left the vulnerable Andrew Johnson, a Southerner and former slave owner with no college education, President. Could he live up to Lincoln's ideals? Would he be allowed the opportunity? That is the question. • After the Civil War congress was controlled by a group called the "Radical Republicans." Lincoln was able to control them and had proposed a plan for reconstruction that looked to treating the South more like a lost brother returning home. Lincoln looked to reconstruction as a time of healing. The Radical Republicans, however, looked at reconstruction as an opportunity to teach the South a lesson and to punish them. In 1866 Congress passed the Wade-Davis Bill, which called for rather draconian Reconstruction measures. Johnsonvetoed the bill but the debate raged.
Immediately following the Civil War, Southern states passed numerous laws restricting the rights of Blacks. They were known as the "Black codes". Mississippi, for example, barred interracial marriages. The punishment for such an act was death. Another code restricted the area in which Blacks could live. For example, Blacks could not own or rent land outside of an incorporated town. The purpose of this code was to undermine the efforts of the federal government in giving forty acres of land to former slaves. Many large plantations in the South were confiscated or abandoned. Much of this land was parceled out to slaves in forty acre allotments.
These actions by Southern states angered congress. Led by the "Radical Republicans", congress passed sweeping legislation during the Reconstruction years. Congressmen Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens led the fight and first passed an act to establish the Freedmen's Bureau. Its purpose was to provide education and training for Blacks in their transition from slavery to freedom. Despite the best efforts of President Andrew Johnson to stop all legislation assisting Blacks, several significant bills were passed. With martial law in force in the South, congress could do virtually anything it wanted to. The rebellious states could not vote on the measures before congress, and there were enough votes to override President Johnson's vetoes. • The year following the Civil War, congress passed the Civil Rights act of 1866. It was subsequently vetoed by Andrew Johnson. Congress, however, overrode his veto and immediately passed the 14th Amendment due in part to Johnson's resistance. The purpose of both measures involved the rights of persons born or naturalized in the United States, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, 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." With exception to Tennessee, all Southern states refused to ratify the amendment.
Congress than passed the Reconstruction Act, which prohibited these states from participating in Congress until they passed the measure and revised their own state constitutions. Passage of this amendment and the Reconstruction Act met with violent opposition. Despite the presence of the military, Whites went on a rampage killing, beating, burning, and destroying any Blacks they could find. Blacks were lynched by the hundreds. In 1870, another Civil Rights Act was passed, and was immediately followed by the 15th Amendment - "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 conditions of servitude." • Clearly the discord between Johnson and the Radical Republicans made Johnson an ineffective President and strengthened the power of Congress. In 1868 Congress impeached Johnson for violating a law called the Tenure of Office Act which forbade the President from firing a member of the Cabinet. Johnson was not convicted but clearly he was a lame duck President.
How successful was reconstruction in dealing with the economic and social problems of freedmen? • A. What economic problems did newly freed slaves face? • 1. They had no education and could not read or write as a result of the Slave Codes. • 2. Job opportunities were extremely limited. • 3. Often the only skills a freed slave had was in farming and even then they usually only knew how to do the manual labor, not the actual running of a farm. • 4. Freed slaves had no money, clothing, etc.
B. What types of jobs did freedmen take? • 1. Sharecropping - Many freed slaves remained on their plantations and worked as sharecroppers. In this arrangement landowners (former plantation owners) also had no money to hire workers so what they would do is allow a freed slave to work the land and give a portion of the harvest to the landowner. The portion was usually quite high and it was difficult for the freeman to save enough to sell on his own. In theory a sharecropper could save enough money to buy some mules and eventually rent the land but this was rare. • 2. Tenant Farming - Some sharecroppers actually made enough to begin renting the land. This was known as tenant farming. Certainly this was better than 'cropping but they still struggled to make ends meet.
C. Who do you think they could turn to find some relief from this emotional burden? • 1. Growth of black Methodist and Baptist Churches - had Evangelical roots. Used spiritual song and gospel; they were the forerunner of Southern Baptist churches. AME - African Methodist Episcopal Church sent missionaries to the south immediately after the war. Membership increased from 70,000 to 390,000.
D. What needed to be done to help African Americans re-enter society? • 1. Freedmen's Bureau - created as a part of the Reconstruction Act, it was a Federal agency designed to provide food, clothes and shelter for freed slaves and whites in need. • 2. Education - black and white school teachers came south and began to teach the freed slaves. Booker T. Washington said "It was a whole race going to school. Few were too young and none were too old.“ • Land – “50 acres and a mule” W. T. Sherman
E. How successful was reconstruction in creating real economic freedom? • 1. Not very much. many called sharecropping and tenant farming economic slavery because it still kept freedmen subservient to whites and at their whim. • F. What would be the ultimate level of achievement for a freedman? • 1.. Election to the government - sixteen blacks elected to Congress, 2 senators and 14 reps. Hiram Revels, a Senator, took Jefferson Davis' spot from Mississippi the other Senator from Mississippi was also black, a former slave who has escaped from Virginia before the war - Blanche Bruce.
G. How do you think most southerners reacted to reconstruction? • 1. Supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia were formed . Some originally warned blacks not to vote, then turned violent. • H. How did groups like the Klan effect reconstruction? • 1. Southerners may have had to live with blacks but they sure didn't like it and they sure were not going to treat them as equals. What came to exist in the south was a segregated society, or one where the races are separated. This was not originally law (though it later came to be) and is thus referred to as de facto segregation or segregation by the fact that it exists.
To what extent did Reconstruction create political equality for freedmen? • A. If you were a southerner what laws would you pass to deal with freedmen? • 1. Southerners fearing Black political power passed a series of laws in each state called Black Codes. Black Codes enforced in Southern States during Reconstruction prevented freed slaves from exercising many rights.
2. The Black Codes • Now that the slaves have become emancipated, it is necessary to pass regulations that preserve public order. These regulations must also preserve the comfort and correct behavior of the former slaves. Therefore, the following rules have been adopted with the approval of the United States military authorities who have commanded this area. • 1) Every Negro is required to be in the regular service of some white person or former owner, who shall be held responsible for the conduct of that Negro. • 2) No public meetings or congregations of Negroes shall be allowed after sunset. Such public meetings may be held during the day with the permission of the local captain in charge of the area. • 3) No Negro shall be permitted to preach or otherwise speak out to congregations of colored people without special permission in writing from the government. • 4) Negroes may legally marry, own property and sue and be sued in a court of law. • 5) Negroes may not serve on juries. • 6) A Negro may not testify against a white person in a Court of Law. • 7) It shall be illegal for a Negro or a person of Negro descent to marry a white person. • 8) No Negro shall be permitted outside in public after sundown without permission in writing from the government. A Negro conducting business for a white person may do so but only under the direct supervision of his employer. • 9) No Negro shall sell, trade, or exchange merchandise within this area without the special written permission of his employer. • 10) No Negro who is not in the military service shall be allowed to carry firearms or any kind or weapons of any type without the special written permission of his employers.
B. How do you think the Radical Republicans reacted to the Black Codes? • 1. They were outraged. The Black Codes clearly did two things. It created a political situation tantamount to slavery and it also placed the same southerners in political power who had power before the war! • 2. Passage of the Reconstruction Amendments • 13th - Ended Slavery • 14th - Equal protection under the law, no state may deprive any person of life, liberty and property without due process of law. • 15th - Gave African Americans the right to vote.
D. How do you think the South responded to these amendments? • 1. Refused to ratify 14th amendment. Amendment was passed after the First Reconstruction Act which created military districts and mandated that the state constitutions include suffrage for blacks. The Act also mandated that states must ratify the 14th amendment before being readmitted to the Union.
E. Who helped run Southern governments after the reconstruction acts threw out the old Southern leaders? • 1. Scalawags (means scoundrel) -White southerners who joined the Republican Party. There were mixed motivations. Some wanted rapid industrialization, some opposed slavery and secession, some were selfish office seekers who used blacks to gain elective office by stuffing ballot boxes etc. • 2. Carpetbaggers (from pictures of all belongings rolled in a carpet carried on their shoulders.)-Northerners who moved South. There were again various motives to support reconstruction. Some were teachers and clergy who really wanted to help former slaves, some were Union soldiers who preferred a warm climate, some were entrepreneurs, some were dishonest profit seekers. • 3. Scalawags and Carpetbaggers both took political power away from blacks because they were the ones to fill the void in political leadership, not blacks as had been intended. • In the end freed slaves did not receive the political equality they sought. The black codes created segregation by law, known as de jure segregation to go along with existing de facto segregation. The south quickly became a divided society, and it placed the black family at the bottom of the economic, social and political heap.
What happened to freedmen after reconstruction came to an end? • I. The End of Reconstruction • A. Reconstruction began in 1865, how do you think Northerners felt about it by 1877? • 1. Northerners were tired of reconstruction after twelve long years. In the beginning it had been a great social adventure. Many had been convinced that they were doing a very good, important thing. By 1877 many felt that they would never accomplish the social good that they sought to accomplish. The general feeling was that the south might never really change. • 2. Northerners were also increasingly upset at the fact that the northern military had to occupy the south. They wanted their soldiers back home to support their families. • B. How do you think the Depression of 1873 affected Northern effort at Reconstruction? • 1. The north could no longer afford the costs of reconstruction.
C. How did the scandals of the Grant administration affect the next election? • 1. Ulysses S. Grant, the military hero of the Civil War had been swept into office after the Johnson Administration. Unfortunately his administration, as well as his personal life, were ripped with scandal. Grant, an alcoholic, was unable to police his own cabinet and scandals began to emerge. • In what became known as the Credit Mobilier scandal key Republican congressman and members of the administration had arranged for the Credit Mobilier holding company to receive government land and money to build a railroad out west. In return these men received bribes. The railroad was never built and the scandal showed America how little control Grant actually had. • 2. After eight years of the scandalous Grant administration and his rather uninspiring leadership the Republican party began to lose influence. The once hated Democrats again gained national recognition. One party rule ended and two party rule returned.
D. How did the election of 1876 affect reconstruction? • 1. In the election of 1876 Democrats realized they had an opportunity to regain political power and prestige, in fact many thought they had a good chance of winning the presidency with the right candidate. The Republicans ran Rutherford B. Hayes and the Democrats ran a New Yorker, Sam Tilden. • 2. Tilden carried the popular vote by 250,000 votes. He also had a lead in the electoral vote 184 to 165. He needed 185 to win and 20 votes were in dispute. Tilden only needed one of the twenty votes to win. If Hayes received all twenty he would win • 3. The fate of those 20 votes and the election were placed in the hands of a committee of 8 Republicans and 7 Democrats who ended up cutting a deal that gave Hayes the votes and the Presidency. Had the election been honest Tilden would have won. • a. The deal was that military forces had to leave those states thus ending reconstruction. • b. The federal government had to build a railroad from Texas to California , building money, waterway improvements and a conservative in the Cabinet were also part of the deal.
E. Once Conservative Democrats were back in control, what types of laws do you think they would pass? • 1. Literacy Tests - The democrats passed voter qualification laws that mandated that a person had to read in order to vote. Most Blacks were asked to read the constitution. Considering that most had been slaves, and were uneducated, they could not pass the test. This took away the rights of blacks to vote. • 2. Poll Taxes - The democrats passed voter qualification laws that mandated that a person had to pay a two dollar tax in order to vote. This was a lot of money for a newly freed slave and most could not afford it. • 3. Grandfather clause - The democrats passed voter qualification laws that mandated that a person could only vote if their grandfather had been eligible to vote and had been a citizen. Since most slaves' grandfathers had also been slaves they did not qualify to vote under these laws.
These laws were specifically designed to take away the political power of Blacks by taking away their right to vote granted in the 15th amendment. This is known as attempting to disenfranchise the Blacks. The word franchise means "the right to vote" (as does suffrage). To disenfranchise means "to take away the right to vote. • 4. Jim Crow Laws - These were laws passed to separate Blacks from Whites. This process was known as segregation. Jim Crow laws created separate facilities throughout the south for Blacks and Whites. • a. The creation of segregation by law is called de jure segregation (segregation by law). • b. The other type of segregation that existed in the south was called de facto segregation, or segregation by the fact that it exists. Socially, not legally sanctioned. • Clearly reconstruction had not met the goal of bringing about racial equality.
How was legalized segregation created in the south? • I. The creation of a divided society. • A. How did White southerners remove the political power of Blacks? • 1. As discussed in the previous slide, whites passed a series of voter qualification laws such as: • a. Poll Taxes • b. Literacy Tests • c. Grandfather Clause • 2. All of these laws served to disenfranchise blacks. (If you don't know the word disenfranchise look it up in the last lesson's notes.) • B. How did white southerners justify these laws? • 1. According to the constitution laws regarding voter qualifications were a reserved power left up to the states. Therefore southern states could pass laws that went around the 15th amendment.
C. How did Whites separate Blacks from Whites? • 1. The passed a series of laws making it illegal for Blacks and Whites to share the same schools, trains, etc. These were called Jim Crow Laws. • 2. Here are some examples of the Jim Crow laws in Alabama. • No person or corporation shall require any white female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which Negro men are placed. • The conductor of each passenger train is authorized and required to assign each passenger to the car or the division of the car, when it is divided by a partition, designated for the race to which such passenger belongs. • Every employer of white or negro males shall provide for such white or negro males reasonably accessible and separate toilet facilities.
D. What happened when the Jim Crow Laws were challenged? (Plessy v Ferguson) • 1. Blacks felt that the Jim Crow laws violated the 14th amendment that provided equal protection under the law. • 2. Homer Plessy, a member of a citizens group protesting the Jim Crow laws that created segregation in the south, was arrested for violating the law that forced Blacks to ride in separate train cars. Plessy, who was “octoroon” claimed that the laws violated the 14th amendment to the Constitution that said that all citizens were to receive "equal protection under the law." The state argued that Plessy and other Blacks did receive equal treatment, just separate. • 3. Plessy's conviction of a violation of Jim Crow laws has upheld by the Court. The Court ruled in 1896 that the 14th amendment said that Blacks did not have the right to the same facilities, just equal facilities. By ruling this way the court created the doctrine of "separate but equal.“ • 4. This ruling set the stage for 58 years of de jure segregation until overturned by Brown v The Board of Education, Topeka Kansas in 1954.
Here are excerpts from the decision: • Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation (of Blacks and Whites) in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power. The most common instance of this is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children, which has been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of States where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enforced. • We think the enforced separation of the races... neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man, deprives him of his property without due process of law, nor denies him the equal protection of the laws within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. • � Justice Henry Brown, Majority Opinion, Plessy v Ferguson, 1896.
Booker T. Washington • (1856-1915), American educator, who urged blacks to attempt to uplift themselves through educational attainments and economic advancement. • Washington was born April 5, 1856, on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia, the son of a slave. Following the American Civil War, his family moved to Malden, W.Virginia, where he worked in a salt furnace and in coal mines, attending school whenever he could. From 1872 to 1875 he attended a newly founded school for blacks, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University). After graduation he taught for two years in Malden and then studied at Wayland Seminary, in Washington, D.C. In 1879 he became an instructor at Hampton Institute, where he helped to organize a night school and was in charge of the industrial training of 75 Native Americans. The school was so successful that in 1881 the founder of Hampton Institute, the American educator Samuel Chapman Armstrong, appointed Washington organizer and principal of a black normal school in Tuskegee, Alabama (now Tuskegee University). Washington made the institution into a major center for industrial and agricultural training and in the process became a well-known public speaker.On September 18, 1895, in Atlanta, Georgia, Washington made his famous compromise speech. In this address he urged blacks to accept their inferior social position for the present and to strive to raise themselves through vocational training and economic self-reliance. Many whites, pleased by his views, and many blacks, awed by his prestige, accepted Washington as the chief spokesperson of the American black. More militant blacks, such as the American writer and sociologist. E. B. Du Bois, objected to such quiescent tactics, however, and strongly opposed Washington.Washington founded several organizations, including the National Negro Business League, to further black advancement. He died on November 14, 1915, at Tuskegee. Among his books are The Future of the American Negro (1899), the autobiography Up from Slavery (1901), Life of Frederick Douglass (1907), The Story of the Negro (1909), and My Larger Education (1911).
W.E.B. Du Bois • (1868-1963), American writer and sociologist, who helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). • Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and educated at Fisk and Harvard universities and the University of Berlin. In 1895 he became the first black to be awarded a Ph.D degree from Harvard. He taught history and economics at Atlanta University from 1897 to 1910. In 1903, in his famous book The Souls of Black Folk,Du Bois charged that Washington's strategy, rather than freeing the black man from oppression, would serve only to perpetuate it. Du Bois, as an ardent advocate of complete racial equality, discounted Washington's views of blacks as a minority in a white society. • This attack crystallized the opposition to Booker T. Washington among many black intellectuals, polarizing the leaders of the black community into two wings--the "conservative" supporters of Washington and his "radical" critics. Although originally Du Bois had believed that social science could provide the knowledge to solve the race problem, he gradually came to the conclusion that in a climate of virulent racism, expressed in such evils as lynching, peonage, disfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation laws, and race riots, social change could be accomplished only through agitation and protest.
After the founding of the NAACP in 1910, Du Bois served as the association's director of publications (1910-32) and as the editor of The Crisis, the official organ of the NAACP. In 1926 he visited the Soviet Union and thereafter became increasingly convinced that advancement of American blacks could best be achieved through socialism. In 1934, having left the NAACP, Du Bois returned to teach at Atlanta University; he also served (1940-44) as editor of the university's quarterly Phylon. In 1944 he again joined the staff of the NAACP, as director of the department of special research; he remained with the organization until 1948. Du Bois, increasingly involved in the promotion of world peace and nuclear disarmament, became chairman of the Peace Information Center in New York City in 1950, but the next year the organization was declared subversive by the U.S. government. During the 1950s he traveled extensively in Eastern Europe. Awarded the 1959 Lenin Peace Prize, Du Bois joined the Communist party in 1961 and settled in Ghana later the same year. Shortly before his death in Accra, on August 27, 1963, he became a citizen of Ghana. At the time of his death Du Bois was engaged in editing the Encyclopedia Africana. • Du Bois wrote some 20 books, including The Philadelphia Negro (1899), Black Reconstruction (1935), and a trilogy, Black Flame: The Ordeal of Mansart (1957), Mansart Builds a School (1959), and Worlds of Color (1961).
Marcus Garvey • (1887-1940), black nationalist leader, who created a "Back to Africa" movement in the United States. • Garvey was born the youngest of 11 children in Saint Ann's Bay, Jamaica. He left school at the age of 14 to serve as a printer's apprentice. A few years later, he took a job at a printing company in Kingston, where in 1907 he led a printer's strike for higher wages. Garvey then traveled to South America and Central America. In 1912 he went to England, where he became interested in African history and culture. He returned to Jamaica in 1914 and shortly thereafter founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the African Communities League. • In 1916 Garvey moved to the United States and settled in New York City. There he incorporated the UNIA and started a weekly newspaper, the Negro World. A persuasive orator and author, Garvey urged American blacks to be proud of their race and preached their return to Africa, their ancestral homeland. To this end he founded the Black Star Line in 1919 to provide steamship transportation, and the Negro Factories Corporation to encourage black economic independence. Garvey attracted thousands of supporters and claimed two million members for the UNIA. He suffered a series of economic disasters, however, and in 1922 he was arrested for mail fraud. Garvey served as his own defense attorney at his trial, was convicted, and went to prison in 1925. His sentence was commuted two years later, but he was immediately deported to Jamaica. Unable to resurrect the UNIA or regain his influence, Garvey moved to London, where he died in relative obscurity.
