Chapter 15

Chapter 15

C. Reconstructing the National Identity, 1865-1877

I. Postwar Period Abounded with Change

A. New sense of national identity after war.

1. Public emphasis on the nation's homogeneity.

2. Still important disagreements about race, class, and gender.

3. Lingering questions about definition of U.S. citizenship.

4. Many groups remained outsiders--ex-slaves, immigrants, women, Native Americans.

B. New sense of federal power.

1. Vast quantity of national legislation.

-number of bills tripled over previous ten years and laws passed doubled

2. Growing federal bureaucracy.

-bureau of statistics 1866,

-the Department of Justice and Weather Bureau in 1870

-an expanded national census greatly increased record keeping

C. Postwar period witnessed rapid economic development.

1. Completion of transcontinental railroad, urbanization, agricultural expansion.

2. Economy took people's minds off questions of citizenship, suffrage, civil rights.

II. The Promise of Reconstruction

A. Planning for reconstruction began even before the Civil War had ended.

1. Lincoln had a generous plan designed to convince Confederates to surrender.

-included a general amnesty to Confederates. It was to encourage confederate surrender to restore the union.

2. Congressional Wade-Davis bill was more rigid; Lincoln vetoed.

-it demanded that a majority, (not just 10 percent) of southern voters take iron clad oaths of loyalty to the Union., repudiate Confederated debts, disenfranchise Confederate leaders, and accept the end of slavery.

-after the Confederate surrender and Lincoln’s assassination, the issue of reconstruction could no longer be avoided.

B. African Americans demonstrated a passion for freedom that altered society.

1. Freed slaves immediately asserted their independence

-many took new surnames: kinship, former owners, famous personage

2. Changed their work patterns to exert greater control over their lives.

-to stabilize their family lives, married women tried to avoid paid work and assumed domestic roles, black domestics who worked for whites tended to dwell at home

3. Family structures changed as blacks legalized their marriages.

-partly for reasons of morality, partly to relieve governments of responsibility for illegitimate children, and to enforce the legal responsibilities between husbands and wives for financial support.

a. State laws presumed that men were heads of their households.

b. Demoted black women, who had previously run their families.

-married black women, who had considerable family responsibility during slavery, now faced a state-imposed patriarchal family structure.

4. Freed slaves formed their own churches, usually Methodist or Baptist.

-in this way, they continued to develop a distinct religious system that perpetuated African-derived styles of Christian worship services, such as singing, clapping, “call-and-response”

5. Many slaves found freedom and new responsibilities difficult to handle.

- vulnerability enabled unscrupulous whites to cheat, refuse to pay wages, or commit violence.

C. Johnson's policy of restoration was lenient and conciliatory.

1. Lifelong Tennessee Democrat who hoped to circumvent Congress, which was out of session.

2. Presidential policies favored ex-Confederates at the expense of former slaves.

-he offered amnesty to southern rebels who agreed to a loyalty oath; he restored property and political rights to all but the richest southern leaders.

-in a second proclamation he called for the creation of state governments, limiting votes to pardoned whites, in so doing demanded ratification of the 13^th Amendment which abolished slavery as a condition for readmission into the union. He also ordered the return of lands confiscated by the Union armies to pardoned ex-confederates, even if freed slaves already inhabited them.

-consequence of Johnson’s appeasement, his pacification of whites was that ex-confederates drafted state constitutions and hesitated to repudiate secession and the abolition of slavery.

3. Allowed southern states to establish "Black Codes" for repressing former slaves.

- minimal rights, right to marry, own property, make contracts, bring law suits, and testify in court against other blacks

-however, they excluded blacks from juries, denied them the right to vote, rejected black testimony against whites, and provided for more severe penalties for black criminals than white ones.

D. Congressional conflicts with Johnson were inevitable.

1. Republicans divided into two camps.

a. Radicals wanted equal rights for all citizens, blacks as well as whites.

-this group included Charles Sumner from Massachusetts’s, Ohio’s Ben Wade (in senate), and Pennsylvania’s Thaddeus Stevens in the house.

b. Moderates felt no commitment to black equality; willing to work with Johnson.

-as the larger wing within the Republican party, only wanted assurances that slavery and secession were dead, as for them, protection of black labour, not seizure of white-owned land, remained their goal.

-the only group that eventually surrendered land to former slaves were the southern Native Americans in Indian territory.

-under the Southern Homestead Act of 1866, only undeveloped public lands were offered for purchase by blacks and other unionists, yet they were costly for slaves.

2. Congress ended up overriding presidential vetoes of reconstruction-oriented bills.

a. Civil Rights bill of 1866 allowed federal government to prevent discrimination.

-it was moderate in its stance since it simply disallowed discrimination in state laws and was directed at those states which refused to guarantee civil rights to their own citizens. But Johnson vetoed it as an unnecessary expansion of federal power.

b. Freedmen's Bureau bill continued federal aid to ex-slaves.

-established by congress 1 month before the war ended, as the “Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned Land,” its mission was to assist ex-slaves and poor whites with food, transportation and legal advice; and to help them obtain work, settle on abandoned lands, and to establish schools to prepare them to live independently.

3. Fourteenth Amendment drawn up guaranteeing black citizenship.

-essentially granted citizenship to all people born or naturalized, but did not include Indians. It also addressed the matter of black suffrage. The old limitations on southern states through the Three-Fifths Compromise to count blacks as a fraction of whites in apportioning representatives to congress, now saw blacks count as whole persons. To balance white voters therefore, the proposed Amendment authorized congressional representation to be based on the number of ‘male’ inhabitants allowed to vote, an effort to induce states to give the suffrage to black men.

a. Overturned Dred Scott decision of 1857.

“In March of 1857, the United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, declared that all blacks -- slaves as well as free -- were not and could never become citizens of the United States. The court also declared the 1820 Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, thus permiting slavery in all of the country's territories.The case before the court was that of Dred Scott v. Sanford. Dred Scott, a slave who had lived in the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin before moving back to the slave state of Missouri, had appealed to the Supreme Court in hopes of being granted his freedom. Taney -- a staunch supporter of slavery and intent on protecting southerners from northern aggression -- wrote in the Court's majority opinion that, because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The framers of the Constitution, he wrote, believed that blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it." Referring to the language in the Declaration of Independence that includes the phrase, "all men are created equal," Taney reasoned that "it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration. . . ."Abolitionists were incensed. Although disappointed, Frederick Douglass, found a bright side to the decision and announced, "my hopes were never brighter than now." For Douglass, the decision would bring slavery to the attention of the nation and was a step toward slavery's ultimate destruction.”

b. Introduced word "male" into U.S. Constitution for first time.

c. Not popular with former Confederate states; only Tennessee ratified.

-the provision not popular in the northern states, only six gave black men the ballot. Eventually eight others voted on the issue, but it passed only in Iowa and Minnesota.

-14^th amendment also disqualified former Confederate officials from holding office. Congress sent it to the states for ratification, of the former Confederate states only Tennessee voted to ratify.

d. Worsened rift between Johnson and Congress.

E. Congress introduced own reconstruction program in 1867; conflict with Johnson ensued.

1. Embodied in series of Reconstruction Acts, passed over Johnson's veto.

-denying the legality of the previous southern governments the Republican Dominated Congress

a. Divided south into 5 military districts.

b. Ensure enforcement of federal laws; strict criteria for elections and candidates.

c. Required black suffrage; took political rights from leading Confederates.

d. Mandated ratification of Fourteenth Amendment.

2. Gave Republicans possibility of countering white southern power in Congress.

3. Brought blacks right into the political structure.

4. Johnson responded by pardoning ex-Confederates and appointing cronies.

5. Congress countered with Tenure of Office Act (1867)--forbade removal of appointees.

F. Congressional struggle with Johnson eventually resulted in his impeachment in 1868.

1. Immediate cause was removal of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.

-Stanton was a supporter of Congressional reconstruction, Johnson defied the law and dismissed him, which led to Radical Republicans pushing for the President’s impeachment).

2. Basis was violation of Tenure of Office Act.

3. House voted to impeach; Senate convicted but fell one vote short of removal. {(35-19) needed a two thirds majority]

4. Ended any chance Johnson had of being reelected in 1868.

G. Continuing debates over votes for blacks--and for women.

-although as the presidential crisis ended in 1868 most southern states had adopted constitutions providing for black suffrage, ratified the 14^th amendment, and returned delegates to congress, 1868 elections underscored a political trend – violence against black voters demonstrated that many whites did not accept the political settlement. 1. Southern interference with black voting alarmed Republicans in Congress.

2. Also worried about Democratic success in winning the black vote in the north.

-(16 northern states were blacks were denied suffrage, Democrats made election gains).

3. Solution was Fifteenth Amendment--prohibited race-based interference with voting.

(Put up on Screen) Amendment 15 (1870)

a. Said nothing about non-racial voting restrictions, so threatened no existing power.

b. Angered women reformers, because it referred only to "male" voters.

c. Led to push for women's suffrage amendment.

-Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott and Lucy Stone, who had formed the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 to push for merged campaigns in favour of both black and female voting. Female voting was even less popular.

-In 1868 reformers who opposed compromise formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, dedicated to the passage of the 16^th Amendment for the women’s vote. – Women attempted to vot in 1871-72, famous arrest and trial of Susan B. Anthony for illegal voting.

-In 1869 Mormon-dominated Utah granted women the franchise to strengthen conservative power, Wyoming followed in 1870 (where it was seen as a moral force against social disorder).

III. Reconstruction Comes to the South

A. Political leadership in the Reconstruction South was very polarized.

1. Blacks formed majority of southern Republicans.

2. Most southern whites supported Democrats, with two exceptions.

a. Carpetbaggers--transplanted northerners who sought opportunity in south.

-implied that they were opportunists with no stake in southern society.

b. Scalawags--southerners who had opposed slavery.

-they had roots in the Whig party and favored regional economic development or came from non-slaveholding regions. Many were small farmers who opposed the restoration of planter leadership.

Scalawags was contemporary slang that meant “mean fellows” or “disgraces” which suggested they were betraying their region by supporting outsiders.

B. Republican agenda in the south reflected its diverse constituency.

1. Ended discrimination in many public accommodations, but laws not enforced.

-Following the work of the Freedman’s Bureau schools, they sent teachers into the south, every state established a system of tax-supported public schools, increased literary for a generation of African Americans.

2. Support for economic development.

-It was Democrats in this period who objected to growing state indebtedness and higher taxes

-problems were that northern capital remained scarce, and during the 1870s a period of economic Depression nationally pushed southern municipal and state governments toward bankruptcy, undermining support for Republican polices: easing of interest rates, donating public lands to factories and enacted general incorporation laws.

3. South remained largely tied to agriculture.

-in reconstruction what emerged as the dominant form of labour relations in farming were:

a) Share-cropping (most common type) – for a year’s labour, landowners provided food, supplies, tools and seed, and paid workers with a portion of the crop (a share) after the annual harvest was sold. Pros and cons: the sharecropping system encouraged individual families to contract with landowners to grow specific crops, as family workers rather than paid workers it drew in women and children; con, although they sometimes enjoyed independence from direct supervision, they remained workers, not tenants and the crops belonged to landowners who settled accounts only after deducting expenses, carrying charges, interest and high markup — sharecroppers easily became debtors

b) less common arrangement called tenant farming – farmers rented land for a specified sum and then repaid the landowner after the harvest. Tenants usually owned their own tools, farm animals and seed, therefore less dependent on landowners and could plant what they wished.

-Throughout this period in changes in labour practices southern staple crops dominated the economy. Cotton remained the most valuable commodity per acre, intensification of production occurred to cover wartime costs, and sharecropping also encouraged cotton production. IN 1876, 60 percent of the black labour force was planting cotton. This emphasis on cotton undermined food production and forced the south to import food from other regions.

-Cotton provided the capital to support the republican agenda of stimulating economic development, especially investment in railroads to carry southern crops to market, to save Georgia’s peach industry.

-railroad penetration into the mountainous counties of the south where non-slaveholding farmers had practised subsistence agriculture before the war altered the small farm economy. Using new fertilizers, and cultivating previously unproductive fields, these individuals became increasingly dependent on merchants credit to obtain tools and supplies. Fence laws passed in the 1870s, prevented open grazing on private property, game laws affected nutrition and destroyed dietary supplements.

-Despite these similarities in experience and position between poor blacks and whites, racial tensions remained and prevented political cooperation.

IV. Rebuilding the National Economy

A. Reconstruction period saw unprecedented economic growth.

-some changes strengthened the south, increased opportunities, others did not

1. Northern investors saw great profits in western development, especially railroads.

2. Meant little money left to invest in rebuilding the south.

3. Railroads knit nation together.

-stimulated economic growth, made it easier for cotton to reach northern markets and western food to southern cotton growers and also encouraged western migration of farmers.

4. Creation of national marketplace accentuated problems of outsiders.

5. Continued difficulties for Native Americans and some immigrant groups.

6. Economic concerns predominated; people little concerned with problems of others.

B. Great railroad boom in the post-Civil War period.

“The whole country is opening up” exclaimed the hustler Colonel Sellers in Mark Twain’s satire of post Civil War greed, The Gilded Age (1874).

1. Federal government contributed land, made loans, and issued bonds.

-Congress gave 100 million acres of public land, 100 million of federal loans and bonds to the railroad fever which nearly doubled the length of the nations tracks

2. Local governments gave tax breaks to encourage construction.

3. Speculation and corruption were widespread.

-20 million of the government’s 100 went to dishonest investor and congressmen

4. Railroad collapse fuelled Panic of 1873.

C. Large number of Chinese immigrants arrived during Reconstruction period.

1. Many came to work on the western railroads.

2. Burlingame Treaty of 1868 provided for trade and unlimited immigration.

-Ambassador Anson Burlingame negotiated with China, annually brought 18,000 workers into the country

3. Chinese prohibited from becoming citizens by 1790 Naturalization Act.

- no politician endorsed extending the 14^th amendment to cover Chinese settlers

4. Railroad workers experienced discrimination and racial violence.

-just before the symbolic golden spike linked the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah, in May 1869, Chinese workers were moved out of camera range

5. Moved into agriculture or manufacturing once railroads were finished.

-in California land reclamation projects, in San Francisco factories making shoes, cigars, clothing; as farmers specializing in Chinese vegetables and fruits; on the east coast as strikebreakers fuelling hostility to “coolie” labour.

6. Congress voted to restrict most Chinese immigration in 1882.

D. The imperatives of railroad construction altered relations with Native Americans.

1. Plains groups attacked railroad workers encroaching on buffalo hunting grounds.

2. Government determined to move Natives from areas designated for railroad lines.

3. Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868 created "Great Sioux Reservation."

-in Western South Dakota

4. Congress ended treaty-making relationship in 1871 to facilitate western expansion.

5. Plains Sioux forced to accept new limits by 1878.

E. Defeat of the Plains peoples accelerated railroad construction and western settlement.

1. Railroads recruited passengers in foreign countries.

-the white population of the northern plains (Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas) jumped from 300,000 in 1860 to over 2 million twenty years later.

2. Rise of cattle industry in west was unprecedented.

-during the civil war Texas had lost their export markets in New Orleans and held enormous herds by war’s end. Met the Union Pacific railroad as it inched westward toward the town of Abilene, Kansas. Cattle drovers pushed their herds to the railhead their for shipment to urban markets.

-in 1867, 35,000 cows were shipped out and a year later the demand exceeded the supply.

-cattle industry soon collided with agriculture, plains farmers imposed quarantine lines, known as deadlines, to regulate the cattle trade. Fence laws to protect their crops appeared, but shortage of timber made fencing cost prohibitive.

-in 1873, Congress passed Timber Culture Act, offering free land for planting trees,

-1874, Nebraska’s governor J. Sterling Morton passed a special day for tree planting,

which later became a legal holiday in many states.

-problem of fencing fixed in the decade after the civil war, federal Patent office issued 800 new patents, for fencing; in 1874 introduction of barbed wire, “flexible, cattle resistant, nearly invisible – provided the long awaited solution.”

– Fenced cattle replaced buffalo on the plains; intensive grazing eliminated the natural tall grasses, Prairie fires, a much feared hazard of the Plains, disappeared.

3. Plains farmers found life difficult.

4. Patrons of Husbandry (Grange) formed in 1867.

-a cooperative group to share information and marketing, established by a Department of Agriculture Official, Oliver H. Kelly.

-it claimed 1 million members by early 1870s

-its goal was to protect self-sufficient family farms, organized cooperative stores, grain elevators to eliminate commercial middlemen, targeted banks, merchants and railroads

a. Network of social organizations modelled on Masons.

b. Lobbied for laws setting railroad rates.

-it was successful in several states to prohibit discounts for larger shippers or lower charges for long hauls than short trips and to set maximum freight rates,

-these “granger laws” on railroad pricing initially won approval from the Supreme Court in Munn vs. Illinois (1877), though later rulings prohibited states from regulating interstate commerce.

F. Rising agricultural production in the west stimulated urban expansion.

1. Cities served as centers for importing raw produce and selling finished products.

-steam-powered elevators offered the possibility of building vertically, but urban planners preferred geographic dispersal

2. Transportation and housing problems required creative solutions.

-New York launched an elevated train system in 1868 and an experimental subway two years later; San Francisco’s cable cars began running in 1873, stimulating residential construction on the city’s hills.

-to ease health problems created by congestion, NYC adopted the Tenement House law in 1867: it required improved ventilation, lighting, sanitation, in multistoried residential buildings, new residential suburbs appeared, where landscape architects introduced contour designs instead of rectangle streets,

-most dramatic urban developments remained commercial. Chicago’s Union Stock Yards, begun in 1865, covered 100 acres, 3 miles of troughs, half a million gallons of water to process tens of thousands of animals each day. By the end of the 1860s, vast disassembly lines, refrigerated railcars made Chicago the meat packing centre of the nation, if not world.

V. The End of Reconstruction

A. Promise of the Grant presidency did not meet reality.

1. Campaign slogan of 1868 "Let Us Have Peace" summed up administration's goals.

-Ulysses S. Grant, Republican nominated war hero.

2. Corruption scandals marred administration and tarnished Grant's image.

-although he remained above corruption, he was loyal to cabinet officers, a vice-president and his personal secretary, even after news of their acceptance of bribes became public knowledge.

3. Civil Service Commission created in 1871 to end political patronage.

4. Liberal Republicans broke with Grant in 1872 and nominated Horace Greeley.

-they had had enough of Grant’s spoils system; their criticism of “bayonet rule” in the South broadened their appeal even among democrats, but Grant held the confidence of the North.

5. Grant was easily reelected, but still pretty ineffectual.

B. Democratic "Redeemers" sought to end Reconstruction and retake the south.

1. Amnesty Act in 1872 restored political rights to almost all ex-Confederates

- it excluded only 500 leading rebels from holding office; republicans feared that new voters would back Democratic candidates and thus proposed “home rule” the removal of all federal troops from the South to attract white voters to the Republican Party.

2. Democrats also appealed to white supremacy to pull whites away from Republican party.

-As early as 1866 the KKK and other white vigilante groups successfully intimidated republican voters; Congressional investigations led to the passage of the KKK Act, and other laws which made interference with civil and political rights a federal crime; Washington investigated and prosecuted hundreds of cases but also increased racial tensions.

3. Democrats won control of House of Representatives in 1874; first time since 1861.

-also made gains in Northern States.

4. Republicans lost their ability to coerce the south in Congress.

-it became a lame duck congress, managed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1875, outlawing racial discrimination in public places; yet enforcement required Blacks to file legal complaints, a complicated procedure that seldom occurred, the law was virtually dead before it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883.

5. African Americans in south lost national support between 1869 and 1875.

-in states such as Mississippi, whites used economic pressure and intimidation to bring carpet baggers into the Democratic party, while threatening Blacks with violence.

6. Supreme Court took limited interpretation of civil rights amendments.

-Slaughterhouse case of 1873, found that the 14^th Amendment protected only national citizenship, not rights traditionally monitored by the states; 1876 in US V. Cruickshank found that new Amendments only applied to actions by the states, not private individuals, thereby restricting federal enforcement of civil rights; Court also held that the 15^th Amendment did not guarantee the right to vote.

7. In Sum, white supremacy, racial segregation, voting restrictions free from federal interference.

C. The election of 1876 spelled the end of Reconstruction.

1. Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes vs. New York Democrat Samuel Tilden.

-both ran on vague promises of political reform, neither won clear majority.

2. Tilden won popular vote (250,000) , but at 184 he was one electoral vote short of presidency. Hayes claimed 165.

3. Twenty electoral votes in dispute, all but one in the south. (Oregon).

4. Hayes arranged Compromise of 1877 to secure the White House.

a. Agreed to appoint a southerner to the cabinet.

b. Agreed to appropriate funds for internal improvements in the south.

c. Agreed to adopt a policy of non-interference in southern politics.

5. Last federal troops removed from south shortly after Hayes took office.