Due to this African Americans were mostly unable to vote and hence couldn't prevent the election of openly racist politicians. This compromise said that federal troops would be removed from the south and in return the republican candidate for president-Rutherford B.Hayes-was elected. continue reading The end of Reconstruction was a staggered process, and the period of Republican control ended at different times in different states. Omissions? It did not pass, and women would not gain the vote for more than half a century after Stanton and others signed this petition. . The Civil War, like all wars, interrupted the rhythms of commercial life by destroying lives and property. In the fall 1866 congressional elections, Northern voters overwhelmingly repudiated Johnsons policies. Many political leaders and officeholders were ministers. These laws granted some rights to African Americans, like the right to own property, to marry, or to make contracts. Lincolns policy was lenient, conservative, and short-lived. Under these new terms, states would have to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, write new constitutions enfranchising African Americans, and abolish repressive Black Codes before rejoining the union. This political cartoon reflects this viewpoint, showing Lincoln and Johnson happily stitching the Union back together with little anger towards the South. Over the next three decades, the civil rights that blacks had been promised during Reconstruction crumbled under white rule in the south. Similar ambiguous vagrancy laws throughout the South reasserted control over Black labor in what one scholar has called slavery by another name.7 Black Codes effectively criminalized Black peoples leisure, limited their mobility, and locked many into exploitative farming contracts. Currier & Ives, First Colored Senator and Representatives in the 41st and 42nd Congress of the United States, 1872.Library of Congress. But the United States never committed the personnel required to restore order and guarantee Black southerners the rights promised by the Fourteenth Amendment. The only way to protect Republican interests in the South was to give the vote to the hundreds of thousands of Black men. In January 1874, over 7,000 protesters congregated in New York Citys Tompkins Square to insist the government make job creation a priority. President Abraham Lincoln began planning for the reunification of the United States in the fall of 1863.2 With a sense that Union victory was imminent and that he could turn the tide of the war by stoking Unionist support in the Confederate states, Lincoln issued a proclamation allowing southerners to take an oath of allegiance. A lack of respect for private property and free enterprise prevented any real assault on eco slavery). In working to ensure that crops would be harvested, agents sometimes coerced formerly enslaved people into signing contracts with their former enslavers. citizenship, and democracy? Women like Nannie Helen Burroughs and Virginia Broughton, leaders of the Baptist Womans Convention, worked to protect Black women from sexual violence from white men. They also offered lavish aid to railroads and other enterprises in the hope of creating a New South whose economic expansion would benefit Blacks and whites alike. For example, public schools for African Americans were almost always inferior to schools for whites. defined the 14th Amendment very narrowly in the late 19th The Civil War showed white women, especially upper-class women, life without their husbands protection. The first document includes Frances Thompson and Lucy Smiths testimony about their assault, rape, and robbery in 1866. . War brought destruction across the South. Their goods crisscrossed the country on the Norths growing railroad network. But Black voters formed the backbone of the Republican coalition in the South. Black Americans hoped that the end of the Civil War would create an entirely new world, while white southerners tried to restore the antebellum order as much as they could. States grappled with the challenges of reintegrating into the Union the states that had US Army general William Tecumseh Sherman redistributed Confederate territory on the coasts of Georgia The Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court House and the subsequent adoption by the U.S. Congress of the Thirteenth Amendment destroyed the institution of American slavery and threw southern society into disarray. Thousands of individual citizens, men and women, white and Black, had their homes raided and were whipped, raped, or murdered.32. Meanwhile, Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, won a landslide victory in the Ohio gubernatorial election without mentioning Reconstruction, focusing instead on fighting corruption and alcohol abuse and promoting economic recovery. Does it look as if he has forgiven me, seeing how he tries to keep me in a condition of helplessness?14. Universal suffrage, she argued, would not so clearly address the complex difficulties posed by racial, economic, and gender inequality.24. Reconstruction ended with the compromise of 1877 which was between republicans and democrats. Some Republicans were already convinced that equal rights for the former slaves had to accompany the Souths readmission to the Union. Carpetbaggers, or recent arrivals from the North, were former Union soldiers, teachers, Freedmens Bureau agents, and businessmen. Attempts to restore the antebellum economic order largely succeeded. Pardoned Rebels murdered him. The amendment legally abolished slavery except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. Section Two of the amendment granted Congress the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. State ratification followed, and by the end of the year the requisite three fourths of the states had approved the amendment, and four million people were forever free from the slavery that had existed in North America for 250 years.4. Meanwhile, this washerwoman and others like her set wages and hours for themselves, and in many cases began to take washing into their own homes in order to avoid the surveillance of white women and the sexual threat posed by white men.28. The former slaves also demanded economic independence. Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features. Reconstruction ended in 1877 because of a variety of reasons. We had passably good roads, on which we could reach almost any part of the State, and the next week they were all gonenot simply broken up, but gone. When just 10 percent of a states voting population had taken such an oath, loyal Unionists could then establish governments.3 These so-called Lincoln governments sprang up in pockets where Union support existed like Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Republicans in Congress responded to the codes with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first federal attempt to constitutionally define all American-born residents (except Native peoples) as citizens. What was one result of the end of Reconstruction in the South? Reconstruction, the print seems to argue, will form a more perfect Union that upholds the ideals of the American Revolution, most importantly (as seen on a streaming banner near the top) that All men are born free and equal. John Giles Lawrence, Reconstruction, 1867.Library of Congress. The war and its aftermath forever ended legal slavery in the United States, but African Americans remained second-class citizens and women still struggled for full participation in the public life of the United States. When Black Americans and their radical allies succeeded in securing citizenship for freedpeople, a new fight commenced to determine the legal, political, and social implications of American citizenship. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. However, this provoked a violent backlash from whites who did not want to relinquish supremacy. African Americans and Radical Republicans pushed the nation to finally realize the Declaration of Independences promises that all men are created equal and have certain unalienable rights. White Democrats granted African Americans legal freedom but little more. What proposal did Hayes make to the Democrats in order to end their opposition? Like white LMA members, African American women formed clubs to bury their dead, to celebrate African American masculinity, and to provide aid to their communities. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 The The Midwest produced seas of grain that fed the country, with enough left over for export to Europe. So when Johnson announced that the southern states had been restored, congressional Republicans refused to seat delegates from the newly reconstructed states. If they had no proof, they could be arrested, fined, or even re-enslaved and leased out to their former enslaver. It was not uncommon to find a one-room school with more than fifty students ranging in age from three to eighty. It built mills and factories to develop its resources. How did the lives of African Americans and whites in the South differ when segregation was law? went from personal property to full civic participants, The foundation of southern society had been shaken, but southern whites used Black Codes and racial terrorism to reassert control over formerly enslaved people. The future of the South was uncertain. With the war coming to an end, the question of how to reunite the former Confederate states with the Union was a divisive one. Numerous Republican politicians, perhaps dozens, were killed, either while in office or while campaigning. Was freedom just the absence of slavery, as most white Southerners believed, or did it imply citizenship, Johnson, a states-rights, strict-constructionist, and unapologetic racist from Tennessee, offered southern states a quick restoration into the Union. However, the bureau also instituted courts where African Americans could seek redress if their employers were abusing them or not paying them. By the end of Reconstruction, the desire for self-definition, economic independence, and racial pride coalesced in the founding of dozens of Black towns across the South. Black representatives repeatedly articulated this concern in state constitutional conventions early in the Reconstruction era. Frustrated by responsibility for the growing numbers of freed people following his troops, General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. The Fourteenth Amendment developed concurrently with the Civil Rights Act to ensure its constitutionality. Sherman lacked the authority to confiscate and distribute land, so this plan never fully took effect.13 One of the main purposes of the Freedmens Bureau, however, was to redistribute lands to formerly enslaved people that had been abandoned and confiscated by the federal government. Meanwhile, the social and economic transformation of the South proceeded apace. The House of Representatives approved the Fourteenth Amendment on June 13, 1866. After the Civil War, they also wanted to enact harsh penalties against the former Confederate states. They couldn't force labor in the way they were previously able to. Most African Americans believed that their years of Reconstruction was a significant chapter in the history of civil rights in the United States, but most historians consider it a failure because the South became a poverty-stricken backwater attached to agriculture. The law also prohibited any curtailment of citizens fundamental rights.8. Only the presence of federal troops in key southern cities prevented Reconstructions quick collapse. Cotton fed the textile mills of America and Europe and brought great wealth to the region. Can my 13 year old choose to live with me? Well, after the amendments, African Americans were free what it means to be free. Groups like the Union League, militias, and fraternal organizations all used the regalia, ritual, and even hymns of churches to inform and shape their practice. the number of US citizens and it decoupled Southern state governments attempted to limit the physical freedom of African Americans as well, with statutes known as the Black Codes. The acts also deemed violent Klan behavior as acts of rebellion against the United States and allowed for the use of U.S. troops to protect freedpeople. This scene is contrasted to the bottom right where General Philips Sheridan bows to Louisiana Attorney General Andrew Herron in 1866, implying a defeat forReconstruction. What was the "New South" that was emerging by 1900? These divisions came to a head early in 1867, as the AERA organized a campaign in Kansas to determine the fate of Black and woman suffrage. There were riots in southern cities several times during Reconstruction. Meanwhile, New Departure Democratswho focused on business, economics, political corruption, and tradegained strength by distancing themselves from pro-slavery Democrats and Copperheads. Celebrated May 19th 1870, 1870.Library of Congress. Charlotte Forten teaches freed children in South Carolina, 1864, Charlotte Forten was born into a wealthy Black family in Philadelphia. WebThe most significant enduring legacy of Reconstruction was the: creation of true social equality in the South. The last ember of hope for land redistribution was extinguished when Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumners proposed land reform bills were tabled in Congress. At the federal level, Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce were chosen as U.S. senators from Mississippi. In the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court ruled in favor of a Louisiana law requiring segregated railroad cars. Why did southern Democrats agree to the Compromise of 1877? Please clickhereto improve this chapter.*. Andrew Johnson attempted to return the Southern states to essentially the condition they were in before the American Civil War, Republicans in Congress passed laws and amendments that affirmed the equality of all men before the law and prohibited racial discrimination, that made African Americans full U.S. citizens, and that forbade laws to prevent African Americans from voting. By 1876, as southern Democrats reestablished home rule and redeemed the South from Republicans, federal opposition to the KKK weakened. The following is Jourdon Andersons reply. Disheartened, Stanton and Anthony allied instead with white supremacists who supported womens equality. The Fifteenth Amendment prohibited discrimination in voting rights on the basis of race, color, or previous status (i.e. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. Thus began the period of Radical or Congressional Reconstruction, which lasted until the end of the last Southern Republican governments in 1877. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln propelled Vice President Andrew Johnson into the executive office in April 1865. How did the South use its resources to develop manufacturing? citizenship from whiteness. How did Plessy v. Ferguson make the fight against segregation more difficult?