Review
The three phases
Presidential Reconstruction (Lincoln, then Johnson), then Congressional or Radical Reconstruction (from 1867), then Redemption, ending with the Compromise of 1877.
Presidential Reconstruction: lenient
- Ten Percent Plan (Lincoln, 1863): a state could rejoin once 10 percent of its 1860 voters swore loyalty and accepted emancipation.
- Wade-Davis Bill (1864): the Radical alternative. A majority of a state's white men had to swear loyalty, plus an "ironclad oath" for voters and delegates. Lincoln killed it with a pocket veto.
- Andrew Johnson (Tennessee Democrat, president after Lincoln's assassination in April 1865) pardoned former Confederates freely. States only had to abolish slavery, void secession, and repudiate Confederate debt.
- The new Southern governments passed Black Codes (1865 to 1866): forced labor contracts, vagrancy laws, limits on jobs and land ownership. Slavery in all but name. Northern outrage handed power to the Radicals.
Congressional (Radical) Reconstruction: in order
| 1865 | Thirteenth Amendment: abolished slavery everywhere (ratified December 1865). The Emancipation Proclamation had been only a war measure for rebelling areas. |
| 1865 | Freedmen's Bureau: first major federal relief agency. Food, medical care, legal help, labor contracts, and above all schools (over 4,000). Land redistribution ("forty acres and a mule") mostly failed. |
| 1866 | Civil Rights Act of 1866, passed over Johnson's veto, a direct answer to the Black Codes. |
| 1867 | Reconstruction Acts: the South (minus Tennessee, already readmitted) split into five military districts. To rejoin, a state needed a new constitution with Black male suffrage and had to ratify the Fourteenth. |
| 1868 | Fourteenth Amendment (passed by Congress 1866, ratified July 1868): citizenship for all born or naturalized in the U.S. (overturned Dred Scott), due process, equal protection. Also cut representation for states denying adult men the vote and barred some ex-Confederates from office. The key amendment for later cases like Brown. |
| 1868 | Johnson impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act by firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Senate fell one vote short of removal. |
| 1870 | Fifteenth Amendment: vote cannot be denied for race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Not sex, which split the women's movement (Stanton and Anthony's NWSA vs. Lucy Stone's AWSA). |
13 freed, 14 made citizens with equal protection, 15 protected the vote from racial bars. Women waited for the 19th (1920). Poll taxes in federal elections waited for the 24th (1964).
Life in the Reconstruction South
- Hiram Revels (first Black U.S. senator, 1870) and Blanche K. Bruce, both from Mississippi. Republican state governments built the South's first public school systems.
- Carpetbaggers: Northerners who moved South. Scalawags: white Southerners who backed the Republicans.
- Sharecropping: farm someone else's land with only your labor, pay with a share of the crop. Tenant farmer: rents land but owns tools, mule, seed (better off). Crop-lien system: merchants advance supplies on credit against the next harvest at high interest, so debt ties the farmer to the land year after year.
- Ku Klux Klan (founded in Tennessee right after the war): terror to stop Black voting. Congress answered with the Enforcement Acts (1870 to 1871), including the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which let Grant use troops and suspend habeas corpus. Grant did both in South Carolina, and the first Klan was largely broken by 1872.
Why Reconstruction ended
- Grant scandals (Credit Mobilier, Whiskey Ring) and Northern fatigue. Amnesty Act of 1872 restored officeholding to most ex-Confederates.
- Panic of 1873: the economy replaced the South as the North's priority.
- Courts narrowed the amendments: Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), and the Civil Rights Cases (1883), which struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 because the Fourteenth limits states, not private businesses.
- Compromise of 1877: disputed 1876 election, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes vs. Democrat Samuel Tilden (Tilden won the popular vote; Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina returns disputed). Hayes got the presidency; the last federal troops left Southern statehouses. Also called the Compromise of 1876.
- Redeemers (Bourbon Democrats) took back every Southern state, cut taxes and services, and laid the groundwork for Jim Crow.
Jim Crow and disfranchisement
The Fifteenth Amendment banned racial voting bars, so Southern states wrote rules that never mentioned race but worked as if they did. Mississippi's 1890 constitution was the model.
| Tool | How it worked | How it ended |
|---|---|---|
| Poll tax | Pay to vote; most freedpeople were poor. | 24th Amendment, 1964 (federal); Harper v. Virginia, 1966 (state) |
| Literacy test | White registrars decided who passed. | Voting Rights Act, 1965 |
| Grandfather clause | Exempted men from literacy or property tests if their fathers or grandfathers could vote before Black men were enfranchised (Louisiana, 1898: before 1867). Covered nearly all whites, almost no Blacks. | Guinn v. United States, 1915 |
| White primary | Only whites voted in the Democratic primary, the only election that mattered in the one-party South. | Smith v. Allwright, 1944 |
- Williams v. Mississippi (1898): Court upheld Mississippi's poll tax and literacy test because the laws did not discriminate on their face.
- Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): Homer Plessy sat in a whites-only Louisiana railroad car. The Court (7 to 1) upheld "separate but equal." Lone dissent: Justice John Marshall Harlan, "Our Constitution is color-blind." Overturned for schools by Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
- Jim Crow laws: state and local segregation of trains, schools, restaurants, and bathrooms, enforced by violence, especially lynching.
Plessy 1896 created "separate but equal." Brown 1954 overturned it. Williams 1898 is the voting twin of Plessy: race-neutral wording, racist effect, upheld.
Black responses
- Frederick Douglass: championed the Fifteenth, stayed loyal to the Republicans, died 1895.
- Booker T. Washington: born enslaved, founded Tuskegee Institute (1881). Atlanta Compromise speech, 1895: accept segregation for now, skip direct political agitation, build economic strength through vocational training. "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand." Autobiography: Up From Slavery.
- W.E.B. Du Bois: first Black Harvard PhD. The Souls of Black Folk (1903): "double consciousness," attacked Washington. Full civil and political rights now, liberal arts education for a "Talented Tenth." Niagara Movement (1905) led to the NAACP (1909), interracial, sparked partly by the 1908 Springfield, Illinois race riot. Du Bois edited its magazine, The Crisis. Strategy: lawsuits and publicity.
- Ida B. Wells: Memphis journalist. After three friends were lynched in 1892 she published Southern Horrors (1892) and later The Red Record (1895), proving lynching was terror, not punishment for crime. Led the national anti-lynching campaign; NAACP founding member.
- Exodusters (1879): Black Southerners who moved to Kansas. Do not confuse with the Great Migration.
- Great Migration (starts about 1915 to 1916): WWI factory jobs opened in Northern cities as the war cut off European immigration. Push: Jim Crow, lynching, the boll weevil. About six million moved by 1970. Built Harlem and gave Black voters political power in the North.
Accommodation and economic progress first = Booker T. Washington. Rights now = Du Bois. Expect at least one question on this contrast.
Cause and effect chains
Johnson's lenient pardons then Black Codes then Northern outrage then Civil Rights Act of 1866 and Fourteenth Amendment then Radical Reconstruction Acts of 1867.
Johnson fires Stanton then violates Tenure of Office Act then impeached 1868 then acquitted by one vote.
Klan terror then Enforcement Acts and KKK Act of 1871 then Grant prosecutes the Klan.
Grant scandals + Panic of 1873 + court rulings then Northern retreat then Compromise of 1877 then Redeemers then Jim Crow.
Fifteenth Amendment bans racial voting bars then race-neutral tools (poll tax, literacy test, grandfather clause) then upheld in Williams v. Mississippi 1898.
Jim Crow and lynching then Washington (accommodate) vs. Du Bois (rights now) then Niagara 1905 then NAACP 1909 then Great Migration north during WWI.
Timeline
| 1863 | Ten Percent Plan |
| 1864 | Wade-Davis Bill, pocket-vetoed |
| 1865 | Lincoln killed; Freedmen's Bureau; Thirteenth Amendment; Black Codes begin |
| 1866 | Civil Rights Act of 1866 over veto; Fourteenth passed by Congress |
| 1867 | Reconstruction Acts; Tenure of Office Act |
| 1868 | Johnson impeached, acquitted; Fourteenth ratified; Grant elected |
| 1870 | Fifteenth ratified; Revels seated in Senate |
| 1871 | Ku Klux Klan Act |
| 1873 | Panic of 1873; Slaughterhouse Cases |
| 1877 | Compromise of 1877; Reconstruction ends |
| 1879 | Exodusters to Kansas |
| 1881 | Tuskegee Institute founded |
| 1883 | Civil Rights Cases |
| 1890 | Mississippi constitution: poll tax, literacy test |
| 1892 | Wells, Southern Horrors |
| 1895 | Atlanta Compromise; Douglass dies |
| 1896 | Plessy v. Ferguson |
| 1898 | Williams v. Mississippi; Louisiana grandfather clause |
| 1903 | The Souls of Black Folk |
| 1905 | Niagara Movement |
| 1909 | NAACP founded |
| 1915 | Guinn v. United States strikes grandfather clauses |
| 1916 | Great Migration under way |
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