- Lincoln's Ten-Percent Plan and Presidential Reconstruction
- Andrew Johnson's Control of Presidential Reconstruction
- Congressional Reconstruction
14th Amendment to the Constitution (1868)
15th Amendment to the Constitution (1870)
Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1870, 1871, and 1875
- Civil Rights Act of 1866, 14 Stat. 27 (1866).
- Civil Rights Act of 1870 (The Enforcement Act), 16 Stat. 140 (1870).
- Civil Rights Act of 1871, 17 Stat. 13 (1871).
- Civil Rights Act of 1875, 18 Stat. 335 (1875).
- Freedmen's Bureau (The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) (operative 1865-1872)
Why was Reconstruction defeated? Here are some points to consider and discuss
1. White Violence and the making of a Southern apartheid
- Rise of the Ku Klux Klan
- Colfax Massacre in Colfax, LA (1873)
2. Structural limits and administrative shortcomings in the funding and execution of the Freedmen's Bureau. Limits and failure of achieving land reform and resultant conditions and prevalence of sharecropping.
3. Judicial intervention limiting the political and legal rights of Freed Blacks.
- Cruikshank Case
- The Slaughter-House cases 1873
4. Empire building and national expansion led to the political compromise of 1877 ending formal reconstruction.
5. Racism as a division of labor in which race functioned as a marker of caste was convenient to American capitalism.
6. Limited advances of suffrage, that denied women the right to vote encumbered the possibility of hegemony and cooperation between women radicals and African American advocacy.
Historiography and Reconstruction
The best overview is Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988). The following is a synopsis from Foner.
The study of Reconstruction began
early in the twentieth century with the so-called Dunning School. The work of William Dunning, John Burgess and
others provided a model for Reconstruction that consisted of the following:
- At the end of the Civil War Southern whites accepted defeat and were ready to emancipate their slaves, and wanted reintegration into the national system
- Before his assassination Lincoln embarked on a course of sectional reconciliation
- During Presidential Reconstruction (1865-1867) Andrew Johnson attempted to carry out Lincoln’s policies
- Johnson’s efforts were opposed and blocked by Radical Republicans in Congress
- Radical Republicans had a deep hatred of Southern rebels and wanted to consolidate their party’s national ascendancy.
- Radical Republicans swept aside the Southern governments of Johnson and forced black suffrage on the South. This ushered in the second phase known as Congressional Reconstruction
- Congressional or Radical reconstruction ensued (1867-1877) a period of corruption with its synonomous carpetbaggers from the North and Southern white scalawags and ignorant freedmen.
- Ultimately the Southern whites banded together to overthrow these governments and restore “home rule” (a euphemism for white supremacy) (Foner, Reconstruction, xix)
The Dunning School based itself on
racial theories of the incapacity of blacks and fears of negro rule. Blacks were seen as manipulated by Northern
whites or as having animal natures that threatened the stability of
civilization.
William A. Dunning, Reconstruction,
Political and Economic 1865-1877, (New York, 1907); Walter L. Fleming, The Sequel of Appomattox
(New Haven, 1919); Claude G. Bowers, The
Tragic Era, (1929); E. Merton Coulter, The South during Reconstruction
1865-1877, (1947)
During the 1920s and 1930s new
studies of Johnson painted him in a more favourable light and as a defender of
ideals of constitutional liberty.
Further the Progressive School arose and viewed political ideologies as
masks for economic ends and in their histories
they undermined the Radicals reputation by portraying them as agents of
Northern capitalism, who used the issue of black rights to enforce the economic
subordination of the South. John W.
Burgess, Reconstruction and the Constitution 1866-1867, (1902); Robert W. Winston, iAndrew Johnson: Plebeian and Patriot (1926); George Milton, The Age of Hate: Andrew Johnson and the Radicals, (1930); Howard K. Beale, The Critical Year: a Study of Andrew Johnson and Reconstruciton,
(1930)
Reconstruction received a shot in
the arm with the appearance of W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in
America, 1935. Although Du Bois’
work was only later received, he attacked the racial bias of studies on
Reconstruction. He also depicted
Reconstruction as an idealism that sought to build a democratic, interracial
political order from the remains of slavery. He also saw it a as a phase of
long struggle between capital and labor for control of the Southern economy. He literally
rewrote the official history of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Prior to
Du Bois, it was commonly accepted that the Civil War was a tragic conflict that
set brother against brother, but that slaves lacked any real historical agency
or ability to partake as historical actors on their own behalf. Before Du Bois the consensus view of Reconstruction
was that of a disastrous period , caused by the “premature” granting of civil
and political rights to African Americans. Du Bois deconstructed the myths of Reconstruction
as found in three stereotypes propogated in white scholarship on the subject.
All Negroes were ignorant;
All Negroes were lazy, dishonest, and extravagant;
Negroes were responsible for bad government during Reconstruction. (711–12)
White racism and the open organization of the Ku Klux Klan surged in the 1920s and was reified in D.W. Griffin’s racist interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction in his film Birth of A Nation (1915). W.E.B. Du Bois the African American scholar and activist for the NAACP responded through the creation of The Crisis, the first national journal for African Americans. In his monthly editorials and columns during the period from 1916 to the early 20’s Du Bois critiqued the reality of institutionalized racial violence directed against African Americans and other minorities.
Reconstruction and Jim Crow
UCSC library guide to American History
The Digital History project has the following collection of documents:
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/reconstruction/index.html
Chronology of Reconstruction
The following documents are from the Fordham Internet Sourcebook
The Digital History project has the following collection of documents:
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/reconstruction/index.html
Chronology of Reconstruction
The following documents are from the Fordham Internet Sourcebook
- Proclamation Declaring The Insurrection At An End, 1866 [At this Site]
- Thaddeus Stevens (1792-1868): Speech, December 18, 1865 [At American Revolution]
- Address of a Convention of Negroes held in Alexandria, Virginia, August 1865 [At American Revolution]
- Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, June 20, 1866 [At American Revolution]
- Frederick Douglass (1817-1895): An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Sufferage, January, 1867 [At U Oklahoma]
- Frederick Douglass, Reconstruction, The Atlantic Monthly, December 1866, [At Virginia]
- Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896 [At Landmark Cases]
Established the legal basis for American apartheid in the South.
Documenting the American South 18th through 20th century
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