A SURVEY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Unit 3: Reconstruction and UrbanizationPart 2: Reconstruction Begins

THADDEUS STEVENS

• House Representative from Pennsylvania and leader of the Radical Republicans.

• Instrumental in securing the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.

• Radical abolitionist who believed in nothing less than absolute equality before the law between African Americans and white Americans.

• Drafted the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and 1868 and guided them through Congress.

WHAT WAS RECONSTRUCTION?

‘Reconstruction’ refers to both the physical rebuilding of Southern infrastructure after the destruction of the Civil War and the moral reform of Southern society to advance a culture of racial equality.

WHAT WAS RECONSTRUCTION?

Technically, the Reconstruction Era is the period between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the Compromise of 1877. However, the Reconstruction Era did not come into full force until the passage of the Reconstruction Acts of 1867.

THE RECONSTRUCTION ACTS OF 1867 AND 1868

• Drafted and passed during the time in which the Congress refused to seat representatives from states that had not ratified the Fourteenth Amendment.

• These states included all of the former Confederate States except for Tennessee, which had ratified the amendment.

• Divided these states into five military districts, each of which would be commanded by a general who would establish a provisional district government.

THE RECONSTRUCTION ACTS OF 1867 AND 1868

• Required each state to draft a new state constitution and have this constitution approved by the Congress before allowing Congressional representation.

• Allowed African American men to vote for and be elected as Congressional representatives, and made former Confederate officials ineligible for election.

• Vetoed by Andrew Johnson, but passed again by the Congress in several overrides of the Presidential veto.

THE RECONSTRUCTION ACTS OF 1867 AND 1868

• Essentially resulted in the military occupation of the South by federal troops, as if the South was a foreign nation that had recently been conquered.

• Southerners who supported Reconstruction in their states were known as ‘scalawags.’

• Northerners who moved to the South to exploit the new political and economic opportunities that arose there were known as ‘carpetbaggers.’

JOHNSON’S IMPEACHMENT

Andrew Johnson’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, and the Commanding General of the United States Army, Ulysses S. Grant, worked to enforce the Reconstruction Acts in the South. This put the two of them at odds with Johnson.

After Johnson publicly suggested that he would dismiss Stanton, the Congress quickly passed the Tenure of Office Act to prohibit him from doing this. Johnson nevertheless replaced Stanton with Grant and came into conflict with Congress.

GRANT BECOMES THE PRESIDENT

• In March 1868, the House of Representatives subjected Johnson to an impeachment trial, attempting to remove him for his intentional violation of the Tenure of Office Act.

• The trial lasted almost three months. Ultimately, the House voted to impeach Johnson but the Senate fell one vote short of impeaching him.

• The impeachment process secured Johnson’s defeat in the Presidential election of 1868.

GRANT BECOMES THE PRESIDENT

• Ulysses S. Grant won the election as the Republican candidate for the Presidency.

• Grant’s victory was narrow, with a margin of only 300,000 votes.

• Since his winning total included 500,000 African American votes, his victory proved that the Republicans could maintain power by extending rights to African Americans.

• Grant won election by using a strategy now known as ‘waving the bloody shirt.’

THE KU KLUX KLAN

In 1865, in response to the outcome of the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan was founded. It appeared first in Pennsylvania, then spread into the South. Between 1865 and 1869, its members violently opposed Reconstruction.

The Klan used lynching to kill and intimidate innocent African Americans with recently expanded rights. But it also targeted white supporters of Reconstruction, particularly those in the South: carpetbaggers and scalawags.

WAVING THE BLOODY SHIRT

• The phrase ‘waving the bloody shirt’ dates to 1871, when Benjamin Franklin Butler gave a speech denouncing the KKK to the House of Representatives.

• Butler spoke of an incident in which carpetbaggers had been attacked by the Ku Klux Klan, and subsequent urban legends suggested that he held up the bloody shirt of one of the victims and waved it around.

• The phrase now refers to an effort to win sympathy for a cause by exploiting memories of those who were injured or killed by fighting for the same cause.

WAVING THE BLOODY SHIRT

• In the election of 1869, Grant ‘waved the bloody shirt’ by repeatedly reminding voters of all the sacrifices that the North had made in the Civil War, and by pointing out all the ways in which the South refused to accept defeat.

• When he came to office, Southern recidivism was one of the main issues he had to handle, particularly in the form of the KKK and its aggressive nativism.

• In other words, although the literal battles of the Civil War were over, the battles over attitudes and beliefs were only just beginning...

A SURVEY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Unit 3: Reconstruction and UrbanizationPart 2: Reconstruction Begins