This 1865 cartoon pokes fun at twoRichmond ladies as they pass by aUnion officer on their way to receivefree government rations
This cartoon from the presidentialcampaign of 1864 shows the “RailSplitter.” Shows Lincolnleveraging the broken nation backtogether with his running mate,Andrew Johnson
Wartime Reconstruction
•President Lincoln’s plan – Proclamation ofAmnesty and Reconstruction (December1863)
•South’s transition from slavery to free labor
•Freedmen’s Bureau – distributed food andclothing to impoverished Southerners &eased the transition of blacks from slaves tofree persons
•The African American Quest for Autonomy
Presidential Reconstruction
•President Andrew Johnson’s program ofReconciliation
•Black Codes – sought to keep former slavessubordinate to whites by subjecting them toevery sort of discrimination
•The 14th Amendment made Blacks nationalcitizens & provided a national guarantee ofequality before the law
•In 1867, Congress overturned Johnson’s stategovernments and initiated military rule in thesouth
•Impeaching President Johnson
•15th Amendment to the Constitution – prohibitedstates from depriving any citizen of the right to votebecause of “race, color, or previous condition ofservitude”
•Woman suffrage advocates were disappointed withthe 15th Amendment
•Freedmen, Yankees, and Yeomen
•The reconstruction constitutions introduced twobroad categories of changes in the South: thosethat reduced aristocratic privilege and increaseddemocratic equality and those that expanded thestate’s responsibility for the general welfare
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (left) and SusanB. Anthony (right) were veteranreformers who advocated, amongother things, better working conditionsfor labor, married women’s propertyrights, liberalization of divorce laws,and women’s admission into college ortrade schools
Sharecroppers
•Sharecropping – in this system planters dividedtheir cotton plantations into small farms thatfreedmen rented, paying with a share of eachyear’s crop, usually half
•Most African Americans remained depended onwhite landlords, who had the power to expel themat the end of each growing season
•Crop Lien - a merchant would advance goods to asharecropper in exchange for a lien, or legal claim,on the farmer’s future crop
President Ulysses S. Grant
•Hero of the Civil War and supporter ofcongressional reconstruction
•Grant was not as good a president as he was ageneral. The talents he had demonstrated on thebattlefield – decisiveness, clarity, and resolution –were less obvious in the White House
•In 1872, anti-Grant Republicans bolted andlaunched the Liberal Party
Northern Resolve Declines
•Economic depression of 1873
•the Ku Klux Klan Act (1871), made interference withvoting rights a felony
•Civil Rights Act of 1875, which boldly outlawed racialdiscrimination in transportation, publicaccommodations, and juries
•Slaughterhouse cases (1873)
•White Supremacy strengthens in the South
•The Redeemers - swore to save southern civilizationfrom a descent into “African barbarism”
•The 1876 elections & the Compromise of 1877
Redeemers was a name taken bysouthern Democrats whose goal wasto overthrow Republican rule & blackpolitical power
The Compromise of 1877 was an informal agreement in whichDemocrats agreed not to block Hayes’s inauguration and todeal fairly with freedmen, and Hayes vowed not to use thearmy to uphold the remaining Republican regimes in theSouth. This “Compromise” brought the Reconstruction era toan end
