Reconstruction Marked the End of the Civil War and the Rebuilding of America

• Racism was still prevalent although 4 million enslaved Americans were free

• Southern Economy was destroyed

• Ex-confederates were defiant and bitter but freed slaves felt the opposite

• Few willingly freed their slaves until Union Soldiers arrived

• Henry Adams-former slave who left the Louisiana Plantation was confronted by a group of whites who confronted him and asked for his owner's name which he said “I now belong to no one”.

• Name changes symbolized former slaves changed status and a new identity as free

• 13th amendment (Dec. 1865)- abolished slavery everywhere

• Former slaves needed self-reliance and independence for which the government must help with, but white southerners were resisting efforts to reconstruct

• Some Northerners wanted the southern states returned without or with little change, others wanted former confederate political/military leaders to be imprisoned/executed.

• Debates Over Political Reconstruction

Lincoln’s Plan (1863)

• Lincoln issued the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction:

• Any confederate state could recreate a union gov. Once 10 percent of voters in 1860 swore allegiance to the constitution/union.

• They received a presidential pardon for treason. Those denied pardons were Confederate gov. officials/senior officers of the confed. army/navy, those who abused African American soldiers, judges/congressmen/military officers of the US who left posts to aid the rebellion.

• Congressional Plans- Northern Politicians disagreed over who had the authority to restore rebel states to the union.

• Many Republicans/so-called rebels argued congress, NOT PRESIDENT, should supervise reconstruction.

• The Radical republicans favored drastic transformation of southern society and wanted to grant freed slaves full citizenship, motivated by religious/moral values that believed all people were equal regardless of race in God's eyes.

• They wanted no compromise with the sin of racism. Radicals hoped to replace the white, democratic planter elite w a new-gen. Of small farmers, along with mid. Class Republicans, both black and white. Radical leader=Thaddeus Stevens.

Wade-Davis Bill (1864)

• During the War, the Radical Republicans tried to take charge of reconstruction with the Wade-Davis Bill.

• Sponsored by Senator Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland.

• The bill required that a majority of white males swear allegiance to the union before a confed. The state could be readmitted.

• The bill never became a law, Lincoln vetoed it as being too harsh. In retaliation- republicans issues the Wade-Davis Manifesto- accused lincoln of exceeding his constitutional authority- Lincoln moved ahead with his own plan unfazed.

The Freedman’s Bureau (1865)

• Congress approved the 13th amendment (abolishing slavery), liberating 4 million slaves. In major northern cities, people formed freedmen’s aid societies to raise funds and recruit volunteers to help African Americans in the south; churches also did the same. But the needs far exceeded the grassroots efforts.

• On March 3, 1865, congress created the Freedmen's Bureau (within the war department). It was the first federal experiment in providing assistance directly to people other than from the states.

• May 1865- General Oliver O. Howard, the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau, sent agents to the south to negotiate labor contracts b/t blacks and white landowners, many of whom resisted.

• The bureau provided former slaves with medical care, food, clothing, and helped set up schools. By 1870-Bureau was supervising 4000 new schools serving 250000 students whose teachers were Northern women volunteers. They also helped former slaves reconnect to family members and legalized marriage that had been prohibited by slavery.

Freed Slaves and Land

• Some northerners argued that freed slaves needed their own land. In coastal South Carolina and in Mississippi, former slaves were given land by the Union armies that had taken control of confederate areas during the war.

• Even northern abolitionists balked at radical proposals to confiscate white-owned land and distribute it to the freed slaves. The discussions fueled false rumors that freed slaves would get “forty acres and a mule”- a slogan that swept across the south.

• Ulysses S. Grant- general in chief of the US Army reported that the mistaken belief among freed slaves was interfering with their willingness to sign labor contracts.

• July 1865-hundreds of freed slaves gathered near an old church on st. Helena island off the S. Carolina Coast Martin Delaney, Virginia Born Freeman-The highest-ranked officer in the 104th US colored troops addressed them. He was a prominent abolitionist in the north and had now assured the gathering that slavery had been absolutely abolished.

• He stressed that abolition was less the result of Abe Lincoln’s leadership than the outcome of former slaves and free blacks like him deciding to resist and undermine the confed. He believed that they must find ways to be economically self-reliant.

Death of a President

• The possibility of a lenient reconstruction of the confederacy died with Abraham Lincoln.

• April 11, 1865- he rejected calls by radicals for a vengeful peace, he wanted no extreme efforts to restructure southern social and economic life.

• Three days later, he and his wife Mary saw a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington D.C. Lincoln was defenseless as his bodyguard was called away to Richmond as John Wilkes Booth, A popular Actor and a rabid confederate, slipped into the presidential box and shot the president.

• Booths claimed that God directed him to kill the president. Booth then stabbed a military aide and jumped from the box to the stage, breaking his leg and limping out the stage door, mounting a waiting horse, and fled. Lincoln died 9 hours later.

• As Booth was shooting the president, other assassins were targeting VP Andrew Johnson and secretary of state William H. Seward. Johnson escaped injury because his would-be assassin got cold feet and got tipsy in the VP’s hotel-room bathroom. Seward and four others, including his son, suffered knife wounds when attacked at home.

• After an 11 day manhunt, Booth was pursued in Virginia and killed in a burning barn, and three of his collaborators were convicted by a military court and hanged, as was Mary Surratt who owned the Washington Boardinghouse where the assassinations were planned.

Johnson’s Plan

• Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a pro-union Democrat who had been added to the national union ticket in 1864 only to help Lincoln win reelection.

• Johnson hated the white-southern elite and the idea of racial equality and had a weakness for liquor. He gave his VP address in 1865-- drunk.

• Johnson was born in poverty in Raleigh, N. Carolina. He never attended school, he moved and became a tailor and learned to read.

• Self-Proclaimed friend of the common man. He served as the mayor, state legislator, governor, congressional rep, and US Senator. His supporters were mostly small farmers and working poor, he called himself a Johnsonian Democrat as the strictest meaning of the terms.

• He shared the racist values of the confederacy and he opposed the republican economic policies to spur industrial development and wanted federal gov. To be small and inactive. Johnson was temporarily in control of what he called the restoration of the Union, he needed to put his plan in place over the next 7 months before the new congress convened and the republicans would take charge.

• May 1865- Issued a new proclamation of Amnesty that excluded ex-confederates that Lincoln barred from a presidential pardon and anyone with property worth more than $20,000. He surprisingly pardoned most of the white aristocrats he despised. He decided to buy political support from prominent southerners by pardoning them.

• Johnson’s restoration Plan included the appointment of a unionist as provisional gov in each southern state, a position w the authority to call a convention of men elected by loyal (that is, not confederate) voters.

• His plan required each state convention to ratify the 13th amendment before being readmitted to the union and encouraged conventions to consider giving a few blacks voting rights to “disarm” the republicans who wanted to give all African Americans the right to vote. Except for Mississippi, each state of the former confederacy held a convention that met Johnson’s requirements but ignored his suggestion about voting rights for blacks.

The Radical Rebels

• Johnson won the support of the Radical Republicans initially, but many radicals were infuriated by Johnson's efforts to bring the south back as quickly as possible.

• Leading radical republicans (Stevens and Charles Sumner of Mass.) wanted to deny former confederates the right to vote in order to keep them from re-electing the old planter elite.

• Johnson balked at the idea of congress re-admitting the states and was committed to state’s rights. Radical Republicans gained a majority in congress and were warring w johnson over reconstruction control.

• Dec 4, 1865- Johnson announced the south had been restored to the union, he wanted Congress to admit newly elected southern reps to their seats in the house and senate.

• Georgia had elected Alexander Stephens, former VP of the confederacy. Across the south 4 confed generals, 8 colonels, 6 confed. Cabinet members, and 58 confed. Legislators were elected. Outraged Republicans denied seats to all rebel officials and appointed a congressional committee to develop a new plan to reconstruct the south.

Johnson Versus the Radicals

• Johnson vetoed a bill that renewed funding for the freedmen's Bureau.

• Stevens and other radicals realized that Johnson was trying to redefine the civil war as a conflict b/t states' rights and fed. Power instead of a struggle over slavery.

• March 1866-Radical Led Congress passed Civil Rights Act- All persons born in the US (except native Americans) were citizens entitled to full and equal benefit of all laws which enraged johnson and he vetoed both bills which in turn infuriated the republicans.

• April 1866-Congress overrode Johnson’s vetoes so Johnson lost public and political support.

• Summer of 1866- Rampaging white mobs in the south murdered/wounded hundreds of African Americans during the Race Riots in Memphis and New Orleans.

Black Codes

• The violence was partly triggered by African American Protests over restrictive laws.

• The purpose of the Black Codes was intended to restore white supremacy. Black Marriages were recognized but African Americans could not vote, serve on a jury, testify against whites, or attend public schools, own farmland in Mississippi, or city property in S. Carolina, own guns in Alabama, In Mississippi, every black male over 18 had to be apprenticed to a white.

• The black codes disgusted republicans

Fourteenth Amendment

• To ensure the legality of the new fed. Civil rights act, the congressional joint committee on reconstruction proposed in April 1866-- the 14th amendment (guaranteed citizenship to anyone born/naturalized in the US except Native Americans, prohibited deprivation of life, liberty, and property w/o due process or equal protection of the law).

• Approved June 16, 1866. Not a single democrat in the house or senate voted for it. All the former confed. States were required to ratify it to be readmitted to the union. This Infuriated Johnson.

Johnson Versus Radicals

• To win votes for democratic candidates, Johnson went on a speaking tour of the midwest where he denounced radical republicans. Several of his speeches backfired.

• It was a devastating defeat for Johnson and the democrats, in each house radical republican candidates won more than a ⅔ majority, the margin required to override presidential vetoes.

• Congressional Republicans would now take over the process of reconstruction.

Congress Takes Charge

• March 2 1867-new congress passed over johnson’s vetoes, 3 crucial laws creating what was called the Congressional Reconstruction: the military reconstruction act, the command of the army act, and the tenure of office act.

• Military reconstruction act-abolished all-new gov. In the rebel states estab. Under Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction policies, congress estab. Milt. control over 10/11 former confed. States.

• Tennessee was exempted because it ratified the 14th amendment, the others were divided into 5 milt districts, each commanded by a general who acted as governor.

• Guaranteed right to vote for all men-not women. State legislators had to ratify the 14th amendment.

• Command of the Army Act - President issues all army orders through gen. In chief Ulysses S Grant. Radical Republicans feared Johnson would be too lenient when appointing generals so they bypassed to grant.

• Tenure of Office act-Required senate permission for the president to remove any fed official whose appointment the senate had confirmed This was to prevent Johnson from firing Secretary Of War Edwin Stanton- Johnson’s most outstanding critic in the cabinet.

Impeaching the President

• In 1867-1868, Radicals decided that the defiant democratic president must be removed from office.

• Johnson fired Sec. of war- Edwin Stanton, who refused to resign, in violation of the Tenure of office act.

• The House passed 11 articles of impeachment which were flimsy regarding Stanton's firing.

• The first senate trial of a sitting president was march 5 1868 w chief justice Salmon P chase presiding. The 5-week trial ended as Senate voted 35 to 19 for conviction, only one vote short of the ⅔ needed for removal from office.

• Senator Edward G Ross, a young radical, cast the deciding vote in favor of acquittal- knowing his political career would be ruined. To avoid being convicted, Johnson privately agreed to stop obstructing congressional reconstruction.

Republican Rule in the South

• June 1868-8 southern states were allowed to send delegates to congress again. Virginia, Mississippi, Texas were readmitted in 1870 (they had to ratify the 15th amendment).

• 15th amendment-Prohibit states from denying any man the vote on grounds of race, color, previous condition of servitude.

Blacks Under Reconstruction

• Freed but not equal.

• White Southerners used terror, intimidation, and Violence to suppress black efforts to gain social and economic equality.

• Black Military veterans would form the core of first-gen African American Political Leaders in Postwar South

Black Churches and Schools

• Many former slaves identified with the Biblical Hebrews, ex-slaves eagerly established their own African-American churches.

• The black churches were the first social institutions the former slaves could control and quickly became the crossroads for black community life.

• Many African Americans became Baptists or Methodists. African American communities also rushed to establish schools.

• S. Carolina’s Mary McLeod Bethune earned a scholarship to college and became the first black woman to found a school that became a 4-year college- Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida.

African Americans in Southern Politics

• Groups sponsored by the union league (founded in Philadelphia 1862) throughout the south encouraged freed slaves to embrace the repub. Party, Recruited African Americans and loyal whites. They had 88 chapters just in S. Carolina. Claimed to have enrolled almost every adult black male in the state.

• Many African Americans served as state legislature under congressional reconstruction.

• In Louisiana, Pinckney Pinchback, a northern free black and former union soldier was elected lt. Gov, there were two black senators in congress-Hiram Revels and Blanche K Bruce (Mississippi Natives educated in the North), 14 black members of US House of reps. White southerners and Democrat extremists were appalled and Racist.

Land, Labor, and Disappointment

• Some northerners argued that former slaves needed their own land, freed slaves agreed.

• In several Southern states, former slaves had been given land by union armies after they had control of confed. Areas during the war. Transfers of white owned property to former slaves were reversed in 1865 by Johnson.

• Union generals urged the former slaves to put aside the feelings of unfairness/bitterness, but they knew ownership of land was the foundation of their freedom. It was also virtually impossible for former slaves to get loans to buy farmland because few banks were willing to lend to them.

• What emerged was sharecropping-the landowner provided land, seed, and tools to a poor farmer in exchange for a share of the crop, many freed blacks preferred sharecropping overworking for wages since it freed them from day-to-day supervision by white landowners, but soon they found themselves tied to the discouraging system of dependence that over time felt like slavery.

Tensions Among Southern Blacks

• African Americans in the postwar south were by no means a uniform community. Affluent northern blacks and southern free black elite (city dwellers and Mulattos) often opposed efforts to redistribute land to the freedmen, but in general, unity prevailed and they focused on common concerns.

• Many African Americans served in state gov w distinction. Nonetheless, the scornful label black reconstruction used by critics distorts American political influence.

• Only S. Carolina's Repub. State convention had a black majority Louisiana's was evenly divided racially and Florida and Virginia were more than 20% black members.

Carpetbaggers and Scalawags

• Most offices in new S. State govs went to white republicans who were dismissed as carpetbaggers or scalawags.

• Carpetbaggers, critics argued, were scheming northerners who rushed south w cheap carpet suitcases to grab political power. Some were corrupt opportunists. Most were union milt. Veterans drawn to the south by the desire to rebuild the devastated econ.

• Ex: NY-er George spencer arrived in alabama w union army during the war and pursued selling cotton and building railroads, eventually elected to US Senate, many other so-called CarpetBaggers were teachers, Social workers, Ministers w a genuine desire to help the free blacks and poor whites improve quality of life.

• Scalawags or White southern republicans were hated by the S. democrats who considered them traitors.

• Most scalawags were unionists opposed to secession and were prominent in mtn counties. Ex: Former confed. General James Longstreet decided after approximation that the south must change. Became a successful cotton broker in New Orleans, joined repub. Party and supported radical reconstruction program.

• Other scalawags were former whigs attracted by the econ policy of Repubs.

Southern Resistance and White Redemption

• Most southerners viewed secession as a noble lost cause rather than a mistake.

• White southern ministers tried to convince congregations that god endorsed white supremacy.

• The Civil War had brought freedom to enslaved African Americans, but it did not bring them protection against exploitation or abuse.

• Several secret terrorist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, and the White League, emerged to harass, intimidate, and even kill scalawags, carpetbaggers, and African Americans.

• The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was formed in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee. The name Ku Klux was derived from the Greek word kuklos, meaning “circle” or “band.” Klan came from the English word clan, or family. The Klan, and other groups like it, began initially as a social club, with costumes and secret rituals. But its members, most of them former Confederate soldiers, soon began harassing blacks and white republicans. Klansmen rode about at night spreading rumors, issuing threats, and burning schools and churches.

The Legacy of Republican Rule

• The Republican state governments were gradually overturned, but they left behind an important accomplishment--the new constitutions they created.

• Among the most significant innovations brought about by the Republican state governments were protecting black voting rights, restructuring legislatures to reflect shifting populations, and making more state offices elective to weaken the “good old boy” tradition of rewarding political supporters with state government jobs.

• They constructed an extensive railroad network and established public, though racially segregated, school systems funded by state governments and open to all children. Some 600,000 black pupils were enrolled in southern schools by 1877.

• The Radicals also gave more attention to the poor and to orphanages, asylums, and institutions for the deaf and blind of both races. Public roads, bridges, and buildings were repaired or rebuilt.

• African Americans achieved rights and opportunities that would repeatedly be violated in coming decades but would never completely be taken away, at least in principle: equality before the law and the rights to own property, attend schools, learn to read and write, enter professions, and carry on business. Yet several Republican state governments also engaged in corrupt practices.

• Bribes and kickbacks, whereby companies received government contracts in return for giving government officials cash or stock, were commonplace.

• In Louisiana, a twenty-six-year-old carpetbagger, Henry Clay Warmoth, a Union war veteran, and an attorney, somehow turned an annual salary of $8,000 into a million-dollar fortune over four years as governor. (He was eventually impeached and removed from office.) Such corruption was not invented by the Radical Republican regimes, nor did it die with them.

The Grant Administration - Election of 1868

• Both parties wooed Ulysses S. Grant, the “Lion of Vicksburg” His falling-out with President Johnson, however, had pushed him toward the Republicans, who unanimously nominated him as their candidate.

• The Republican party platform endorsed Congressional Reconstruction. The public expectations driving the candidacy of Ulysses S. Grant were important, whose campaign slogan was “Let us have peace.”

• The Democrats charged that the Radical Republicans were subjecting the South “to military despotism and Negro supremacy.”

• They nominated Horation Seymour, the wartime gov. And a critic of congress. Reconstruction. Running mate-Francis P Blair Jr. (former union general from Missouri who had served in congress) appealed to white bigotry when he denounced republicans for promoting equality.

• Grant swept the electoral college, 214 to 80, but his popular majority was only 307,000 out of almost 6 million votes.

• Grant, the youngest president ever (forty-six years old at the time of his inauguration), had proved himself a great military leader, but he was not a strong politician. He passively followed the lead of Congress. Members of his own party would become his greatest disappointments and worst enemies.

• A failure as a storekeeper before the Civil War, Grant was awestruck by men of wealth who lavished gifts on him. He also showed poor judgment in his selection of cabinet members, often favoring friendship and loyalty over integrity and ability.

• During Grant’s two terms in office, his seven cabinet positions changed twenty-four times. Some of the men betrayed his trust and engaged in criminal behavior.

Scandals

• President Grant’s administration was quickly mired in scandal.

• In the summer of 1869, two unprincipled financial schemers, Jay Gould and the colorful James Fisk Jr. (known as “Diamond Jim”), both infamous for bribing politicians and judges, plotted with Abel Corbin, the president’s brother-in-law, to corner the gold market.

• They wanted to buy up massive quantities of gold to create a public craze and drive up it’s value. The only danger to the complicated scheme lay in the possibility that the federal Treasury would burst the bubble by selling large amounts of its gold supply, which would deflate the value of gold by putting more in circulation.

• When Grant was seen in public with Gould and Fisk, people assumed that he supported their scheme.

• On September 24, 1869—soon to be remembered as “Black Friday”—the scheme to drive up the price of gold worked, at least at first. , leading more and more investors across the nation and around the world to join the stampede.

• Then, around noon, President Grant and his Treasury secretary realized what was happening and began selling huge amounts of government gold. Within fifteen minutes, the bubble created by Fisk and Gould burst, and the price of gold plummeted. For weeks after the gold bubble collapsed, financial markets were paralyzed and business confidence was shaken.

• The secretary of war, it turned out, had accepted bribes from merchants who traded with Indians at army posts in the West. In St. Louis, whiskey distillers—dubbed the “whiskey ring” in the press—bribed federal agents in an effort to avoid taxes, bilking the government out of millions of dollars in revenue.

• Congressional committees investigated most of the scandals but uncovered no evidence that Grant himself was ever involved. His poor choice of associates, however, earned him widespread criticism.

The Money Supply

• Complex financial issues—especially monetary policy—dominated Grant’s presidency.

• Prior to the Civil War, the economy operated on a gold standard; state banks issued paper money that could be exchanged for an equal value of gold coins. .

• Greenbacks (so-called because of the dye color used on the printed dollars) were issued during the Civil War to help pay for the war.

• When a nation’s supply of money grows faster than the economy itself, prices for goods and services increase (inflation). This happened when the greenbacks were issued.

• The most vocal supporters of a return to “hard money” were eastern creditors (mostly bankers and merchants) who did not want their debtors to pay them in paper currency.

• Critics of the gold standard tended to be farmers and other debtors. soft-money advocates opposed taking greenbacks out of circulation because shrinking the supply of money would bring lower prices (deflation) for their crops and livestock, thereby reducing their income.

• In 1868, congressional supporters of such a “soft-money” policy—mostly Democrats— forced the Treasury to stop withdrawing greenbacks from circulation. President Grant sided with the “hard-money” camp. On March 18, 1869, he signed the Public Credit Act, which said that the investors who purchased government bonds to help finance the war effort must be paid back in gold.

• The Public Credit Act led to a decline in consumer prices that hurt debtors and helped creditors.

Financial Panic

• President Grant’s effort to withdraw the greenbacks from circulation unintentionally helped cause a major economic collapse.

• During 1873, two dozen overextended railroads stopped paying their bills, forcing Jay Cooke and Company, the nation’s leading business lender, to go bankrupt and close its headquarters which created a snowball effect.

• The Panic of 1873 triggered a deep economic depression.

• The depression led the U.S. Treasury to reverse course and begin printing more greenbacks.

• For a time, the supporters of paper money celebrated, but in 1874, Grant, after a period of agonized reflection, overruled his cabinet and vetoed a bill to issue even more greenbacks. His decision pleased the financial community but also ignited a barrage of criticism. In the end, Grant’s decision only prolonged what was then the worst depression in the nation’s history.

Liberal Republicans

• The collapse of the economy in 1873 contributed to northerners’ losing interest in Reconstruction and Republicans dividing into two factions: the Liberals (or Conscience Republicans) and the Capitalists (Stalwart Republicans).

• The Liberal Republicans, led by senators Charles Sumner and Carl Schurz, called for the “best elements” in both national parties to join together. Their goal was to oust the “tyrannical” Grant from the presidency, end federal Reconstruction efforts in the South, lower tariffs intended to line the pockets of big corporations, and promote “civil service reforms” to end the “partisan tyranny” of the “patronage system”.

• In 1872, the breakaway Liberal Republicans, many of whom were newspaper editors suspicious of the “working classes,” held their own national convention in Cincinnati,

• They then committed political suicide by nominating an unlikely and ill-suited presidential candidate: Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune and a longtime champion of a variety of causes: abolitionism, socialism, vegetarianism, and spiritualism.

• His image as an eccentric who repeatedly reversed his political positions was complemented by his record of hostility to the Democrats, whose support the Liberal Republicans needed if they were going to win the election.

• The Democrats nevertheless gave their nomination to Greeley.

• Southern Democrats liked his criticism of federal reconstruction policies. Most northerners, however, were appalled at Greeley’s candidacy.

• By nominating Greeley, said the New York Times, the Liberal Republicans and Democrats had killed any chance of electoral victory. Greeley carried only six southern states and none in the North.

• Grant won thirty-one states and carried the national election by 3,598,235 votes to 2,834,761. Greely died three weeks later.

White Terror

• President Grant initially fought to enforce federal efforts to reconstruct the postwar South. Klansmen focused their program of murder, violence, and intimidation on prominent Republicans, black and white—elected officials, teachers in black schools, state militias.

• They intentionally avoided clashes with federal troops. An Alabama Republican pleaded with Grant to intervene.

• At the urging of President Grant, Republicans in Congress responded with three Enforcement Acts (1870–1871).

• The first of these measures imposed penalties on anyone who interfered with any citizen’s right to vote.

• The second dispatched federal supervisors and marshals to monitor elections in southern districts where political terrorism flourished.

• The third, called the Ku Klux Klan Act, outlawed the main activities of the KKK—forming conspiracies, wearing disguises, resisting officers, and intimidating officials.

• In general, however, the Enforcement Acts were not consistently enforced. As a result, the efforts of southern whites to use violence to thwart Reconstruction- “Worse Than Slavery” a Thomas Nast cartoon condemns the Ku Klux Klan for promoting conditions “worse than slavery” for southern blacks after the Civil War.

• On Easter Sunday in 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, a mob of white vigilantes, most of them ex-Confederate soldiers disappointed by local election results, used a cannon, rifles, and pistols to attack a group of black Republicans in the courthouse, slaughtering eighty-one and burning down the building.

Southern Redeemers

• The Ku Klux Klan’s impact on southern politics varied from state to state. In the Upper South, it played only a modest role in helping Democrats win local elections. In the Lower South, however, Klan violence and intimidation had more serious effects.

• Throughout the South, the activities of white supremacists disheartened black and white Republicans alike. At the same time, northerners displayed a growing weariness with using federal troops to reconstruct the South. President Grant, however, desperately wanted to use more federal force to preserve peace and asked Congress to pass new legislation that would “leave my duties perfectly clear.” Congress responded with the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the most comprehensive guarantee of civil rights to that point.

• Unfortunately for Grant, however, the new law provided little authority to enforce its provisions. Those who felt their rights were being violated had to file suit in court, and the penalties for violators were modest. Public interest in protecting civil rights in the South continued to wane as other issues emerged to distract northerners.

• Republican political control ended in Virginia and Tennessee as early as 1869; in Georgia and North Carolina, it collapsed in 1870, although North Carolina had a Republican governor until 1876.

• Reconstruction lasted longest in the Lower South, where whites abandoned Klan robes for barefaced intimidation in paramilitary groups such as the Mississippi Rifle Club and the South Carolina Red Shirts.

The Contested Election of 1877

• President Grant wanted to run for an unprecedented third term in 1876, but many Republicans had lost confidence in his leadership.

• In the summer of 1875, Grant acknowledged the inevitable, and announced that he would retire.

• James Gillespie Blaine of Maine, the former Speaker of the House, was the likeliest Republican to succeed Grant, but his candidacy crumbled when it was revealed that he had promised political favors to railroad executives in exchange for shares of stock in the company.

• The scandal led the Republican convention to pass over Blaine in favor of Ohio’s favorite son, Rutherford B. Hayes. Elected governor of Ohio three times, most recently as a “hard money” gold advocate, Hayes also was a civil service reformer eager to reduce the number of federal jobs subject to a political appointment. But his chief virtue was that he offended neither Radicals nor reformers. As a journalist put it, he was “obnoxious to no one.”.

• The Democratic convention was uncharacteristically harmonious from the start. The nomination went to Samuel J. Tilden, a wealthy corporate lawyer and reform governor of New York. The 1876 campaign avoided controversial issues. Both candidates favored relaxing federal military authority in the South.

• In the absence of strong ideological differences, Democrats highlighted the scandals embroiling the Republicans. In response, Republicans ignored the depression and repeatedly waved “the bloody shirt,” linking the Democrats to secession, civil war, and the violence committed against Republicans in the South.

• Despite the lack of major issues, the 1876 election generated the most votes of any national election in U.S. history to that point.

• Early returns pointed to a victory for Tilden. Nationwide, he outpolled Hayes by almost 300,000 votes. Tilden had won 184 electoral votes, just one short of the total needed for victory.

• Overnight, however, Republican activists realized that the election hinged on 19 disputed electoral votes from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. The Democrats needed only one of the challenged votes to claim victory; the Republicans needed all nineteen.

• Republicans in those key states had engaged in election fraud, while Democrats had used physical intimidation to keep black voters at home. But all three states were governed by a Republican who appointed the election boards, each of which reported narrow victories for Hayes.

• The Democrats immediately challenged the results. In all three states, rival election boards submitted conflicting vote counts.

• On January 29, 1877, Congress set up an electoral commission to settle the dispute. It met daily for weeks trying to verify the disputed vote counts.

• Finally, on March 1, 1877, the commission voted 8 to 7 along party lines in favor of Hayes. The next day, the House of Representatives declared Hayes president by an electoral vote of 185 to 184. Hayes’s victory hinged on the defection of key southern Democrats, who, it turned out, had made a number of secret deals with the Republicans.

• On February 26, 1877, prominent Ohio Republicans and powerful southern Democrats struck a private bargain—the Compromise of 1877—at Wormley’s Hotel in Washington, D.C. The Republicans promised that if Hayes were named president, he would remove the last federal troops from the South

The End of Reconstruction

• In 1877, newly inaugurated President Hayes withdrew federal troops from Louisiana and South Carolina, whose Republican governments collapsed soon thereafter. Hayes insisted that it was not his fault.

• Over the next thirty years, the protection of black civil rights in the South crumbled.

The War’s Aftermath in The South

• Northern wealth increased by 50 percent, southern wealth dropped 60 percent-- South was in economic ruin

• Union soldiers were despised in the south, passed sentiment onto southern children as well

• Cotton was either destroyed or seized by federal troops, cotton was heavily significant to the nation’s wealth in the south--went down from 30% to 12%

• Injuries-⅕ of Mississippi's Budget went for artificial Limbs for confederate soldiers

• Forming New State Gov. required determining the official status of seceded states

• The important question for reconstruction: What was the status of freed slaves? Were they Citizens?