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APUSH Document Analysis The Ordeal of Reconstruction Historical Context: The battle was done, the guns silent. Boneweary and bloodied, the American people, North and South, now faced the staggering challenges of peace. Four questions loomed large. How would the South, physically devastated by war and socially revolutionized by Emancipation, be rebuilt? How would the liberated blacks fare as free men and women? How would the Southern states be reintegrated into the Union? And who would direct the process of Reconstruction—the Southern states themselves, the president, or Congress? The South was economically destroyed after the war. The former leaders were not allowed to have positions of political power. To fill this void, three groups stepped into political office. The scalawags were yeoman farmers who didn’t like the rich and the elite who saw them as traitors despised them. The carpetbaggers were northerners who moved to the south. Some of them came to assist the south and others came to exploit them economically for personal financial gain. The third group was the African Americans. They voted often and won seats to the U.S. congress. Unfortunately, the fragile alliance was full of mistrust, hatred, and racism, and fell apart. The Ku Klux Klan, founded by a former confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, was designed to scare off republican voters from the polls. It also terrorized freedmen who dared to exercise their newfound freedoms. It was so effective that by 1880, it had nearly dissolved itself. When the Republicans lost political control in the south the former Democratic leaders stepped back into power. This new (old) leadership is known as the redeemers. They sought to revert the South to the antebellum (before the Civil War) period and make blacks second class citizens in a role nearly identical to slavery. They forced the freedmen into an economic subservient situation similar to slavery known as sharecropping and tenant farming. At the conclusion of the war, many blacks moved around in search of family members who had been sold. Others moved to Kansas and were known as exodusters. This is known as the first great African American migration. Those who stayed in the south ended up as tenant farmers or sharecroppers. It was nearly identical to slavery, with the former masters in charge once again. The redeemer’s government passed harsh Jim Crow laws to keep the races separate. They also passed poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather laws to keep them from voting. In 1872, General Ulysses Grant was elected as president. This started a period of Republican presidential dominance. The north was encouraged to vote against the democratic south and they vigorously waved the bloody shirt to show that they had fought to save the Union. Grant himself was honest, but he was a terrible judge of character, and the people he appointed to office stole millions of dollars from the Federal government. The Whiskey Ring scandal was a tax skimming operation, but the biggest scandal involved bribes from railroad officials to bail out a company, this was called the Credit Moblier Scandal. By the election of 1876, people in the north had tired of spending so much money to rebuild the south, especially after the economic Panic of 1873. The people who lost jobs didn’t care about the freedmen anymore. The election itself was acrimonious with rampant charges of voter fraud; Florida was in a dispute with both the Democrats and Republicans claiming victory. The country nearly went to war again. The Democratic candidate had won more votes, but in a compromise deal the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes became president. To appease the south, all northern troops were removed from occupying the south. Conditions would remain horrible for African Americans until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Prompt: To what extent did the Reconstruction Era fundamentally change the lives of newly freed African Americans? In your answer, be sure to address the political, social and economic effects of the Reconstruction in the period from 1865 to 1885. Document 1 Source: The Louisiana Black Code, 1865 “Section 1. Be it ordained by the police jury of the parish of St. Landry, that no negro shall be allowed to pass within the limits of said parish without special permit in writing from his employer… Section 3… no negro shall be permitted to rent or keep a house within said parish… Section 4…Every negro is required to be in the regular service of some white person or former owner, who shall be held responsible for the conduct of said negro… Section 7…No negro who is not in the military service shall be allowed to carry fire-arms, or any kind of weapons, within the parish… Section 11…It shall be the duty of every citizen to act as a police officer for the detection of offences and the apprehension of offenders, who shall immediately be handed over to the proper captain or chief of patrol.” Document 2 Source: : 14th Amendment, Section 1, 1868 . . . All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. . . . Document 3 Source: Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor, A warning to 'scalawags and carpetbaggers' in 1868 Document 4 Source: The Freedmen’s Bureau, by Alfred R. Waud, Harpers Weekly, July 25, 1868 Document 5 Source: Congressman John R. Lynch, “Speech on the Civil Rights Bill,” 1875 "Think of it for a moment, my colleagues. When I leave my home in Mississippi to come to the capital of the nation to take part in the deliberations of this House, and to participate with you in making laws for the government of this great republic, I am treated, not as an American citizen, but as a brute, forced to occupy a filthy smoking car, both night and day, with drunkards, gamblers and criminals, and for what? Not that I am unable or unwilling to pay my way, not that I am obnoxious in my personal appearance or disrespectful in my conduct, but simply because I happen to be of a darker complexion." Now here's the irony and the point. The majority of those men he was speaking to that day in the Congress, in their minds, when they heard him, to the extent they listened when he said that, I think we can safely assume were thinking, "yeah, that's just exactly the way you should be treated." Document 6 Source: J. William T. Youngs, “Beyond Emancipation,” American Realities: Historical Episodes, Longman, 2001 "The long ordeal of slavery came to an end in 1865 for 4 million African Americans. Suddenly the freedom they had longed for during two centuries of bondage was theirs. The world opened before them: they could freely visit loved ones, attend schools, or run for public office. Blacks soon realized, however, that chains other than slavery still held them. Penniless, they could not afford to buy farms; untrained, they could not move into better jobs. In the 1870s and 1880s they lost many of the privileges they had gained when freed, including the right to vote. Booker T. Washington grew to maturity in years when blacks experienced both the exhilaration of freedom and the humiliation of segregation. He proved in his early life that an ex-slave could prosper by hard work. When in his later years he saw the cords of prejudice tightening around his people, he responded in the best way he knew, advocating self-help in the face of prejudice and segregation. . . ." Document 7 Source: Scribner’s Monthly, “A Georgia Plantation,” April 1881