American History I
Notes From 11/28 and 11/30
During these classes, we talked about the Civil War and its aftermath. At the heart of the sectional crisis that led to the War was the debate over slavery. The southern and northern states disagreed vehemently over slavery, both as a moral and economic issue. There were many people in the North who advocated the abolition of slavery. Other northerners may not have been strong abolitionists, but they did feel that slavery should not be allowed in the new states that were created out of the vast western territories. There were tensions over the issue of fugitive slaves; whether free states could be compelled under the law to return such runaways. Additionally, many southerners advocated "states’ rights" and felt that the federal government, dominated by northern business concerns, no longer represented their best interests. They argued that states had the right to nullify federal law, when those law were unconstitutional or oppressive.
By the 1850’s the divisions between north and south had become irreconcilable. Books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe hardened the abolitionists’ resolve to end slavery, as did the 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. That famous case involved a slave and his wife who had lived in a free territory for many years. When their owner died, Scott sued for his freedom, on the theory that he had lived for many years in a territory where slavery was illegal. The Supreme Court ruled against Scott, saying that as an African American he was not a citizen of the U.S. and therefore did not have the right to file a lawsuit. The Supreme Court also said that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories, thus enraging anti-slavery forces.
Southerners also became hardened during the 1850’s. They viewed attempts by abolitionists to end slavery as an attack on their way of life. In 1859 a militant abolitionist named John Brown led a raid on an arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the idea of arming local slaves and starting a full scale revolt. Although Brown was captured and hanged, many in the North were sympathetic to him. This enraged southerners, who became fearful that northerners would try to incite more slave revolts.
Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 was the last straw for the South. Lincoln was a Republican, which meant he opposed the extension of slavery in the territories. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union. By February 1, 1861, six additional states in the Deep South had joined South Carolina, forming a loose Confederacy.
In April, 1861 Confederate troops captured Fort Sumter in South Carolina, and Lincoln officially proclaimed that the Deep South was in a state of insurrection. The war was on. Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas joined the Confederacy after Fort Sumter.
You don’t need to know a lot about the military history of the war. In terms of resources, the Union (North) had a serious advantage which the Confederacy (South) would find impossible to overcome. There were 10 times as many workers and factories in the Union than in the Confederacy; 20 times as much iron production and 30 times as many firearms. However, since most of the war was fought in the Confederacy and because the Union was plagued by poor military leadership, the war went badly for the Union in 1861 and 1862. In 1863, a hard-won Union victory at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania ended the Confederacy’s attempts to invade the North, and by the end of that year Confederate forces were on the defensive. Even so, the war dragged on for another year and a half, with the South finally surrendering at Appomatox, Virginia in April, 1865.
The Civil War was the bloodiest in American history. Over 200,000 troops died from wounds, another 410,000 died from disease during the war. Some 375,000 were injured. With the Confederate surrender at Appomatax, the public’s attention would now be directed to "reconstructing" the Union. Given the tremendous cost of the conflict and the continued divisions in the country over the place of African-Americans, this "Reconstruction" would generate almost as bitter a controversy as the sectional crisis that caused the war in the first place.
Reconstruction. During the war years, Abraham Lincoln’s priority was to "save the Union," not end slavery. In 1862, he wrote a famous letter to Horace Greeley (publisher of the New York Tribune) saying that as President, if he could save the Union without freeing any slave he would do so, and that if he could save the Union by freeing all the slaves he would do that too. The paramount objective was to preserve the Union. Even the famous Emancipation Proclamation (1863) freed only those slaves in areas still under Confederate control, and of course in those areas it had no immediate effect since the Confederacy had its own government and laws. In December, 1863, Lincoln issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, which offered a full pardon to all Southerners (except leaders of the Confederacy) who swore allegiance to the Union and acknowledged the legality of emancipation. Once 10% of the voting population swore allegiance, they would be authorized to set up a loyal government. Southern states that were occupied by Union forces tried to take advantage of this lenient plan; by 1864 Louisiana and Arkansas had fully functioning pro-Union governments again.
Lincoln hoped his leniency would shorten the Civil War by making it easier for the southern states to surrender. However, there were many Republicans in Congress who wanted to take a more stringent approach. They thought it should be up to the Congress, not President Lincoln, to decide how the rebellious southern states ought to be readmitted. Congress decided not to recognize Lincoln's "10% plan," and instead they passed their own Reconstruction bill in 1864. This was known as the Wade-Davis Bill. It required that 50% of voters swear allegiance to the federal government. The Wade-Davis Bill also gave the federal courts power to enforce African-American voting rights in the South, although it stopped short of actually requiring Black suffrage (the right to vote). Lincoln refused to sign the Wade-Davis Bill, and for the remainder of the Civil War, he and Congress were stalemated over the issue of Reconstruction.
Lincoln was assassinated in April, 1865, shortly after the Confederate surrender at Appomatox. Historians are unsure whether he would have eventually compromised with Congress on the Reconstruction issue. Lincoln’s Vice-President was Andrew Johnson. He was the only southern senator who remained loyal to the Union after 1861, and was picked as Lincoln’s running mate when Lincoln ran for re-election in 1864. Johnson's background was even humbler than Lincoln's. He was born to impoverished parents in North Carolina, and orphaned at an early age. At the age of 10, he was apprenticed to a tailor; he did not fully learn to read and write until he was an adult. He moved to Tennessee at the age of 17, where he later became active in local politics, a champion of poor white farmers against the slave-owning plantation aristocracy. Johnson was an ardent racist; his major objection to slavery in the South was that it only benefited a small number of whites, working to the disadvantage of poor whites who could not afford slaves themselves.
At first, Radical Republicans in Congress thought they could work with Johnson, even though he was a white supremacist and a southerner himself. But Johnson soon ran into trouble with Congress, because he embraced Lincoln's lenient 10% plan and recognized the governments that had been set up in the South under that plan. Towards the end of 1865, newly constituted southern governments began to pass "Black Codes," laws aimed at keeping newly free blacks out of the political process and physically segregated from whites, and away from economic opportunity. The Black Codes imposed severe penalties on blacks who tried to get out of their labor contracts, forbade blacks from serving on juries or voting, and from owning or even renting land. Click here to look at the Mississippi Black Code of 1865, which also imposed life sentences on Blacks who intermarried with whites. Basically, the southern governments that were being created under Lincoln's 10% plan were trying to keep blacks in a state of virtual slavery, even though the 13th Amendment to the Constitution had been ratified, abolishing actual slavery throughout the United States.
Johnson also ticked off members of Congress by pardoning a number of prominent ex-Confederate leaders. Moreover, the Radical Republicans were inflamed when in December, 1865, newly elected southern delegations showed up in Washington, D.C. to claim their seats in the Congress. Among the southern delegates were four former Confederate generals, five colonels, and various members of the Confederate cabinet and Congress. The most notorious member of the newly elected southern delegations was Alexander Stephens, the ex-vice president of the Confederacy, who was still under indictment for treason. The Republicans in Congress refused to allow these southerners to take their seats in the House and Senate, and decided that now was the time to move forward with their own Reconstruction plan, with or without Andrew Johnson's support.
During the Congressional elections of 1866, the Radical Republicans gained even more seats, and they then proceeded to enact their own Reconstruction Plan over Johnson’s objections. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 invalidated most of the Black Codes. Under the First Reconstruction Act (1867) the South was divided into 5 military districts under the rule of the Union Army. States would be readmitted into the Union once their constitutions guaranteed blacks the right to vote. They also conditioned re-admission on each state ratifying the 14thAmendment to the Constitution, which made blacks citizens and guaranteed due process and equal protection of the laws.
By 1867, northern Republicans were committed to the enfranchisement (giving someone the right to vote) of blacks in the South, while at the same time insistent that thousands of white Southerners who had taken part in the rebellion be denied the right to vote. For the first time, southern blacks were being elected to various state legislatures, and, after 1868, to the U.S. Congress. However, whites remained in the majority of most state legislatures, and no blacks were elected as governors of any of the southern states. Even so, whites began to resent new found black political power, and many viewed the former slaves as tools of unscrupulous northern carpet baggers.
White resistance to Reconstruction soon became violent, as local white supremacist groups began to crop up throughout the South. Of course, the most notorious of these groups was the Ku Klux Klan, founded in Tennessee in 1866. The Klan's strategy was to intimidate blacks from voting and exercising other rights. The federal government tried to suppress the Klan and similar groups, passing a series of laws known as the Force Acts, which made it a federal crime to interfere with voting rights. (The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, making it illegal to deny someone the right to vote because of color, had been ratified in 1870. The 15th Amendment, however, still permitted states the right to deny women the right to vote, which annoyed many prominent women activists that had been so active in the abolition movement.)
Meanwhile, the Freedmen's Bureau, which had been established in 1865 to assist former slaves, continued its efforts at reform. Certainly, its greatest successes were in education; the Bureau taught an estimated 200,000 blacks how to read. The Bureau was also given control over hundreds of thousands of acres of confiscated or abandoned land in the South, and was authorized to make 40-acre land grants to black settlers. The grants were for three-year terms, after which the settler could buy the land at a discounted price. Although thousands of black farmers took the grants, very few actually ended up owning the land afterwards. Whites in the South resented the Freedmen's Bureau interference in local affairs, and the Bureau received little support from Andrew Johnson. By 1869, the Bureau had been completely phased out.
The bitter division between Andrew Johnson and the Republican Congress continued. In 1868 he was impeached. Although the basis for the impeachment was that Johnson violated the Tenure of Office Act by firing a member of his Cabinet without Congressional approval, it was the underlying disagreement over Reconstruction that really led to the impeachment. Johnson went on trial before the Senate, and was acquitted by only one vote. He then finished the remainder of his term.
In 1869, Johnson was succeeded by Ulysses Grant, the victorious Union commander. During Grant’s first term, organized groups such as the Ku Klux Klan continued to terrorize black voters. The Klan sought to undermine Republican control in the South by keeping blacks away from the polls. Congress passed several laws aimed at protecting black voting rights and allowing the use of the army against the Klan but the intimidation continued. Moreover, the country’s attention was being focused on other issues. These included the debate between "greenbackers" and "hard money" advocates over monetary policy and a number of scandals that plagued the Grant Administration, including the famous Credit Mobilier Scandal (1869). (I will discuss the economic issue, as well as political corruption in the U.S. during this period, later on in the course.)
The election of 1876 was hotly contested. The Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes received about 250,000 fewer votes than his Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden. However the results in three southern states (South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana) were being contested. If Hayes were awarded the electoral votes from those states, plus one additional vote in Oregon, he would win the Presidency, even though he had lost the popular vote. Republicans struck a deal with conservative Southern Democrats. If they abandoned their support for Tilden, the Republicans would agree to end Reconstruction by withdrawing the remaining federal troops and allowing the restoration of "home rule." This became known as the Compromise of 1877. Although slavery would remain illegal, the southern states are successful in "turning back the clock." Very quickly black voting rights and rights were taken away, and legally mandated segregation ("Jim Crow" laws) was put into place.
A series of Supreme Court decisions (see the Chart on page 508) helped the southern whites turn back the clock. In Hall v. DeCuir (1878), the Court said that Louisiana could not legally prohibit racial discrimination on railroads, steamboats and other interstate transportation. In United States v. Harris (1882), the Court said that the federal government had no right to punish crimes like murder or assault (even if they were racially motivated), because those crimes were supposed to be handled by local authorities. In a series of disputes known collectively as the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Supreme Court severely limited Congress' authority to pass laws on civil rights, and held that the 14th Amendment did not prohibit discrimination by private individuals. Of course, the most important and far reaching of these post-Reconstruction cases (and certainly the one you all should remember) was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In that case, the Supreme Court basically said that states could legally enforce segregation between blacks and whites. Facilities could be separate as long as they were "equal." This notion of separate but equal would remain the law of the land until 1954, when the Court reversed its ruling in the case, Brown v. Board of Education.
The curtailment of black voting rights was also upheld by the Court. In the 1898 case, Williams v. Mississippi, the Court upheld a state law requiring potential voters to pass a literacy test. Despite the fact that illiterate whites were allowed to vote under various grandfather clauses, the Court refused to declare state tests a violation of the 15th Amendment.
So Reconstruction ended, and African-Americans in the South (as well as the rest of the country), would have to wait several more generations in their elusive quest for racial justice.
