US History week 15

Yawp and documents

Describe south after civil war

• Completely destroyed

• Future was uncertain

The answers to many of Reconstruction’s questions

• hinged on the concepts of citizenship and equality.

African Americans during reconstruction

• pushed the nation to finally realize the Declaration of Independence’s promises that “all men are created equal” and have “certain unalienable rights”

• legal freedom but little more.

Life after securing freedom for black people

• a new fight commenced to determine the legal, political, and social implications of American citizenship

Reconstruction:

• the effort to restore southern states to the Union and to redefine African Americans’ place in American society

• Began before the Civil War ended 

Lincoln’s view of reconstruction

• oath of allegiance

• When just 10 percent of a state’s voting population had taken such an oath, loyal Unionists could then establish governments

13th Amendment

• The amendment legally abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

The only way to protect Republican interests in the South

• was to give the vote to the hundreds of thousands of Black men

14th amendment:

• developed concurrently with the Civil Rights Act (to ensure its constitutionality) 

• Section One granted citizenship and repealed the Taney Court’s infamous Dred Scott (1857) decision

• it ensured that state laws could not deny due process or discriminate against particular groups of people

• The Fourteenth Amendment signaled the federal government’s willingness to enforce the Bill of Rights over the authority of the states.

Johnson resistance:

• He did not believe African Americans deserved equal rights

• opposed the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and vetoed the Civil Rights Act

First reconstruction act:

• dissolving state governments and dividing the South into five military districts

• States would have to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment,

• write new constitutions enfranchising African Americans, and abolish repressive “Black Codes”

Scalawag

derisive term used to describe white Republicans in the South and carpetbaggers was the term for northerners who traveled to the South during Reconstruction

backbone of the Republican coalition in the South.

• Black Voters

Political Transformation:

• Black men started to win elections

Public Education Establishment:

the establishment of a public school system in every southern state by the end of Reconstruction

Black men who served as senators;

• Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce.

Most African American officeholders

• Gained their freedom during the civil war