AS

Reconstruction

Reconstruction

  • a political and social project:
    • re-incorporating rebel states into the Union
    • rebuilding the southern society without slavery
  • the 12 year period (1865-77) when these projects dominated national politics
  • critical period of nation-building, even a “second founding”
    • amendments 13, 14, 15 re-made the United States Constitution
    • individual, equal national citizenship and male suffrage
    • federal power over the states
    • they were imperfect and incomplete, but laid the groundwork of modern citizenship and governance in United States
  • two key problems:
    • what would freedom mean in practice for African Americans?
    • how would white southern rebels be treated and reincorporated?
  • this was bitterly contested in the government and on the ground

Wartime Reconstruction

  • reconstruction began under Lincoln administration
    • emancipation and abolition, but reluctant to do more for racial equality
    • leniency to rebels, rapid re-incorporation of states
    • “radical” republicans wanted more
  • Congress established Freedman’s Bureau, March 3, 1865, renewed until 1872
    • Freedman’s Bureau: an agency of the war department set up in 1865 to assist formerly enslaved people, freed from slavery by emancipation
    • chronically underfunded
    • first, humanitarian relief
    • later on…
      • mediators between black and white southerners
      • education and social work for freed people
  • Lincoln was assassinated days after Lee’s surrender, April, 14, 1865
  • reconstruction fell to Vice President Andrew Johnson and Congress
  • the Reconstruction Act of 1867 divided the south into five military districts ran by the army
  • President Andrew Johnson granted pardons to many Confederate leaders
  • the combination of white intimidation, a large economic depression, and the Democratic Party winning control of the House of Representatives resulted in Reconstruction failing
  • white southerners who joined the republican party and helped with eh reconstruction were called scalawags
  • the goal of the wartime reconstruction was to encourage the states to stop fighting and rejoin the Union
    • he hoped that the simplicity and kindness of his plan would bring an early end to the war