Lincoln’s Plan

• Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction (1863)

  • 10% allegiance oath

  • Acceptance of the 13th amendment

• Freedmen’s Bureau

  • Created by Congress to provide food, shelter, medical aid, and education for freed slaves and homeless whites

  • Lincoln also supported extending the vote to black soldiers and other freedmen who were “very intelligent”

Johnson’s Plan

• Continuance of Lincoln’s 10% plan

• Wealthy confederates and former confederate leaders lose the right to vote and hold public office

• Acceptance of the 13th amendment

Text of the 13th Amendment

• Section 1

  • Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction

• Section 2

  • Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation

Black Codes

• Southern states began adopting laws that restricted the rights and movements of former slaves

• Prohibited blacks from renting land or borrowing money to buy land

• Forced freedmen to work in various ways

• Prohibited blacks from testifying against whites in court and from serving on juries

Radical Republicans

• A faction withing the Republican Party who called themselves “Radicals” and were opposed by the Moderate Republicans (led by Abraham Lincoln), the Conservative Republicans, and the pro-slavery Democrat Party

• Radicals strongly opposed slavery during the war and after the war distrusted ex-Confederates, demanding harsh policies for the former rebels, and emphasizing civil rights and voting rights for freedmen (recently freed slaves)

Congressional Reconstruction

• Civil Rights Act of 1866

  • Written in reaction to Black Codes of Southern states

• 14th Amendment

  • Created statute of “birthright citizenship” and “equal protection of the laws”

• Reconstruction Acts of 1867

  • Placed the South under military occupation

• 15th Amendment

  • Protected the right to vote for all men

• Civil Rights Act of 1875

  • Prohibited discrimination in public places and allowed blacks to serve on juries

End of Reconstruction

• By the 1870s, Radical Republicans lost its popularity and Southern conservatism (redeemers) was on the rise

• White supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan

  • White terrorist groups use violence to intimidate black voters and white reformers, carpetbaggers, and scalawags

• Amnesty Act of 1872

  • Gives the vote back to ex-confederates

Election of 1876 and Compromise of 1877

• Democrat Samuel Tilden versus Republican Rutherford B. Hayes

• Tilden won popular vote and was one electoral vote shy of a winning majority

• Compromise of 1877

  • Hayes becomes President in return for the removal of all federal troops from southern states

Black Disenfranchisement

• Poll tax

  • Pay to vote

• Literacy test

  • Rigged, fake tests

• Grandfather clause

  • If your grandfather could vote, you were excused from tax and test

• Ku Klux Klan

  • Threats and terror

Plessy v. Ferguson - 1896

• Protected the constitutionality of state segregation laws

• “Separate but Equal”

• Segregation remained legal until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision

• Only one dissenting justice, John Marshall Harlan, wrote:

  • “In the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens”