Chapter 12 Section 2 Guided Reading and Review Congressional Reconstruction

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, y'all will be able to:

• Explain the purpose of the second stage of Reconstruction and some of the key legislation put forward by Congress
• Describe the impeachment of President Johnson
• Discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the Fifteenth Amendment

During the Congressional election in the fall of 1866, Republicans gained fifty-fifty greater victories. This was due in large measure out to the northern voter opposition that had developed toward President Johnson because of the inflexible and overbearing attitude he had exhibited in the White House, likewise every bit his missteps during his 1866 speaking bout. Leading Radical Republicans in Congress included Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner (the same senator whom proslavery S Carolina representative Preston Brooks had thrashed with his cane in 1856 during the Bleeding Kansas crisis) and Pennsylvania representative Thaddeus Stevens. These men and their supporters envisioned a much more expansive modify in the South. Sumner advocated integrating schools and giving Black men the correct to vote while disenfranchising many southern voters. For his part, Stevens considered that the southern states had forfeited their rights equally states when they seceded, and were no more than conquered territory that the federal government could organize equally it wished. He envisioned the redistribution of plantation lands and U.Due south. military control over the one-time Confederacy.

Their goals included the transformation of the Due south from an area built on slave labor to a costless-labor lodge. They as well wanted to ensure that freed people were protected and given the opportunity for a better life. Violent race riots in Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1866 gave greater urgency to the 2nd stage of Reconstruction, begun in 1867.

THE RECONSTRUCTION ACTS

The 1867 Armed forces Reconstruction Act, which encompassed the vision of Radical Republicans, set a new direction for Reconstruction in the S. Republicans saw this law, and iii supplementary laws passed by Congress that year, called the Reconstruction Acts, equally a way to deal with the disorder in the Due south. The 1867 act divided the ten southern states that had yet to ratify the Fourteenth Subpoena into five military districts (Tennessee had already been readmitted to the Union by this time and so was excluded from these acts). Martial law was imposed, and a Union general allowable each district. These generals and twenty thousand federal troops stationed in the districts were charged with protecting freed people. When a supplementary human activity extended the right to vote to all freed men of voting historic period (21 years one-time), the armed forces in each commune oversaw the elections and the registration of voters. Only after new state constitutions had been written and states had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment could these states rejoin the Union. Predictably, President Johnson vetoed the Reconstruction Acts, viewing them equally both unnecessary and unconstitutional. In one case once more, Congress overrode Johnson's vetoes, and by the end of 1870, all the southern states under military dominion had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and been restored to the Matrimony (Figure 16.7).

Figure xvi.vii The map in a higher place shows the five armed forces districts established past the 1867 Military Reconstruction Act and the date each country rejoined the Matrimony. Tennessee was not included in the Reconstruction Acts as it had already been readmitted to the Union at the time of their passage.

THE IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON

President Johnson's relentless vetoing of congressional measures created a deep rift in Washington, DC, and neither he nor Congress would back downwardly. Johnson's prickly personality proved to be a liability, and many people constitute him grating. Moreover, he firmly believed in White supremacy, declaring in his 1868 Country of the Union address, "The endeavour to identify the White population under the domination of persons of color in the South has impaired, if not destroyed, the kindly relations that had previously existed betwixt them; and mutual distrust has engendered a feeling of animosity which leading in some instances to collision and bloodshed, has prevented that cooperation between the two races so essential to the success of industrial enterprise in the southern states." The president's racism put him even farther at odds with those in Congress who wanted to create full equality betwixt Black people and White people.

The Republican majority in Congress by now despised the president, and they wanted to prevent him from interfering in congressional Reconstruction. To that finish, Radical Republicans passed two laws of dubious constitutionality. The Command of the Regular army Human activity prohibited the president from issuing armed services orders except through the commanding general of the ground forces, who could non be relieved or reassigned without the consent of the Senate. The Tenure of Office Act, which Congress passed in 1867, required the president to gain the approval of the Senate whenever he appointed or removed officials. Congress had passed this act to ensure that Republicans who favored Radical Reconstruction would non exist barred or stripped of their jobs. In August 1867, President Johnson removed Secretary of State of war Edwin M. Stanton, who had aligned himself with the Radical Republicans, without gaining Senate approval. He replaced Stanton with Ulysses S. Grant, but Grant resigned and sided with the Republicans confronting the president. Many Radical Republicans welcomed this blunder by the president as it allowed them to take activeness to remove Johnson from office, arguing that Johnson had openly violated the Tenure of Office Act. The Business firm of Representatives quickly drafted a resolution to impeach him, a first in American history.

In impeachment proceedings, the House of Representatives serves every bit the prosecution and the Senate acts as judge, deciding whether the president should exist removed from office (Effigy sixteen.8). The House brought eleven counts against Johnson, all alleging his inroad on the powers of Congress. In the Senate, Johnson barely survived. Vii Republicans joined the Democrats and independents to support acquittal; the terminal vote was 35 to xix, ane vote curt of the required ii-thirds bulk. The Radicals then dropped the impeachment effort, but the events had effectively silenced President Johnson, and Radical Republicans continued with their plan to reconstruct the Due south.

Figure 16.eight This illustration by Theodore R. Davis, which was captioned "The Senate as a courtroom of impeachment for the trial of Andrew Johnson," appeared in Harper's Weekly in 1868. Here, the House of Representatives brings its grievances against Johnson to the Senate during impeachment hearings.

THE FIFTEENTH Amendment

In Nov 1868, Ulysses S. Grant, the Matrimony's war hero, easily won the presidency in a landslide victory. The Democratic nominee was Horatio Seymour, but the Democrats carried the stigma of disunion. The Republicans, in their campaign, blamed the devastating Ceremonious War and the violence of its backwash on the rival party, a strategy that southerners called "waving the bloody shirt."

Though Grant did not side with the Radical Republicans, his victory allowed the continuance of the Radical Reconstruction program. In the winter of 1869, Republicans introduced another constitutional amendment, the third of the Reconstruction era. When Republicans had passed the Fourteenth Subpoena, which addressed citizenship rights and equal protections, they were unable to explicitly ban states from withholding the franchise based on race. With the Fifteenth Amendment, they sought to right this major weakness by finally extending to Black men the correct to vote. The amendment directed that "[t]he right of citizens of the Us to vote shall not exist denied or abridged by the United states or by whatever Land on business relationship of race, colour, or previous condition of servitude." Unfortunately, the new amendment had weaknesses of its ain. As part of a compromise to ensure the passage of the amendment with the broadest possible support, drafters of the subpoena specifically excluded language that addressed literacy tests and poll taxes, the most common means Black people were traditionally disenfranchised in both the Due north and the South. Indeed, Radical Republican leader Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, himself an ardent supporter of legal equality without exception to race, refused to vote for the amendment precisely because information technology did not accost these obvious loopholes.

Despite these weaknesses, the language of the subpoena did provide for universal manhood suffrage—the right of all men to vote—and crucially identified Black men, including those who had been enslaved, as deserving the right to vote. This, the third and final of the Reconstruction amendments, was ratified in 1870 (Figure 16.9). With the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, many believed that the process of restoring the Union was safely coming to a close and that the rights of the formerly enslaved were finally secure. African American communities expressed not bad hope every bit they celebrated what they understood to be a national confirmation of their unqualified citizenship.

Figure 16.9 The Fifteenth Amendment. Celebrated May 19th, 1870, a commemorative print by Thomas Kelly, celebrates the passage of the Fifteenth Subpoena with a series of vignettes highlighting Black rights and those who championed them. Portraits include Ulysses Southward. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, and John Brown, as well as Blackness leaders Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and Hiram Revels. Vignettes include the celebratory parade for the amendment's passage, "The Ballot Box is open to us," and "Our representative Sits in the National Legislature."

Click and Explore

Visit the Library of Congress to take a closer await at The Fifteenth Amendment past Thomas Kelly. Examine each individual vignette and the accompanying text. Why exercise you think Kelly chose these to highlight?

WOMEN'Southward SUFFRAGE

While the Fifteenth Subpoena may have been greeted with applause in many corners, leading women's rights activists, who had been campaigning for decades for the right to vote, saw information technology as a major disappointment. More dispiriting still was the fact that many women's rights activists, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had played a big part in the abolitionist move leading upwardly to the Civil War. Following the war, women and men, White and Blackness, formed the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) for the expressed purpose of securing "equal Rights to all American citizens, especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, colour or sexual practice." Two years later, with the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, section two of which specifically qualified the liberties it extended to "male citizens," information technology seemed every bit though the progress made in support of ceremonious rights was not only passing women by but was purposely codifying their exclusion. Every bit Congress debated the language of the Fifteenth Amendment, some held out hope that it would finally extend the franchise to women. Those hopes were dashed when Congress adopted the last language.

The outcome of these frustrated hopes was the constructive split of a civil rights movement that had once been united in back up of African Americans and women. Seeing this dissever occur, Frederick Douglass, a great admirer of Stanton, struggled to debate for a piecemeal approach that should prioritize the franchise for Black men if that was the only option. He insisted that his support for women's correct to vote was sincere, simply that getting Black men the correct to vote was "of the almost urgent necessity." "The government of this country loves women," he argued. "They are the sisters, mothers, wives and daughters of our rulers; only the negro is loathed. . . . The negro needs suffrage to protect his life and property, and to ensure him respect and didactics."

These appeals were largely accustomed by women's rights leaders and AERA members like Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell, who believed that more time was needed to bring about female person suffrage. Others demanded firsthand action. Amid those who pressed forrard despite the setback were Stanton and Anthony. They felt greatly aggrieved at the fact that other abolitionists, with whom they had worked closely for years, did non demand that women exist included in the linguistic communication of the amendments. Stanton argued that the women's vote would be necessary to counter the influence of uneducated freedmen in the South and the waves of poor European immigrants arriving in the E.

In 1869, Stanton and Anthony helped organize the National Adult female Suffrage Association (NWSA), an organization dedicated to ensuring that women gained the right to vote immediately, not at some time to come, undetermined appointment. Some women, including Virginia Minor, a member of the NWSA, took action by trying to annals to vote; Small attempted this in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1872. When ballot officials turned her abroad, Minor brought the issue to the Missouri land courts, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment ensured that she was a citizen with the right to vote. This legal try to bring nigh women's suffrage eventually made its style to the Supreme Courtroom, which declared in 1874 that "the constitution of the U.s.a. does not confer the correct of suffrage upon any one," effectively dismissing Minor's claim.

Defining American

Constitution of the National Adult female Suffrage Association

Despite the Fifteenth Amendment's failure to guarantee female suffrage, women did gain the right to vote in western territories, with the Wyoming Territory leading the way in 1869. 1 reason for this was a belief that giving women the right to vote would provide a moral compass to the otherwise lawless western frontier. Extending the correct to vote in western territories also provided an incentive for White women to emigrate to the West, where they were scarce. However, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others believed that immediate action on the national front was required, leading to the system of the NWSA and its resulting constitution.

Commodity 1.—This organisation shall be called the National Woman Suffrage Association.

Article 2.—The object of this Association shall exist to secure STATE and NATIONAL protection for women citizens in the practice of their right to vote.

Article 3.—All citizens of the United states subscribing to this Constitution, and contributing non less than one dollar annually, shall be considered members of the Association, with the right to participate in its deliberations.

ARTICLE 4.—The officers of this Clan shall be a President, Vice-Presidents from each of u.s. and Territories, Corresponding and Recording Secretaries, a Treasurer, an Executive Commission of not less than v, and an Advisory Commission consisting of one or more persons from each State and Territory.

Commodity 5.—All Woman Suffrage Societies throughout the country shall be welcomed as auxiliaries; and their accredited officers or duly appointed representatives shall be recognized every bit members of the National Association.
OFFICERS OF THE NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE Clan.

PRESIDENT.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY, Rochester, Due north. Y.

How was the NWSA organized? How would the fact that information technology operated at the national level, rather than at the state or local level, help it to reach its goals?

BLACK POLITICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Black voter registration in the late 1860s and the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment finally brought what Lincoln had characterized as "a new birth of freedom." Union Leagues, fraternal groups founded in the Due north that promoted loyalty to the Union and the Republican Political party during the Civil State of war, expanded into the South afterward the war and were transformed into political clubs that served both political and civic functions. As centers of the Black communities in the Southward, the leagues became vehicles for the dissemination of information, acted as mediators between members of the Black community and the White establishment, and served other practical functions like helping to build schools and churches for the community they served. As extensions of the Republican Party, these leagues worked to enroll newly enfranchised Blackness voters, campaign for candidates, and by and large help the party win elections (Figure 16.10).

Figure 16.x The First Vote, past Alfred R. Waud, appeared in Harper'southward Weekly in 1867. The Fifteenth Subpoena gave Black men the right to vote for the first fourth dimension.

The political activities of the leagues launched a nifty many African Americans and formerly enslaved people into politics throughout the South. For the offset time, Black people began to concord political office, and several were elected to the U.S. Congress. In the 1870s, fifteen members of the House of Representatives and ii senators were Black. The two senators, Blanche K. Bruce and Hiram Revels, were both from Mississippi, the home country of quondam U.South. senator and later Amalgamated president Jefferson Davis. Hiram Revels (Effigy 16.eleven), was a freeborn man from North Carolina who rose to prominence as a government minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church so as a Mississippi state senator in 1869. The following twelvemonth he was elected by the state legislature to fill one of Mississippi'south two U.Southward. Senate seats, which had been vacant since the war. His inflow in Washington, DC, drew intense interest: equally the New York Times noted, when "the colored Senator from Mississippi, was sworn in and admitted to his seat this afternoon . . . there was not an inch of standing or sitting room in the galleries, so densely were they packed. . . . When the Vice-President uttered the words, 'The Senator elect volition now advance and take the oath,' a pin might accept been heard driblet."

Figure sixteen.xi Hiram Revels served every bit a preacher throughout the Midwest before settling in Mississippi in 1866. When he was elected by the Mississippi state legislature in 1870, he became the country's first African American senator.

Defining American

Senator Revels on Segregated Schools in Washington, DC

Hiram R. Revels became the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate in 1870. In 1871, he gave the following speech about Washington'due south segregated schools before Congress.

Volition establishing such [desegregated] schools every bit I am now advocating in this District harm our white friends? . . . By some it is contended that if we plant mixed schools hither a great insult will be given to the white citizens, and that the white schools will be seriously damaged. . . . When I was on a lecturing bout in the country of Ohio . . . [o]ne of the leading gentlemen connected with the schools in that town came to run into me. . . . He asked me, "Take you been to New England, where they accept mixed schools?" I replied, "I have sir." "Well," said he, "delight tell me this: does not social equality result from mixed schools?" "No, sir; very far from it," I responded. "Why," said he, "how can it be otherwise?" I replied, "I will tell you how it tin can be otherwise, and how information technology is otherwise. Go to the schools and y'all see there white children and colored children seated side by side, studying their lessons, standing side past side and reciting their lessons, and maybe in walking to school they may walk together; but that is the concluding of it. The white children become to their homes; the colored children go to theirs; and on the Lord's day yous will see those colored children in colored churches, and the white family unit, y'all will run into the white children there, and the colored children at entertainments given by persons of their color." I aver, sir, that mixed schools are very far from bringing about social equality."

Co-ordinate to Senator Revels's speech communication, what is "social equality" and why is it important to the issue of desegregated schools? Does Revels favor social equality or social segregation? Did social equality exist in the United States in 1871?

Though the fact of their presence was dramatic and important, as the New York Times description above demonstrates, the few African American representatives and senators who served in Congress during Reconstruction represented only a tiny fraction of the many hundreds, possibly thousands, of Black people who served in a peachy number of capacities at the local and state levels. The S during the early 1870s brimmed with formerly enslaved and freeborn Black people serving as school board commissioners, canton commissioners, clerks of court, board of education and city council members, justices of the peace, constables, coroners, magistrates, sheriffs, auditors, and registrars. This moving ridge of local African American political action contributed to and was accompanied past a new business organisation for the poor and disadvantaged in the South. The southern Republican leadership did away with the hated Black codes, undid the work of White supremacists, and worked to reduce obstacles confronting freed people.

Reconstruction governments invested in infrastructure, paying special attention to the rehabilitation of the southern railroads. They prepare public education systems that enrolled both White and Black students. They established or increased funding for hospitals, orphanages, and asylums for the insane. In some states, the state and local governments provided the poor with basic necessities like firewood and even breadstuff. And to pay for these new services and subsidies, the governments levied taxes on country and property, an action that struck at the middle of the foundation of southern economic inequality. Indeed, the state taxation compounded the existing bug of White landowners, who were often cash-poor, and contributed to resentment of what southerners viewed as another northern attack on their style of life.

White southerners reacted with outrage at the changes imposed upon them. The sight of in one case-enslaved Black people serving in positions of authority as sheriffs, congressmen, and urban center council members stimulated neat resentment at the process of Reconstruction and its undermining of the traditional social and economic foundations of the South. Indignant southerners referred to this period of reform as a time of "negro misrule." They complained of profligate corruption on the role of vengeful freed people and greedy northerners looking to fill their pockets with the South's riches. Unfortunately for the nifty many honest reformers, southerners did have a handful of existent examples of corruption they could point to, such as legislators using country revenues to buy hams and perfumes or giving themselves inflated salaries. Such examples, however, were relatively few and largely comparable to nineteenth-century abuse across the country. Yet these powerful stories, combined with deep-seated racial animosity toward Blackness people in the South, led to Autonomous campaigns to "redeem" state governments. Democrats across the South leveraged planters' economic ability and wielded White vigilante violence to ultimately take dorsum state political power from the Republicans. By the fourth dimension President Grant's attentions were beingness directed abroad from the South and toward the Indian Wars in the West in 1876, ability in the Due south had largely been returned to White people and Reconstruction was finer abandoned. By the end of 1876, only South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida even so had Republican governments.

The sense that the South had been unfairly sacrificed to northern vice and Black vengeance, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, persisted for many decades. So powerful and pervasive was this narrative that by the fourth dimension D. W. Griffith released his 1915 motion picture, The Nascency of a Nation, White people around the country were primed to take the fallacy that White southerners were the frequent victims of violence and violation at the easily of unrestrained Black people. The reality is that the reverse was true. White southerners orchestrated a sometimes violent and mostly successful counterrevolution against Reconstruction policies in the Due south beginning in the 1860s. Those who worked to modify and modernize the Due south typically did so under threats of violence. Black Republican officials in the South were frequently terrorized, assaulted, and even murdered with impunity by organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. When not ignoring the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments altogether, White leaders frequently used trickery and fraud at the polls to get the results they wanted. Equally Reconstruction came to a shut, these methods came to ascertain southern life for African Americans for nearly a century afterward.

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Source: https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/16-3-radical-reconstruction-1867-1872

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