01:512:205 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: American Missionary Association, Republican Congress, War Democrat
18 May 2018
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Chapter 22: The Ordeal of Reconstruction, 1865-1877
1. The Problems of Peace
1. What should be done with the captured Confederate ringleaders (all liable
of treason)?
1. Davis was temporarily clapped into irons during the early days of his
two-year imprisonment but he and his conspirators were finally
release, partly because the odds were that no Virginia jury would
convict them of the charge of treason
2. All rebel leaders were finally pardoned by President Johnson as sort
of a Christmas present in 1868 but Congress did not remove all
remaining civil disabilities until thirty years later and only restored
Daviss citizenship more than a century later
2. In the South, not only had an age perished, but a civilization had
collapsed, in both its economic and its social structure (Old South had
forever gone with the wind)
1. Charleston and Richmond were rubble-strewn and weed-chocked
2. Economic life had creaked to a half; banks and business houses had
locked their doors, ruined by runaway inflation; factories were
smokeless, silent, dismantled
3. The transportation system had broken down completely; agriculture—
the economic lifeblood of the South—was almost hopelessly crippled
4. The cotton fields now yielded a lush harvest of nothing, the slave-
labor system had collapsed, seed was scarce, and livestock had been
driven off by plundering Yankees
3. Beaten but unbent, many high-spirited white Southerners remained
dangerously defiant; they cursed the damnyankees and spoke of your
government in Washington; conscious of no crime, these former
Confederates continued to believe that their view of secession was correct
and that the lost cause was still a just war (provided problems)
2. Freedmen Define Freedom
1. Confusion abounded in the South about the precise meaning of freedom
for blacks
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1. Emancipation took effect haltingly and unevenly in different parts of
the conquered Confederacy; as Union armies marched in and out of
various localities, many blacks found themselves emancipated and
then re-enslaved (process of freedom slow)
2.
3. The variety of responses to emancipation, by whites as well as blacks,
illustrated the sometimes startling complexity of the master-slave
relationship
4. Loyalty to masters prompted some slaves to resist the liberating
Union armies, while other slaves pent-up bitterness burst forth
violently on the day of liberation; many newly emancipated slaves
joined Union troops in pillaging their masters possessions
5. Prodded by Yankee armies of occupation, all masters were eventually
forced to recognize their slaves permanent freedom; though some
blacks initially responded to news of their emancipation with suspicion
and uncertainty, they soon celebrated
2. Many freed slaves took new names; though many whites perceived such
behavior as insubordinate, they were forced to recognize the realities of
emancipation
3. Tens of thousands of emancipated blacks took to the roads, some to test
their freedom, others to search for long-lost spouses, parents, and
children
1. Emancipation thus strengthened the black family, and many newly
freed men and women formalized Slave marriages for personal and
pragmatic reasons, including the desire to make their children legal
heirs to plots of land they now owned
2. Other blacks left former masters to work in towns and cities, where
existing black communities provided protection and mutual assistance
(whole communities moved)
3. The westward flood of these Exodusters was stemmed only when
steamboat captains refused to transport more black migrants across
the Mississippi River
4. The church became focus of black community life in the years following
emancipation
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1. As slaves, blacks had worshiped alongside whites, but now they
formed their own churches pastured by their own ministers (Baptist,
Methodist Episcopal Church)
2. These churches formed the bedrock of black community life, and they
soon gave rise to other benevolent, fraternal and mutual aid societies
(protected newly won freedom)
5. Emancipation also meant education for many blacks; learning to read and
write had been a privilege generally denied to them under slavery;
freedmen wasted no time establishing societies for self-improvement,
which undertook to raise funds to purchase land, build schoolhouses, and
hire teachers (Southern blacks found out that demand stripped supply)
6. They accepted the aid of Northern white women sent by the American
Missionary Association, who volunteered their services as teachers
(federal government for help)
3. The Freedmens Bureau
1. Abolitionists had long preached that slavery was a degrading institution;
now the emancipators were faced with the brutal reality that the freedmen
were overwhelmingly unskilled, unlettered, without property or money, and
with scant knowledge
1. To cope with the problem throughout the conquered South, Congress
created the Freedmens Bureau on March 3, 1865 (intended to be a
primitive welfare agency)
2. It was to provide food, clothing, medical care, and education both to
freedmen and to white refugees; heading the bureau was a warmly
sympathetic friend of the blacks, Union general Oliver O. Howard
(founded and president of Howard University)
2. The bureau helped education the most; it taught 200,00 blacks how to
read—many former slaves had a passion for learning, partly because they
wanted to close the gap between themselves and whites and partly
because they longed to read the Word of God
3. But in other areas, the bureaus accomplishments were meager—or even
mischievous
1. Although the bureau was authorized to settled former slaves on forty-
acre tracts confiscated from the Confederates, little land actually
made it into blacks hands
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Document Summary
House from humbler beginnings: born to impoverished parents in north carolina and early orphaned, North but no the south when he refused to secede with his won state (appointed war governor of tn: political exigency next thrust johnson into the vice presidency; lincoln(cid:1685)s. Reconstruction had begun: abraham lincoln believed that the southern states had never legally withdrawn from the union; their formal restoration to the union would therefore be relatively simple, accordingly, lincoln in 1863 proclaimed his (cid:1688)10 percent(cid:1689) Reconstruction plan; it decreed that a state could be reintegrated into the union when 10 percent of its voters in the presidential election of. 1860 had taken an oath of allegiance to the united states and pledged to abide by emancipation (formal erection of state government: lincoln(cid:1685)s proclamation provoked a sharp reaction in congress; Republicans feared the restoration of the planter aristocracy to power and the possible re-enslavement of blacks: republicans there rammed through congress in 1864 the wade-
