Begin the assignment by either reading the mini-lecture on Reconstruction provided below or watching the lecture vi

Consider the situation facing President Abraham Lincoln and the American people at the end of the Civil War in April of 1865. Eleven states and 5.5 million white southerners had detested Lincoln and the Republican party so much that they attempted to leave the United States and form their own country. The ensuing Civil War led to some 620,000 deaths. As a result of this death toll it is estimated that there were seven women for every four men in the United States in 1865. Much of the southern population was literally starving to death as the war concluded. In addition, with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution the practice of slavery was finally officially abolished. This meant that there were about 4 million people who had been held in slavery all their lives that were now free. These Americans had been denied virtually every important right one could think of and most were illiterate with little concept of American governmental systems. How do you make the country whole again? This is the question of Reconstruction.

The process came down to two fundamental issues. How should the southern states be brought back into the United States and how should former slaves be brought into freedom? We will never know how Abraham Lincoln would have really dealt with these problems as he was assassinated in April 1865. Ironically, the man that was brought to the presidency, Andrew Johnson, was a southerner and a democrat. This began a struggle between Johnson and the Republican Congress over who should provide leadership in reconstructing the country, with Congress eventually taking charge with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Reconstruction Acts of 1867.

Put yourself in a former slave’s position. You and your family have worked on a cotton plantation all your life and someone finally tells you that you are no longer enslaved. What would you do? What would you hope for? Most, like most Americans in this time period, wanted economic independence in the form of a small farm. The motto “forty acres and a mule” reflects the aspirations of many former slaves in the Reconstruction era. Access to education and freedom of religion were also important and these were largely successfully secured through a combination of community work and government assistance. However, economic security and legal and political rights remained as problems that were only somewhat addressed by Reconstruction.

It is said that the sign of a good compromise is when no one is fully satisfied. This might be said about Reconstruction. When reading your text, make sure to read about sharecropping and crop lien farming and the precarious economic position that many southerners, both black and white, found themselves in during the postwar years. Also read about the Ku Klux Klan and other forms of white resistance and systematic racism that worked against political and legal equality and economic opportunity for emancipated Americans. Finally, read about the Election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877 which was one of the most controversial presidential elections in US history, where the Republican party ultimately gave up on Reconstruction and the idea that the federal government had a responsibility to assist an oppressed minority in attaining its rights. At the conclusion of Reconstruction in 1877 many southern African Americans found themselves in situations that were not entirely different from the circumstances they faced before the Thirteenth Amendment. It took almost one hundred more years before southern African Americans and the federal government embarked on a second Reconstruction in the form of the civil rights movement.

http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/mcmilln.htm 

http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/Head.htm

Assignment: Read the information in Chapters 15 and then compare it with the testimony of a South Carolina freedman (Links to an external site.). (Links to an external site.) Also read “A Statement of a Mississippi Freedman (Links to an external site.)“.  Then, consider the following questions. 

1) What was Reconstruction and what were some of its goals?

2) How did President Johnson’s views on Reconstruction differ from Republicans in Congress?

3)  What were some of the problems facing former slaves? Consider using the online links in the required readings for information.

4) What were some of the important achievements of the Republican Party and Reconstruction? What were the limits? How should we evaluate the Reconstruction era? Was it a success?