RECONSTRUCTION
Interpreting
Primary Sources
We hold it
to be the duty of the government to inflict condign punishment on the rebel
belligerents, and so weaken their hands that they can never again endanger the
Union; and so reform their municipal institutions as to make them republican in
spirit as well as in name....
We propose
to confiscate all the estate of every rebel belligerent whose estate was worth
$l0,000 or whose land exceeded two hundred acres in quantity....By thus
forfeiting the estates of the leading rebels, the Government would have
394,000,000 of acres....Give if you please forty acres to each adult male
freedman. Suppose there are one million
of them. That would require 40,000,000
of acres....
The whole
fabric of southern society must be changed....How can republican institutions,
free schools, free churches, free social intercourse exist in a mingled
community of nabobs and serfs; of the owners of twenty thousand acre manors
with lordly palaces, and the occupants of narrow huts inhabited by "low
white trash?"....
The property
of the rebels shall pay our national debt, and indemnify freedmen and loyal
sufferers.
--Representative
Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsyylvania, 1865, on the radical program for
Reconstruction
Be it
enacted, That said rebel States shall be divided into military districts and made subject to the military
authority of the United States...That it shall be the duty of each officer...to
protect all persons in their rights of persons and property, to suppress
insurrection, disorder, and violence, or cause to be punished, all disturbers
of the public peace and criminals....
--First
Reconstruction Act, 1867, the radical program
The
power...given to the commanding officer over all the people of each district is
that of an absolute monarch. His mere
will is to take the place of all law....It reduces the whole population of the
ten states--all persons, of every color, sex, and condition, and every stranger
within their limits--to the most abject and degrading slavery.
--President
Johnson's veto of the radical program
Waving
the Bloody Flag
Every state
that seceded from the United States was a Democratic State....Every man that
shot Union soldiers was a Democrat.
Every man that loved slavery better than liberty was a Democrat. The man that assassinated Abraham Lincoln
was a Democrat....Every man that raised bloodhounds to pursue human beings was
a Democrat. Every man that clutched from shrieking, shuddering, crouching
mothers, babes from their breasts, and sold them into slavery, was a Democrat.
--Robert G.
Ingersoll, 1876
It was the
most soul-sickening spectacle that America had ever been called upon to
behold. Every principle of the old
American polity was here reversed. In
place of government by the most intelligent and virtuous part of the people for
the benefit of the governed, here was government by the most ignorant and
vicious part of the population for the benefit, the vulgar, materialistic,
brutal benefit of the governing set.
--Historian
John W. Burgess, 1902
In South
Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana, the proportion of Negroes was so large,
their leaders of sufficient power, and the Federal control so effective that
for the years l868-l874 the will of black labor was powerful; and so far as it
was intelligently led, and had definite goals, it took perceptible steps toward
public education, confiscation of large incomes, betterment of labor
conditions, universal suffrage, and in some cases distribution of land to the
peasant.
--W.E.B.
DuBois
Questions
to think about:
1. What was the radical Republican program for
reconstructing the Union?
2. What were the goals of the radical
Republican program?
3. Why was the program unacceptable to
President Andrew Johnson?
4. Why do you think the North failed to follow
through with policies that would have secured the rights and economic status of
the freedmen?
5. What were the major political and social
achievements of Reconstruction?
STUDY
AID: RECONSTRUCTION AMENDMENTS
13th Prohibited
slavery in the United States
14th Defined
national citizenship
Reduced
state representation in Congress proportional to number of disfranchised voters
Denied
former Confederates the right to hold public office
15th Prohibited
denial of vote on grounds of race, color, or previous servitude
White
Democrats Regain Control of Southern Legislatures
1869 Virginia
1870 North
Carolina
1871 Georgia
1873 Texas
1874 Alabama
Arkansas
1875 Mississippi
1877 Florida
Louisiana
South
Carolina