Transcript Title: Failure of Reconstruction

Title: Failure of Reconstruction
Successes of the Reconstruction:
• New state constitutions allowed all Southern
men to vote
• Replaced many appointed government
positions with elected positions
• Stimulated industrial and rail development in
the South through loans, grants, and tax
exemptions
• New Southern governments directed mostly by
transplanted Northern Republicans, African
Americans, and Southern moderates created
public schools and orphanages
However, Reconstruction ultimately
failed.
• State governments were seen as ineffective.
• There was widespread poverty and lack of land
reform for African Americans.
• Many who participated in Reconstruction were
corrupt, selling their votes for money and
favors.
• Although government industrialization plans
helped rebuild the Southern economy, these
plans cost a lot of money.
– High tax rates turned public opinion, already
antagonistic to Reconstruction, even more hostile.
Believing that giving away planters’ land to
former slaves was too extreme, Congress
passed the Southern Homestead Act.
• This law set aside 45 million acres of government-owned land
to provide free farms.
• The failure of Congress to provide 40 acres and a mule resulted
in a new economic dependency on their former masters
• The sharecropping system developed
– The employer provided the land, tools, seed—basically everything but
the labor.
• If able, some switched to tenant farming, renting the land they
farmed from the landowner.
• Land ownership usually consolidated into huge holdings and
concentrated on one cash crop, usually cotton
• African American signed work contracts with white landowners
to toil under the lash, as if slavery still existed
•
13 year old boy sharecropping
Opponents waged a propaganda
war against Reconstruction:
• Southerners who cooperated
were called scalawags
– Many were farmers who never
owned slaves
• Northerners who ran the
programs carpetbaggers
– The name came from the suitcases
they carried, implying they had
come to the South merely to stuff
their bags with will-gotten wealth
Accompanying the propaganda war
was a war of intimidation, spearheaded
by the Ku Klux Klan.
• The Klan targeted those who supported Reconstruction; it
attacked and often murdered scalawags, black and white
Republican leaders, community activists, and teachers
• The Klan successfully intimidated many of its opponents,
preventing a more complete implementation of Reconstruction
Because Reconstruction did nothing to
redistribute the South’s wealth or guarantee
that the freedmen would own property, it did
very little to alter the basic power structure of
the region
• Southerners knew that when the Northerners
left things would return to a condition much
closer to the way they were before
Reconstruction
• The New South was becoming industrial, but
in many ways it remained the same.
• White southerners deeply resented that the
federal government controlled their states.
Worse, throughout the 1860s and 1870s, the
Supreme Court consistently restricted the
scope of the 14th and 15th Amendments
• In United States v. Reese, the court legalized
“grandfather clauses,” poll taxes, property
requirements, and other restrictions on voting
privileges
– Soon nearly all Southern states had restrictive
laws that effectively prevented African
Americans from voting
• In the Slaughter-House case, the court ruled that
the 14th Amendment applied only to the federal
government, not to state governments, an opinion
the court strengthened in United States v.
Cruikshank
• Finally, because
Grant’s
administration
was so
thoroughly
corrupt, it tainted
everything with
which it was
associated,
including
Reconstruction
During the 1872 election, moderates
calling themselves Liberal
Republicans abandoned the coalition
that supported Reconstruction.
• Angered by widespread
corruption, this group hoped to
end federal control of the
South
• Although their candidate,
Horace Greeley, did not
defeat Grant, they made gains
in congressional and state
elections.
Several congressional acts, among them
the Amnesty Act of 1872, pardoned
many of the rebels, thus allowing them to
reenter public life
• Other crises, such as the financial Panic of
1873, drew the nation’s attention away from
Reconstruction
• By 1876, Southern Democrats regained control
of most of the region’s state legislatures.
The election of 1876 was extremely close,
with the vote in several states contested on
charges of fraud
• The election
demonstrated
the split
between the
North & South
• With the
Compromise
of 1877,
Republicans
agreed to
withdraw
federal troops
in the South,
and in return,
Rutherford B.
Hayes became
president
For a century after Reconstruction ended, the
South was known as the Solid South,
always voting Democratic.
• It was not until the 1970s that the Republican Party
was able to gain ground in the South.