The End Of The Movement
- The Radical movement was coming to an end, its agenda superseded by concerns about the economy, which had been hit by recession in 1873.
- In the Congressional elections of 1874, the Democrats took control. Southern State legislatures gradually reverted to the Democrats as well, and the reforms of the Radical Republicans began to be rolled back.
- In the highly controversial 1876 presidential election, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes managed to win power despite losing the popular vote, when he promised Southern States that all federal troops would be withdrawn.
- After this, civil rights were no longer enforced in the South, and the former Confederate states brought in the so-called Jim Crow laws.
- These laws allowed the segregation of white and black people, and although they did not explicitly state that black people could not vote, the conditions that had to be met in order to vote were disproportionately unfavourable to African-Americans. The inequality imposed by the Jim Crow laws persisted for almost a century.
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What Did The Radical Republicans Stand For
Radical RepublicansRepublican
The Radical Republicans believed blacks were entitled to the same political rights and opportunities as whites. They also believed that the Confederate leaders should be punished for their roles in the Civil War.
Additionally, what were three policies that the Radical Republicans proposed for reconstruction? On the political front, the Republicans wanted to maintain their wartime agenda, which included support for:
- Protective tariffs.
- Liberal land policies for settlers.
- Federal aid for railroad development.
Thereof, what was the Radical Republicans plan?
The Radical Republicans reconstruction offered all kinds of new opportunities to African Americans, including the vote , property ownership, education, legal rights, and even the possibility of holding political office. By the beginning of 1868, about 700,000 African Americans were registered voters.
Did the radical Republicans favored emancipation?
Radical Republican. Radical Republican, during and after the American Civil War, a member of the Republican Party committed to emancipation of the slaves and later to the equal treatment and enfranchisement of the freed blacks.
Johnson’s Bold Reconstruction Stance
After the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, Vice PresidentAndrew Johnson , a former U.S. senator from Tennessee, was thrust unexpectedly into the highest office in the nation. Instead of waiting for Congress to convenean event scheduled for December 1865Johnson abruptly put into effect his own plan for readmitting the Southern states into the Union and reorganizing their state governments.
Expected to deal harshly with those who had rebelled against the Union, Johnson surprised everyone by treating them leniently. Owing to Johnson’s liberal signing of presidential pardons, many Confederate military and civil leaders were able to regain power in the South. The governments they formed then went about trying to recreate the conditions of slavery, using laws called Black Codes to limit the economic options and civil rights of the former slaves.
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An African American Institution Of Higher Learningwilberforce University
A group of Ohioans, including four African American men, established Wilberforce University near Xenia, Ohio, in 1856, and named it after the famous British abolitionist, William Wilberforce. When the school failed to meet its financial obligations, leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church purchased it in 1863.
The articles of association of Wilberforce University, dated July 10, 1863, state that its purpose was to promote education, religion and morality amongst the colored race. Even though the university was established by and for people of color, the articles stipulated that no one should be excluded from the benefits of said institution as officers, faculty, or pupils on account of merely race or color.
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Constitution Of The National Woman Suffrage Association
Despite the Fifteenth Amendments failure to guarantee female suffrage, women did gain the right to vote in western territories, with the Wyoming Territory leading the way in 1869. One 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 right 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 organization of the NWSA and its resulting constitution.
How was the NWSA organized? How would the fact that it operated at the national level, rather than at the state or local level, help it to achieve its goals?
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The Reconstruction Acts Of 1867
By the beginning of 1867, only one former Confederate state, Tennessee, had been readmitted to the Union. The other ten states were still undergoing reconstruction. In early March, Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act. This act divided the South into five military districts and established martial law. It also listed the requirements a state must meet to be readmitted into the Union. Each state had to include universal male voting rights in its constitution; receive approval of its constitution from the majority of its voters; and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to ”all persons born or naturalized in the United States” and declared that states could not deny any person ”life, liberty or property, without due process of law.”
To give the First Reconstruction Act sharper teeth, Congress passed the Second Reconstruction Act later in March. This act put the military in charge of protecting voter registration efforts to make sure that no one, especially the African American, was refused his right to vote.
What Were The Goals Of Reconstruction For Radical Republicans
They wanted to prevent the leaders of the confederacy from returning to power after the war, they wanted the republican party to become a powerful institution in the south, and they wanted the federal government to help african americans achieve political equality by guaranteeing their rights to vote in the south.
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Andrew Johnson: Domestic Affairs
On April 15, six weeks after Andrew Johnson was sworn in as vice president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Had the assassin’s plot gone as planned, Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Secretary of State William Seward would have also been killed. As it turned out, co-conspirator George Atzerodt had stalked the vice president but lost his nerve at the last minute. Johnson, who was staying at the Kirkwood House hotel, rushed to Lincoln’s bedside when he was told of the attack. A few hours after Lincoln’s death, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase swore Johnson in as President of the United States. Republicans were relieved that Johnson had not been killed and could provide continuity; they thought that he would be putty in their hands and would follow the dictates of Republican congressional leaders.
The Question of Black Suffrage
Phase I: Presidential Reconstruction
Phase II: Congressional Reconstruction
Off-Year Election Showdown
Impeachment of Andrew Johnson
What Was The Radical Plan Of Reconstruction
After the election of November 6, 1866, Congress imposes its own Reconstruction policies, referred to by historians as Radical Reconstruction. This re-empowers the Freedmans Bureau and sets reform efforts in motion that will lead to the 14th and 15th Amendments, which, respectively, grant citizenship to all
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Iv Reconstruction And Women
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton maintained a strong and productive relationship for nearly half a century as they sought to secure political rights for women. While the fight for womens rights stalled during the war, it sprung back to life as Anthony, Stanton, and others formed the American Equal Rights Association. , between 1880 and 1902.;Library of Congress.
for all
The AERA was split over whether Black male suffrage should take precedence over universal suffrage, given the political climate of the South. Some worried that political support for freedmen would be undermined by the pursuit of womens suffrage. For example, AERA member Frederick Douglass insisted that the ballot was literally a question of life and death for southern Black men, but not for women.23 Some African American women challenged white suffragists in other ways. Frances Harper, for example, a freeborn Black woman living in Ohio, urged them to consider their own privilege as white and middle class. Universal suffrage, she argued, would not so clearly address the complex difficulties posed by racial, economic, and gender inequality.24
Republicans Sweep The 1866 Elections
During the campaign of 1866, most support for Johnson came from the Democratic Party, whose members tried to play on white fears about expanding rights for blacks. They claimed, for example, that the Republicans wanted to give black workers an advantage over white workers. Meanwhile, the Republicans also campaigned hard and used dramatic language and images to discredit Johnson. As recounted in The Era of Reconstruction: 18651877, Indiana governor Oliver P. Morton called the Democratic Party a “common sewer and loathsome receptacle, into which is emptied every element of treason North and South, every element of inhumanity and barbarism which has dishonored the age.”
When the election results came in, the widespread lack of support for Johnson was evident. The Republicans had won by a huge margin. They were now solidly in control of every Northern state legislature and government; in addition, they had more than the two-thirds majority needed to pass bills in both houses of the U.S. Congress. As the second session of the Thirty-ninth Congress met in December 1866, the Radicals were at their most powerful.
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Two Different Plans For Reconstruction
During the months following the April 1865 conclusion of the Civil War, the U.S. Congress was the stage for another kind of battle. A group of senators and representatives known as the Radical Republicans opposed the Reconstruction program put forth by President Andrew Johnson . Having gained that office unexpectedly when Abraham Lincoln was assassinatedonly days after the wars endby an enraged Southerner, Johnson had surprised everyone with a plan that allowed white Southerners to virtually recreate the days of slavery. The Republicans had managed to win public support for their own vision of a reconstructed South, which they saw as a place where free labor and industry would thrive and where, most importantly, access to equal civil and political rights would allow African Americans to become full, responsible U.S. citizens.
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Battles Over Reconstruction Policy
During fall 1865, as a response to the Black Codes and worrisome signs of Southern recalcitrance, the Radical Republicans blocked the readmission of the former rebellious states to the Congress. Johnson, however, was content with allowing former Confederate states into the Union as long as their state governments adopted the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. By December 6, 1865, the amendment was ratified, and Johnson considered Reconstruction over. Radical Republicans in Congress disagreed. They rejected Johnson’s moderate Reconstruction efforts, and organized the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, a 15-member panel to devise more stringent Reconstruction requirements for the Southern states to be restored to the Union.
In January 1866, Congress renewed the Freedmen’s Bureau, which Johnson vetoed in February. Although Johnson sympathized with the plights of the freedmen, he was against federal assistance. An attempt to override the veto failed on February 20, 1866. This veto shocked the congressional Radicals. In response, both the Senate and House passed a joint resolution not to allow any senator or representative seat admittance until Congress decided when Reconstruction was finished.
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Freed Persons Receive Wages From Former Owner
Some emancipated slaves quickly fled from the neighborhood of their owners, while others became wage laborers for former owners. Most importantly, African Americans could make choices for themselves about where they labored and the type of work they performed. This account book shows that former slaves who became free workers after the Civil War received pay for their work on Hampton Plantation in South Carolina.
Hampton Plantation Account Book, 18661868. South Carolina. Handwritten manuscript. Page 68 Page 69. Miscellaneous Manuscript Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
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The End Of Radical Reconstruction
The end of Reconstruction was a staggered process, and the period of Republican control ended at different times in different states. With the Compromise of 1877, army intervention in the South ceased and Republican control collapsed in the last three state governments in the South. This was followed by a period that white Southerners labeled “Redemption,” during which white-dominated state legislatures enacted Jim Crow laws and, beginning in 1890, disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites through a combination of constitutional amendments and electoral laws. The white Democrat Southerners’ memory of Reconstruction played a major role in imposing the system of white supremacy and second-class citizenship for blacks, known as “The Age of Jim Crow.”
Many of the ambitions of the Radical Republicans were, in the end, undermined and unfulfilled. Early Supreme Court rulings around the turn of the century upheld many of these new Southern constitutions and laws, and most blacks were prevented from voting in the South until the 1960s. Full federal enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments did not occur until passage of legislation in the mid-1960s as a result of the African-American Civil Rights Movement .
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Grant Is Elected President
The 1868 presidential election would be the first in which African Americans would participate, and they would play an important role in the election of the next president, Ulysses S. Grant . A career army officer and a hero of the Civil War, during which he had helped carry out such presidential orders as the Emancipation Proclamation, Grant had shown no previous interest in politics. His stance as a moderate made him an attractive candidate for the Republican Party, which wanted to put forth an individual who would represent stability during a troubled period in the nations history. To oppose Grant, the Democrats nominated a rather colorless figure, former New York governor Horatio Seymour . Their campaign centered on the theme of maintaining white supremacy at a time when, racists maintained, blacks were threatening to take over the country.
The sight of black people voting in the 1867 elections to choose convention delegates had been difficult for many
Impeachment Of Andrew Johnson
Impeachment of Andrew Johnson by the Senate 1866
In 1866 the Radical Republican Congress sought to remove President Andrew Johnson from office. This was part of the power struggle between Johnson who sought highly lenient policies towards the former Confederate states and the Radical Republicans who wanted a harsher version of Reconstruction as well as more forceful protection of the rights of the newly freed southern black population. Ultimately the impeachment, which was not popular or supported by the general public, failed by one vote.
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Freedmen Navigate Legislative Shoals
In order to regulate the activities of newly freed African Americans, national, state, and local governments developed a body of laws relating to them. Some laws were for their protection, particularly those relating to labor contracts, but others circumscribed their citizenship rights. This volume, compiled by the staff of General Oliver O. Howard, the director of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Landsusually called the Freedmens Bureauprovides a digest of these laws in ten of the former Confederate states up to 1867.
Laws in Relation to Freedmen, U.S. Sen. 39th Congress, 2nd Sess. Senate Executive Doc. No. 6. Washington: War Department, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1866-67. Pamphlet. Law Library, Library of Congress
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The Freedmen’s Bureau Bill
One of the first actions Congress had taken after refusing to recognize the Southern legislators was to create a Joint Committee on Reconstruction to investigate and report on conditions in the South. Already reports were arriving that documented the mistreatment of blacks in the South. Perhaps the most revealing report was compiled by ex-Union general Carl Schurz . As the new year began, it was clear that the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal agency established in March 1865 to assist the former slaves in their transition to freedom, needed more power to punish those who denied blacks their rights or physically assaulted them. To that end, Senator Trumbull introduced a bill to extend the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and broaden the power of its agents to protect blacks.
It came as a surprise to almost everyone when President Johnson vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau bill. He claimed that it was not necessary and too expensive to extend the Bureau’s life and even asserted, as noted in A Short History of Reconstruction, that giving blacks assistance was unfair to “our own people” . Even Johnson’s supporters had urged him to sign the bill, as it would help to keep the moderate Republicans on his side. Congress immediately overrode the bill, and it became law.
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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 Washingtons segregated schools before Congress.
According to Senator Revelss speech, 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 blacks who served in a great number of capacities at the local and state levels. The South during the early 1870s brimmed with freed slaves and freeborn blacks serving as school board commissioners, county commissioners, clerks of court, board of education and city council members, justices of the peace, constables, coroners, magistrates, sheriffs, auditors, and registrars. This wave of local African American political activity contributed to and was accompanied by a new concern 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.
