During the Panic of , workers began demanding that the federal government help alleviate the strain on Americans. They were met with brutality as police dispersed the crowd, and consequently the unemployment movement lost much of its steam.
On the eve of the Presidential election, the nation still reeling from depression, the Grant administration found itself no longer able to intervene in the South due to growing national hostility to interference in southern affairs.
Scandalous corruption in the Grant Administration had sapped the national trust. Meanwhile, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes, won big without mentioning Reconstruction, focusing instead on honest government, economic recovery, and temperance. His success entered him into the running as a potential Presidential candidate. The stage was set for an election that would end Reconstruction as a national issue.
Republicans chose Rutherford B. Hayes as their nominee while Democrats chose Samuel J. Tilden, who ran on honest politics and home rule in the South. He was also the first black presiding officer of the House of Representatives.
Rainey was the Republican representative from South Carolina. Gordon, a Louisiana slave who escaped to freedom in March Slavery is a legal and economic system where people are treated as property.
Slavery in North America existed since settlement began in the 17th century. Within the United States, by the time of the start of the civil war slavery had become extinct in the northern states, defined largely as north of the Mason-Dixon line that forms the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Slavery continued to exist in the south until put down by the Union Army and abolished officially by the 13th amendment to the Constitution in The international slave trade was ended by the British Navy in the early 19th century. Carpetbagger by Thomas Nast. Carpetbaggers was the term used to refere to Northerners who moved to the south during Reconstruction to profit from the situation in the territory.
The name was a referece to the carpet bag luggage that many of the Northerners used. Scalawags were Southern whites who supported the Republicans and the various policies of Reconstruction in the south. The name was originally a reference to low-grade farm animals. It has had three different manifestations in three different eras. The first era, when the group was founded, was in the aftermath of the Civil War, particularly during Reconstruction.
The Klan operated as a vigilante group that targeted newly freed black populations and Republican politicians in the Reconstruction governments of the former Confederacy. Though it was officially disbanded in , it continued to function well into the the early s. The Federal government passed a variety of laws and acts to dismantle the Klan in that period which had some success. The KKK did not resurface again until the beginning of the 20th century.
Nathan Bedford Forrest July 13 - October 29 Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Confederate cavalry leader. These repressive codes enraged many in the North, including numerous members of Congress, which refused to seat congressmen and senators elected from the southern states. The first bill extended the life of the bureau, originally established as a temporary organization charged with assisting refugees and formerly enslaved people, while the second defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens who were to enjoy equality before the law.
After Johnson vetoed the bills—causing a permanent rupture in his relationship with Congress that would culminate in his impeachment in —the Civil Rights Act became the first major bill to become law over presidential veto.
The participation of African Americans in southern public life after would be by far the most radical development of Reconstruction, which was essentially a large-scale experiment in interracial democracy unlike that of any other society following the abolition of slavery.
Southern Black people won election to southern state governments and even to the U. Congress during this period. After , an increasing number of southern whites turned to violence in response to the revolutionary changes of Radical Reconstruction.
The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations targeted local Republican leaders, white and Black, and other African Americans who challenged white authority. Though federal legislation passed during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in took aim at the Klan and others who attempted to interfere with Black suffrage and other political rights, white supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South after the early s as support for Reconstruction waned.
Racism was still a potent force in both South and North, and Republicans became more conservative and less egalitarian as the decade continued.
In —after an economic depression plunged much of the South into poverty—the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War. When Democrats waged a campaign of violence to take control of Mississippi in , Grant refused to send federal troops, marking the end of federal support for Reconstruction-era state governments in the South.
In the contested presidential election that year, Republican candidate Rutherford B. The combined strength of the regular and volunteer forces had fallen between April and January from over 1 million men to just 90, Those who did remain were unenthusiastic about occupation duties. The supreme irony of this gesture was that, before the war, posse comitatus was exactly what slaveholders had been demanding as a mechanism for retrieving fugitive slaves. It is dubious whether any Congress, Republican or Democrat, would have authorized the spending needed to support an effective army of occupation, capable of suppressing Southern white insurgencies, especially with the awesome debt of the war years looming.
Nor was it likely, in simple ideological terms, that Republicans could have been persuaded by anything less than outright civil war or anyone less than Abraham Lincoln to have adopted transitional military dictatorships as an acceptable way of securing republican government for any significant length of time. Military occupations strained both the patience of taxpayers and the ingrained suspicion of military rule in American minds.
After the Panic of and the Democratic takeover of the House the following year, the unlikelihood shrank to the vanishing point. If it were possible to establish a scorecard for Reconstruction, the most promising tallies would be the successful restoration of the Union as a federal Union, the legal extirpation of secession as a political tool in settling national disputes, the raising of the freed slaves to citizenship through the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and the avoidance of mass executions and imprisonments.
That Reconstruction fell short of fully implementing most of these accomplishments is its tragedy, and that tragedy can be briefly and bluntly accounted for by six factors: the sheer unpreparedness of the victorious Union to undertake something as unprecedented as a political reconstruction of a third of its territory; the insurgent resistance of the defeated South; the unwillingness to prolong a military occupation to deal with that insurgency; the deaths and removal of the Radical Republican leadership starting with Lincoln ; the resurgence of the Northern Democrats; and, finally, the shortsighted decisions of the federal courts.
It is also possible to say that Reconstruction might have turned out a good deal worse than it did. Both the Civil War and Reconstruction were remarkable for their limited durations. By the standard of civil conflict, the American Civil War was comparatively short — the English Civil Wars lasted seven years, and sporadic fighting continued in Scotland and Ireland for another five; the Taiping Rebellion lasted for 14; Sulla was the trigger for continual outbreaks of civil conflict for half a century, down to Octavian and Marc Antony.
Indeed, some never seem to find any endpoint. Reflecting on the English Civil Wars, T. I question whether any serious civil war ever does end. Throughout that period English society was so convulsed and divided that the effects are still felt. Any proper epitaph for Reconstruction must acknowledge that at least it managed to avoid the fate of other post—civil war eras.
0コメント