American History the Defeated South

American History The Defeated South The confederacy was confronted by the defeat set upon them. This was a time to come to grips with the idea of a democracy and what it meant. Now was a time of uncertainty, no one was quite sure of how the now defeated states of the Confederacy would blend cohesively into the union preserving and maintaining the unity and power of America.

Significant numbers of lives were lost, two-thirds of the region's wealth had been destroyed, and the slaves who counted for one third of the population were now free. Inquires began to build regarding how could the North feel confident that it could reestablish a working independence dealing with citizens that could end up being defiant due to their ultimate defeat. Now was time for restructuring of the southern culture.

Now was a need for race relations to be reworked, class conflicts addressed, these matters were considered of the highest importance not just regionally rather on a national level. For a large number of northerners the end of the war proposed the question of how to define democracy for freed men and how to insure that, in exercising their democratic rights at the national level, southerners still embracing confederate ways of thinking could end up complicating the process and this was a cause for concern with the enforced governance structure.

(Smith, 1994, p. 92) Reconstruction brought about issues that were unique but deeply rooted in racism, compounded with class differences, making reform difficult. Now the north was obligated to re-introduce the south into the United States under the basis of full constitutional equality. Research suggests that the victory by the North's policy during reconstruction serves as more of an analogy than as a template for an understanding of the character of America. (Smith, 1994, p.

97) The battle was won, but there were still battles to be wagered to combine the north and the south together. Lincoln's Plan The initial step in the creation and development of Lincoln's plan for reconstruction came in the states of the Upper South and became known as his border state policy. The plan initiated with politics, Lincoln attempted to prevent any further breach of the Union. Southerners were on board and loyal, but they had been mislead by political leaders.

All they needed were new leaders to follow and all would be back on board. It was stated that Lincoln gave very little thought to the concepts that principle and duty might actuate the South's Leaders and people. Therefore Lincoln's plan of reconstruction included the idea of installing a new governor under military auspice and with whatever popular support he could marshal. (Hiesseltine, 1960, p. 9) Various aspects came together to create Lincoln's plan of reconstruction.

The western counties of Virginia, from the Alleghenies to the Ohio River, had been unhappy for a long time, yoked to eastern Virginia Tidewater, Piedmont and Valley regions. In the west the Kanawha River drained a rich valley into the Ohio. North of it, counties adjacent to the Ohio looked away from Richmond.

And if the "mystic chords" of sentiment did not bind the people to the Union, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad tied their commerce to Chesapeake Bay, which if nothing else gave a reason for some amount of cohesion between the states. (Hiesseltine, 1960, p. 25) The writing goes on to state that once the seating of the senators took place, the restored legislature set in motion the steps leading to a new state.

During the winter of 1861 to 1862 a constitutional convention formed the instrument of government for West Virginia; however Lincoln remained only a passive observer of the movement. The division of Virginia became no precedent for reconstruction either during or after the war. But no one, social reformer, economic entrepreneur, or political manipulator, seriously proposed readjusting the historical boundaries of the Southern states. Instead, the Virginia contribution to the development of Lincoln's plan of reconstruction was consistent with the lessons learned from Maryland and Missouri.

By the summer of 1861 the experiences of the Border States had given a basic outline to Lincoln's plan of reconstruction. To implement the movement he would use patronage to build a Unionist party. (Hiesseltine, 1960, p. 57) Civil Rights Bill The first permanent English colony in North America was founded at Jamestown, Virginia, in May 1607. Twelve years later, in 1619, a Dutch ship sailed into the harbor at Jamestown and sold twenty African slaves to the Virginia colonists.

Thus did "slavery" and "involuntary servitude," as they are referred to in the United States Constitution, come to the American South. The flat farmlands, served by meandering Tidewater Rivers, were ideal for creating large plantations for growing cotton and other agricultural products. The African slaves provided a cheap and reliable source of agricultural and household labor for the emerging southern economy. (Humphrey, Rauh & Stewart, 1997, p. 1) Any civil rights bill to come before the U.S.

Senate would face a filibuster by a determined group of southern senators, and the filibuster could only be stopped by a "cloture vote," which required a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Thus, from the very beginning of the black civil rights movement, the Senate filibuster was regarded as the great obstacle -- and a successful cloture vote to stop a civil rights filibuster was the great goal. The Civil War Amendments "worked" but only for a short while.

During a twelve-year period of "Reconstruction" in the South following the Civil War, blacks were allowed to vote and a number were elected to important state and national political offices. But, after the Civil War ended, white southern politicians and government officials went to work subverting and reducing the position of blacks in the American South.

As early as 1865, the year the Civil War ended, a number of southern state legislatures began passing Black Codes, laws designed to put black citizens in a state of near slavery by limiting their rights and privileges. (Humphrey, Rauh & Stewart, 1997, p. 3) The Republican majority in the United States Congress responded to the Black Codes with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which made it illegal to deprive a person of his civil rights regardless of race, color, or previous servitude.

Additional civil rights laws were passed by Congress in 1870, 1871, and 1875, all of them designed to have the national government in Washington, D.C., protect black Americans from white-dominated southern state governments, Throughout this period, the Republicans in Congress sought to "nationalize" the issue of black civil rights so that southern white-state legislatures could not undo the work of the Civil War. (Humphrey, Rauh & Stewart, 1997, p. 4) Andrew Johnson's Presidency On Apr. 15, 1865, following Lincoln's assassination, Johnson took the oath of office as President.

His Reconstruction program (and he insisted that Reconstruction was an executive, not a legislative, function) was based on the theory that the Southern states had never been out of the Union. He therefore restored civil government in the ex-Confederate states as soon as it was feasible.

Because he was not prepared to grant equal civil rights to blacks and because he did not press for the wholesale disqualification for office of Confederate leaders, he was roundly denounced by the radical Republicans, who, led by Thaddeus Stevens, set out to undo Johnson's work on the convening of the 39th Congress in Dec., 1865. ("Andrew Johnson, Presidency," 2007) In Apr., 1866, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act over Johnson's veto, and his political power began to decline drastically. During the rest of his administration there was one humiliation after another.

His "swing around the circle" in the congressional elections of 1866 was unsuccessful. On Mar. 2, 1867, the radicals passed over his veto the First Reconstruction Act and the Tenure of Office Act. When Johnson insisted upon his intention to force out of office his Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, whom he rightly suspected of conspiring with the congressional leaders, the radical Republicans sought to remove the President. Their first attempt failed (Dec., 1867), but on Feb. 24, 1868, the House passed a resolution of impeachment against him even before it adopted (Mar.

2 -- 3) 11 articles detailing the reasons for it. Although the problems of Reconstruction dominated Johnson's administration, there were important achievements in foreign relations, notably the purchase (1867) of Alaska, negotiated by Secretary of State William H. Seward. Johnson's name figured in the balloting at the Democratic convention of 1868. In 1875, he died a few months after taking his seat. ("Andrew Johnson, Presidency," 2007, p. 4) The Impeachment Crisis At the core of the only presidential impeachment of a president of the United States lay the crisis of American Reconstruction after the Civil War.

The danger of national disintegration had been all too valid, the sacrifices to avert it immense. When the war ended, Americans whom to this point had been loyal faced real traitors, people who had fought gallantly and bitterly to slash the fabric of the nation.

To understand the spirit of the Reconstruction crisis, one must understand the reality of the civil war, recognize that the generation of Americans caught up in the web of Reconstruction actually lived, actually confronted a situation, today totally alien to us, where countrymen killed countrymen, where political power involved more than the simple control of administration. (Benedict, 1973, p. 1) Americans were ill equipped to cope with the problem effectively.

By 1865 most Northerners, particularly Republicans, had come to identify security for the Union with concrete, fundamental change in southern society, particularly in black & white relations. Most important, Republicans insisted upon protection for former slaves in their new freedom. Yet these same Northerners, including Republicans, displayed a remarkable reluctance to force these changes on the South through the power of the national government.

At first many Republicans hoped Southerners themselves would inaugurate the necessary changes voluntarily, but it quickly became apparent that even modest change in southern society, beyond the eradication of slavery would require the national action so many Northerners wanted to avoid. But further complications arose in the person of the seventeenth president of the United States, Andrew Johnson. If the critical importance of Reconstruction for the security of the nation provided the kindling for the impeachment crisis, it was the torch of Andrew Johnson's personal character that ignited the flame.

(Benedict, 1973, p. 3) The Radical Republican Vision The key issues of Reconstruction involved how the national government would define its relationship to the defeated Confederate states and the former slaves. The South had been thoroughly defeated and its economy lay in ruins. The presence of Union troops further embittered white Southerners. But the bitterest pill was the changed status of African-Americans whose freedom seemed an affront to white supremacy. ("The politics of Reconstruction," n.d., p.

89) During his life, Lincoln had promoted a plan that authorized amnesty for those swearing an oath of allegiance. Once 10% of a Confederate state's voters registered their oaths they could establish a state government. Arkansas and Louisiana met this criterion, but congressional radicals pushed for a harsher stance. They pushed through a bill that would fundamentally transform southern society, though Lincoln killed it with a pocket veto. Redistribution of land posed another thorny issue. Many former slaves had worked on abandoned plantations, leased to northern investors.

General Sherman had settled others on 40-acre plots. Congress had created the Freedman's Bureau to help with the transition to freedom and had passed the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery. But an assassin's bullet ended Lincoln's role in Reconstruction. Andrew Johnson, the new president, was a War Democrat from Tennessee. He had used harsh language to describe southern "traitors" but blamed individuals rather than the entire South for secession. While Congress was not in session he granted amnesty to most Confederates.

Initially, wealthy landholders and members of the political elite had been excluded. But Johnson pardoned most of them. Johnson appointed provisional governors who organized new governments. By December, Johnson claimed that "restoration" was virtually complete. A lifelong Democrat, Johnson sympathized with his fellow white southerners and was committed to white supremacy. ("The politics of Reconstruction," n.d., p. 89) Carpetbaggers Carpetbaggers was a name given to those Northerners who went South during reconstruction, motivated in part by profit and/or idealism.

The name refers to the clothing bags that were used by most to transport his or her goods. Despite the name there were many carpetbaggers that were sincere in wanting to aid in the freedom and education of previous slaves. Carpetbaggers came to Louisiana during the war and especially after the slaves had been declared free. Members of Union regiments who had served in the South were captivated by the glowing economic prospects of growing cotton.

Cotton growth increasingly had provided the foundation for the southern economy before the war, and economic realities assured its continued dominance. The land would be worked and new crops planted. Antebellum creditors hoped to see their debts paid by new loans and new crops. (Ashkenazi, 1988, p. 27) The well-educated, bourgeois carpetbaggers who sought to improve on the plantation economy as run by planters did not do any better. In contrast stands the community of Jewish rural merchants who succeeded without special interest in controlling land, an aim of the carpetbaggers.

Merchants, with some exceptions, stuck to the business they knew, stocking a store with merchandise to be exchanged for cotton or a debt to be satisfied in the future through a cotton sale. Jewish merchants who did control land applied the capitalist practices of the merchant, not those of the feudal baron, to the running of plantations. To survive, Jewish merchants lived frugally and rarely aspired to the creature comforts desired by the carpetbaggers who appeared in Louisiana during and after the war.

Country merchants became more important sources of credit and supply to planters and croppers through their own credit lines with New Orleans and New York. These ties diminished as the country merchant financed inventories on his own and accepted pledges of crops from growers. (Ashkenazi, 1988, p. 29) Scalawags Scalawags a derogatory term (originally describing worthless livestock) applied to native white Southerners who supported the federal reconstruction plan and cooperated with the blacks in order to achieve their ends.

Some of the scalawags were entirely above board, having opposed the Confederacy in earlier times and later wanted a new South to emerge from the rubble. Others cooperated with or served in the Republican governments in order to avail themselves of money-making opportunities. Scalawags have had bad press in Alabama as well as in another place in the South.

Alabama natives frequently have practiced amnesia in dealing with scalawags, preferring to forget those, whether direct ancestors or not or at least dismiss them as being guilty of a gross lapse of judgment in the turmoil of the post-Civil War years. Even historian Thomas M. Owen omitted scalawag governor William Hugh Smith from the biographical sketches in his four-volume History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography, the only governor accorded such distinction.

Although Willis Brewer and William Garrett bravely included prominent scalawags in their significant nineteenth-century biographical collections, someone has neatly sliced out the sketch of Alabama's other scalawag governor David P. Lewis from The University of Alabama's copy of Brewer Alabama. Over the tissue-paper patch a delicate Victorian hand has inscribed, "It seems that someone has removed the sketch of David P. Lewis which originally occupied this page; he was Alabama's second scalawag governor (1872-1874) (Wiggins, 1991, p.

1) In the new General Assembly scalawags were the most numerous group, as they also were in the state executive and judicial branches. Of the one hundred members of the House of Representatives, three were Democrats. Among the ninety-seven Republicans were thirty-three Southerners, fourteen Northern men, and twenty-seven blacks. (Wiggins, 1991, p. 39) Sharecropping Sharecropping developed after various other production schemes failed. By 1868, it was the predominant capital-labor arrangement throughout the South. In retrospect, the development of sharecropping seems a tragedy, because.