Transcript for:
Southern Resistance to Reconstruction and the End of Reconstruction

hey there students welcome back for another segment of intensive review in this segment we are going to continue our coverage of reconstruction looking at u.s. HC 3.4 that's focusing on southern resistance to reconstruction and the end of reconstruction so gonna take a quick look there now this is a carpetbag all right it is a bag made of carpet you just pull up an old carpet you sew it together you make a bag out of it these this is for luggage for people who can't afford real lunch all right now a lot of people came down south of carpet-bags after the Civil War and these were carpetbaggers these are people who were nicknamed by Southern whites people who came from the north to the south now of course this is a you know somewhat of an insulting term that is applied by white southerners to people who shouldn't be here in their views all right and keep in mind there's kind of a carpetbagger stereotype that is maybe sometimes true but often not not the case so as far as the carpetbagger stereotype you see this guy where it looks to me like he's got the bag that he came in with and he's got the bag that he's leaving with that this guy was just some sort of shyster or scam artist or something like that alright and this is kind of the view of these carpetbaggers that was present in the late 19th and early 20th century but anyway as far as carpetbaggers their goals really you know some of them may have come for power some of them came for opportunity you know there are jobs what do you do you go where the jobs are wealth alright some people got wealthy but then other people came to serve you know to staff schools and teach and that sort of thing what we see here is a woman who is educating free men and women keep in mind that this is the first opportunity these people had for an education because this was illegal under the old under the old system and in the south the Republican coalition all right kept the Republicans in power this coalition was made up of carpetbaggers also scalawags now since Galloway guess this was a term applied to southerners who had supported the Confederacy during the Civil War and then when reconstruction happens if you can't beat them join them that they joined the Republican Party and cooperated with you know who the a lot of the white Southerners saw as occupiers now General James Longstreet who's pictured here was one of robert e lee's lieutenant generals and you know he decided well you know what i'm gonna join the republican party and you know cooperate and that sort of thing so a scalawag this is something if you've seen Pirates of the Caribbean I think you've probably run into this term it's somebody that's a scoundrel a low-life criminal that sort of thing and then the freedmen who during radical reconstruction were able to vote all right and so what you see here is a great deal of resistance from certain segments of white Southerners in the form of the Ku Klux Klan now you can tell these in this cartoon here these people that are hanging we would describe as carpetbaggers this guy's got a carpetbag it says of hiyo on it this is somebody who came from the north and this is the first Ku Klux Klan now keep in mind that there are two clans one during Reconstruction that ceases to exist once reconstruction is over and then the other Klan that materializes in the 1920s so the Ku Klux Klan commits acts of violence and eventually southern states they are to you know taking back over by the Democratic Party which you would call Home Rule all right that white Southerners re-establish themselves kind of one state at a time as you can see on this map and by 1874 what happens here is that a lot of people up north or growing kind of weary of radical reconstruction and there's this this is Harper's Weekly what I've got here which is a Republican newspaper so even a moderate Republican newspaper is putting out this this sort of idea that these states are subjected to colored rule in in the south all right that they're you know that the carpetbag state governments are corrupt and it's time to stop supporting radical reconstruction now also there was a bad econ and the Republicans paid pretty big in 1874 in the election to the US House of Representatives that the Democratic Party took the US House in 1874 which is going to lead to the election of 1876 which was a disputed election and we see these people kicking around the ballot box what happened was there were three states South Carolina Florida and Louisiana that still had radical rape you know radical reconstruction still had you know small contingents of Union troops in the state and they sent two groups of electors the Republicans said that the Republicans won the Democrats the Democrats won and so this is a disputed election what ends up happening is that the Republican Rutherford B Hayes ends up getting all of the electoral votes in return now there's never anything written down or anything like that but in return there's at least kind of a tacit unwritten agreement that the troops will be pulled out of these states as well all right so the Union troops are gone and radical reconstruction is over and white southern Democratic home rule is re-established and this is what we would call the Redeemer governments under people like Wade Hampton who had been a Confederate General and keep in mind the phenomenon the solid south almost 50 years later and then there's Jim Crow now Jim Crow describes this system of racial segregation that existed in the post reconstruction silence alright so Jim Crow walls typically talking about racial segregation and also you could lump in the literacy test and the grandfather clause now the thing is that the Fifteenth Amendment said you can't stop someone from voting because of race color previous condition of servitude now it doesn't say that you can't tell someone they can't vote because they can't greet and or because they didn't pay a poll-tax or something like that so literacy tests and poll taxes so when you think about Jim Crow segregation literacy test poll taxes all that stuff now another thing that they did is they decide to come up with a grandfather clause which essentially said if your and father could vote then you were grandfathered in so to speak you didn't have to take the literacy test you didn't have to necessarily pay the poll tax or whatever so you could make an exception here and they still use that term you'll probably be grandfathered into something sometime in your life where you were already part of something and because you were already a part of something you were not subjected to new rules and so that nomenclature is still present in our language today so keep that in mind and then the Supreme Court pretty much affirmed Jim Crow and segregation and the grandfather calls and all of that kind of stuff the literacy test so the Supreme Court cooperated with with these you know with these southern home rule governments that were disenfranchising blacks and then there's Plessy be Ferguson which you'd need to know that's in 1896 and Plessy be Ferguson affirmed the doctrine of separate but equal all right and keep in mind that Plessy be Ferguson was overturned by brown v board in 1954 all right but this was about railroad cars in the state of Louisiana segregated railroad cars somebody said well the Fourteenth Amendment says that equal protection of laws right that everybody is equal under the law everywhere you know no state shall you know abridge someone's privileges and immunities all that well Supreme Court says if there is a separate car it's still it's gonna be equal if the you know now all the cars were white then that would be a problem so it's just like if you know we ordered pizza and there are two pizzas well because I'm eating one pizza and you're eating another pizza they're equal but they're separate so keep in mind plus V Ferguson separate but equal and then overturn by brown v board 1954 probably shouldn't use the food analogy now I'm hungry but anyway we will move on to three point five and just bit but first I think we need a coffee break so anyway hope you'll join us for the next segment see you in a bit [Music]