hello there it's Dr liy um and I'm very happy but also a little sad um because this is the final new bit of new material um for our course and today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about um the process of reconstruction in the United States following the Civil War um a process that was taking place as we see the sort of dramatic process of emancipation and the creation of civil liberties for this huge population of people of African ancestry living um in the United States becoming um African-Americans becoming um citizens of the United States for the first time as a result of these reforms the focus of what I'm going to talk about today is really the failure of reconstruction and some of the material I'm going to bring up is material that your textbook talks about some of it is not material that you see in a lot of depth but I wanted to explain it to you okay this is by the way the material that begins um 117 B which I encourage you to take if you now you finished 1177a I encourage you to take 117b and pick up where the story left off and and learn more about um the history of modern America um okay so let's jump in okay now when we look at the end of the Civil War right and this sort of massive conflict hundreds of thousands of people killed in about four years of fighting a very short war um uh really by all measures but incredibly destructive for both both North and especially um for the American South there were lots of questions right um what is going to happen with um African-Americans remember the Emancipation Proclamation only freed enslaved people that were controlled in territories by the Confederacy um during the midst of the war and so there was this question of how will emancipation take place what does that mean what's going to happen in the South when you look at what was going on in the South there were Union troops everywhere but his troops would move from one Community to another in some people who had been liberated right would be re-enslaved by their former Masters there was no system to replace the social and economic structures of slavery in the Deep South it was just chaos um and how do you rebuild this country that according to some politicians including um the country's President Abraham Lincoln a country that never was really torn apart um that secession never really could happen legally that this was a set of rebellions that had to be put down so there's a lot to be addressed and a lot to be dealt with one of the things that the federal government immediately decides to do to the Union in this case mutely decides to do is to figure out how to support these millions of people who were um once enslaved in the American South who were now free but lacked critical literacy skills lacked access to jobs lacked homes it was you know obviously a very chaotic time in the South um so and and let's think about this too it's not just chaotic for them but it's actually chaotic for all Southerners and particularly think about white Southerners who had fought on the side of the Confederacy and then lost the war there is this incredible really incredible tension that exists in the South and so this is what leads to even before um all the fighting is completely done the creation in 1865 of an organization called the Freeman's Bureau that's this really great cartoon that sort of illustrates what the Freeman's Bureau was doing and here you see the Freeman's Bureau represented by this gentleman in um Union um Garb right and he's standing as an intermediary between angry Southern whites okay and angry Southern blacks who are not neither of these groups are very happy with one another now the reality is the Freeman's Bureau was not just an intermediary Force okay um in fact it was something was much more significant much more important the Freeman's Bureau um actually provided critical literacy skills instruction and reading and writing jobs programs um all throughout the Deep South were enslaved people essentially it was trying to create a new sort of um culture certainly a new economic status for now recently liberated slaves in the South now I want to show you this is actually kind of a cool image this is a map and you see these little white dots here are locations of Freeman's Bureau branches you can see remember when we were talking about the practice of slavery that band um where slavery where cotton was grown most intensely you can see that's where the focus of the Freeman's Bureau branches are but when you also see popping up through the Deep South during the era of reconstruction um or what we know today is historically black colleges and universities now many of these institutions noted with these little red flags okay many of these institutions were actually institutions that were built to support people who had just gained um literacy skills so they weren't like a college as we might think of it today but they provided vocational education and advanced scholarship um allowing the um recently liberated people to be able to gain more in the way of an education many of these institutions still exist today as as actual colleges and universities um a real kind of amazing network of historic U historically black colleges and universities that still exist in the United States founded during Reconstruction so this is a major effort now most of these colleges were very small at the time anywhere between 5 and 800 students are usually um although they will get to be a little bit bigger in the postreconstruction era so how do you put the country back together after the Civil War Lincoln believed that it was a really simple act okay he argued for what was something called the 10% plan or what eventually became known as Presidential Reconstruction in essence all it required were 10% of Southern voters okay in a particular state to sign an oath of allegiance to the union and then the state was back in okay this is called the 10% plan for that reason okay this is what Lincoln thought this is perfect now um a lot of republicans in Congress many of whom were not moderates like Lincoln but were a bit more radical in their approaches they didn't think that was enough um Congress will pass something called the way Davis Bill in 1865 that says that um in essence okay um 50% of Southern voters needed to sign the S of Allegiance it also had these other requirements as well now Lincoln is going to do something to this bill it's called a pocket veto a pocket veto is pretty passive aggressive it's actually amazing if you think about it it's not that he signs and says I'm not doing this he vetos it o um overtly it's essentially he puts it away and lets it expire after 30 days he doesn't even acknowledge it which is a pretty big slap in the face okay now Lincoln ultimately will be assassinated um actually pretty soon after his veto the way Davis bill um but this is a really is an important moment um to think about right is that there is this opposition to having a dramatic reconstruction Lincoln wanted it to be much smoother that essentially pretend like none of this ever happened okay now as early as 1865 we see southern states and local governments state and local governments in the South starting to pass laws to try to reconstitute an Era of white Authority in the South I me these laws collectively are known as the Black Codes these laws um restricted every everything from um creating curfews for black people they passed laws that made it illegal for black people to be unemployed a lot of Southern whites particularly Planters were worried they weren't going to have enough of a labor force to produce cotton to make a profit and so they wanted to make sure that people were in jobs so it made it illegal to be unemployed can you imagine that um many of us in our lives would have broken the law um it also regulated people's behavior and practices now the black codes that are passed starting in 1865 in anticipate a later set of restrictions called Jim Crow laws which I'll talk about um in a moment okay but these are pretty universally passed and Northern Democrat Northern Republicans Republicans excuse me are livid at this they are very concerned and it's one of the things that they will campaign against in 1866 and in this pretty very important election a congressional election midterm election that will bring in a wave of more Radical Republicans into Congress okay now it it is after Lincoln's assassination that we see the rise of a new President Andrew Johnson now Johnson will not go down in history as one of America's most important presidents um or certainly one of the most effective um he is noteworthy according to historians and his contemporaries for being a bit of an alcoholic for not being super effective and not being well-liked by anyone he was actually a southern Democrat he came from a family that had owned slaves he was chosen by Lincoln as sort of a Unity ticket in 1864 to be his running mate so Southern Democrats hated him Northern Republicans hated him too because he was a Democrat he couldn't be trusted and here is this guy now in the white house there's actually going to be impeachment proceedings against Johnson um because he's seen as ineffective there are real charges against him um but in essence it's going to allow Congress to take over in terms of reconstruction Congress immediately okay in 1865 is going to push through a constitutional amendment that ends the practice of slavery that's the 13th Amendment but they're then going to start moving on different approaches to reforming American society the first is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and the 14th Amendment is important for so many reasons it was a pretty hastily written Amendment um it defines American citizenship in a way that had never been done before in fact when you look at the Constitution before the 14th Amendment what it takes to be a citizen isn't necessarily defined including being a natural born citizen there wasn't any real restriction on immigration that was constitutionally reported um ever put into place by Congress except for one law passed in 1790 the Constitution didn't provide for it what the 14th Amendment does is it defines citizenship and it includes um people who are black really regardless of race it includes folks as Citizens and and incorporates those citizenship rights in now when you hear about Supreme Court decisions pay attention when you're paying listening to the news or reading the news online pay attention because often times the Supreme Court makes a decision based on the 14th Amendment okay um we're incorporating 14th Amendment and a lot of this has to do with because it is such a kind of complicated addition to our constitution now the 14th Amendment AED this sort of coming movement of what was called radical reconstruction after the successful Congressional elections of 1866 Radical Republicans are going to push through a piece of legislation called the Reconstruction Act of 1867 now your book talks about this so pay attention to it does a whole bunch of things one of those things is it actually Ides up the South into military occupation zones so States who had been brought back into the Union under Presidential Reconstruction were now asked to go through the process again and you can see the years that they entered now what's interesting about this is that troops actually don't leave the South fully until 1877 okay you'll see the last troops actually leaves Louisiana at that point Presidential Reconstruction is dead and this more radical reconstruction required states to ratify the 14th Amendment to to essentially rebuke the debt that had been um uh acred by the Confederacy had there were a whole bunch of different statutes that were um put into place as a result of this act and it also required these new southern states to guarantee free blacks the right to vote something that did not exist through much of the United States which is one of the reasons why Congress will push forward the 15th Amendment and now this really great lithograph commemorating the passage of the 15th amendment something to think about is that it's this Constitutional Amendment that gives um people the right to men the right to vote I should say to be very clear men the right to vote regardless of their race um in the South what's fascinating about this is that states that start to be incorporated back into the Union are that have majority black populations are actually going to start electing African-Americans to federal office including to the House of Representatives and to the Senate and this is actually a drawing of some of those first repres resentatives that are elected what's interesting about radical reconstruction is that it provides this seemingly High Watermark okay for civil rights in America a a watermark that won't be achieved again until um well after reconstruction when reconstruction collapses and spoiler alert it does fall apart after reconstruction collapses we don't see African-Americans holding these high elective offices for sometime again in fact the first black senator to be elected okay again to the Senate doesn't come about until much much later in fact in my own lifetime um and I'm pretty young so keep that in mind um so this is a really sort of a remarkable transformation now think about this there's all of this radical shift not just in ending slavery but in reforming the social order giving citizenship rights and political rights to blacks and in in the United States that North and South was pretty verant racist okay you can understand why people were responding negatively so as you you see blacks getting the right to vote in the South and in the north gaining the right to to essentially serve in Congress you start to see a real reaction against this not just in the South but also in the north I want to show you a the cover of a publication called um Harper's Weekly it was a popular magazine from this era and it has features this um edition of it from March of 1874 okay um again this is a popular publication in the north okay features a features a itical cartoon and the caption of this cartoon if you look at it I'll zoom in so you can see a little bit better is colored rule in a reconstructed State now look at this image look carefully at it this is a state legislature which now is seemingly dominated by elected officials who are black but look at how those people are depicted they're depicted with exaggerated features sort of animalistic Tendencies and this is part of a long history in the south of a sort of Southern nationalism that was to a support of slavery that enslaved people were not really people but now they're running States what's significant about this of course is this is a northern publication people in the north were just as much in opposition of this practice as in the South the support of radical reconstruction had really fallen off okay by the 1870s in fact there was a growing resistance even among some members of the Republican party to the practice of reconstruction and this is why it starts to fall apart in the south the resistance to reconstruction was much more deadly we see the organization of vigilante groups perhaps no most noteworthy is the Klux Clan this is the first image we actually have of the members of the clan um and this is also from Harper's Weekly um and you get the idea these are people who hid their identities they engaged in vigilante work where they lynched or attacked and killed black folks living in the South and also sympathetic whites but mostly black folks and we're not talking about a dozen or two or even a few hundred but over the force of the Next Generation thousands of people who will be killed um and publicly slaughtered in fact by the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century one of the most popular images on American postcards lynching photos photos of bodies hanging from trees and people picnicking underneath the Klux Clan is perhaps the most sensationalistic of these organizations but there are lots of these different vigilante groups that were operating um indeed the clan becomes part of American culture during this era um a very important novel is written um history is written about them called The Clansman is is a novel but it sort of provides sort of basis of History eventually The Clansman is adapted to become the first featurelength film um in American history and that's of course a film called Birth of a Nation um in the 19s so the clan has this kind of deep support although it will Wayne at the end of the 19 beginning of the 20th century it does come roaring back at different points in our history even now as it turns out unfortunately now I talked a little bit about how how politics and culture was responding to or reacting against um reconstruction but what happened in terms of the economic world in the South well what starts to happen and this is fair even fairly early on is that southern whites large landholders start to come up with a new system um that essentially replicates slavery and this system is known as the crop lean system of share cropping okay share cropping worked like this you would essentially rent out pieces of Plantation land to individuals whites and blacks okay um to families in exchange for a share of the crop so the rent they would pay as a portion of what they produced now think about this this makes some sense right except if you're going to start farming you need a whole bunch of stuff you need right you need uh seed you need water you need food to live off of you need shelter all of that is charged by the plantation owner to this new tenant and what starts to happen is those charges are so high they exceed 100% of the crop okay and you can't leave if you're in Deb so what happens to these people they're bound to the land sharecropping is a system that we can almost think of as like slavery the Next Generation it persists for Generations in fact sharecropping persists well into the middle of the 20th century um it's still present when civil rights activists are working in the Deep South although it had already started to wne really clear clear okay really want to be clear here Equity is prevented by sharecropping in the South it also keeps the South stuck in this agian model until the federal government forcibly intervenes in the 20th century something you would learn about in 117b actually um so this is really important to note okay we tend to look back at the past and say well slavery ended so long ago why is this still a problem because sharecropping comes about that inequity persists and it builds up layers over generations and generations and in fact when we look at maps of this inequity that existed in the South It lines up perfectly with that old Cotton Belt with the density where slavery was practiced the most now by the end of the by the end of the 1870s reconstruction ends not that fact that these constitutional amendments are overturned in fact they stay in the books but state and local laws are passed okay to essentially restrict the enforcement of these laws these new laws are sort of building upon the black are called Jim Crow laws they particularly are focused on restrictions in terms of political rights so in for example a lot of Southern States and local governments will pass poll taxes or poll tests that are selectively applied to blacks but most sort of um cleverly they pass laws like the grandfather clause which says your grandfather could not legally vote you cannot legally vote you're seeing where this goes right so Mo almost all these people who were enslaved people right all of them in fact their grandparents could not vote because they were slaves and so it persists for Generations um these laws are not forcibly overturned even though they're unconstitutional not forcibly overturned until the 1960s and even today there are lots of accounts of and we can think about this in our recent history lots of accounts of people who are are restricted at the polls and there's certainly a movement in that direction so this isn't something that just goes away okay now in 1877 the union is firmly back together a compromise of 1877 withdraws the last Union troops out of the south in exchange for allowing a republican who likely did not win that election in 1876 um ruford behaves to become president it's a sort of back room deal but it ends reconstruction it ends Northern oversight into Southern Affairs um ultimately it ends of course any chance for blacks living in the South to have political rights or Equity now today we remember reconstruction as a failure right as this false start but we also remember this is a time in which Southern Culture is being reaffirmed white Southern Culture um and of course our memory remember when I talk to you a little bit about the historiography the study of the South a lot of this is built in the sort of aftermath reconstruction it's not just in history books it's also in popular culture too here's a poster from perhaps one of the most important films produced in the 20th century Gone With the Wind it's based on a novel okay um and it is a story that illustrates the Dunning school so well right this is a film that talks about the Romantic peaceful wonderful South before the Civil War and how the Civil War just ruins everything for everyone including the slaves right this idea of course is fundamentally based in a kind of systematic um systematically practiced and culturally present racism then exists not just in the South but all throughout the United States okay attitudes about African-Americans become more firmly entrenched after the Civil War and even though slavery ends many of components are reconstructed in different forms in that way reconstruction is a kind of success okay African-Americans face a dim future it seems in this sort of postreconstruction world and this is why when we start to think about the building of modern America why it's so important that we think about civil rights right this is so important to think about groups of people who are pushed to the margins who are not allowed to express their voices in public spaces um because that's fundamental to understanding the nature of American citizenship I want to thank you all for all of your hard work in this course um and I'm really looking forward to reading your final essays um I'm hoping I have another chance to have you in a course so please look into courses in history both face to-face in online there are lots of different opportunities um here in aloney okay have a great um final experience as you're working your essays and I will hopefully see you around