Hello and welcome to another flipped classroom lesson from Students of History. This one is on the era of Reconstruction, the period right after the American Civil War. Got a few different options for you for taking your notes through this presentation. You have some graphic organizers and a traditional outline form. Both work perfectly with it.
So let's get started. We're going to start things off, though, with President Abraham Lincoln. Throughout the war, Lincoln and the government were planning on what to do when the war was over.
And in 1863, Lincoln developed what became known as the Ten Percent Plan, and he expressed this beautifully in his second inaugural address just weeks before he died in 1865, where he said he wanted to welcome the back of the South with malice towards none, with charity for all, with... firmness in the right to bind up the nation's wounds and come back together again as brothers in this one country, which is a very kind of lenient plan that was very easy on the South, who many Republicans saw as rebels who deserve to be punished or traitors. So Lincoln's plan came to be known as the 10% plan. That's very simple why.
Only 10% of a state's voters had to take a loyalty oath to pledge loyalty to the United States and support emancipation for freeing enslaved people, for supporting the Union, and rejoining the United States. 10%, not that many. If you think about like the thousands of people that are in a state, not that many at all, really 10%.
So very easy on the South. He wanted to put this whole terrible era behind them. And kind of focus on rejoining, going forward as one nation, united again, forward. Opposing him were members of his own political party, Republicans. Lincoln was a Republican.
But these guys are called radical Republicans because they are, they believe Lincoln is being too easy on the South. If they think just 10% that's too easy, these guys caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in this Civil War. Over.
over four years. They were rebels. They were traitors to the country. They fought against the United States. These men are criminals.
They should be punished, and we should not welcome them back so easily. So a lot of these radical Republicans in the Senate and in Congress who gained power during the course of the Civil War when you had the southern states not participating in government and not voting. The radical Republicans are going to do a lot of things that we today consider basic human rights and certainly very positive measures of equality, like demanding civil rights for freed men, freed slaves, ensuring they have the right to vote, ensuring they can get an education, ensuring they're not terrorized. And they want to make sure all that occurs by providing protection for African Americans in the South with Union soldiers to be stationed across the South.
Well, as you know, Abraham Lincoln will become, will be assassinated. So this is going to throw a wrench into everything, all of these plans that were going forward. But the Wade Davis bill is going to be drafted by radical Republicans in 1864. And this is named after two congressmen seen here.
This is Benjamin Wade of Ohio. And this one says 50% of voters in the state must take an oath of allegiance. They must swear this oath of allegiance. So Lincoln says 10%. You can pretty easily get 10%.
They say 50%. A majority of voters must take an oath of allegiance. Now that's going to be tough when you think about... Just think about politics today, how tough it is to get 50% of people to support anything. And they just fought a war against the union, and they're saying it's going to take 50% for them to rejoin the union.
And in the meantime, they would have that military forces spread out across the South, divided into five military districts. Very strict. So this passes both houses of Congress, Senate and the House of Representatives.
But Lincoln is going to pocket veto it. A pocket veto is when you just don't sign it and you let it expire. Because Lincoln thinks this is too harsh, we'll antagonize them more. We'll never come back together again as a nation.
Well, like I said, as we know, Abraham Lincoln will be assassinated in April of 1865 by John Wilkes Booth, sadly just days after the Appomattox courthouse signing to end the war with Grant and Lee. And the new president is Lincoln's vice president, Andrew Johnson. Now, Lincoln picked Johnson because he was a southerner.
He was a southerner, but he was a Republican, and he thought this would be a good time to end the war. kind of be a way of making amends with the South. And Andrew Johnson, being a Southerner, is going to be more sympathetic to the Southern cause.
And he's going to kind of agree with Lincoln, but kind of issue his new plan, a new plan of his own as well, which is going to antagonize our radical Republicans. So he calls for state conventions. Every state in the South should hold a convention to repeal the secession statements that they issued. years before seceding from the union. And he's going to eventually allow all these southern states to rejoin the union.
They don't have to get 50% loyalty pledges. They don't have to go to any extremes based on Johnson's plan. And the radical Republicans are furious with this. They can't believe that he is being so easy on these southern states that caused so much pain and heartache over so long.
that they felt were traitors. And the radical Republicans are going to impeach Andrew Johnson, which is this process for removing a president from office. They take the steps to impeach him in the House, and they're only just one vote short of eventually removing him from office. And it would be another 130 years before another president was impeached, Bill Clinton.
Neither one were removed from office. But the impeachment process is that steps towards removing a president. It's obviously complicated to remove a president from office. It takes a lot. We don't want to make it easy when they are founding the Constitution.
But Johnson is one of only two presidents so far to be impeached. Well, this era is called Reconstruction. It's the rebuilding of the South. So now the South is re-welcomed back into the United States. And we are going to have an era of Reconstruction.
And some people to know, we'll go over some important people and groups to know during this era as we get a look at the big picture of the Reconstruction era. So first are Carpetbaggers and Scalawags. Two fanciful names here. Carpetbagger is someone who's from the north, a Union state, who moved to the south during Reconstruction.
generally to make money, although not all of them were seeking money. Lots of missionaries headed south to help out. Lots of teachers to open up schools. Lots of missionaries who wanted to open up churches in the south to help freed slaves.
So lots of people went down there for very positive reasons to help out. Others were politicians and businessmen who saw that they could make a profit in the rebuilding of the south. They're called carpetbaggers because they generally traveled back then with a carpet bag thrown over their shoulder like this guy in this picture.
A scalawag. A scalawag would be the term for a southerner who supports the Union, who was maybe a Republican, who supported the Reconstruction cause, who supported the rebuilding process, who supported rights for freedmen. Scalawags are the pejorative name for them. The Freedmen's Bureau of the Union.
was one of the most positive things set up by congress the radical republicans passed legislation that would develop a freed men's bureau and it's basically exactly what it sounds like it's a bureau or a government agency designed to help former slaves who are now freed free for freed men and freed women and they opened up many schools all across the south this is a photograph of one of the freed men's bureau schools in the south They helped to get people jobs. If they wanted to leave the South, they helped find them transportation. They helped rebuild churches.
They ensured people knew how to register to vote and to qualify for a job, to vote, help people get jobs and housing. So the Freedmen's Bureau did a lot of good things for former slaves in the South to kind of help them adjust to their new lives as free men and women. Uh... Next up are going to be elections.
During the era of Reconstruction, with the thanks to the Freedmen's Bureau and the 13th Amendment and the 14th Amendment, African Americans are going to be ensured the right to vote. And as a result, across the South for the first time, you're going to have African Americans voting other African Americans into office. And most famously, it was a guy named Hiram Revels, who's in this picture on the bottom left. He is the first African American senator in American history.
He was voted to the Senate. Six other congressmen, African-American congressmen, joined the House of Representatives during the era of Reconstruction. So all these people who were enslaved for so long now achieve the right to vote, and they're going to elect people who they think are going to help them out to Congress.
And you eventually have, yes, seven former African-Americans now. In office, Hiram Rebels actually took the Senate seat of Jefferson Davis. Jefferson Davis, who was the president of the Confederacy, Hiram Rebels took his Senate seat, interestingly.
And like I mentioned of the amendments, there are three what are known as Reconstruction amendments. Amendments to the United States Constitution that were passed during Reconstruction. The 13th officially ended slavery. across the United States. You had the Emancipation Proclamation, which was really a war measure.
But once the war was over, technically that would no longer be in place. So Congress passed the 13th Amendment, which forever ended slavery across the United States. The 14th Amendment, radical Republicans saw that these Southern states were gonna figure out ways to deny African-Americans the right to vote. So they passed the 14th Amendment guaranteeing citizenship and voting rights to all people born in the United States, all men, voting rights that is, and naturalized citizens, naturalized citizens in the United States. And finally the 15th Amendment says you cannot take away a man's right to vote.
All free men are guaranteed that right to vote. When they saw that these southern states were passing grandfather clauses and poll taxes and things like that, which will actually come back after Reconstruction is over. But these three amendments are very important amendments for ensuring that enslaved African Americans who are now free have the rights that they deserve.
And you have this scene here, a picture from back then of the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution and the celebrating that went on. Well, as a response to this, former Confederate soldiers formed these underground organizations, the most famous of which was the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan, to terrorize African Americans who they felt now were getting more rights than they deserved. They didn't like that these African Americans had equality, had voting rights, had property rights, had jobs, had everything.
that they deserved in life in the South. And the KKK was a terrorist organization founded to terrorize African Americans. President Ulysses S. Grant, who we'll look at in a minute, used something known as the Enforcement Acts so that he could enforce those amendments to fight back against the KKK and actually had them essentially wiped out during Reconstruction.
Unfortunately, though, as we know, they will come back in the 20th century. Sharecropping is something that's going to be developed during this time period. So you had all of these enslaved people who now have their freedom.
Many of them left and headed north, but many others had spent their entire lives in the south for generations. And all they knew was farming and owning farms. And they were not guaranteed, they were not given land to own for themselves, so they sought jobs. And some plantation owners said, hey. I'll tell you what, you're not enslaved anymore, but you can have a job working on my farm doing essentially the same thing you were doing before, whether it was picking cotton or tending to the farm in some way.
And they're like, you know, this can be a job for you. This will be great. You'll have your freedom, but you can do this. And it sounds appealing, but then if you think about it, it's almost essentially the same thing as slavery, because what these plantation owners did was say, okay, well, I'll give you housing.
I'll provide you food and in return you'll work. And if there's extra wages that you earn beyond what it costs for your housing and your food, then you can earn that. Well, of course, they said, oh, no, you didn't earn any extra wages. Your housing costs went up.
Your food costs went up. So they're working in exchange for housing and food, which is essentially the same thing as slavery. And it was this.
way of twisting it that a lot of plantation owners turned to, which so life didn't change so much for some of these African Americans in the South. To make matters worse, many southern states passed what were known as black codes. These were laws passed across the South to limit the rights of African Americans, and it meant segregation. It meant denying them the same rights that others had in terms of voting or holding a job or holding a...
office or public using public facilities any way that they could a lot of these southern states pass these black codes to deny these rights to african americans well what about the former generals these guys who fought and who were so well known across the united states during the civil war most famously robert e lee when he surrendered at appomattox he urged southerners to reconcile He urged Southerners to come back together with the Union to admit defeat, and he went on to serve as the president of Washington College, which would be known as Washington and Lee College today. He famously kind of helped get Southerners to kind of support the Union again and tried to defuse his role as a rebel. He spent the rest of his life trying to kind of help his own image as the war as during the war and before the war.
And as a result, he kind of became a hero to many across the South for years and years due to this sort of PR campaign that he led afterwards about his role and how he was seen by Southerners. On the other side, you had Ulysses S. Grant, leader of the Union Army. He was elected president during Reconstruction in 1868. He advocates for the rights of freed slaves. As we saw, he fought against the KKK with the Enforcement Act. He's going to guarantee voting rights through the amendments were passed during his time as president.
He's going to help ensure that they have equality across the South. He's going to do quite a lot. He was a great leader, but unfortunately, he had quite a corrupt administration.
A lot of the people who he picked to serve in his administration were corrupt and caused quite a few scandals, which really hurt his time in office as president. Well, the end of Reconstruction is going to come. Reconstruction lasted 13 years and a few months, but it's going to come to an end. And this isn't one of those sort of vague endings where it sort of like comes to an end.
This is a very, has a very definitive end, how Reconstruction. And that is with the election of 1876. So in the election of 1876 you had a Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, seen there. And Rutherford B. Hayes is going to run against the Democrat Samuel Tilden. So the Republicans were the party of Lincoln, the radical Republicans, generally the North, Democrats, Samuel Tilden, they were generally had support in the South.
But at this time, a lot of people were growing tired of reconstruction. It had been going on for years. And the popular vote is going to be very, very close. But Tilden is going to get about 200,000 more votes, if you look at this map, than Hayes.
You see lots of blue across the south for Tilden getting his support across the south. Hayes, you see all that support in the north, the west. and then in New Orleans he had quite a bit of support as well. So it's close but Tilden gets more popular vote but as you know the popular vote does not determine the presidency the electoral and the electoral college comes out with Tilden with the 184 electoral votes to Hayes'165.
Okay so Tilden gets more electoral votes also but A lot of these electoral votes are in dispute. They're saying they're disagreeing about the actual the final vote total. There's riots going on at these election offices.
It's chaos there. They're trying to communicate to these offices and it takes a while. And each party is reporting that their candidate won those states.
And no one's really quite sure what's what's really happened or who actually won. some of these states. And Hayes and the Republicans, of course, have their union forces still stationed across the South due to Reconstruction. They control a lot of these electoral boards across the South.
So that is going to come into play, and it's going to become known as the corrupt bargain. So Union troops occupy the South. They control these election boards and they're going to force it so that Hayes wins the election. They're going to kind of fix it. They're going to have their guys come in, go through the votes and make sure that Hayes comes out to be the winner.
Well, this isn't really a deep secret that they stole this election. The Democrats are sure of it and they think they can prove it. So they come to a compromise.
The Democrats agree, okay, you can have your president. We know you cheated. We know you really lost. We know you fixed this election so that Hayes won. But in return, you have to do something for us.
And what is that thing they have to do? They got to get all those troops out of the South. They have to end.
reconstruction, the whole reconstruction era has to be over. All those troops out of the South, reconstruction's over and you can have your Republican president, Rutherford B. Hayes, can win this election of 1876. And that's why you have this image here of Hayes heading off with Lady Liberty and the solid South winning the election. And this guy Conkling who helps fix the election is Mephistopheles, you know, making a deal with the devil. You know, they made a deal with the devil. They sold out the South because now all those troops are gone.
And all those former enslaved people who are still trying to get up on their feet and kind of rebuild and adjust to a new life. The Freedmen's Bureau is going to be gone. And what's known as the Jim Crow era is going to begin. And it's going to last 75 years or so.
So in the southern states. Now, the KKK, which had been wiped out under Grants Enforcement Act, they're going to slowly start to kind of build back up again. You're going to have segregation, like in this photo of this cafe.
You see on the left there is a white entrance and on the right there is a colored entrance. A segregation of society in almost all aspects of Southern society from restaurants like this to schools to churches to railroads to all public facilities. There would be a segregation of races and these southern states are going to find ways to deny the basic rights to African-Americans that they deserve. They're going to be denying them these rights.
Either it's taking away their right to vote through a poll tax, having to pay a tax to vote, a literacy test, making them pass a test before they can vote, and then allowing whites to get away with that, not having to do those through grandfather clauses. And this is going to last all the way through the Civil Rights era, this Jim Crow era of the South. So that would take you all the way through into the 1960s and 1970s, as you know.
But that is another unit for U.S. history. But hopefully you learned quite a bit about the age of Reconstruction and you understand how it came to be, what it was like, and how it ended. And stay tuned for more flipped classroom lessons like this from students of history.
Going forward. Take care.