Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd EditionCopyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company

The ruins of Richmond, in an 1865 photograph byAlexander Gardner.

The Nature of the War• One reason the war was so bloody is because men on both sides

were fighting for a cause they believed in to the root of their being. Another has to do with the nature of war. Once begun, war acquires a momentum of its own. Soldiers, generals, and presidents start doing what it takes to win.

• The Confederate line at Fredericksburg stretched for seven miles on a series of hills and ridges – on December 13 1862,

• Orders then rang out for the final advance. Quickly a new Federal brigade burst toward Marye's Heights and the "terrible stone wall," then another, and another, until three entire divisions had hurled themselves at the Confederate bastion. In one hour, the Army of the Potomac lost nearly 3,000 men; but the madness continued.

• During the Battle of Fredericksburg, Confederate artillery and infantry lined the heights. Not a single Union soldier reached the heights, 8,000 fell in the attempt.

• The hideous cries of the wounded, "weird, unearthly, terrible to hear and bear," echoed through the night.

• Why would Union General Hooker put so many of his men in a perilous suicidal mission?

Sullivan BallouBallou devoted his brief life to public service. He was elected in 1854 as clerk of the Rhode Island House of Representatives, later serving as its speaker.He married Sarah Hart Shumway on October 15, 1855, and the following year saw the birth of their first child, Edgar. A second son, William, was born in 1859.Ballou immediately entered the military in 1861 after the war broke out. He became judge advocate of the Rhode Island militia and was 32 at the time of his death at the first Battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861.

A War captured in Photography • Mathew Brady• His team of photographers

captured how the war became a lethal slaughter

• There are many more images from Northern than from Southern photographers. Why might that be and what, if anything, does the difference suggest about the two regions during the Civil War?

The Civil War: First Modern War• The Two Combatants

• The Technology of War• Mobilizing Resources• Strategies • Lincoln’s Mission for Emancipation• Questions:1. What made the Civil War the first modern war & how

did the public sphere shape public opinion as the war became more bloody?

2. Identify the early Southern successes and how the North ultimately defeated the South over four years.

3. Describe how the war developed from a one to preserving the Union to Freeing the slaves.

Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd EditionCopyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & CompanyA surgeon’s kit used in the Civil War

Battle Hymn of the Republic & DixielandMine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord, He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,He hath loosed his fateful lightningof His terrible swift sword,His truth is marching on

I wish I was in the land of cottonOld times there are not forgottenLook away, look away, look away to Dixie LandIn Dixie Land where I was bornEarly on one frosty mornLook away, look away, look away to Dixie LandI wish I was in DixieAway, awayIn Dixie Land I'll take my standTo live and die in DixieAway, away, away down south in DixieAway, away, away down south in Dixie

Look out, Mama,there's a white boatcomin' up the riverWith a big red beacon,and a flag,and a man on the railI think you'd better call John,'Cause it don'tlook like they're hereto deliver the mailAnd it's less than a mile awayI hope they didn't come to stayIt's got numbers on the sideand a gunAnd it's makin' big waves.

Powderfinger by Neil Young

Daddy's gone,my brother's out huntingin the mountainsBig John's been drinkingsince the river took Emmy-LouSo the powers that beleft me hereto do the thinkin'And I just turned twenty-twoI was wonderin' what to doAnd the closer they got,The more those feelings grew.

Daddy's rifle in my handfelt reassurin'He told me,Red means run, son,numbers add up to nothin'But when the first shothit the docks I saw it comin'Raised my rifle to my eyeNever stopped to wonder why.Then I saw black,And my face splashed in the sky.Shelter me from the powderand the fingerCover me with the thoughtthat pulled the triggerThink of meas one you'd never figuredWould fade away so youngWith so much left undoneRemember me to my love,I know I'll miss her.

• The Secession Movement – The Seven Deep Cotton Producers Leave US

• The Secession Crisis – Lincoln Inaugural Speech• And the War Came

Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd EditionCopyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & CompanyMap 14.1 The Secession of Southern States, 1860-1861

Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address was delivered by President Abraham Lincoln, on Monday, March 4, 1861. After being snuck into our nation’s capitol for fear of his life – Lincoln delivered a conciliatory message

" I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” ~ Abraham Lincoln

They thought it would be a short conflict….• The most destructive war in America's history was fought among its own

people.• The CIVIL WAR was a tragedy of unimaginable proportions. For four long

and bloody years, Americans were killed at the hands of other Americans. One of every 25 American men perished in the war. Over 620,000 soldiers were killed. Many civilians also died — in numbers often unrecorded.

• At the battle of Antietam, more Americans were killed than on any other single day in all of American history. On that day, 22,719 soldiers fell to their deaths — four times the number of Americans lost during the D-Day assault on Normandy in WWII. In fact, more American soldiers died in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined.

• The war was fought in American fields, on American roads, and in American cities with a ferocity that could be evoked only in terrible nightmares. Nearly every family in the nation was touched by this war. Scarcely a family in the South did not lose a son, brother, or father.

• Four long years of battle changed everything. No other event since the Revolutionary War altered the political, social, economic, and cultural fabric of the United States. In the end, a predominantly industrial society triumphed over an agricultural one. The Old South was forever changed. The blemish of slavery was finally removed from American life, though its legacy would long linger.

Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd EditionCopyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & CompanyFigure 14.1 Resources For War: Union Versus Confederacy

Anaconda Plan

Strategies: The Geography of the War

• The Civil War was fought in two main theaters: the East, where most of the fighting occurred in Virginia; and the West, where most of the fighting took place in the area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River.

• In the East, the North's main objective was the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, which was defended by Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia.

• Out West, the North's objective was to reopen the Confederate-controlled Mississippi River, and to use the river as an invasion highway into the South.

HOW DID PRESIDENT LINCOLN USE EXECUTIVE POWER TO PRESERVE THE FEDERAL UNION?

1. Message to Congress on July 1, 1861“no choice was left but to call out the war power of the Government; and so to resist force employed for its destruction by force for its preservation.” Lincoln claimed that his actions were necessary to save the Union and the Constitution – Congress then passed laws expanding Lincoln’s Presidential War time powers to defeat the CSA

2. The Prize Cases, which came before the Supreme Court in 1863 posed another constitutional test of Lincoln’s use of war powers during an emergency. On April 19, Lincoln had proclaimed a blockade of ports in the Confederate states. Four owners of ships seized by U.S. naval forces claimed the president had exceeded his executive authority under the Constitution by blockading seaports without a declaration of war by Congress. The Court decided (5 votes to 4) against the petitioners, and concluded that the president had constitutionally used his war powers in a moment of crisis to oppose an insurrection.

3. At the outset of the war, Lincoln suspended the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus and approved military trials for civilians accused of aiding or abetting the Confederacy in certain areas of the country. More than 12,000 civilians were arrested and held by the military during the Civil War.

4. John Merryman military prison in Maryland, where he had been detained for alleged pro-Confederacy actions.

General George McClellan

Catch Me if You Can…while I hide in the Shenandoah

Cotton Diplomacy & Bloody Antietam1. Initially, CSA President Jefferson Davis believed that if the South

withheld its cotton exports from England, the English would be economically pressured to support the southern cause.

2. Poor struggling yeoman southern farmers only saw such acts as further proof that the war was a “Rich man’s war and a poor man’s battle.”

3. However, England had a surplus of Cotton prior to the war’s start and began developing its own cotton industry in its colonial regions of Egypt and India.

4. Robert E. Lee Jefferson Davis believed that one more successful campaign might bring British and French recognition of the Confederacy.

5. Although Britain and France both saw advantages of a split United States, neither country was willing to support the Confederacy without being convinced the South could win. Lee and Davis were desperately seeking that decisive victory.

"The most deadly fire of the war. Rifles are shot to pieces in the hands of the soldiers, canteens and haversacks are riddled with bullets, the dead and wounded go down in scores." Captain Benjamin F. Cook of the 12th Massachusetts Infantry, on the attack by the Louisiana Tigers at the Cornfield

"So thick were men lying that General Hood found difficulty in keeping his horse from stepping on wounded men." General D. H. Hill, September 17, 1862, Antietam

At the place known as Antietam, Hood's Brigade had been so cut to pieces that when its dauntless commander was asked, "Where is your division?" Hood replied, "Dead on the field!"

1. On September 15, Lee deployed his 30,000 soldiers on some four miles of rising ground behind ANTIETAM CREEK. He utilized the cover of rock outcroppings, rolling farmland, stone walls, fields of standing corn, and a sunken road in the center of his line.

2. The battle began early on the morning of September 17 when Union troops under the command of GENERAL JOSEPH HOOKER attacked the forces of Stonewall Jackson across a cornfield that lay between them. The fighting was ferocious. The battle surged back and forth across the cornfield 15 times, costing each side nine generals. Within five hours, 12,000 soldiers lay dead or wounded, and the weary opponents stopped fighting for the day.

3. This day sits in history as the bloodiest single day America has ever suffered. Over 22,000 soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing — more than all such casualties during the entire American Revolution. Lee lost a quarter of his army; the survivors headed back to Virginia the next night.

1. By mid-1862 Lincoln had come to believe in the need to end slavery. Besides his disdain for the institution, he simply felt that the South could not come back into the Union after trying to destroy it.

2. The opposition Democratic Party threatened to turn itself into an antiwar party. Lincoln's military commander, General George McClellan, was vehemently against emancipation.

3. Many Republicans who backed policies that forbid black settlement in their states were against granting blacks additional rights.

4. When Lincoln indicated he wanted to issue a proclamation of freedom to his cabinet in mid-1862, they convinced him he had to wait until the Union achieved a significant military success.

1. On January 1, 1863, the war formally made its transition to one of securing the Union to one of finally abolishing slavery. By signing and issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln reflected his personal changing views upon slavery that would shape the nation’s as well. However, the document did not free all the slaves and at first applied to very few.

2. Based on Lincoln’s authority as military commander-in-chief, the proclamation exempted areas under Union control. Thus, it did not apply to loyal border slave states that had not seceded or to parts of the Confederacy occupied by Union forces, such as Tennessee and parts of Virginia and Louisiana. But it declared free the vast majority of the South’s slaves, more than 3 million men, women, and children. Still behind Confederate lines, these slaves would be free only when Union military success made them so.

3. The Emancipation Proclamation made the Union Army an agent of freedom and promised the death of slavery by combining the goals of abolition and the Union. It altered the nature of the Civil War and the course of American history. It also represented a change in Lincoln’s thinking. Lincoln did not mention compensating slaveholders for the loss of their slaves, nor did he mention colonization. The order committed the North to enlisting blacks soldiers in the Union Army.

4. Now the Civil War, begun to preserve the nation, now promised a revolutionary transformation of southern life and a redefinition of American freedom. Without colonization, emancipation meant incorporating freed slaves into American life. A new system of labor, politics, and race relations would have to replace slavery.

“Fellow citizens, we cannon escape history, the fiery trial through which we pass will light down, in honor or dishonor to the latest generation…in giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve,” Lincoln announced in December 1862 just prior to the formal adoption of the Emancipation Proclamation.

“Sound the loud timbrel o’ver Egypt’s dark sea, Jehovah has triumphed, his people are free,” exclaimed a black preacher during a celebration in Boston.

William Tecumseh Sherman put it more bluntly: "We have not yet killed enough," he told another general. "We must make this war so fatal and horrible that a century will pass before...new traitors will dare to resort to violence and war to achieve their ends.”

As Sherman said before his march from Atlanta to the city of Savannah Georgia in 1864: "This war is different from European wars of the past. We're fighting not only a hostile army, but a hostile people. And we must make them, old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war."

"You Southerners underestimate the people of the North. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth--right at your doors. You are bound to fail."

Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd EditionCopyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & CompanyMap 14.5 The Civil War, 1863

1863: Turning Points – Vicksburg Siege, The Threshold of Gettysburg, Gettysburg Address – A New Birth of Freedom

Vicksburg: The Key to Ending Southern Economic Stability & Moral

1. The Vicksburg campaign brought the Union army, for the first time, into the heart of cotton culture.

2. And it began, and this is important, at the time Lincoln signed his Emancipation Proclamation on January l, l863. These factors of geography and timing would make it the most important military campaign of the war.

3. It took Grant 6 months to capture the place. And in trying to capture it his huge, marauding army roamed over the countryside, confiscating and burning plantations and freeing slaves, and causing general wreck and ruin.

For the South it was a cruel irony. In holding on to Vicksburg, Rebel soldiers were losing, losing their farms, losing their slaves, and having their wives and children turned into terror-stricken refugees by Yankee raiders. But maybe the worst indignity, the worst insult of all, was seeing their former slaves in Yankee blue, carrying muskets.So Grant settled in for a siege. Every night his men dug approach trenches toward the Confederate lines. And every day and night his artillery and the Navy's mortar boats pounded the city. For 47 days the two armies faced each other at distances, in some places, of less than 25 feet.

Robert E. Lee had a vision.• He proposed to take the

offensive, invade Pennsylvania, and defeat the Union Army in its own territory. Such a victory would relieve Virginia of the burden of war, strengthen the hand of PEACE DEMOCRATS in the North, and undermine Lincoln's chances for reelection.

• It would reopen the possibility for European support that was closed at Antietam. And perhaps, it would even lead to peace.

• The battle that would turn the tide of the war was fought at Gettysburg is a small Pennsylvania town 50 miles NW of the nation’s capital – it was known as a seminary college and a cross roads for railroads…

• The result of this vision was the largest battle ever fought on the North American continent. This was GETTYSBURG, where more than 170,000 fought and over 40,000 were casualties.

• The worst sight in war is a battlefield after the battle. At Gettysburg, where there were 50,000 casualties, the scene was beyond belief. Two gigantic armies, Robert E. Lee's army of 70,000 and George Gordon Meade's army of 90,000, had fought the greatest battle of the Civil War in a college town of 2,500 residents. They shot the place, and each other, to pieces.

• At noon on July 2, the second day of the battle, Lee ordered his divisions to attack, hoping to crumble both sides of the Union line and win the battle. The BIG ROUND TOP and LITTLE ROUND TOP were nearby hills that had been left unprotected. If the Confederates could take these positions, they could surround the Union forces.

• Union troops under COLONEL JOSHUA CHAMBERLAIN arrived just in time to meet Confederate troops charging up the hill to Little Round Top. In some of the most ferocious fighting of the battle, Chamberlain's 20th Maine held on to Little Round Top and perhaps saved the Union from defeat.

• Lee was determined to leave Pennsylvania with a victory. On the third day of battle, he ordered a major assault against the center of the Union line on CEMETERY RIDGE. Confederate batteries started to fire into the Union center. The firing continued for two hours. At 3 p.m., 14,000 Confederate soldiers under the command of GENERAL GEORGE PICKETT began their famous charge across three-quarters of a mile of open field to the Union line.

• Few Confederates made it. Lee's attempt for a decisive victory in Pennsylvania had failed. He had lost 28,000 troops — one-third of his army. A month later, he offered his resignation to Jefferson Davis, which was refused. Meade had lost 23,000 soldiers.

• The hope for Southern recognition by any foreign government was dashed. The war continued for two more years, but Gettysburg marked the end of Lee's major offensives. The Confederacy tottered toward its defeat.

Two sides of a coin in our national fountain

A New Birth Of Freedom

• http://myloc.gov/Multimedia/Gettysburg.aspx• Lincoln had been invited to speak a dedication of a national cemetery for the

Union soldiers who died at a Gettysburg• He would follow distinguished speaker Edward Everett who spoke for over an hours • Anticipating the President’s speech, a photographer began setting up his camera – • Lincoln stood up took his speech out of his hat and delivered the most significant

speech in our history – it only lasted 2 minutes – The Photographer missed it – but we won’t

• What does it mean??

The Gettysburg Addressafternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863

1. Lincoln attempted to redefine the Civil War itself.2. For years, the South had argued that the U.S. Constitution allowed for both the

institution of slavery as well as the secession of the Confederate states in defense of its rights.

3. Lincoln turned that on its head, stating that the true moral and legal codes of the nation preceded the Constitution and were found instead in the Declaration of Independence, with its “proposition that all men are created equal”—blacks as well as whites.

4. Surrounded by the recently buried dead of the Civil War’s bloodiest battle, he argued that the conflict must have higher, loftier goals than previously stated. No longer could either side view it as a fight to preserve just one nation.

5. Instead, it was a battle to defend the very idea of democracy itself, proving that the idea of “government of the people, by the people, for the people” was possible and ushering in a “new birth of freedom.”

6. Edward Everett seems to have been among the first to realize that his own speech would be best remembered as, essentially, a historical warm-up act. The day after the ceremony, he wrote to Lincoln, famously stating that he hadn’t come “as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

A. Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that "all men are created equal."

B. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so that this nation might live. It is all together fitting and proper that we do this.

C. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow, this ground—The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.

D. It is rather for us, the living, to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us —that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain;

E. that this nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Lincoln’s Thesis for Freedom

New York City Draft RiotsJuly 14-16 1863

Andersonville Prison CampAndersonville held more captured Union soldiers than any other Confederate camp, a total of more than 45,000, nearly 30 percent of whom died in captivity.

The North had learned of the camp's appalling conditions well before the emaciated survivors were released in 1865, and outraged citizens urged retribution on Southern prisoners of war.

That was hardly necessary: the Union had its own wretched prison camps, including Elmira, New York, where the death rate approached Andersonville's, even though the North was far better equipped to cope with captured soldiers. Mismanagement and severe shortages were more to blame for the horrors of Andersonville than any deliberate attempt to mistreat prisoners.

Fort Pillow & Nathan Bedford Forest“The affair at Fort Pillow was simply an orgy of death, a mass lynching to satisfy the basest of conduct – intentional murder – for the vilest of reasons – racism and personal enmity.”“Whether the massacre was premeditated or spontaneous does not address the more fundamental question of whether a massacre took place... it certainly did, in every dictionary sense of the word.” “One of the wounded negroes told me that he had'nt done a thing, and when the rebels drove our men out of the fort they (our men) threw away their guns and cried out that they surrendered; but the rebels kept on shooting them down until they had shot all but a few.” ~ ROBERT S. CRITCHELL, USN as reported to New York Times published May 3, 1864

Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Speech March 4, 1864

Lincoln's Second Inaugrual Address delivered on March 4, 1865. Inspired by the Bible, Lincoln refers to the outcome of the war as “God’s Will” and impresses upon his audience of 14,000 that “forgiveness and mercy” should reign over the land when the war endsThis is the speech in which he urges Americans to work together to heal the nation, "(w)ith malice toward none, with charity for all...."

1. Expecting the Civil War to end within a month but concerned that his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation may be discarded by the courts once the war had concluded and the 13th Amendment defeated by the returning slave states, Lincoln believed it was imperative to pass the a constitutional amendment by the end of January 1865, thus removing any possibility that slaves who have already been freed may be re-enslaved.

2. To gain support from both Radical Republicans, led by Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner who demanded an immediate emancipation of all slaves, including universal suffrage, and conservative Republicans led by party founder Francis Blair who desired a negotiated peace settlement with the CSA – Lincoln had significant obstacles in winning the passage.

3. In addition, his “Team of Rivals” – his own cabinet pressured Lincoln to delay the Amendment following the many new Republican legislators who had defeated many Democrats in the 1864 Mid-term elections.

4. Nevertheless, Lincoln firmly fought for the passage with political savvy, compromises and Grant’s timely capture of Petersberg Harbor – the gateway to finally capturing the CSA’s capitol of Richmond.

5. On January 31, 1865, Congress, after months of debate and delay approved the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery throughout the entire Union.

6. The Thirteenth Amendment completed the abolition of slavery in the United States, which had begun with President Abraham Lincoln issuing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

Passage of the 13th Amendment

1. In November 1864, Sherman started a “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to the Georgia coast. His forces destroyed railroads, buildings, and food and supplies to deny their use by Confederate troops.

2. Sherman’s vision of destroying civilian property and resources as a way to win the war was controversial but very modern. Sherman continued his path of destruction into South Carolina, freeing slaves and ruining plantations. Total war meant the total defeat of the old South

3. On April 2, Grant finally pierced Lee’s lines at Petersburg, causing Lee to retreat and abandon Richmond, which was occupied by northern troops the next day.

4. On April 4, Lincoln, ignoring his own safety, walked Richmond’s streets, accompanied by only a dozen troops. Slaves celebrated and praised him everywhere he went. Lee and his army headed west but were soon surrounded by Grant’s army.

5. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, on April 9, bringing the Civil War to an end. Only five days later, before Lincoln could announce plans to reconstruct the south, he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a celebrated actor, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.

Gone With the Wind: 1864/65 – The Surrender of the Confederates States of America

Twenty two after seven

The Conflict over Reconstruction• Lincoln’s 10 % Plan• Andrew Johnson• The Failure of Presidential

Reconstruction• The Black Codes• The Radical Republicans• The Origins of Civil Rights• The Fourteenth Amendment• The Reconstruction Act• Impeachment and the Election of Grant• The Fifteenth Amendment• The “Great Constitutional Revolution”

Lincoln’s Plan 10% Plan LenientWade Davis Bill Responds – In a Harsher Manner

I) Requirements for reconstruction.States had to apply for a pardon.10% of 1860 electorate had to sign a loyalty oath.Property return to southerners.Seceded states had to create new Constitution and ratify 13th

AmendmentHis plan died with his assassination

In opposition to Lincoln's plan, the 1864 Wade-Davis Bill proposed that Confederate territories would only be readmitted into the Union after a series of steps. First, a simple majority of white, male southerners from their individual states had to declare alliance to the Union. At this time (when the simple majority is reached), the states would be able to hold a state convention to elect their government officials. However, unlike the Lincoln Plan, only those who swore to the Ironclad Oath would be able to vote for these delegates.

Reconstruction1. Spanning the momentous years from 1866 to 1877,

Reconstruction was the extraordinary rebuilding of a shattered American Spirit -- Southern and Northern, white and black -- as they struggle to shape new lives for themselves in a world turned upside down.

2. Reconstructing was one of the most daunting challenges ever faced by the American people. The Northern economy emerged from the war stronger than ever, poised for an unprecedented expansion. But the South was bankrupt and prostrate, its farms and factories in ruins.

3. It was also the new birth of freedom Lincoln had addressed at Gettysburg when almost 4 million freed African American slaves sought their own path to pursue their own happiness secured by Jefferson’s former declaratory promise made in 1776.

4. After four bloody years of civil war, North and South would continue to fight over the meaning of freedom, the meaning of citizenship, and the survival of the nation itself.

What it is to Be Free

On January 12, 1865 General Sherman and Secretary of War Stanton met soon to be freed slave political leaders in the city Sherman had sacked for Lincoln’s X-Mas present, Savannah Georgia. During the meeting former slave Garrison Frasier told the federal officials what he believed Freedom meant:

To not be forced to work but to work for one’s own fruits of his labor – to have land and work it – sufficient intelligence to receive equal protection under the laws.

Special Field Order 15 (Jan. 16 1865)

I) Why issued by William T. Sherman?

II) Parts of coastal Georgia and S. Carolina were given to former slaves.

a) 40 acres and a loan of mules

III) 40,000 settled in 400,000 acres.

This act became the model for what would be called the Freedmen’s Bureau – Federally funded programs that provided political, educational and economic support for freed slaves

What former slaves wanted…

• Family• Work• Education• Religion• Political

Participation

What they got….• Sharecropping• Increased Debt• Continued resistance

from racist southerners• Terrorism from KKK

Office of Freedmen’s Bureau, Memphis, Tennessee, Harper’s Weekly, June 2, 1866

Biggest failure was not providing direct deeds to

land and initiating long term reform

I) Established March 1865 - 1870 headed by O.O. Howard

II) Only 1,000 FB Agents served the entire South

The Freedmen’s Bureau provided food,

clothing, fuel, and supervised abandoned land.

a) Legal assistance to blacks.b) Medical Carec) Helped fund schools. By

1869, 3000 school serving 150,000 black students

Freedman’s Bureau

A recalcitrant southern racist attitude prevailed that never would freed slaves enjoy any semblance of equality. African Americans wanted to be homesteaders and have economic autonomy over their own, family and community welfare – what they got was a sharecropping system that kept them as second class citizens and under perpetual debt.

Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd EditionCopyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & CompanyMap 15.1 The Barrow Plantation

"What Is Freedom?": Reconstruction, 1865–1877The Meaning of Freedom

• Blacks and the Meaning of Freedom

• Families in Freedom• Church and School• Political Freedom• Land, Labor, and

Freedom• Masters without

Slaves• The Free Labor

Vision

Map 15.1 The Barrow Plantation

The Meaning of Freedom• The Freedmen’s Bureau• The Failure of Land Reform

1. In May 1865, Johnson started to release proclamations that inaugurated a period that historians call Presidential Reconstruction (1865–1867).

2. Johnson offered pardons, which restored political and property rights (except for slaves), to all white southerners who took an oath of allegiance, excluding only Confederate leaders and wealthy planters whose prewar property was worth more than $20,000. But Johnson soon pardoned those exempted by this rule.

3. He also appointed provisional governors and ordered them to call state conventions, elected by whites only, to establish loyal southern state governments. These new state governments were required only to abolish slavery, repudiate secession, and refuse to pay Confederate debts.

4. While many people in the North at first supported Johnson’s plan, southern whites mostly returned prominent Confederates and old elites to power and violence against the freed people and northerners in the South generated opposition to Johnson’s policies.

I) Pardon southern states.b) Southern states took oath of allegiance.II) Tensions between the Republican party.

Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (1865-67)

• The Black Codes1. New state laws in the South regulating the lives of former

slaves, called the Black Codes, caused the most opposition to Johnson’s Reconstruction policy.

2. While these laws gave blacks the right to legally marry, own property, and access the courts in some ways, they denied them rights to testify against whites, serve on juries or state militias, or vote.

3. They also allowed authorities to arrest and hire out to white landowners any blacks who refused to sign annual labor contracts, a measure to force the former slaves to return to the plantations.

4. Some states prohibited blacks from buying land and allowed judges to assign black children to work for their former owners without parental consent.

5. These codes, an effort to reinstitute conditions of slavery, violated the free labor principles of the Republican North and caused many in the North to believe that Johnson’s policy was encouraging white southerners to restore their prewar way of life.

Radical Reconstruction: 1867-18771. Led by Representative Thaddeus Stevens from Pennsylvania and

Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts & the CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS OF 1866 brought RADICAL REPUBLICANS to power. They wanted to punish the South, and to prevent the ruling class from continuing in power.

2. Moderate Republicans sought reconciliation with Johnson, but when Black Codes and Johnson reinstated the The Southern “Old Guard” to suppress Black political empowerment – both Radicals and Moderates clashed with Johnson over Reconstruction Legislation

3. They passed the MILITARY RECONSTRUCTION ACTS OF 1867, which divided the South into five military districts and outlined how the new governments would be designed.

4. Under federal bayonets, blacks, including those who had recently been freed, received the right to vote, hold political offices, and become judges and police chiefs.

5. They held positions that formerly belonged to Southern Democrats.

1866 Civil Rights ActAlthough the military conflict had ended, Reconstruction was in many ways still a war. This important struggle was waged by radical northerners who wanted to punish the South and Southerners who desperately wanted to preserve their way of life.

1. Equality before the law was central to the bill, making it impossible for states to have laws, like the Black Codes, that discriminated against blacks.

2. Free labor values also informed the bill, which prohibited laws denying citizens’ rights to make contracts, bring lawsuits, or enjoy protection of person and property. The bill said nothing of black suffrage.

3. Johnson, who shocked the Congress by vetoing both bills, claimed he was defending states’ rights and said blacks did not deserve citizenship. Johnson’s vetoes alienated many in the Republican Party, and in April 1866, the Civil Rights Bill became the first major law in U.S. history to be passed over a presidential veto.

Constitutional Reform Is the Most Important Legacy of Reconstruction

Slavery, in practical terms, died with the end of the Civil War.

Three Constitutional amendments altered the nature of African-American rights. The Thirteenth Amendment formally abolished slavery in all states and territories.

The FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT prohibited states from depriving any male citizen of equal protection under the law, regardless of race.

The FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT granted the right to vote to African-American males. Ratification of these amendments became a requirement for Southern states to be readmitted into the Union. Although these measures were positive steps toward racial equality, their enforcement proved extremely difficult.

• The 1866 elections revolved around the Fourteenth Amendment.

• Johnson urged voters to elect men to Congress who supported his policies and claimed that Radicals were plotting to assassinate him.

• This, along with riots in southern cities targeting blacks, undermined support for Johnson’s allies, and Republican opponents emerged victorious in the elections.

• But every southern state except Tennessee refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.

• Johnson and the white South’s resistance pushed moderate Republicans into the Radical camp,

• and in March 1867, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act, which temporarily divided the South into five military districts and called for the establishment of new state governments, in which black men could vote. This inaugurated the period of Radical Reconstruction, lasting until 1877

I) In 1865 black demand civil equality.II) 735,000 black men registereda) Men voted Republican1. The Reconstruction Act sparked great political activity amongst former

slaves in the South, who held mass meetings, went on strike, and tried to desegregate public transportation.

2. Thousands of southern blacks joined the Union League, an organization tied to the Republican Party, and the vast majority of eligible black voters registered to vote.

3. But the 2,000 African-Americans who held public office in Reconstruction represented a radical shift of power in the South. Two blacks were elected to the U.S. Senate, fourteen were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and one served as the first black governor, in Louisiana. Many blacks served in state legislatures and more blacks than ever before held lower offices such as sheriff, tax assessor, and policeman. Most were former slaves.

4. In the words of one former slave turned political leader, blacks had heard “the tocsin of freedom.”

Impeachment of Johnson1. Congress simultaneously approved a measure prohibiting the

president from removing certain officeholders, including members of the cabinet, without the Senate’s consent.

2. The Tenure of Office Act passed in 1866, was the principle act that Congress relied upon to check Johnson’s refusal to pass Radical Reconstruction legislation and maintain a Republican power in Congress

3. Johnson believed this unconstitutionally limited his authority, and when he removed secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton, a Radical ally, the House approved articles of impeachment—sending charges against Johnson to the Senate, which was to decide his fate.

4. This was the first time a president had faced trial in the Senate for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Not all Republicans supported impeachment, and Johnson indicated he would halt his interference with Congress’s Reconstruction policy.

5. Twenty Republicans refused to convict and He barely escaped impeachment by one vote.

1. Grant won the presidential contest by a slim margin.

2. Despite having been a heroic aggressive military figure, the Grant Presidency was saddled by continued sectional turmoil, political corruption in his cabinet and his failure to continue economically and politically empower freed slaves.

3. However during his two terms, Republicans responded in February 1869 by adopting the third and final Reconstruction amendment, the Fifteenth, which barred federal and state governments from denying the right to vote to any citizen based on race.

1. Denounced by Democrats, the amendment was ratified in 1870. The Fifteenth Amendment enabled states to make suffrage restrictions not based on race, such as literacy tests, property requirements, and poll taxes, and did not give the vote to women, but it represented the culmination of abolitionism.

2. Reconstruction laws and amendments reflected the power of the new national state and the idea that citizens should enjoy legal equality.

3. They were, in the words of one Republican, a “great Constitutional revolution” that transformed the federal system and the language of American freedom. Before the Civil War, citizenship had been bounded by race.

4. But Reconstruction laws rejected the notion that citizenship was reserved only for whites. Their guarantees of legal equality affected discriminatory laws in all states, North and South.

The Fifteenth AmendmentThe “Great Constitutional Revolution”

• Reconstruction laws and amendments reflected the power of the new national state and the idea that citizens should enjoy legal equality. They were, in the words of one Republican, a “great Constitutional revolution” that transformed the federal system and the language of American freedom. Before the Civil War, citizenship had been bounded by race. But Reconstruction laws rejected the notion that citizenship was reserved only for whites. Their guarantees of legal equality affected discriminatory laws in all states, North and South.

• The new amendments also changed the relationship between states and the federal government. The Bill of Rights had assumed that the central government threatened liberties, but the Reconstruction amendments assumed that only the national government could protect individual rights. They made the Constitution an instrument by which vulnerable minorities could make claims for freedom and against government misconduct at all levels. Many important twentieth-century Supreme Court decisions were based on the Fourteenth Amendment, such as the 1954 Brown ruling outlawing school segregation.

The South’s new state governments also empowered new groups of whites. Some were northerners who migrated to the South after the war. Opponents called them “carpetbaggers,” implying they packed their possessions in a suitcase to quickly move to the South and gain the spoils of office. While a few were corrupt, most

carpetbaggers were Union Army veterans who decided to stay in the south after the war. Others were investors in land and railroads seeking economic opportunity. Yet others were teachers, Freedmen’s Bureau officers, or others who traveled to the South to help former slaves.

Most white Republicans, however, were from the South, and were despised by former Confederates, who saw them as treasonous “scalawags.” While a few were wealthy whites, most were non-slaveholding small white farmers from the southern upcountry. Many had been Unionists during the war or hoped Reconstruction governments would pass laws favoring indebted farmers.

• Violence was endemic in the Reconstruction-era south.

1. At first it was local and unorganized, with blacks being assaulted and murdered for refusing to make way for whites on sidewalks or trying to purchase land.

2. But the establishment of Republican state governments after 1867 ignited organized campaigns of violence against supporters of Radical Reconstructi.

3. Secret societies, most notably the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), tried to prevent blacks from voting and tried to destroy the Republican Party by assassinating local leaders and public officials.

1. The KKK, a terrorist organization started in 1866 in Tennessee that soon spread throughout the Southon, functioned as the military arm of the Democratic Party in that region.

2. In many counties, it started a “reign of terror” against black and white Republican leaders. But blacks were especially targeted, particularly blacks who held office or exercised political rights.

3. The new southern governments could not suppress the KKK, and in 1870 and 1871 Congress adopted Enforcement Acts that outlawed terrorist groups, allowed the president to use the army against them, and defined acts that deprived citizens of civil and political rights as federal crimes.

4. President Grant dispatched federal marshals and troops to suppress the KKK, and by 1872, most areas of the South were peaceful.

The End of ReconstructionNorthern commitment to Reconstruction declined in the 1870s. Radicals such as Thaddeus Stevens passed away or otherwise left politics, and they were replaced by figures less dedicated to equal rights for blacks.

Northerners more and more felt the South should solve its own problems without continuous federal involvement.

Many in the North believed that now that the national government had freed the slaves, made them citizens, and given them the vote, blacks had to depend on themselves.

Northern capital was diverted to western investments such as the Transcontinental R/R & emerging western towns and cities

The Overthrow of Reconstruction• The Triumph of the Redeemers

• The Disputed Election and Bargain of 1877

1. The compromise of 1877 was an unwritten, informal deal between the Republican and Democrats of Congress to recognize the Republican Rutheford B. Hayes as president if the federal troops from the southern states were removed, at least one southern Democrat was appointed into Rutherford Hayes’s administration, a second transcontinental railroad in the south was constructed, and if the legislation was enacted to help industrialize the South.

2. The Compromise of 1876 effectively ended the reconstruction era. Southern Democrats’ promises to protect civil and political rights of blacks were not kept and interference in southern affairs completely ended. Right???

3. Exclusion of black voters also occurred. Although several laws had already been formed, southern legislatures continued to pass more laws requiring the separation of whites from persons of color on public transportation, in schools, parks, restaurants, theaters, and other locations.

4. These segregationist statues, known as the “Jim Crow laws”, governed life in the South through the middle of the next century, ending not until 1960s.