US Hist 7.pdf

Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States

Lecture 7

Lecture Seven

(Re)construction of Modern America (1865-1895)

Scope: This lecture will examine the post war reconstruction of the South and the transformation of

the US into an industrial giant. Presidential as well as congressional reconstructions will be discussed

and the overall gains of the reconstruction will be assessed. The “redemption” of the south by the

Democratic Party will be seen as part of a larger process in which national attention was gradually

redirected away from reconstruction and toward new problems of urban and industrial America. The

rise of big business, the emergence of new social classes, and the consequences of economic

transformations of the east, the south and the west will be discussed so as to explain what processes

made the US the leading capitalist nation on earth.

Outline

I. Even while the Civil War was still going on Republicans in Congress and the White House

considered questions concerning the reconstruction of the southern states, the new system of free

labor that would replace slavery, and the political conditions under which the southern states

would be readmitted to the Union. By 1865 three proposals had emerged.

A. The Banks Plan—implemented during the war throughout the lower Mississippi Valley—

required African Americans to sign year-long contracts to work on their former plantations.

Workers would be paid for their labor, and would be provided with food and shelter. They

were forbidden to leave the plantations without permission.

B. Lincoln’s Ten-Percent Plan promised full pardons and the restoration of civil rights to all those

who swore their loyalty to the Union and specified that when the number of loyal whites in

any of the former Confederate states reached 10% of the 1860 voting population, they could

organize a new state constitution and set up a new government. The only stipulation was that

they recognize the abolition of slavery.

C. Complaining that Lincoln’s Ten-Percent Plan was too kind to former Confederates and that the

Banks Plan was too harsh on former slaves, Republican Radicals instead championed the

Wade-Davis Bill. This proposal stipulated that reconstruction could not begin until a majority

of a state’s white men swore an oath of allegiance to the Union. In addition, the Wade-Davis

Bill guaranteed full legal and civil rights to African Americans, but not the right to vote.

II. Presidential Reconstruction (1865-66) was an attempt of President Andrew Johnson to reconstruct

the south according to his own opinions and without consultation with Congress.

A. In 1865 Johnson offered amnesty and the restoration of property to white southerners who

swore an oath of loyalty to the Union. To earn readmission to the Union, the seceded states

were required to nullify their secession ordinances, repudiate their Confederate war debts, and

ratify the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery.

B. Johnson’s leniency encouraged a mood of defiance among white southerners.

D. In 1865, the Republicans established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned

Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Although designed as an emergency

measure to provide newly freed slaves with food and clothing, the Freedmen’s Bureau quickly

became involved in the politics of land redistribution.

Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States

Lecture 7

1. Leading Confederates soon assumed public office in the southern states and demanded the

restoration of all properties confiscated or abandoned during the war. Johnson quickly

obliged.

2. The Johnsonian state governments enacted a series of “Black Codes” severely restricting

the civil rights of freed people.

C. When Congress came back into session in late 1865, President Johnson was obsessed with

fears of “negro rule” in the South and insisted on the swift readmission of southern states that

were controlled by unrepentant Confederates. Congress refused.

1. The Republicans formed a Joint Committee on Reconstruction to review conditions in the

South and propose the terms for the readmission of the seceded states.

2. In 1866, Congress passed a landmark Civil Rights Act. It overturned the Dred Scott

decision by granting US citizenship to Americans regardless of race.

3. To ensure that the civil rights of the freed people would be impervious to future

presidential or congressional interference, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction proposed

a Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. The fourteenth guaranteed national

citizenship to all males born in the US, regardless of color.

4. Congress refused to recognize the state governments established under Johnson’s plan, and

made ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment by the former Confederate states a

requirement for their readmission to the Union.

III. Congressional Reconstruction (1866-70) was a partly successful attempt of Radical Republicans

who controlled Congress to reconstruct the south more radically than the President envisioned it.

A. In 1866 Congress repudiated presidential Reconstruction and in 1867 it passed two

reconstruction acts.

1. The First Reconstruction Act reduced the southern states to the status of territories and

divided the South into five military districts directly controlled by the US Army. Before

the southern states could be readmitted to the Union they had to draw up new constitutions,

ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and allow African-American men to vote.

2. The Second Reconstruction Act established the procedures to enforce African-American

suffrage by placing the military in charge of voter registration.

B. Beginning in 1867, the constitutions of the southern states were completely rewritten,

thousands of African Americans began to vote, and hundreds of them assumed public office in

Republican governments throughout the south. These Radical governments in the South

boasted several important achievements.

1. They funded the construction of hospitals, insane asylums, prisons, and roads.

2. They established public school systems.

3. They abolished the Black Codes, and passed statutes giving African-American workers

more control over the crops they grew.

C. Congressional Reconstruction enabled the creation of a new system of labor called

sharecropping.

1. In the sharecropping system an agricultural worker and his family agreed to work for one

year on a particular plot of land while the landowner provided the tools, seed, and the work

animals. At the end of the year the sharecropper and the landlord split the crop, perhaps

one-third going to the sharecropper and two-thirds to the owner.

Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States

Lecture 7

2. Sharecropping required landowners to break up their plantations into family-sized plots.

3. Sharecropping had advantages for landlords and for the workers too.

D. In 1870 Congressional Reconstruction led to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment that

prohibited the use of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” to disqualify voters

anywhere in the US. By outlawing voter discrimination on the basis of race, the Amendment

protected the most radical achievement of Congressional Reconstruction.

E. The end of Reconstruction came in 1877 as a result of a series of developments in the South

and in the north alike.

1. Postwar Americans witnessed an extraordinary display of public dishonesty and

corruption. Angered by corruption, white Republicans across the South succumbed in

growing numbers to the Democratic Party’s appeal for “redemption,” a restoration of white

supremacy. By “redeeming” their states from Republican rule, Democrats promised to end

corruption, bring prosperity and order.

2. By 1877 every southern state had been redeemed by the Democrats. The following year the

Supreme Court began to issue a series of rulings that further undermined the achievements

of Reconstruction.

3. In 1877 President Rutherford Hayes ordered the federal troops guarding the Republican

statehouses in South Carolina and Louisiana to return to their barracks. This order marked

the formal end of military occupation of the South and the symbolic end of the

Reconstruction process.

F. The achievements of Reconstruction were impressive. Across the South, African-American

men and women carved out a space in which their families could live more freely than ever

before. They established their own churches, sanctified their marriages by law, and educated

their children. African-American men registered to vote and elected to office some of the most

democratic state legislatures of the 19 th century. Voting with their feet, thousands more

repudiated the contract labor system in favor of an innovative compromise known as

sharecropping. Furthermore, Reconstruction added three important amendments to the

Constitution that transformed civil rights and electoral laws not only in the South but

throughout the nation.

IV. The rise of big business was the most spectacular feature of American capitalism in the 19 th

century. It was part of a dramatic economic transformation Americans passed through between

1870s and 1890s. When it was over, the US had become the leading capitalist nation on earth.

A. By 1880s railroads, the manufacturing and banking industries produced businesses that they

dwarfed their largest antebellum counterparts. The massive, complex bureaucracies of big

business were managed by professionals rather than owners. They were financed through a

national banking system centered on Wall Street. They marketed their goods and services

across the nation and around the world. Finally, big business generated wealth in staggering

concentrations.

B. One extraordinary career that perfectly illustrates the rise of big business was Andrew

Carnegie’s spectacular climb from rags to riches. Arriving in America at the age of twelve, the

poor Scots lad ended up the richest man in the world.

1. In the course of his career Carnegie mastered the telegraph, railroad, petroleum, iron, and

steel industries.

Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States

Lecture 7

2. He introduced modern management techniques and strict accounting procedures to

American manufacturing.

3. By 1890 Carnegie became a patron of culture and gave much of his money away for

building libraries, cultural institutions and endowing universities.

C. By 1880s big businesses consolidated and the names of a handful of wealthy capitalists

became closely associated with different industries: Gustavus Swift in meatpacking, John D.

Rockefeller in oil refining, Collis P. Huntington in railroads, J. P. Morgan in financing, and

Andrew Carnegie in steel. These powerful individuals were called “Robber Barons.”

D. Most big businesses were so big that no single individual or family could own them, much less

run them. And because they were so big, they had to be kept in operation continuously—even

during economic crises. By 1880s big businesses developed several strategies designed to

shield them from the effects of economic slumps and ruinous competition.

1. The most common strategy was Carnegie’s “vertical integration,” the attempt to control as

many aspects of a business as possible, from the production of raw materials to the sale of

the finished product.

2. The other strategy, devised by John D. Rockefeller, was the forming of trusts—elaborate

legal devices by which different producers came together under the umbrella of a single

company that could police competition internally.

3. Soon the trust gave way to the “holding company”. By 1900 many of the largest industries

in America were dominated by one or two massive holding companies.

E. In the south, these transformations produced two important results. One was rapid

industrialization. The other change was a transformation of sharecropping into wage labor, a

form of labor in which the employers had the most power.

V. The most important social consequence of these economic transformations was the emergence of

new social classes: a new millionaire class and a new middle class.

A. By 1890 the new millionaire class in America included about 4,000 families. At the very top of

the social pyramid were some 200 families, each worth more than 20 million (about 3 billion

by 2010 worth).

1. As a group America’s millionaires had a lot in common. Most traced their ancestry to

Great Britain, most were Protestant, and were unusually well educated. Except in the

South, this class voted Republican.

B. The new middle class emerged throughout 1870s although the phrase “middle class” was

introduced for the first time in the US only in 1889.

1. The backbone of the new middle class were professionals—architects, teachers, doctors,

lawyers and other professionals—who organized themselves into professional associations,

and set educational standards for admission.

2. Behind the professionals who ran the industrial and financial bureaucracies marched an

expanding white-collar army of cashiers, clerks, and government employees.

(1) White-collar workers were overwhelmingly men.

(2) They earned annual incomes far beyond those of independent craftsmen and factory

workers.

(3) By 1900, one of the sharpest markers of middle-class status was a home in a

respectable neighborhood or suburb.

Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States

Lecture 7

3. The lower rung of the middle class was made up of independent craftsmen. Their incomes

rarely matched those of white-collar clerks. The manual crafts were a bridge between the

remnants of the independent middle class and the growing industrial working class made

up of men and women alike.

VI. The economic transformation of the east and the south changed the West as well. By the time the

director of the US census declared the frontier “closed” in 1890, the political economy of the

American West was composed of railroad tycoons and immigrant workers, commercial farmers

and impoverished Native Americans, industrial magnates and choking miners.

A. In the second part of the 19 th century most Americans still believed that by migrating west, one

can escape the limitations of the urban and industrial East. Beyond the Mississippi River, as

the story went, lonesome cowboys and sturdy pioneers kept the dream of American

individualism alive. The realities of daily life in the American West challenged this enduring

legend. Far from escaping the social hierarchy of industrial capitalism, the settlers brought it

with them.

C. The journey across the Overland Trail changed over the years. By 1850s it became safer due to

string of forts along the various overland routes. Besides protecting migrants from Indians, the

forts became stopping points for wagon trains.

D. In 1850s the government began to pursue a long-term solution to the growing problem of

Native American-white relations in the trans-Mississippi West. The solution was the

“reservation” system in which each tribe would be given a separate territory and government

subsidies to entice the Indians to stay within their territories.

1. The reservation system was first proposed in Fort Laramie, Wyoming, in 1851 and for the

rest of the century the government struggled to force the Indians to accept it.

2. From the start the reservation system was riddled with corruption and difficult to enforce.

3. The flaws in the system led to wars that dragged on for many decades.

4. The breakthrough came with the extinction of the buffalo. Some 13 million bison in 1850

were reduced, by 1880, to a few hundred.

5. With their subsistence thus destroyed, the Indians’ surrender was only a matter of time. In

1881, Chief Sitting Bull and his starving men finally gave up. The Sioux war ended in

1890 with a massacre of 200 Native-American men, women, and children at Wounded

Knee, South Dakota.

E. Reformers who advocated reservations over extermination always believed that the Indians

should be absorbed into the political economy of capitalism.

1. By confining Native-Americans to reservations, the government hoped to gradually

accustom them to the idea of individual property, which would be the best method for their

reclamation and civilization.

2. Yet the cultivation of individual property meant the destruction of Native-American family

structures, political institutions, and economic relationships.

3. The reformers’ influence peaked in 1887 when Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act,

the most important piece of Indian legislation in the century. Under the terms of the Act

land within the reservations was broken up into separate plots and distributed among

B. The Homestead Act, passed by Congress during the Civil War, was designed to ensure that the

trans-Mississippi West would be settled by small, hard-working, independent farmers. In some

part it was so: most migrants went in family groups, and the families were mostly middle class.

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