1 gen 1888 anni - Summary

Descrizione:

Lasting Legacies
In the short run, the political events of 1877 made little difference to most southerners, black or white. Most of the work of “Redemption” had already been done. What mattered was the long, slow decline of Radical Republican power and the corresponding rise of Democrats in the South and nationally. It was obvious that so-called Redeemers in the South had assumed power through violence. But many Americans, including prominent classical liberals who shaped public opinion, believed the Democrats had overthrown corrupt, illegitimate governments and thus the end justified the means. After Democrats’ sweeping victories in the 1874 election, those who deplored the results had little political traction. The only remaining question was how far Reconstruction would be rolled back.

EXAM TIP
Defining the ways that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments established a basis for full equality of all citizens is important to know for the AP® Exam.

The South never went back to the antebellum status quo. Sharecropping, for all its flaws and injustices, was not slavery. Freedmen and freedwomen managed to resist gang labor and work on their own terms. They also established their right to marry, read and write, worship as they pleased, and travel in search of a better life — rights that were not easily revoked. Across the South, black farmers overcame great odds to buy and work their own land. African American businessmen built thriving enterprises. Black churches and community groups sustained networks of mutual aid. Parents sacrificed to send their children to school, and a few proudly watched their sons and daughters graduate from college.

Reconstruction had also shaken, if not fully overturned, the legal and political framework that had made the United States a white man’s country. This was a stunning achievement, and though hostile courts and political opponents undercut it, no one ever repealed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, or Fifteenth Amendments. They remained in the Constitution, as a foundation on which the twentieth-century civil rights movement would return and build (Chapter 26).

Still, in the final reckoning, Reconstruction failed. The majority of freedpeople remained in poverty, and by the late 1870s their political rights were also eroding. Vocal advocates of smaller government argued that Reconstruction had been a mistake; pressured by economic hardship, northern voters abandoned their southern Unionist allies. One of the enduring legacies of this process was the way later Americans remembered Reconstruction itself. After “Redemption,” generations of schoolchildren were taught that ignorant, lazy blacks and corrupt whites had imposed illegitimate Reconstruction “regimes” on the South. White southerners won national support for their celebration of a heroic Confederacy and “Redemption” after an era of Reconstruction misrule (see “Thinking Like a Historian”).

One of the first historians to challenge these views was the great African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois. In Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Du Bois meticulously documented the history of African American struggle, white vigilante violence, and national policy failure. If northerners had sustained Reconstruction with determination, he wrote, “we should be living today in a different world.” His words still ring true, but in 1935 historians ignored him. Not a single scholarly journal reviewed Du Bois’s important book. Ex-Confederates had lost the war but won control over the nation’s memory of Reconstruction.

Meanwhile, though their programs failed in the South, Republicans carried their nation-building project into the West, where their policies helped consolidate a continental empire. There, the federal power that had secured emancipation created another set of injustices — as well as the conditions for the United States to become an industrial power and a major leader on the world stage.


Postwar Republicans faced two tasks: restoring rebellious states to the Union and defining the role of emancipated slaves. After Lincoln’s assassination, his successor, Andrew Johnson, hostile to Congress, unilaterally offered the South easy terms for reentering the Union. Exploiting this opportunity, southerners adopted oppressive Black Codes and put ex-Confederates back in power. Congress impeached Johnson and, though failing to convict him, seized the initiative and placed the South under military rule. In this second, or radical, phase of Reconstruction, Republican state governments tried to transform the South’s economic and social institutions. Congress passed innovative civil rights acts and funded new agencies like the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Fourteenth Amendment defined U.S. citizenship and asserted that states could no longer supersede it, and the Fifteenth Amendment gave voting rights to formerly enslaved men. Debate over this amendment precipitated a split among women’s rights advocates, since women did not win inclusion.

Freedmen found that their goals conflicted with those of Republican leaders, who counted on cotton to fuel economic growth. Like southern landowners, national lawmakers envisioned former slaves as wageworkers, while freedmen wanted their own land. Sharecropping, which satisfied no one completely, emerged as a compromise suited to the needs of the cotton market and an impoverished, credit-starved region.

Nothing could reconcile ex-Confederates to Republican government, and they staged a violent counterrevolution in the name of white supremacy and “Redemption.” Meanwhile, struck by a massive economic depression, northern voters handed Republicans a crushing defeat in the election of 1874. By 1876, Reconstruction was dead. Rutherford B. Hayes’s narrow victory in the presidential election of that year resulted in withdrawal of the last Union troops from the South. A series of Supreme Court decisions also undermined the Fourteenth Amendment and civil rights laws, setting up legal parameters through which, over the long term, disenfranchisement and segregation would flourish.

Aggiunto al nastro di tempo:

Data: