Many people had different views and ideas about Reconstruction. There was much debate about how the Confederate states, which included Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, should be readmitted into the Union. Some people believed that the states should be treated as territories, and others believed that the southern leaders should be punished instead of the states. Still, others believed that the South still belonged to the Union because secession was illegal. During the Civil War, on December 1863, President Lincoln announced his 10 % Plan for Reconstruction. Many Northerners considered it to be too mild, but the blacks condemned it for ignoring saying nothing about civil rights fir the freedmen and ignoring black suffrage. Lincoln’s plan was never carried out because he was assassinated less than one week after the Civil War. However, while Lincoln was president, a national debate developed over whether Congress or the President should establish the Reconstruction policy. Andrew Johnson, who became President of the U.S. in 1865, had his own Reconstruction plan, but it turned out to be unsuccessful largely because of the unfair ways in which blacks were treated. According to his plan, pardons would be offered to all southern whites except wealthy Confederate supporters and the main Confederate leaders. Conventions were to be held by the defeated southern states and new state governments were to be formed. These new governments had to make a vow of loyalty to the nation and abolish slavery in order to rejoin the Union. However, this plan did not offer the blacks a role in this process; he left the responsibility of determining the black people’s roles to the southern states. Under his plan, new state governments were organized throughout the South during the summer and fall of 1865. These states governments passed a series of laws known as the Black Codes. These codes allowed employees to whip black workers, allowed states to jail unemployed blacks and to hire out their children, and forced blacks to sign labor contracts that required them to work a job for a full year. The Republicans in Congress believed that Johnson’s plan was a failure, not only because of the Black Codes that were passed, but because when Congress reassembled in December of 1865, numerous newly ele... ... middle of paper ... ...icans. The Reconstruction did have some good effects. Some examples of its positive effects are that it restored the Union, started the rebuilding of the South, and public schools were established in the south that had a lasting importance on the region. However, the many negative effects of this era outweigh the positive effects. It failed to solve the economic problems of either the blacks or the South as a whole. Few blacks acquired land and so lacked the economic independence that it provided. Most blacks continued to pick cotton land that was owned by whites, the same labor they had performed as slaves. The South remained the poorest, most backward section of the country. In politics, Reconstruction made most southern whites firm supporters of the Democratic party and created what was known as the “Solid South”. For more than 40 years after Reconstruction, no Republican Presidential candidate received a majority of votes in any southern states. Reconstruction failed to bring racial harmony to the South. Whites refused to share important political power with blacks. In turn, blacks set up their own churches and other institutions rather than attempting to join white society.
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Show MoreThe Civil War was at most one of the darkest hours in United States history. Bloodshed and loss quaked the land of our forefathers in a way we could not imagine. In the wake of the battles, the Union forces found new hope in their victories and came out on top in the victory of the war. In the hope to reconstruct the United States Abraham Lincoln proceeded with the new idea of reconstruction. The main idea was to give the freed slaves more rights and try to condone for the sins of the past and present. This was a short-lived initial plan, as the hopes and plans changed when Andrew Johnson took to presidency. His views of reconstruction conflicted towards the reconstruction, and the plan soon was updated to fit the new president’s beliefs. The
The most critical issue raised by the North’s victory was the South acceptance of transition of freedom for former slaves. Since most of southern whites did not agree with the idea of freedmen, they created several ways to foreclose the blacks to exercise their rights. The South utilized dirty tactics to preserve the idea of slavery, such as laws as the black codes, lynching and other violent ways promoted by groups known as Ku Klux Klan.
President Lincoln was elected into presidency at a horrible time for the country but he still fought to do the best he could. After the civil war the main focus of Lincoln was to rebuild the North but still keep the South happy. His plans consisted of making the North's reconstruction a main focal point and distributing 10% of the damages done to the south to aid their reconstruction. President Lincoln thought that the states that seceded last should be given less guilt than the ones who seceded first. He gave more money to Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia and he treated them better because they were the last to secede. Along with his plans for reconstruction came the Radical Republicans who were a small minority in congress. They were very strict on giving all rights to African Americans and wanted to punish the south. All of these ideas and plans for Lincoln were all good ideas and could have been successful but they came to an abrupt end when Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in 1865.
After a war that claimed the lives of more men than that of all other wars combined, much of the country was left in ruins, literally and figuratively. Dozens of towns in the South had been burned to the ground. Meanwhile, the relations between the North and South had crumbled to pieces. Something needed to be done so that the country could once again be the United States of America, not the Divided States of America. The years from 1865 to 1877 were a time of rebuilding – the broken communities and the broken relations. This time period was known as Reconstruction. Reconstruction was a failure on the basis that the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments that were passed should have given protection and freedom to the African American people, instead, it actually hurt them because the laws were not enforced, and eventually lead to the organization of white supremacy terrorist groups.
Although Lincoln and Johnson both passed Reconstruction plans that helped reunite the north and the south, ultimately Congress was not satisfied and passed its own plan. Lincoln passed a rather forgiving Reconstruction plan because in his opinion, the Confederate states had never seceded from the Union. The Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction included a ten percent plan, which “ would recognize them as people of the states within which they acted, and aid them to gain in all respects full acknowledgement and enjoyment of statehood, even though the persons who thus acted were but a tenth part of the original voters of their states” (W...
There were many successes and failures of reconstruction in the south after the Civil War. Here are some of the positive and negative things that came out of reconstruction: Positive: the reunification of the union, Expansion of the South & North’s economy, More laws, Freedmen’s Bureau, Education, The compromise of 1877, and the Enforcement Act of 1870. Negative: Ku Klux Klan, Poverty, Sharecropping, and black codes.
His idea was known as the ten percent plan in which ten percent of a states qualified voter would take a loyalty oath to be readmitted into the Union. This would allow the south to get back into the main stream and find some solutions to its many problems. Unfortunately for Lincoln and unfortunately for America, Lincoln would be assainated only one month after the south surrendered. This presented America with one more hurdle to overcome, and that hurdle was to initially be jumped by the newly appointed President Johnson.
After the Civil War, America went through a period of Reconstruction. This was when former Confederate states were readmitted to the Union. Lincoln had a plan that would allow them to come back, but they wouldn’t be able to do it easily. He would make 10% of the population swear an oath of loyalty and establish a government to be recognized. However, he was assassinated in Ford’s Theater and Andrew Johnson became the president; Johnson provided an easy path for Southerners. Congress did their best to ensure equal rights to freedmen, but failed because of groups who were against Reconstruction, white southern Democrats gaining control within the government and the lack of having a plan in place for recently freedmen.
Reconstruction was the period that followed the American Civil War in which attempts were made to amend the wrongs of slavery and the political, economical and social problems that were caused. When Andrew Johnson became president in 1865, he began the period of Presidential Reconstruction. He offered a pardon to all southerners, except wealthy planters and Confederate leaders by giving them full political rights and returning their property (Gilmore). He required the new state governments to abolish slavery, abandon secession and revoke the Confederate debt but other than that they were allowed to freely manage their affairs (Bartley). The southern governments responded to this by creating the black codes, which forced African Americans
... and slavery left millions of newly freed African Americans in the South without an education, a home, or a job. Before reconstruction was put in place, African Americans in the South were left roaming helplessly and hopelessly. During the reconstruction period, the African Americans’ situation did not get much better. Although helped by the government, African Americans were faced with a new problem. African Americans in the South were now being terrorized and violently discriminated by nativist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Such groups formed in backlash to Reconstruction and canceled out all the positive factors of Reconstruction. At last, after the Compromise of 1877, the military was taken out of the South and all of the Reconstruction’s efforts were basically for nothing. African Americans in the South were back to the conditions they started with.
During the reconstruction period, African Americans benefited from the civil rights act of March 1866 and the 13th, 14th and 15th amendment. However, for African Americans in the former confederacy, opportunities were limited as in1865 and 1866 the former confederacy states passed black codes’ a replacement of the former slave codes, which once again forcibly cemented the second-class status of African Americans. The most oppressive of the codes was against vagrancy, ...
After the Civil War, the victorious Union enacted a policy of Reconstruction in the former Confederate states. Reconstruction was aimed at creating as smooth a transition as possible for the southern states to re-enter the Union as well as enacting economic and social changes. However, several factors brought about its failure, and as a result the consequences can be seen in the race problems we still have today. In 1862, President Lincoln had appointed temporary military governors to re-establish functional governments in occupied southern states. In order for a state to be allowed to re-enter the Union, it had to meet the criteria, which was established to be that at least 10 percent of the voting population polled in 1860 must denounce the Confederacy and swear allegiance to the Union again. However this was not good enough for Congress, which at the time was dominated by Radical Republicans who fervently called for social and economic change in the south, specifically the rights of blacks. They were especially concerned with guaranteeing black civil and voting rights, and criticized Lincoln for excluding this in the original plan for Reconstruction.
One of the first goals of Reconstruction was to readmit the Confederate states into the Union, and during the debate in Congress over how to readmit the states, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were ratified. The United States had three different presidents between 1865 and 1877, who all had different opinions as to how the actions of readmitting the states should be carried out. President Lincoln devised the Ten Percent Plan in an effort to get the Confederate states to rejoin the Union. In Lincoln's plan, all Confederates, other than high-ranking officials, would be pardoned if they would swear allegiance to the Union and promise to obey its laws. Once ten percent of the people on the 1860 voting lists took the oath of allegiance, the state would be free to form a state government, and would be readmitted to the Union. Many of the Republicans in Congress were angered by this plan, because they believed that it was too lenient. After President Lincoln was assassinated, Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency with a new plan, which became known as Presiden...
After the Civil War, the South needed to rejoin the North to become a United States. President Abraham Lincoln was very lenient with the idea of restoring the states with the Union. He developed a plan called the Ten-Percent Plan, which proclaimed that ten percent of the southern states’ population needed to pledge to be loyal to the United States. After Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson took over. He was much more lenient towards the South than Lincoln was, giving the South the right to regulate their actions. For example, African Americans could be controlled, but still couldn’t be bought nor sold. Slavery technically ended, but the new sharecropper sy...
If Lincoln had it his way, Reconstruction would have been short, sweet and to the point but the country was not allowing that. I do not know how he expected such a thing considering the South was still acting rebellious and racism was dominant all over the country. There would be no agreements without strong laws being made and enforced by the government. Now, many northerners wanted the South to be punished and completely reformed of