Reconstruction/ Federal Policy

Reconstruction/ Federal Policy

Students will examine the ways that the federal government’s policies affected the lives of formerly enslaved people.

Open Ended

What does political disenfranchisement mean? Please give an example. Feel free to use an outside resource.

Yuri Kochiyama & Malcolm X

 In the 1980s, Kochiyama and her husband pushed for reparations to the Japanese-Americans who had been incarcerated during World War II and a formal apology from the government. The campaign succeeded, and led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

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Multiple Choice

Being placed in a Japanese Internment camp is considered political disenfranchisement.

• False

• True

Freedmen's Bureau

The U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (the Freedmen’s Bureau) was a large bureaucracy created after the Civil War to help African Americans who had been enslaved.

Freedmen's Bureau

It provided services including legal aid, food, housing and education. The Freedmen’s Bureau also tried to reunite separated families and oversaw the attempts to settle formerly enslaved people on confiscated or abandoned Confederate lands.

Multiple Choice

What agency was created by the United States Congress in 1865 to set up schools and churches, supply food and clothing, and solve employment issues for the former slaves?

• African American Education Act

• The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - NAACP

• Freedman's Bureau

• American Missionary Association

Land Distribution

Access to land was one of the main issues to affect the lives of formerly enslaved African Americans. During the war, the Union Army relocated formerly enslaved people onto confiscated Confederate land

Andrew Johnson

However, most of those resettled were kicked off their farms in 1866 when President Andrew Johnson ordered the land returned to the former enslavers.

Political Enfranchisement

By passing the 14th and 15th Amendments during Congressional (Radical) Reconstruction, the federal government made a commitment to protect the legal and political rights of African Americans.

Congressional Reconstruction

Federal troops enforced the civil and political rights of African Americans in the South during Congressional Reconstruction.

Multiple Choice

Political disenfranchisement is best defined as . . .

• Expel someone from society for everyone else's benefit

• To give someone in society basic privilege's and rights

• To deprive someone in society of basic privilege's and rights

• The doctrine that actions are right if they are useful or for the benefit of a majority.

Indigenous Disenfranchisement

None of these Reconstruction efforts applied to formerly enslaved Indigenous people, whose lands and rights continued to be taken away after the end of the Civil War.

Indigenous Disenfranchisement

The 1877 Dawes Severalty Act divided tribal lands into allotments meant for private ownership. The act, which was an attempt to assimilate Indigenous people and undermine tribal governance, offered citizenship to Indigenous people who accepted and held allotments for 25 years.

Land Confiscation

Other land was sold to non-Indigenous people. Although Indigenous people successfully challenged the Act in court, it took 90 million acres of Indigenous land by 1934.

Multiple Choice

Which president crumbled the nations plans for reconstruction following the Civil War?

• Abraham Lincoln

• Andrew Johnson

• Ulysses S Grant

• Mr. Parker