The Reconstruction Era Part 3

The Reconstruction Era

The South During Reconstruction

Republicans in Charge

HOW WERE AFRICAN AMERICANS DISCOURAGED FROM PARTICIPATING IN
CIVIC LIFE IN THE SOUTH?
• Republicans controlled Southern politics during the Reconstruction period.

• Groups in charge of state governments supported the Republican Party.

• These groups included African Americans, some white Southerners, and white

newcomers from the North.

• African Americans in Government

• Though they had fewer rights than white Southerners, African Americans greatly

influenced Southern politics.

• During Reconstruction, African Americans played important roles as voters and

elected officials.
• In some states their votes helped produce victories for Republican candidates, including

African American candidates.
•For a short time, African Americans held the majority in the lower house of the South Carolina
legislature.

• Overall, the number of African Americans holding top positions in most Southern

states during the Reconstruction was small.

Republicans in Charge

• African Americans in Government cont.

• African Americans did not control any state government.

• At the national level, 16 African Americans served in the House of Representatives

and 2 served in the Senate between 1869 and 1880.

• Carpetbaggers and Scalawags

• Some Southern whites supported the Republican Party.

• These were often pro-Union business leaders and farmers who had not owned

enslaved people.
• Scalawags: which is a name given by former Confederates to Southern whites who

supported Republican Reconstruction of the South.
•Also means “scoundrel” or “worthless rascal”

• Republicans also had the support of many Northern whites who moved to the

South after the war.

• White Southerners called the people carpetbaggers, which was a term that referred

to the cheap suit case made of carpet fabric they had.
• White Southerners were suspicious of the Northerners’ intentions.

Republicans in Charge

• Carpetbaggers and Scalawags cont.

• Some carpetbaggers were dishonest people looking to take advantage of the

South’s difficulties, but most were not.

• However, many sincerely wanted to help rebuild the South.

• White Southerners accused Reconstruction governments of corruption, which

are dishonest or illegal activities.

• Yet there is no evidence that corruption in the South was greater than in the North.

• Resistance to Reconstruction

• Life during Reconstruction was difficult for African Americans.

• Most Southern whites did not want African Americans to have more rights.

• White landowners often refused to rent land to freed people.
• Store owners refused them credit.
• Many employers would not hire them.

• Many of the jobs available to African Americans were those that whites were

unwilling to do.

Republicans in Charge

• Resistance to Reconstruction cont.

• A more serious danger to the freed people in the South was secret societies

such as the Ku Klux Klan.

• These groups used fear and violence to deny rights to freed men and women.

• Disguising themselves in white sheets and hoods, Klan members threatened, beat, and killed

thousands of African Americans and whites who supported them.

• Klan members burned African Americans homes, schools, and churches.
• Many Democrats, planters, and other white Southerners supported the Klan.

•Some saw violence as a way to oppose Republican rule.

• In 1870 and 1871, Congress passed several laws to try to stop the growing Klan

violence.

• These laws were not always effective.

• White Southerners often refused to testify against those in their own communities who

attacked African Americans and their white supporters.

Education and Farming

WHAT WERE SOME IMPROVEMENTS AND SOME LIMITATIONS FOR AFRICAN
AMERICANS?
• During the early days of Reconstruction, African Americans built their own

schools.
• Many Northerners came south to teach.

• In the 1870s, Reconstruction governments created public schools for both races.

• Soon about fifty percent of white children and forty percent of African American children

attended school in the South.

• African American and white students usually went to different schools.

• Few states had laws requiring schools to be integrated, which is to have both

white and African American students.

• Often, integration laws were not enforced.

• In addition to education, freed people wanted farmland.

• Having their own land would enable them to support their families.

• Some African Americans bought land with the help of the Freedmen’s Bank.

• Many freed people, however, had not choice but to farm on land owned by whites.

Education and Farming

• Many Southern landowners used sharecropping, which is a system of

farming in which the farmer works land for an owner who provides
equipment and seeds and receives a share of the crop.
• Sharecroppers gave a percentage of their crops to the landowner.
• Landowners often demanded an unfairly large percentage that left the

sharecroppers with almost nothing to support themselves.

• For many, sharecropping was only a little better than slavery.