Reconstruction
Carson Orange
Reconstruction Presidents
Abraham Lincoln announced a lenient plan, with suffrage limited to whites, to attract Southern Confederates back to the Union. By the end of his life, however, Lincoln had come to favor extending the right to vote to educated blacks and former soldiers.
Andrew Johnson was one of the most unfortunate of Presidents. Arrayed against him were the Radical Republicans in Congress, brilliantly led and ruthless in their tactics. Johnson was no match for them.
Andrew Johnson, in 1865 put into effect his own Reconstruction plan, which gave the white South a free hand in establishing new governments.
Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) served as commander in chief of the Union army during the Civil War, leading the North to victory over the Confederacy. Grant later became the eighteenth President of the United States, serving from 1869-77. After fighting in the Mexican-American War, Grant left the army, only to rejoin at the outbreak of the Civil War.
Reconstruction Laws
The Fourteenth Amendment addresses many aspects of citizenship and the rights of citizens. The most commonly used -- and frequently litigated -- phrase in the amendment is "equal protection of the laws"
15th Amendment to the Constitution granted African American men the right to vote by declaring that the "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
Reconstruction Effects
The effort to help the South was not a total failure. The Union had also been saved. By the 1870s, all of the Southern states were part of the Union again. The South was rebuilding its cities. They were growing quickly. People who had left were coming back to start their lives over again.
As farms were rebuilt, people in the South grew crops that weren't food. Some of these products were tobacco and sugar. Farmers began to earn good money again. But this meant that they were growing less food to feed the people who lived there. Much of the food was shipped in from other parts of the country.
Reconstruction People
Oliver O. Howard served as chief commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau (formally established as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands) at the request of President Johnson in May 1865. He was a Union general in the Civil War, and in 1867 he founded Howard University.
Hiram Revels was the first black citizen to be elected to the U.S. Senate. Born to free parents in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Revels had to go to Indiana and Illinois to obtain an education. He became an African Methodist Episcopal church pastor and the principal of a school for blacks in Baltimore, Maryland.
Blanche K. Bruce was a black senator representing Mississippi during Reconutruction, becoming the first African-American politician ever to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate.
Reconstruction - Your Choice - Miscellaneous
This is items or people gathered or considered together of various types or from different sources.
KKK (KU KLUX KLAN) - Organization that used threats and violence to keep blacks away from the polls.
Carpetbaggers- northerns who went south after the civil war looking for political and economic opportunities.
Republicans- Political party that carried out the Reconstruction program.