 Good afternoon. This presentation is about the Civil War and Reconstruction for African American History, and we'll be looking at what happened to African Americans up until about 1900. First of all, one of the things that we tend to think about most frequently in African American history regarding the Civil War is the effects of the Emancipation Proclamation. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was issued after the Battle of Antietam, one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. And Lincoln saw this as the best time to issue the Emancipation Proclamation because it was also the first time the United States troops had scored a massive defeat over the Confederacy, or at least a defeat over the Confederacy. And so one thing, however, to understand about the Emancipation Proclamation is who it really applied to. It didn't apply to slaves in the north, only to slaves in the south. It didn't apply to states along the Ohio River, the middle states. And the question then is, did it really free any slaves? Actually very few. It didn't free any slaves in the south, the only place where it was applied because northern troops didn't have control of the south. So slavery still existed even after the Emancipation Proclamation. So why is it important? Well, it was a tool to demoralize the south. It did have an effect because the south now saw slavery as one of the issues behind the Civil War. Many Southerners did not feel that way. Many Southerners were fighting for the south for other reasons, although one of the main reasons most of the politicians had sided in favor of secession was because of slavery. But this was also used as a diplomatic tool because now slavery to other countries was one of the reasons for the Civil War. And many countries felt uncomfortable with having slavery as an issue. Many countries were like England. The south's biggest trading partner was opposed to slavery by this time. So it demoralized the south. And also the north used the Emancipation Proclamation to basically capture runaway slaves. They were now a contraband, illegal possessions. And so any slave that escaped could be set free and call contraband. It was also an ability to, or at least it facilitated the ability of the American troops to recruit and to arm African American soldiers. In the end, about 10% of the U.S. Army, or about 200,000 soldiers, were African American soldiers. Now there was a lot of discrimination and it was very dangerous if you were captured as a POW by the Confederates for African American soldiers. They received poor pay. They received poor rations. It just wasn't very good. Many people complained about this. We also have to realize that a few people have pointed out that there were African Americans in the Confederacy. And if we look at actually how many served, it wasn't a whole lot. But there were African Americans who did fight. Now the real question is why? Because it was their country. They planted the crops. They were the ones who had a big investment in that country. They didn't know what the Northerners were going to do. And so there were probably about half a million slaves who did support the Confederacy. Some of them were promised freedom if they would enlist, if they were armed and would fight for the Confederacy. However, many were never mustered in, although they did register. The overall legacy of the Civil War, some 600,000 people were dead. Now give or take depending on how you calculate the figures. But the South was devastated economically, socially and politically. Its government, its society and its economy were all in its shambles. The biggest loss economically was that slavery was ended. And slavery was ended with the 13th Amendment. That is what ended slavery across the United States. The North emerged victorious. In many cases many people saw the Civil War as a battle between an agricultural society and an industrial society. Clearly the industrial society won. And we saw massive government changes in the North and the United States. First of all, the Transcontinental Railroad Bill, the Homestead Act and the Moral Education Act. All of these acts had been opposed by Southern politicians. With the South out of the government, the Northern politicians could now push these bills through and they didn't have as much opposition. Some of the questions about Reconstruction then was how do we put the Union back together? And in order to answer that question, there were other questions that came up. What was the Civil War? What's going to happen to the Freemen? And who's going to run Reconstruction? What was the Civil War? If you had a problem answering that, then you were going to have a problem with Reconstruction. Because the Civil War was seen by many as questionable. It wasn't just a massive rebellion. Could states actually secede from the Union? And if so, had these states committed state suicide and so when the nation was put back together, are they going to be considered conquered territory? That then the federal government could do with them whatever they wanted to do. These were important questions and it wasn't easy to answer. Then the question was what was going to happen to the Freemen? Many African Americans of course had their own desires in addition to the ideas and the desires of many Southern whites and Northern whites. Free blacks also had input into this. The federal government established the Freedmen's Bureau. The official title was the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen's and Abandoned Lands. And it was run by the military. And its job, and it was given a one-year charter to accomplish this, was to see that African Americans now free could transition into free life for those in the South, the former slaves. This meant how were they going to find housing? How were they going to find jobs? There were a lot of questions that they had. What about family had been split up during slavery? How were they going to put those families back together? So there were many questions that the Freedmen had to answer and wanted answered. And now the Freedmen's Bureau was going to try to help ease that transition from slavery into freedom. The final question, and this is the political question, was who is going to run Reconstruction? Is it the President's job? Is it Congress's job? Or is it the job of the Supreme Court and the lawmakers? At first we see the rise, actually a battle between the President and Congress and the rise of Congressional Reconstruction will eventually prevail. Now let's see how that happened. First of all, both Lincoln and Johnson wanted to appease the South in the early days of the Civil War. Johnson himself was a Southerner and a Democrat. And Lincoln had gotten Johnson on the ticket in hopes of providing some evidence to the South that he wasn't there to destroy them and to encourage Southerners who wanted to come back into the Union. When Reconstruction happened, Lincoln was assassinated at the end of the Civil War and Johnson as the new President wanted to continue that tradition. And one of the things that he ran up against was the Wade Davis bill. The Wade Davis bill had actually been vetoed, not with a written veto but with a pocket veto. Lincoln just refused to sign the bill. And the Wade Davis bill called for massive control of the South. And Lincoln was opposed to that. He felt that the South would become opposed to it. And so he didn't sign the bill. And Wade Davis passed a manifesto urging the President to keep out and let Congress run Reconstruction. And then when the Southern states enacted black codes, these were attempts at keeping slaves in their former conditions. It restricted property rights. It restricted who they could associate with. There were a lot of restrictions on freedmen and how they behaved, which basically reduced them and try to keep them in the status of being slaves. In response, Congress extended the reach of the Freedmen's Bureau and the length of the Freedmen's Bureau. Johnson opposed it. They then passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first Civil Rights Act in American history. Again, Southerners opposed it and Johnson opposed it. They then passed the 14th Amendment as an effort to make the Civil Rights Act of 1866 somewhat permanent. Again, Johnson opposed it. The 14th Amendment eventually goes through, but it's a very important document. And it is the first time in the Constitution that citizenship is defined. What does it mean to be an American citizen? And what are the roles of the state and the federal government toward those citizens? And it also was aimed at limiting Confederate participation. Now, those provisions don't continue to exist. But at one time, it was aimed at prohibiting former Confederate leaders and officials and military men from coming back in and running the new governments. There was also opposition in the form of Klan-like groups. We tend to think of either being one Klan. In fact, that's not true. There were several different types of Klan's. And in these Klan-ish groups, many of the more mass, they were all bent on intimidation of African-Americans. And the Freedmen's Bureau and Republicans in the South. In 1870 and 1871, Congress undertook to limit the activities of these Klan-like groups with federal legislation called the FORSACs. And in fact, those did drive the Klan underground. In the end, Johnson began fighting against Congress so much, as I mentioned earlier. He urged the South to reject the 14th Amendment. He went on a mid-election campaign when Congress was being elected to some of the states along the Ohio River in the north during a so-called swing around the circle and began campaigning actively against many of the Republicans. Well, it was Republican country and he was received not very well. He was insulted. People were throwing rotten fruit and vegetables at him. And in the end, more Republicans were elected. Those Republicans now in Congress responded with the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which very much restricted the power of the president to run Reconstruction and to run the country. When Johnson opposed those acts and deliberately defied them, Congress brought him to impeachment. And in fact, they also sought to limit the role of the Supreme Court to run Reconstruction. They threatened the Supreme Court to reduce its numbers to limit its power. And so the Supreme Court stepped back. In the end, Congress won. Congress was triumphant and Congress now had the ability to run Reconstruction. The president, although he was not impeached, was basically a lame duck president. In the election of 1876, there was a new president in office. By this time, Ulysses S. Grant had run and was elected twice as the former hero of the Civil War, the winning general. And he served two terms. However, at the end of the second term, there was so much corruption and scandal surrounding his presidency, he couldn't have won again, although he probably wanted to run. The Republicans instead ran, Rutherford B. Hayes, the Democrats ran Samuel Tilton. Because of voter inconsistency and some problems with the voting process in the election, several electoral candidate positions were in dispute, about 20 of them. They could not resolve it. And for many months, there was this worry over who was going to be the next president. How was it going to be decided? Congress formed some conventions, some committees to try to resolve the situation. They couldn't resolve it. In the end, there was a compromise, the so-called Compromise of 1877. Republicans and Democrats supposedly sat down and hammered out what was going to happen and who was going to win and what was going to result for the both Democratic and Republican Party. In the end, Hayes, Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican who actually needed all 20 votes to win, did win. And they made certain promises to the South. And one of those promises was that Reconstruction would end. The military troops in the South would be removed. And in fact, they were. Of all the promises were made, this was the only one that was really kept. The troops came out of Baton Rouge, the final place where there was military occupation on April 23 of 1877. And Reconstruction officially came to an end then. Nation was interested now in the politics of business and in promoting business, rebuilding itself, moving forward. The issues of civil rights and what was going to happen to the free blacks and civil rights in general was largely no longer of much concern to anybody. They wanted to move forward. They wanted to put the civil war behind them. What you see in the new South then is a rise of some old ways. An effort of blending this old aristocratic South, the plantations where blacks kept in their place with a new industrial South. This division that I have here between Redeemers and Bourbons. Bourbons were the old European nobility. And so what you see in the South was this group took on the same, the old class, the old ruling class versus the Redeemers. People who were going to save the South. People who were going to bring the South into a new light, this new South of industry, of cities, of business, of capital. This was going to redeem the South and get rid of the Paul of Reconstruction and the civil war that lingered over the South. One of the promoters, one of the biggest promoters was a newspaper editor named Henry Grady from Atlanta. The Atlanta Constitution Journal editor, as a matter of fact, and he used this term New South over and over again as he went north and made trips and tried to promote the idea of what was going to be happening in the South, the new South. And promoting industry. He was inviting northern industries to come down to the South. They had cheap labor. They had cheap government, low taxes, and they were looking at textile industries. They already had cotton in the South. Why not bring the cotton manufacturers to the South? They were growing tobacco in the South. Why not bring cigar companies, cigarette companies, tobacco companies to the South? There were some metals like in Birmingham. Why not do more mining, more smeltering plants? Not the South as a colonial economy where it just produced the raw materials, but the South as an industrial region. They needed more railroads. They saw during the civil war that they were vastly outnumbered in the amount of railroads. And so the South began promoting railroad growth and development across the region. There were forests in the South. Why not produce lumber? And so you see lumbering manufacturing like the Kirby Lumbering Company in Texas, the first million dollar corporation in Texas. And of course petroleum. During the civil war period, petroleum, crude oil was refined and they were testing it. What did you do with the oil? They found out that oil, which there was plentiful amount in the South, could be used as a fuel. So there was promise in all of these industries that the South could actually make some money off of and could redeem itself and could enter the next century economically, politically ahead. For African Americans, however, what did this mean? Well, the New South, most African Americans continue to live in the South. However, in 1879, because of prejudice and opportunities in the West, prejudice in the South, opportunities in the West, there was a movement to move to Kansas to take advantage of free land under the Homestead Act. This became known as the Exoduster Movement. And you have people like Pap Singleton who was promoting African Americans to move out of the South and to find new opportunities out West. A lot of Southern states opposed this movement because they feared losing their agricultural laborers. You also see the rise of Jim Crow in the latter years of the 19th century. Lynchings began increasing. Voting rights were restricted to Southern blacks. And this starts early after reconstruction with the Mississippi plan to provide literacy tests, to provide voter blocks, IDs, and various things are all seen as ways of preventing what they considered impure voting. They wanted to get just the best people to vote. And one way was to restrict. Now, this also affected poor whites as well as African Americans. You also see the rise of the best example of Jim Crow was in segregation. In 1896, a Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, put this into law, the idea of separate but equal. Now these go back to the black coats. And they were trying to restrict the ability of African Americans to live as free following the Civil War. But by 1896, the Supreme Court recognized these laws, enforced these laws, and so in Plessy v. Ferguson, segregation and therefore Jim Crow segregation as it became to be known became commonplace throughout the South. Also, there were African Americans who were trying to find a way of prospering in the South. And one of these was Booker T. Washington. Booker T. Washington comes under a lot of criticism for the so-called Atlanta compromise speech that African Americans should focus on economic development instead of political ambition. That they should lift themselves up by their own bootstraps, that they should go out and just work hard and eventually they would be recognized as being worthwhile members of the South. Many African Americans rejected that, most especially W. E. B. DeBose in the North. But Washington was an educator and he was trying to build a life for people who remained in the South. He had been born a slave, he founded Tuskegee Institute, and he wanted to train teachers. And he saw if you were going to live in the South and if you were going to prosper in the South, the best thing to do in the South was to get along. Many people saw that as him being a sellout. So as we think about this time period, there are some questions to consider. One of these is why did African Americans fight for the Union? Why did some fight in the Confederacy? Why didn't the end of slavery bring social and political equality? And was reconstruction a success or a failure? Thank you very much and have a good afternoon.