Reconstruction and 1876: Crash Course US History #22 episode transcript - U.S. History by Crash Course

View all full transcripts of U.S. History by Crash Course on the blog: view now

Do you like podcasts? Go to PodExtra AI homepage (podextra.ai) to play and view complete AI-processed content of podcasts: summaries, mindmaps, topics, takeaways, transcripts, keywords and highlights.

Reconstruction and 1876: Crash Course US History #22

From: U.S. History by Crash Course

In which John Green teaches you about Reconstruction. After the divisive, destructive Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had a plan to reconcile the country and make it whole again. Then he got shot, Andrew Johnson took over, and the disagreements between Johnson and Congress ensured that Reconstruction would fail. The election of 1876 made the whole thing even more of a mess, and the country called it off, leaving the nation still very divided. John will talk about the gains made by African-Americans in the years after the Civil War, and how they lost those gains almost immediately when Reconstruction stopped. You'll learn about the Freedman's Bureau, the 14th and 15th amendments, and the disastrous election of 1876. John will explore the goals of Reconstruction, the successes and ultimate failure, and why his alma mater Kenyon College is better than Raoul's alma mater NYU.

Full Transcript

Reconstruction and 1876 Crash Course US History 22

speaker01 00:00:00

I'm John Green, this is Crash us history and the Civil War is over. The Is are free. That hit me in the head. It's very dangerous crash course. So when you say don't aim at a person that includes myself, the roller coaster only goes up from here, my friends, who's that Mr Green? Mr Green, what about the epic failure of Reconstruction? Oh right, stupid reconstruction, always ruining everything.

speaker01 00:34:00

So after the Civil War ended, the United States had to reintegrate both a formerly slave population and a formerly rebellious population back into the country, which is a challenge that we might have met, except Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and we were left with Andrew. I am the third worst president ever. Johnson. I'm sorry, but you don't get to be in the show anymore. So Lincoln's whole post war idea was to facilitate reunion and reconciliation. And Andrew Johnson's guiding reconstruction principle was that South never had a right to secede in the first place. Also, because he was himself a Southerner, he resented all the elites in the South who had snubbed him, and he was also a racist who didn't think that black should have any role in reconstruction.

speaker01 01:11:00

Trifecta between 1860 and 2000. And in 1867, the sole called AED period of presidential reconstruction, Johnson appointed provisional governors and ordered them to call state conventions to establish new all white governments and in their 100% whiteness and depression of former slaves, those new governments look suspiciously like the old Confederate governments they had replaced. And what was changing for the former slaves? Well, in some ways, a lot like Fisk and Howard, universities were established, as well as many primary and secondary schools, thanks in part to the Freedmen's Bureau, which only lasted in 2018 thousand 870, but had the power to divide up confiscated and abandoned Confederate land for former slaves. And this was very important because to most slaves, land ownership was the key to freedom, and many felt like they'd been promised land by the Union Army, like General Sherman's field order 15 promised to distribute land in 40 acre plots to former slaves, but that didn't happen either through the Freedmen's Bureau or anywhere else. Instead President Johnson ordered all land returned to its former owners, so the South remained largely agricultural with the same people owning the same land. And in the end, we ended up with sharecropping.

speaker01 02:14:00

Let's go to the thought bubble, the system of sharecropping, replace slavery in many places throughout the South, landowners would provide housing to the sharecroppers. No, not bubble, not quite that nice. There you go, also tools and seed, and then the sharecroppers received, get this, a share of their crop, usually between a third and a half, with the price for that harvest often set by the landowner. Freed blacks got to control their work and plan owners got a steady workforce that couldn't easily leave because they had little opportunity to save money and make the big capital investments in like land or tools. By the way, the 1860 S poor white farmers were sharecropping as well. In fact, by the Great Depression, most sharecroppers were white. And while sharecropping certainly wasn't slavery, it did result in a quasi serfdom that tied workers to land. They did own, more or less the opposite of Jefferson's ideal of the small independent farmer.

speaker01 03:04:00

So the Republicans in Congress weren't happy that this reconstructed South looked so much like the prescience of war South. So they took the lead in reconstruction after 1000 and 860 twoseven, Republicans felt the war had been fought for equal rights and wanted to see the powers of the national government expanded fewer as radical as thadius Tommy Lee Jones Stevens, who wanted to take away land from the southern planters and give it to the former slaves. But rank and file Republicans were radical enough to pass the civil rights bill, which defined persons born in the United States as citizens and establish nationwide equality before the law, regardless of race. Andrew Johnson immediately vetoed the law, claiming that trying to protect the rights of African Americans amounted to discrimination against white people, which so infuriated Republicans that Congress did something it had never done before in all of American history. They overrode the presidential, vetoed a two thirds majority, and the Civil Rights Act became law. So then Congress really had its stand up and decided to amend the Constitution with the 14th Amendment, which defines citizenship guarantees equal protection, and extends the rights in the Bill of Rights to all the states. Sort of the amendment had almost no Democratic support, but it also didn't need any because there were almost no Democrats in Congress on account of how Congress had refused to seat the representatives from the new all one governments that Johnson supported. And that's how we got the 14th Amendment, arguably the most important in the whole Constitution.

speaker01 04:20:00

Thanks straight to the mystery document today. The rules here are simple. I guess the author of the mystery document and try not to get the let's what we to do section 1, be it ordained by the police jury of the parish of Saint Landry that no Negro shall be allowed to pass within limits of said parish with about special permit in writing from his employer. Section 4 Every Negro is required to be in the regular service of some white person or former owner who shall be held responsible for the conduct of said Negro. Section 6 No Negro shall be permitted to preach, exhort, or otherwise to claim to congregations of colored people without a special permission in writing from the President of the police jury.

speaker01 05:01:00

GE, Stan, I wonder if the president of the police jury was white? I actually know this one. It is a black code, which was basically legal codes. Would they just replace the word slave with the word Negro? And this code shows just how unwilling white governments were to ensure the rights of new free citizens. I would celebrate not getting shocked, but now I am depressed.

speaker01 05:18:00

So OK, in 18867 and again over Johnson's vetoed passed the Reconstruction Act, which divided the South into 5 military districts and required each state to create a new government, one that included participation of black men. Those new governments had to ratify the 14th Amendment if they wanted to get back into the union. Radical Reconstruction had begun. So in 1868, Andrew Johnson was about as elected in the us, says Jefferson Davis, and sure enough, he didn't win. Instead the 1000 and 860 two-eight election was won by Republican and former Union General Ulysses S Grant. But Grant's margin of victory was small enough that Republicans were like, man, we would sure win more elections if black people could vote, which is something you hear Republicans say all the time these days.

speaker01 05:57:00

Congressional Republicans push through the 15th Amendment prohibited states from denying men the right to vote based on race, but not based on gender or literacy or whether your grandfather could vote. So states ended up with a lot of leeway when it came to denying the franchise to African Americans, which, of course, they did. The federal government dictate who can vote and who is and isn't a citizen of a state and establishing equality under the law, even local laws. And this is a really big deal in American history because the national government became, rather than a threat to individual liberty, the custodian of freedom, as radical Republican Charles Sumner put it. So. But with this legal protection, former slaves began to exercise their rights. They participated in the political process by direct action, such as staging, sits ins, integrate streetcars by voting in election and by holding office. Most African Americans were Republicans at the time, and because they could vote and were a large part of the population, the Republican Party came to dominate politics in the South, just like today, except totally different now.

speaker01 06:53:00

Southern mythology about the age of Radical Reconstruction exemplified by Gone with the Wind, which of course tell the story of Northern Republican do and corruption by Southern Republicans. Fortune seeking northern carpetbaggers seen here, as well as Southern turncoat scalawags, dominated politics and all of the African American elected leaders were either corrupt or puppets or both. Well, like the rest have gone with the win. That's a bit of an oversimplification. There were about 2000 African Americans who held office during Reconstruction, and the vast majority of them were not corrupt. Consider, for example, the not corrupt and amazingly named Pinkney B Pinchback, who from 1872, 1973 served very briefly in Louisiana as America's first black governor and went on to be a senator and a member of the House of Representatives, by the way America's second African American governor, Douglas Wilder of Virginia, was elected in 1000 and 980 nine-nine African American office holders was a huge step forward in terms of ensuring the rights of African Americans because it meant that there would be black juries and less discrimination in state and local governments when it came to providing basic services, but in the end, Republican governments failed in the South, important achievements, especially a school system that while segregated, did attempt to educate both black and white children and even more importantly, they created a functioning government where both white and African American citizens could participate according to one white South Carolina lawyer we have gone through one of the most remarkable changes in our relations to each other that has known perhaps in the history of the world That's a little hyperbolic, but we are America after all.

speaker01 08:23:00

It's true that corruption was widespread, but it was in the north, too. I mean, we're talking about governments, and that's not why reconstruction really ended. It ended because one, things like schools and road repair cost money, which meant taxes, which made Republican governments very unpopular in Americans hate taxes, and two, white Southerners could not accept African Americans exercising basic civil rights, holding office or voting. And for many, the best way to return things to the way they were before Reconstruction was through violence, especially after 1867, much of the violence directed toward African Americans in the South was politically motivated. The Ku klux Klan was founded in 1866. It quickly became a terrorist organization, targeting Republicans both black and white, beating and murdering men and women in order to intimidate them and keep them from voting. The worst act of violence was probably the massacre at Colfax, Louisiana, where hundreds of former slaves murder And between intimidation and emerging discriminatory voting laws, fewer black men voted, which allowed white Democrats to take control of state governments in the South and returned white Democratic congressional delegations to Washington. These white Southern politicians called themselves redeemers because they claim to have redeemed the South from northern Republican corruption and black rule.

speaker01 09:33:00

Now it's likely that South would have fallen back into Democratic hands eventually, but the process was aided by northern Republicans losing interest in Reconstruction in 1873, the us fell into yet another not quite great economic depression, and northerners lost the stomach to fight for the rights of black people in the South, which, in addition to being hard, was expensive.

speaker01 09:51:00

So by 1876, the supporters of Reconstruction were in full retreat, and the Democrats were resurgent, especially in the South, and this set up one of the most contentious elections in American history.

speaker01 10:02:00

The Democrats nominated New York governor and NYU Law School graduate Samuel Tilden. The Republicans chose Ohio governor and Kenyon College alumnus Rutherford B Hayes, one man who'd gone to crash course writer Raul Myers Law School and another who'd gone to my college Kenyon know if this election had been based on facial hair as election should be there would have been no controversy. But sadly, we have an electoral college here in the United States, and in 1876, there were disputed electoral votes in South Carolina, Louisiana, and, of course Florida. Now, you might remember that in these situations, there is a constitutional provision that says Congress should decide the winner, but Congress shockingly proved unable to accomplish something, so they appointed a 15 men electoral commission, a supercom, if you will, were 8 Republicans on the committee and seven Democrats. So you will never guess who won. Kenyon College's own Rutherford behave cohors and ladies, and yes, that is our mascot, shut up anyway in order to get the presidency and win the support of the super committee.

speaker01 10:58:00

Hayes's people agreed to cede control of the South to the Democrats and to stop meddling in Southern affairs, and also to build a transcontinental railroad through Texas. This is called the Bargain of 18008 77, because historians are so good at naming things, and it basically killed Reconstruction.

speaker01 11:13:00

Any more federal troops in Southern states and with control of southern legislatures firmly in the hands of white Democrats, the states were free to go back to restricting the freedom of black people, which they did. Legislatures passed Jim Crow laws that limited African Americans access to public accommodations and legal protection. States passed laws that took away black people's right to vote and social and economic mobility among African Americans in the South declined precipitously. However, for a brief moment, the United States was more Democratic than it had ever been before. Entire segment of the population that had no impact on politics before was now allowed to participate. And for the freedmen who lived through it, that was a monumental change, and it would echo down to the civil rights movement in the 1000 and 950 S, in 1000 and 960 S, sometimes called the Reconstruction. We're going to end this episode on a downer, as we are wont to do here us history, because I want to point out a lesser known legacy of Reconstruction, the Reconstruction Amendments and laws that were passed granted former slaves, political freedom and rights, especially the vote and that was critical but to give them what they really wanted and needed plots of land that would make them economically independent would have required confiscation, and that violation of property rights was too much for all but the most radical Republican and that question of what it really means to be free in a system of free market capitalism has proven very indeed. I'll see you next week.

speaker01 12:30:00

Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Moeller. Our script supervisor is Meredith Danko, the associate producer is Danica Johnson. Show is written by my high school history teacher Raul Meyer and myself, and our graphics team is Thought Cafe. Every week there's a new caption for the liberto, you can suggest those in comments where you can also ask questions about today's video that will be answered by our team of historians. Thank you for watching Crash Course. Don't forget to subscribe. And as we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome.