Later, it focused its work on helping the freedmen adjust to their condition of freedom by setting up work opportunities and supervising labor contracts. It soon became, in effect, a military court that handled legal issues. The bureau distributed 15 million rations of food to African Americans, and set up a system in which planters could borrow rations in order to feed freedmen they employed. Prior to the Civil War, no Southern state had a system of universal state-supported public education.
Freedmen had a strong desire to learn to read and write. The bureau faced many challenges despite its good intentions, efforts, and limited successes. By , it was attacked by Southern whites for organizing blacks against their former masters. That same year President Andrew Johnson, supported by Radical Republicans, vetoed a bill for an increase of power for the bureau. Many local bureau agents were hindered in carrying out their duties by the opposition of former Confederates, and lacked a military presence to enforce their authority.
Slave children : Two children who were likely emancipated during the Civil War, circa Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. Many of these laws were focused on legally disfranchising the freedmen, especially with regard to voting, thereby blocking their participation in political life.
Blacks were still elected to local offices in the s, but the establishment Democrats were passing laws to make voter registration and electoral rules more restrictive. As a result, political participation by most blacks and many poor whites began to decrease.
Between and , 10 of the 11 former Confederate states, starting with Mississippi, passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements.
Grandfather clauses temporarily permitted some illiterate whites to vote. Those who could not vote were not eligible to serve on juries and could not run for local offices. They effectively disappeared from political life, as they could not influence the state legislatures, and their interests were overlooked. Public schools had been established by Reconstruction legislatures for the first time in most Southern states.
The schools for black children were consistently underfunded compared to schools for white children, even when considered within the strained finances of the postwar South. The decreasing price of cotton kept the agricultural economy at a low. White supremacist paramilitary organizations, allied with Southern Democrats, used intimidation, violence, and assassinations to repress blacks and prevent them from exercising their civil rights in elections from until the mids. The insurgent Ku Klux Klan KKK was formed in in Tennessee as a backlash to defeat in the war and quickly became a powerful secret vigilante group, with chapters across the South.
The Klan initiated a campaign of intimidation directed against blacks and sympathetic whites. Their violence included vandalism and destruction of property, physical attacks and assassinations, and lynchings.
Teachers who came from the North to teach freedmen were sometimes attacked or intimidated as well. The Republican coalition elected numerous African Americans to local, state, and national offices. Although they did not dominate any electoral offices, black representatives voting in state and federal legislatures marked a drastic social shift.
At the beginning of , no African American in the South held political office, but within three or four years, a significant minority of officeholders in the South were black. About black officeholders had lived outside of the South before the Civil War. Some had escaped from slavery to the North, become educated, and returned to help the South advance in the postwar era. Others were free blacks before the war, who had achieved education and positions of leadership elsewhere.
Other African-American men who served were already leaders in their communities, including a number of preachers. As happened in white communities, not all leadership depended upon wealth and literacy. Hiram Rhodes Revels : U. A few African Americans were elected or appointed to national office.
African Americans voted for white candidates and for blacks. The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed the right to vote, but did not guarantee that the vote would be counted or the districts would be apportioned equally.
In addition, establishment Democrats passed laws to make voter registration and electoral rules more restrictive, with the result that political participation by most blacks was stifled. As a result, states with a majority African-American population often elected only one or two African-American representatives in Congress.
Exceptions included South Carolina; at the end of Reconstruction, four of its five congressmen were African American. Congress as well. He represented Mississippi in and As a senator, Revels advocated compromise and moderation. He vigorously supported racial equality and worked to reassure his fellow senators about the capability of African Americans. In his maiden speech to the Senate on March 16, , he argued for the reinstatement of the black legislators of the Georgia General Assembly, who had been illegally ousted by white Democratic Party representatives.
Joseph Rainey : U. House of Representatives, the second black person to serve in the U. Congress, the first African American to be directly elected to Congress Revels had been appointed , and the first black presiding officer of the U.
House of Representatives. During his term in Congress, Rainey supported legislation to protect the civil rights of Southern blacks, working for two years to gain passage of the Civil Rights Act of He also worked to promote the Southern economy. Meanwhile, white Southerners who supported Reconstruction-era Republicans were called scalawags by their political enemies, who considered them traitors to the South and just as bad, if not worse, than carpetbaggers.
Scalawags included non-slaveholding, small-time farmers; middle-class professionals and others who had stayed loyal to the Union during the war. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Corruption soon followed the Carpetbaggers. The Freedmen became the allies of the political Carpetbaggers. Once elected to office the political Carpetbaggers had the power to pass new laws and to grant contracts for the re-building of the South. How did Carpetbaggers affect Reconstruction?
A useful resource for teachers, kids, schools and colleges undertaking projects for the Black History Month. Carpetbaggers for kids - President Andrew Johnson Video The article on the Carpetbaggers for kids provides an overview of the emergence of the Carpetbaggers during his presidential term in office.
The following Andrew Johnson video will give you additional important facts and dates about the political events experienced by the 17th American President whose presidency spanned from April 15, to March 4, US American History. Voting during the Reconstruction Era.
First Published Cookies Policy. Author Linda Alchin. Updated Publisher Siteseen Limited. Privacy Statement. During or shortly after the Civil War, several thousand northerners migrated into the South.
The great majority of these men had served in the Union Army and seen duty in the South. As a group, they were well educated; indeed, they were probably the best educated class of men in American politics, a disproportionate number of them having college educations.
These northern migrants were a minority, though a very influential minority, in the Reconstruction conventions. In late , an Alabama editor coined the word carpetbagger to describe them, a term the New Orleans press quickly adopted. If he finds a living without capital or labor, he hangs up his carpet bag. They come as shadows, but they sometimes depart full and well stuffed. Union forces occupied New Orleans in May and remained for the duration of the war.
Tens of thousands of federal soldiers, treasury agents, planter lessees, and other northern officials lived in the city and its environs during the long occupation. For this reason, carpetbaggers were more numerous and more powerful in Louisiana than in any other southern state. The state elected three U. Ten of the thirteen congressmen sent to the U.
House of Representatives in the period were carpetbaggers. Even though northerners were always a small minority in the state legislature, the speaker of the House for most of the period was a carpetbagger. Indeed, in the early s, federal jobholders known as the Custom House Ring played a decisive role in state politics, driving Governor Warmoth from office and paving the way for one of their own, William Pitt Kellogg—a former collector of the Port of New Orleans—to become governor.
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