CHAPTER 15 “What is Freedom?”: Reconstruction, 1865–1877
This chapter concentrates on the history of Reconstruction. Opening with an explanation of the origins of General William T. Sher-
man’s Special Field Order 15, which set aside forty-acre plots for former slave families, the chapter explores what freedom meant to
newly free African-Americans and how white American society responded to emancipation. There were many meanings of freedom
for blacks, and they relished various opportunities to express their liberation from slavery. Land ownership became a contentious is-
sue, and blacks were ultimately denied free access to land. The devastation of the Civil War also caused many white farmers to face
poverty as tenant farmers and sharecroppers. The chapter also discusses the national political developments that led to the transition
from President Johnson’s lenient plan to the Radical Reconstruction designed by congressional Republicans. In response to Johnson’s
many presidential pardons of ex-Confederates and to the South’s implementation of Black Codes, Republicans in Congress fought back
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: Sherman’s Special Field Order and Black Definitions of Freedom
A. African-Americans had expansive ideas about freedom as the federal government reconstructed the South with new land poli-
cies after the Civil War.
II. The Meaning of Freedom
A. Blacks and the Meaning of Freedom
1. The destruction of slavery made freedom the central question on the nation’s agenda.
3. Blacks relished the opportunity to demonstrate their liberation from the regulations (both significant and trivial)
associated with slavery.
a. Many moved to southern cities and towns because such places seemed to offer more freedoms.
B. Families in Freedom
1. The family was central to the post-emancipation black community.
a. Widows of black soldiers successfully collected pensions.
2. Freedom subtly altered relationships within the family.
a. Emancipation increased the power of black men within the family.
C. Church and School
1. The rise of the independent black church, with Methodists and Baptists commanding the largest followings, redrew the
2. Blacks of all ages flocked to the schools established by northern missionary societies, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and groups of
ex-slaves.
D. Political Freedom
2. .Who Is an American? (Primary Source document feature)
a. Part of “The Composite Nation”
E. Land, Labor, and Freedom
1. Former slaves’ ideas of freedom were directly related to land ownership.
a. Many former slaves insisted that through their unpaid labor, they had acquired a right to the land.
2. Ex-slaves’ definition of freedom resembled that of whites.
a. Self-ownership
F. Masters without Slaves
1. The South’s defeat was complete and demoralizing.
a. Planter families faced profound changes.
2. Most planters defined black freedom in the narrowest manner—as a privilege, not a right.
G. The Free Labor Vision
1. The victorious Republican North tried to implement its own vision of freedom.
2. The Freedmen’s Bureau began to establish a working free labor system.
H. The Freedmen’s Bureau
1. The task of the bureau—establishing schools, providing aid to the poor and aged, settling disputes, and so forth—was
daunting, especially because the bureau had fewer than 1,000 agents.
2. The bureau’s achievements in some areas, notably education and health care, were striking.
I. The Failure of Land Reform
2. President Andrew Johnson ordered nearly all land in federal hands returned to its former owners.
3. Because no land distribution took place, the vast majority of rural freed people remained poor and without property during
Reconstruction.
J. Toward a New South
2. Sharecropping initially arose as a compromise between blacks’ desire for land and planters’ desire for labor discipline.
a. For blacks, it was preferable to gang labor, but over time, sharecropping became oppressive.
3. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature)
i. A sharecropping contract, representative of thousands of such documents, signed with an X by former slaves in
Tennessee.
K. The White Farmer
1. The aftermath of the war hurt small white farmers.
2. Both black and white farmers found themselves caught in the sharecropping and crop-lien systems.
L. The Urban South
1. Southern cities experienced remarkable growth after the Civil War.
M. Aftermaths of Slavery
1. The Reconstruction-era debates over transitioning from slavery to freedom had parallels in other Western Hemisphere
countries where emancipation occurred in the nineteenth century.
2. Only in the United States did former slaves gain political rights quickly.
III. The Making of Radical Reconstruction
A. Andrew Johnson
2. Johnson lacked Lincoln’s political skills and keen sense of public opinion.
B. The Failure of Presidential Reconstruction
1. Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction offered pardons to the white southern elite.
3. At first, many northerners were willing to give Johnson’s plan a chance.
C. The Black Codes
1. Southern governments began passing new laws that restricted the freedom of blacks.
2. These new laws violated free labor principles and called forth a vigorous response from the Republican North.
D. The Radical Republicans
2. The Radicals fully embraced the expanded powers of the federal government born of the Civil War.
3. Thaddeus Stevens’s most cherished aim was to confiscate the land of disloyal planters and divide it among former slaves
and northern migrants to the South.
E. The Origins of Civil Rights
1. Most Republicans were moderates, not radicals.
2. Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois proposed two bills to modify Johnson’s policy.
3. Johnson vetoed both bills.
4. Congress passed the Civil Rights Bill over Johnson’s veto and later extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau.
F. The Fourteenth Amendment
1. The Fourteenth Amendment placed in the Constitution the principle of citizenship for all persons born in the United States
2. The Fourteenth Amendment produced an intense division between the parties (Democrats unanimously opposed it; most
G. The Reconstruction Act
1. Johnson campaigned against the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1866 midterm elections.
2. All southern states except Tennessee refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.
3. In March 1867, over Johnson’s veto, Congress adopted the Reconstruction Act.
4. The Reconstruction Act thus began Radical Reconstruction, which lasted until 1877.
H. Impeachment and the Election of Grant
1. To demonstrate his dislike for the Tenure of Office Act, Johnson removed the secretary of war from office in 1868.
2. Johnson was impeached, and the Senate fell one vote short of removing him from office.
I. The Fifteenth Amendment
1. Republican Ulysses S. Grant won the 1868 presidential election.
2. Congress approved the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869.
3. The amendment provided for black suffrage.
J. The Second Founding
1. The laws and amendments of Reconstruction reflected the intersection of two products of the Civil War era—a newly
empowered national state and the idea of a national citizenry enjoying equality before the law.
2. The laws and amendments of Reconstruction repudiated the idea that citizenship was an entitlement of whites alone.
3. The new amendments also transformed the relationship between the federal government and the states.
5. The Reconstruction amendments transferred the authority to define citizens’ rights from the states to the nation and were
crucial in creating the world’s first biracial democracy based on birthright citizenship.
K. Boundaries of Freedom
1. That the United States was a “white man’s government” had been a widespread belief before the Civil War.
2. Reconstruction Republicans’ belief in universal rights also had its limits.
a. Asian immigrants were still excluded from the naturalization process.
L. The Rights of Women
2. Other feminists debated how to achieve “liberty for married women.”
M. Feminists and Radicals
2. Talk of woman suffrage and redesigning marriage found few sympathetic male listeners.
3. Some feminists (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony) opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because it did not
4. The divisions among feminists led to the creation of two opposing women’s rights organizations that would not reunite until
5. Reconstruction left the gender boundary largely intact.
IV. Radical Reconstruction in the South
A. The Tocsin of Freedom
2. Blacks used direct action to remedy long-standing grievances.
a. Sit-ins, strikes, and speaking tours
4. By 1870, the Union had been restored and southern states had Republican majorities.
B. The Black Officeholder
1. Two thousand African-Americans occupied public offices during Reconstruction.
2. The presence of black officeholders and their white allies made a real difference in southern life.
3. The majority of state and local black officeholders were former slaves.
C. Carpetbaggers and Scalawags
1. Carpetbaggers were northern-born white Republicans who often held political office in the South.
2. Scalawags were southern-born white Republicans.
3. A small group of scalawags helped swing some state and local elections for Republicans.
D. Southern Republicans in Power
1. Southern Republican governments established the South’s first state-supported public schools.
3. Republican governments took steps to strengthen the position of rural laborers and to promote the South’s economic
recovery.
E. The Quest for Prosperity
1. During Reconstruction, every state helped to finance railroad construction.
2. Northern investors were more inclined to pursue opportunities in the West than they were in the South, and economic
development remained weak in the southern states.
3. More success was found with local biracial governing.
V. The Overthrow of Reconstruction
A. Reconstruction’s Opponents
2. Opponents could not accept the idea of former slaves voting, holding office, and enjoying equality before the law.
B. “A Reign of Terror”
2. Secret societies sprang up in the South with the aim of preventing blacks from voting and destroying the organization of
the Republican Party.
3. The Ku Klux Klan was organized in 1866.
4. Congress and President Grant, with the passage of three Enforcement Acts in 1870 and 1871, put an end to the Ku Klux
Klan by 1872.
C. The Liberal Republicans
2. Some Republicans, alienated from Grant by corruption in his administration, formed the Liberal Republican Party.
a. Horace Greeley
4. Grant easily defeated Greeley, the Liberal Republican and Democratic Party candidate, to win reelection in 1872.
D. The North’s Retreat
2. The 1873 depression also distracted the North from Reconstruction.
4. The Supreme Court whittled away at Congress’s guarantees of black rights.
b. United States v. Cruikshank (1876)
E. The Triumph of the Redeemers
1. Redeemers claimed to have “redeemed” the white South from corruption, misgovernment, and northern and black control.
F. The Disputed Election and Bargain of 1877
1. The election between Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican) and Samuel Tilden (Democrat) was very close, with disputed
electoral votes from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina.
3. Behind the scenes, Hayes made a bargain to allow southern white Democrats to control the South if his election was
accepted.
4. The compromise led to Hayes’s election and the Democrats having a free hand in the South.
G. The End of Reconstruction
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• How did black and white southerners respond to the end of slavery?
• What course did Presidential Reconstruction take? How did the South respond?
• What did freedom mean to blacks? How did they express their newfound freedom?
• How did legal changes to the Constitution during Reconstruction create new rights for Americans?
• What made the Radical Republicans “radical”?
• Discuss Charles Sumner’s remark that rather than being a threat to liberty, the federal government had become “the custodian of
freedom.”
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
Andrew Johnson
Freedmen’s Bureau
information.
Ku Klux Klan
Reconstruction
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Abbott, Richard H. For Free Press and Equal Rights: Republican Newspapers in the Reconstruction South. Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2004.
Ash, Stephen V. A Year in the South, 1865: The True Story of Four Ordinary People Who Lived through the Most Tumultuous Twelve Months in
American History. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Bigham, Darrel E. On Jordan’s Banks: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005.
Bond, James. No Easy Walk to Freedom: Reconstruction and the Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing,
1997.
Brown, Elsa Barkley. “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom.”
Public Culture 7 (1994): 107–146.
Cimbala, Paul. Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865–1870. Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1997.
INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTOR ACTIVITIES
1. Plans for Reconstruction
Give a short lecture setting the stage: It is early 1866, and congressional Republicans are already strongly criticizing President Andrew John-
son’s plan of Reconstruction. Whether as part of the lecture or in a short handout, outline the details of Johnson’s plan for the class. Then ask
the students to form small groups of congressional Republicans and draft their own plans for Reconstruction, creating one shared document or
2. Group Film Analysis
A. Preparation for Discussion
Have students watch scenes from the film The Birth of a Nation that portray African-Americans during Reconstruction in an inaccurate and
racist way.
One of the scenes that best exemplifies historical distortion and racism is the segment from the South Carolina statehouse. Other good ex-
amples include scenes with the Ku Klux Klan, whose members the film portrays as heroes.
B. Discussion Activities
After viewing the scenes, ask students to answer the following questions in small groups or as a class:
1. Describe the actions of the African-American politicians in the South Carolina statehouse scene. How does this portrayal of black office-
holders compare to the information about these officeholders in Chapter 15 of the textbook?
2. Discuss the actions and portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan in the film. How does this portrayal differ from the research provided in the text-
book?
3. In the film clips, what seem to be the fears that white southerners have about the former slaves? Which of these fears most seems to drive their
actions?