CWR - Reconstruction Lesson

Reconstruction

Impeachment of Andrew Johnson

33 WAVING THE BLOODY SHIRT This post-Civil War Republican tactic involved reminding Northern voters that the South was made up mostly of Democrats and that many Northern members of that party had been at best lukewarm about resisting secession. The term came into use after the congressman Benjamin F. Butler displayed before his colleagues the bloodstained shirt of a Northerner who had been flogged in Mississippi. The bloody shirt was used by Republicans for decades as a way of diverting attention from politically embarrassing contemporary issues.During all the Reconstruction period, the biggest issue in northern and southern states alike was the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. The U.S. Constitution allows Congress to remove the president from office by impeaching (accusing) him of committing "high crimes and misdemeanors," so Radical Republicans impeached Johnson when he ignored laws they had passed to limit presidential powers. They passed these laws to stop Johnson from curbing the Radical Republicans' hostile treatment of former Confederate states and their leaders. After a three-month trial in the Senate, Johnson missed being convicted by one vote, so he was not removed from office merely because he held political opinions unpopular among politicians who had the power to impeach him. 

Resistance to Racial Equality

Not all white southerners accepted the equal status of former slaves. After the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, all former slave states enacted Black Codes, which were laws written to control the lives of freed slaves in ways slaveholders had formerly controlled the lives of their slaves. Black Codes deprived voting rights to freed slaves and allowed plantation owners to take advantage of black workers in ways that made it seem slavery had not been abolished.

Other white southerners formed secret societies that used murder, arson, and other threatening actions as a means of controlling freed African Americans and pressuring them not to vote. The Ku Klux Klan was the worst of these societies. The Klan, or KKK, was founded by veterans of the Confederate Army to fight against Reconstruction. Some southern leaders urged the Klan to step down because Federal troops would stay in the South as long as African Americans needed protection from it. 

All in all, the readmission of states proved difficult and led white southerners to resist Reconstruction and regard their Reconstruction state governments as corrupt. Reconstruction came to an end when Union troops were withdrawn from the South as part of the Compromise of 1877. When the soldiers left and white southerners regained control of their state governments, African Americans were left unprotected. The new southern governments quickly passed laws that deprived blacks of their rights and worked to strengthen the segregation of southern society. View the presentation on Reconstruction below.

 

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