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US history
Course: US history > Unit 5
Lesson 3: Reconstruction- Juneteenth
- An overview and the 13th Amendment
- Life after slavery for African Americans
- Black Codes
- The First KKK
- The Freedmen's Bureau
- The 14th Amendment
- The 15th Amendment
- The Compromise of 1877
- Failure of Reconstruction
- Comparing the effects of the Civil War on American national identity
- Reconstruction
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Failure of Reconstruction
Explore how Reconstruction amendments reshaped freedom, citizenship, and democracy in the U.S. post-Civil War. Despite initial strides, African Americans faced limitations through sharecropping, Black Codes, and voter suppression. These amendments, however, laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s.
Want to join the conversation?
- after the 13th amendment "ending slavery" after slavery was still happening. where people ignoring the amendment or was it legal again?(7 votes)
- Enslavement by private citizens was illegal after the 13th amendment. But enslavement by governments through the prison system in America is still legal in the 21st century.(10 votes)
- Why did the Southern Democrats implement Jim Crow segregation? These laws didn't change much; after all, slavery was undisputably outlawed. They couldn't force labor in the way they were previously able to.(4 votes)
- That's a great question Richy. The reason why Southern Democrats implemented Jim Crow laws(which were not just about segregation) was that they wanted to dilute the political, social and economic power of the sizable black population in the South. The most significant part of these laws were voting restrictions like insanely difficult literacy tests, poll taxes and the 'grandfather clause'. Due to this African Americans were mostly unable to vote and hence couldn't prevent the election of openly racist politicians. Segregation was a way to ensure that racial prejudice remained ingrained in the population. After all, it is much easier to hate people whom you do not interact with. Although slavery could not be reinstated, Jim Crow legislation ensured that the core ideology of the Confederacy, white supremacy, was retained.(8 votes)
- Why didnt they have olive gardens back then(3 votes)
- Reconstruction was a project in the territories that had left the United States and fought a war against the United States: a war which their governments jointly and separately lost.
Olive gardens in United States territory at that time were in Southern California, a state which remained loyal throughout the war.(5 votes)
- What's grandfather claus(1 vote)
- A grandfather clause extends the legality of something if a law is later passed making the original thing substandard. An example is the DC-3 Aircraft, which began flying before the regulations for that kind of structure was declared insufficiently stable. The regulations were made, and even though the DC-3 didn't meet them, it was "grandfathered in" so that it could continue being used for military and civilian use.(6 votes)
- Explain what the Freedmen’s Bureau did to change the lives of former slaves in the 1860s(2 votes)
- According to the Freedman Burea bill, they were to provide "provisions, clothing, and fuel...for the immediate and temporary shelter and supply of destitute and suffering refugees and freedmen and their wives and children"(3 votes)
- What is a Grandfather clause?(1 vote)
- A "grandfather clause" legalizes instances of whatever is being permitted by a new law that happened before the law was passed. So if someone claimed a piece of land before registration of claims was made possible, a "grandfathder clause" would let her keep it and give legal title "as of the day" when registrations became a matter of law.(4 votes)
- When showing the amendments at, could they have combined these concepts into a super amendment? The amendment be for African Americans, as it would be to end slavery, extending citizenship to them and all people of the U.S., and the right for them to vote. I don't know what it will be called but, I would wonder in the future if they start combining amendments. 1:34(2 votes)
- It's not just one because these amendments were all made at different times. The 13th was made in 1865, the 14th in 1868, and the 15 in 1870.(2 votes)
- hmmmmmmm... how big are the different definitions in both of the sides of freedom?(2 votes)
- Asian immigrants were considered citizens before or after the 14th amendment?(1 vote)
- Here's the wikipedia information on it. As with all things on wikipedia, check the footnotes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_immigration_to_the_United_States#First_major_wave_of_Asian_immigration_(1850%E2%80%931917)(3 votes)
- without the amendments a lot of people still would have been treated unfairly(1 vote)
- Even WITH the amendments, millions of people were, and continue to be, treated unfairly.(1 vote)
Video transcript
- [Kim] How do you define freedom? Stop for a minute and picture
what it means to be free. What comes into your mind? Traveling wherever you please, having enough money to do what you want, or is freedom better
defined by what it's not? Not having anyone telling you what to do, not being in prison? Freedom is a core aspect
of US national identity, but if someone gave you box
labeled Contents: Freedom, what would you expect to find inside? This was the question that
the United States faced during Reconstruction, the
period following the Civil War, when the US government,
Southern state governments, and African Americans
attempted to negotiate a new social and political
order for the South. But what African Americans
expected to find in the box labeled Freedom was very different from what their former
enslavers wanted to put there. Was freedom just the absence of slavery, as most white Southerners believed, or did it imply citizenship,
political power, and economic self-sufficiency? Try to solve this dilemma, Congress passed, and the states ratified, three new Constitutional amendments during the Reconstruction
era, the 13th Amendment, which ended the system of slavery in 1865, the 14th Amendment, which
extended citizenship to all persons born or
naturalized in the United States in 1868, and the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the
right to vote in 1870. So in just five years, African Americans in the South
went from personal property to full civic participants,
at least in theory. In reality, how different were definitions of freedom, citizenship, and democracy before and after Reconstruction? To really answer this question, we need to examine continuity and change in the Reconstruction era. What stayed the same and what changed in each of these three areas following the passage of the
Reconstruction Amendments? Okay, first let's look at
continuities and changes in the definition of freedom. Before the end of slavery, African Americans had neither
economic nor physical freedom. They didn't have control of their bodies or of their labor. The pass system kept
them from moving freely, and slavery itself meant
that they couldn't choose where to work or earn
money from their own work. So how much did their
physical and economic freedom change after the 13th
Amendment outlawed slavery? Well, their economic self-sufficiency went through some ups and downs. Most African Americans believed that their years of
unpaid toil entitled them to land of their own. US Army general William Tecumseh Sherman redistributed Confederate territory on the coasts of Georgia
and South Carolina to black families, who
farmed there for a few years until Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, gave all confiscated land
back to its former owners. Instead, most black farmers
became sharecroppers, renting a portion of a
white landowner's farm in exchange for part of the crop yield. This gave black farmers a lot more freedom over their own work, since they didn't have to
work under an overseer. But economically, sharecropping
kept black farmers, as well as small white farmers, in an endless cycle of debt and poverty. After the 13th Amendment, most
Southern state governments attempted to limit the physical freedom of African Americans as well, with statutes known as the Black Codes. Many of these codes defined anyone who wasn't under a labor
contract as a vagrant who could be arrested and
have their labor sold. Later, segregation limited
the physical freedom of where Southern African
Americans could go and what they could do. Laws like the Black Codes, which so obviously attempted
to institute slavery by another name, led Congress
to pass the 14th Amendment, which defined a US citizen as anyone born or naturalized
in the United States and specifically prevented states from infringing upon
the rights of citizens. Before the Civil War,
citizenship was exclusively the privilege of white Americans. Non-white immigrants weren't
eligible to become US citizens, and the 1857 Supreme Court
decision in Dred Scott declared that no African Americans
could be citizens at all. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, led to a huge increase in
the number of US citizens and it decoupled
citizenship from whiteness. Even the American-born
children of Asian immigrants were citizens. But the Supreme Court
defined the 14th Amendment very narrowly in the late 19th
century, permitting many laws that discriminated on the basis of race. Only in the 20th century
would the 14th Amendment become an important tool
for civil rights activists to break down segregation. Lastly, the 15th Amendment,
ratified in 1870, extended the right to vote to black men. In the years leading up to the Civil War, with few exceptions, only white
man had the right to vote. The 15th Amendment radically
redefined the terms of American democracy. During Reconstruction, more
than 2,000 African Americans held public office,
including two US senators. But there were limits to this new broader
definition of democracy. First, it didn't include women, much to the frustration of
the women's suffrage movement. Then, as the federal
government ceased to intervene to protect black citizens in
the South in the late 1870s, Southern state governments imposed a range of voter suppression tactics to effectively bar African
Americans from voting, which then reduced the likelihood of black politicians winning office. Not until the 1960s would African American voter registration once again reach
Reconstruction-era levels. So how much did the
Reconstruction Amendments change definitions of freedom,
citizenship, and democracy? Well, after the amendments, African Americans were free
to own their own bodies and labor, but that was about it. The 14th and 15th Amendments
led to short-lived revolutions in the concept of citizenship
and in voting rights, but those rights had all but evaporated by the end of the century. Nevertheless, although they
didn't have much of an impact in the short term, these
amendments would lay the foundation for the civil rights movement
of the 1950s and '60s.