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. Politically, the carpetbaggers were usually dominant; they comprised the majority of Republican governors and congressmen.
However, the Republican Party inside each state was increasingly torn between the more conservative scalawags on one side and the more Radical carpetbaggers with their black allies on the other.
In most cases, the carpetbaggers won out, and many scalawags moved into the conservative or Democratic opposition.
In the context of U. Carpetbagger : This political cartoon from depicts carpetbaggers in a negative light. Together with Republicans, carpetbaggers were viewed as politically manipulating formerly Confederate states for their own financial and political gains.
Carpetbaggers were seen as insidious Northern outsiders with questionable objectives, who attempted to meddle with, and control, Southern politics. In fact, carpetbaggers became a powerful political force during Reconstruction. Sixty carpetbaggers were elected to Congress, and they included a majority of Republican governors in the South during Reconstruction.
Many carpetbaggers moved to the South as social reformers. Beginning in , Northern abolitionists moved to areas in the South that had fallen under Union control. Schoolteachers and religious missionaries arrived in the South, some sponsored by Northern churches. The bureau established schools in rural areas of the South for the purpose of educating the mostly illiterate black population.
Other Northerners who moved to the South participated in rebuilding railroads that had been previously destroyed during the war. During the time blacks were enslaved, they were prohibited from being educated and attaining literacy.
Southern states had no public school systems, and white Southerners either sent their children to private schools or employed private tutors. After the war, hundreds of Northern white women moved South, many to teach newly freed African-American children. While some Northerners went South with reformist impulses, many others went South merely to exploit the chaotic environment for personal gain.
Many carpetbaggers were businessmen who purchased or leased plantations and became wealthy landowners, hiring freedmen to do the labor. Most were former Union soldiers eager to invest their savings in this promising new frontier, and civilians lured South by press reports of easy money on cotton plantations. Following the Civil War, carpetbaggers often bought plantations at fire-sale prices. Because of this and other behavior, they were generally considered to be taking advantage of those living in the South.
Typically, it was used by conservative, pro-federation Southerners to derogate individuals whom they viewed as betraying Southern values by supporting Northern policies such as desegregation. The fate of the carpetbagger and scalawag : A cartoon threatening that the Ku Klux Klan would lynch carpetbaggers, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Independent Monitor, During Reconstruction, scalawags formed coalitions with black freedmen and Northern newcomers to take control of state and local governments.
Despite being a minority, these groups gained power by taking advantage of the Reconstruction laws of These laws disenfranchised individuals who could not take the Ironclad Oath.
Any individual who had served in the Confederate Army, or who had held office in a state or Confederate government, was not allowed to take this oath.
Because they were unable to take this oath, these individuals were disenfranchised. The coalition controlled every former Confederate state except Virginia, as well as Kentucky and Missouri which were claimed by the North and the South for varying lengths of time between and Brown, who had been the wartime governor of Georgia. Scalawags were denounced as corrupt by Democrats. The Democrats alleged that the scalawags were financially and politically corrupt, and willing to support bad government because they profited personally.
Scalawags, along with carpetbaggers, were also targets of violence, mainly by the Ku Klux Klan. The American South remained heavily rural for decades after the Civil War; sharecropping was widespread as a response to economic upheaval.
There were only a few scattered cities; small courthouse towns serviced the farm populations. Local politics revolved around the politicians and lawyers based at the courthouse. Mill towns, narrowly focused on textile production or cigarette manufacturing, began opening in the Piedmont region, especially in the Carolinas. Racial segregation and outward signs of inequality were everywhere and rarely were challenged.
Blacks who violated the color line were susceptible to expulsion or lynching. Cotton became even more important than before, even though prices were much lower. White Southerners showed a reluctance to move North, or to move to cities, so the number of small farms proliferated, and they became smaller and smaller as the population grew.
Sharecropping became widespread as a response to economic upheaval caused by the emancipation of slaves and disenfranchisement of poor whites in the agricultural South during Reconstruction. When slavery ended, the large slave-based plantations were mostly subdivided into tenant or sharecropper farms of 20 to 40 acres. Many white farmers and some blacks owned their land. However, sharecropping, along with tenant farming, became a dominant form in the cotton South from the s to the s, among both blacks and whites.
By the s both had largely disappeared. Sharecropping was a way for very poor farmers, both white and black, to earn a living from land owned by someone else. The landowner provided land, housing, tools, and seed and perhaps a mule , and a local merchant provided food and supplies on credit. At harvest time, the sharecropper received a share of the crop from one-third to one-half, with the landowner taking the rest.
The sharecropper used his share to pay off his debt to the merchant. The system started with blacks when large plantations were subdivided.
By the s, white farmers also became sharecroppers. Plantations had first relied on slaves for cheap labor. Prior to emancipation, sharecropping was limited to poor landless whites, usually working marginal lands for absentee landlords.
Following emancipation, sharecropping came to be an economic arrangement that largely maintained the status quo between blacks and whites through legal means.
In the Reconstruction-era United States, sharecropping was one of few options for penniless freedmen to conduct subsistence farming and support themselves and their families. Other solutions included the crop-lien system in which the farmer was extended credit for seed and other supplies by the merchant , the rent-labor system in which former slaves rented land but kept the entire crop , and the wage system in which the worker earned a fixed wage, but kept none of his crop.
Sharecropping was by far the most economically efficient, as it provided incentives for workers to produce a bigger harvest. Over the next several years, Lincoln considered ideas about how to welcome the devastated South back into the Union, but as the war drew to a close in early , he still had no clear plan. In a speech delivered on April 11, while referring to plans for Reconstruction in Louisiana , Lincoln proposed that some Black people—including free Black people and those who had enlisted in the military—deserved the right to vote.
He was assassinated three days later, however, and it would fall to his successor to put plans for Reconstruction in place. Apart from being required to uphold the abolition of slavery in compliance with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution , swear loyalty to the Union and pay off war debt, southern state governments were given free rein to rebuild themselves.
These repressive codes enraged many in the North, including numerous members of Congress, which refused to seat congressmen and senators elected from the southern states. The first bill extended the life of the bureau, originally established as a temporary organization charged with assisting refugees and formerly enslaved people, while the second defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens who were to enjoy equality before the law.
After Johnson vetoed the bills—causing a permanent rupture in his relationship with Congress that would culminate in his impeachment in —the Civil Rights Act became the first major bill to become law over presidential veto.
The participation of African Americans in southern public life after would be by far the most radical development of Reconstruction, which was essentially a large-scale experiment in interracial democracy unlike that of any other society following the abolition of slavery. Southern Black people won election to southern state governments and even to the U. Congress during this period. After , an increasing number of southern whites turned to violence in response to the revolutionary changes of Radical Reconstruction.
The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations targeted local Republican leaders, white and Black, and other African Americans who challenged white authority. Though federal legislation passed during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in took aim at the Klan and others who attempted to interfere with Black suffrage and other political rights, white supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South after the early s as support for Reconstruction waned. Racism was still a potent force in both South and North, and Republicans became more conservative and less egalitarian as the decade continued.
In —after an economic depression plunged much of the South into poverty—the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War. When Democrats waged a campaign of violence to take control of Mississippi in , Grant refused to send federal troops, marking the end of federal support for Reconstruction-era state governments in the South.
In the contested presidential election that year, Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes reached a compromise with Democrats in Congress: In exchange for certification of his election, he acknowledged Democratic control of the entire South.
They were also very supportive of establishing and protecting the civil and voting rights of the newly freed Black population of the south.
Following Lincoln's assassination and particularly during the Andrew Johnson's presidency, the Radical Republicans largely influenced the direction of Reconstruction. The high point of their power was the impeachment of President Johnson which failed by one vote. They splintered as a political movement within the Republican party once Reconstruction ended in Thaddeus Stevens April 4, — August 11, Thaddeus Stevens was one of the main leaders of the Radical Republican faction in Congress during Reconstruction.
Stevens was an opponent of slavery before the war and after the war sought to secure the rights of the newly freed population in the former Confederacy. He was a political enemy of President Andrew Johnson and played a major role in bring about the failed impeachment proceedings against him. Impeachment of Andrew Johnson by the Senate This was part of the power struggle between Johnson who sought highly lenient policies towards the former Confederate states and the Radical Republicans who wanted a harsher version of Reconstruction as well as more forceful protection of the rights of the newly freed southern black population.
Ultimately the impeachment, which was not popular or supported by the general public, failed by one vote. Ulysses S Grant April 27 - July 23 Ulysses S Grant was the supreme Union general during the civil war and then later 18th President of the United States. Grant was instrumental in the battlefield defeat of the Confederacy and then as President worked to implement Reconstruction.
Joseph Rainey June 21, — August 1, He was also the first black presiding officer of the House of Representatives. Rainey was the Republican representative from South Carolina. Gordon, a Louisiana slave who escaped to freedom in March Slavery is a legal and economic system where people are treated as property. Slavery in North America existed since settlement began in the 17th century. Within the United States, by the time of the start of the civil war slavery had become extinct in the northern states, defined largely as north of the Mason-Dixon line that forms the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Slavery continued to exist in the south until put down by the Union Army and abolished officially by the 13th amendment to the Constitution in The international slave trade was ended by the British Navy in the early 19th century. Carpetbagger by Thomas Nast. Carpetbaggers was the term used to refere to Northerners who moved to the south during Reconstruction to profit from the situation in the territory.
The name was a referece to the carpet bag luggage that many of the Northerners used. Scalawags were Southern whites who supported the Republicans and the various policies of Reconstruction in the south. The name was originally a reference to low-grade farm animals.
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