Tracy High School HA 2

Reconstruction Sources

Source A

Source: Tourgee, Albion Tourgee. Undaunted Radical: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Albion W.

Tourgee. Edited by Mark Elliott and John David Smith. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,

2010.

Source: Originally published in the New York Tribune, May 1870.

Note: Tourgee was a white, Northern soldier who settled in North Carolina after the War. He served as a

judge during Reconstruction and wrote this letter to the North Carolina Republican Senator, Joseph Carter

Abbott.

“It is my mournful duty to inform you that our friend John W. Stephens, State Senator from Caswell, is dead.

He was foully murdered by the Ku Klux in the Grand Jury room of the Court House on Saturday . . . He was

stabbed five or six times, and then hangered on a hook in the Grand Jury room . . . . Another brave, honest

Republican citizen has met his fate at the hands of these fiends. . . .

. . . I have very little doubt that I shall be one of the next victims. My steps have been dogged for months, and

only a good opportunity has been wanted to secure to me who, especially from the South, does not support,

advocate, and urge immediate active and thorough measures to put an end to these outrages. . . is a coward, a

traitor, or a fool.”

A carpetbag is a type of luggage. Since Northerners who traveled to the South during Reconstruction often

carried such bags, Southerners called these Northern outsiders carpetbaggers.

The image of the Alabama lynching is chilling, especially considering it was drawn as a warning to

Republicans in the south. It is a direct threat to carpetbaggers and scalawags who sided with the freedmen.

The KK formed as a social club in 1866 and quickly evolved into an organization that used violence to

intimidate Freemen and any who sought to support Republican Reconstruction governments.

The KKK and other groups often targeted individuals in key positions of power including judges and government officials. Since the KKK did not see the Reconstruction governments as legitimate, they felt

justified in their attacks. The term redemption which they used to describe their efforts, literally means

salvation. The KKK saw themselves as saviors for Southerners who were being enslaved by Reconstruction governments as legitimate, they felt justified in their attacks. The term “redemption,” which they used to

describe their efforts, literally means salvation. The KKK saw themselves as saviors for Southerners who were

being enslaved by Reconstruction governments.

Albion Tourgee is one of the most famous of the so-called carpetbaggers. He not only was an effective judge in a very violent area of North Carolina, he bravely wrote about his experiences and observations, thus

endangering himself even more. He also helped started a school for black students, now known as Bennett

College. After Reconstruction he left North Carolina and became an influential writer and editor in Colorado and New York.

Source B

Source: Klan Warning. Political Cartoon. Tuscaloosa: Independent Monitor, 1868. Digital History

American Reconstruction: People and Politics after the Civil War. Online.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/exhibits/reconstruction/section5/section5_10.html . (Date Accessed January

2, 2018).

Originally, published in the Independent Monitor, September 1, 1868.

A cartoon from the September 1, 1868, issue of the Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor. The lynched images

represent two educators: The Rev. Arad S. Lakin, right, a "carpetbagger" from the north who had just been

named president of the University of Alabama, and Dr. Noah B. Cloud, a southern-born Republican, or

"scalawag," serving as Superintendent of Public Instruction of Alabama. The mule is marked with the initials

of the Ku Klux Klan, and the image serves as a threat to enemies of the Klan.

A carpetbag is a type of luggage. Since Northerners who traveled to the South during Reconstruction often

carried such bags, Southerners called these Northern outsiders carpetbaggers.

The image of the Alabama lynching is chilling, especially considering it was drawn as a warning to

Republicans in the south. It is a direct threat to carpetbaggers and scalawags who sided with the freedmen.

The KK formed as a social club in 1866 and quickly evolved into an organization that used violence to intimidate Freemen and any who sought to support Republican Reconstruction governments.

The KKK and other groups often targeted individuals in key positions of power including judges and government officials. Since the KKK did not see the Reconstruction governments as legitimate, they felt

justified in their attacks. The term redemption which they used to describe their efforts, literally means

salvation. The KKK saw themselves as saviors for Southerners who were being enslaved by Reconstruction governments as legitimate, they felt justified in their attacks. The term “redemption,” which they used to

describe their efforts, literally means salvation. The KKK saw themselves as saviors for Southerners who were being enslaved by Reconstruction governments.

The Donkey is the symbol of the Democratic Party and had been since the Age of Jackson. The image, therefore, is a threat to any who support the Republican efforts at Reconstruction. The donkey clearly links the

KKK to the Democratic Party.

Document C: Targeting Black Voters and Government Officials

Source: Sterling, Dorothy, ed. The Trouble They Seen: The Story of Reconstruction in the Words of African Americans. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1994.

Note: Colby was a former slave who was elected to the Georgia State Legislature during Reconstruction. The

following is excerpted from his 1872 testimony. This testimony was given before a congressional committee

formed to investigate violence against freed people in the South.

“Colby: On the 29th of October 1869, [the Klansmen] broke my door open, took me out of bed, took me to the

woods and whipped me three hours or more and left me for dead. They said to me, “Do you think you

will ever vote another damned Radical ticket?’ I said, “If there was an election tomorrow, I would

vote the radical ticket.” They set in and whipped me a thousand licks more, with sticks and straps that

had buckles on the ends of them.

Question: What is the character of those men who were engaged in whipping you?

Colby: Some are first-class men in our town. One is a lawyer, one a doctor, and some are farmers. They had

their pistols and they took me in my night-clothes and carried me from home. They hit me five

thousand blows. I told President Grant the same that I tell you now. They told me to take off my shirt.

I said, “I never do that for any man.” My drawers fell down about my feet and they took hold of them

and tripped me up. Then they pulled my shirt up over my head. They said I had voted for Grant and

had carried the Negroes against them. About two days before they whipped me they offered me

$5,000 to go with them and said they would pay me $2,500 in cash if I would let another man go to

the legislature in my place. I told them that I would not do it if they would give me all the county was

worth.

The worst thing was my mother, wife and daughter were in the room when they came. My little

daughter begged them not to carry me away. They drew up a gun and actually frightened her to death.

She never got over it until she died. That was the part that grieves me the most.

Question: How long before you recovered from the effects of this treatment?

Colby: I have never got over it yet. They broke something inside of me. I cannot do any work now, though I

always made my living before in the barber-shop, hauling wood, etc.

Question: You spoke about being elected to the next legislature?

Colby: Yes, sir, but they run me off during the election. They swore they would kill me if I stayed. The

Saturday night before the election I went to church. When I got home they just peppered the house

with shot and bullets.”

It was well known in the North and in Congress that voter intimidation was rampant in most Southern states. Colby’s testimony was part of an effort to expose the cruel and illegal nature of the Klan’s activities.

Congress did authorize President Grant to use troops to suppress KKK activities. One of Grant’s greatest efforts led to the arrest of 600 Klansman in South Carolina. Even though the celebrated event led to only 9 of

the 600 men standing trial, much of the Klan’s energies were limited as it leaders went into hiding or fled.

However, as Grant and Congress began to take less forceful measures after 1872, the ideals of Radical Reconstruction were doomed to fail. Soon White Leagues and the KK re-emerged in full force.

Source D

Source: Frost, A.B. Of Course He Wants to Vote the Democratic Ticket.” Political Cartoon. New York:

Harper’s Weekly, October 21, 1876. The Newberry. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and Race in Postbellum

America. Online. http://dcc.newberry.org/items/of-course-he-wants-to-vote-the-democratic-ticket. (3 January

2018).

Elections during Reconstruction were times of increased violence in the south. Many Southerners saw the

Republicans as conquerors—after all they were the party of Lincoln. Not surprisingly, freedmen

overwhelmingly voted for the Republican ticket. In 1868 President Grant won the popular vote by only 310,000 votes. 500,000 African-American votes in the South were the difference.

Harper’s Weekly was a very influential Northern magazine. This 1876 image was a scathing attack on

Southerners’ use of violence to intimidate the black vote. These scare tactics were used well into the 20th

century, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that many black Southerners felt safe enough to cast a vote.

Source E

Source: Danzer, Gerald, et. al. The Americans. New York: McDougal Littell, 1998.

“. . . in the 1870s, Northern voters grew indifferent to events in the South. Weary of the ‘Negro Question’ and

‘sick of carpet-bag’ government, many Northern voters shifted their attention to such national concerns as the

Panic of 1873 and corruption in Grant’s administration. . . . Although political violence continued in the South

. . . the tide of public opinion in the North began to turn against Reconstruction policies.”

Source F

Source: Flanagan, Timothy. Reconstruction: A Primary Source History of the Struggle to Reunite the North and the South after the Civil War. New York: The Rosen Publishing Company, 2005.

Source: Originally published in Harper’s Weekly, 1876.

President U.S. Grant: “I hope I shall get to the bottom soon.”

It is generally accepted that Ulysses S. Grant was not personally corrupt. However, the amount of high-level

scandals that took place during his presidency is staggering. Many of the most corrupt officials were friends of Grant whom he personally appointed.

The Tammany Ring refers to Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine in New York City. It was well-known for its graft (bribery) and corruption.

The Whiskey Ring involved government tax collectors who accepted bribes to help whiskey distillers avoid paying taxes. This cost the government millions of dollars. Grant’s close friend and private secretary, Orville

Babcock, was clearly involved in the scheme, but Grant refused to believe it and protected his friend from

convictions.

The Belknap Affair, also called the Indian Ring, involved Grant’s Secretary of War, William Belknap. Belknap

accepted bribes from merchants who wanted to trade with Indians in the territories.

In 1872, a reform-minded group of liberal Republicans led by Horace Greeley broke away from the Radical Republicans and President Grant. Their primary issue was government corruption, and they believed that it

was the main problem facing the nation—not Reconstruction. IN fact, they saw Southern Reconstruction state

governments as corrupt and unworthy of support. Greeley openly stated that Reconstruction had achieved its goals and the black man had to stand on his own two feet. Democrats, seeing a chance to get rid of Grant,

nominated Greeley for President—which is ironic since Greeley once called the Democrats in the South ‘murderers . . . drunkards, cowards, liars, thieves.” Greeley lost, but Republican unity was shattered, making

it nearly impossible to continue an aggressive campaign of Reconstruction in the South.

Document G

Source: Richardson, Heather Cox. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

“Previous historians have offered several explanations for what one called “the retreat from Reconstruction.”

Perhaps the most influential explanation was that of C. Vann Woodward, who in 1955 ventured the argument

that after the Civil War, Southerners adopted racial segregation to split a political bloc of African-Americans

and poor Southern whites that threatened the political supremacy of the white elite. Northerners capitulated to

segregation, he argued, because they, too, were racists. After Woodward, many historians turned their

attention to racism to explain why white Americans excluded their black countrymen from mainstream life.

They dug into the Southern past, find there such intransigent racism that Northern politicians were eventually

forced to capitulate to it in order build national coalitions that could win elections. Other historians explained

the region’s abandonment of Reconstruction by pointing out that Northerners were exhausted after a

devastating war, preoccupied with problems of corruption in their own section, and forced to dump their black

allies overboard out of political expediency. Taken together, historians since Woodward have painted a

compelling portrait of the importance of white racism in the historical black experience and the development

of American society, as well as confusing world of Northern corruption, spoils manship, and reform.

Powerful though these explanations were, they did not appear to me to explain fully the Northern abandonment

of reconstruction. They seemed to present slices of the late nineteenth-century Northern experience that were

not easily reconciled into a larger picture. While there is no doubt that nineteenth-century Northern were

unselfconsciously racists, for example, had whites reacted to freed people solely on the basis of racism, they

should have discriminated against both poor and prosperous African-Americans alike, and their attitudes

should have been unaffected by specific events or pieces of legislation. This was not the case. Similarly,

while Northerners were increasingly preoccupied with corruption and civil service, they were even more

attentive to Southern

The general press ran along surprisingly standard tracks. Unlike the smaller, specialized labor, business, or

ethnic newspapers and magazines, the mainstream press concentrated on similar topics in all parts of the

country. The San Francisco Daily Alta California, for instance, joined the New York Times, the Chicago

Tribune, and other major papers in worrying about political turmoil over taxation in South Carolina. Their

concerns were shared by many of the black newspapers. While offering different interpretations of

newsworthy events, most newspapers focused on the same issues: money, the south, labor, and the corruption

of government. Examining a range of papers from across the North permitted a larger pattern to emerge from

the complicated local politics of individual cities and states.

Shared perceptions of what was important reflected changing technology, as the booming telegraph news

services standardized the press of the late nineteenth century. Since the powerful news services operated out

of cities, and since the newly widespread railroads delivered city papers throughout the country, the prominent

newspapers of the country usually set the terms of discussion about national issues. Newspaper readers in

rural areas would have access to stories about violent strikers, for example, despite the fact that they might

have worried less about labor agitators than their urban counterparts. The major newspapers of the postwar

North—the Boston Evening Transcript, New York World, New York Herald, New York Times, Cincinnati

Daily Gazette, and so on—offer today’s reader the opportunity to stand in the shoes of a Reconstruction-era

American and observe distant events the same way a literate nineteenth-century Northerner would have.

The postwar years challenged this bucolic model of political economy as widespread industrialization

transformed the nation. Businesses expanded over the nation’s burgeoning transportation systems, beginning

to operate under a new corporate structure that divorced a company’s managers from its workers. By 1880, the

new factories employed 5 million industrial workers, many drawn from the pool of immigrants who poured

into the country after 1880 at the rate of more than 500,000 per year. Increasing mechanization meant that

workers needed fewer skills and could be easily replaced by newcomers living in the ghettos of booming cities

like New York, which, along with Chicago and Philadelphia, had well over a million inhabitants by 1900.

Workers without job security, employed at below-subsistence wages, had a hard time believing in a

harmonious economy in which hard work spelled success [the pre-Civil War view of political economy].

Instead, they sought relief for accumulated grievances by taking to the streets; between 1880 and 1900, 6.6

million workers participated in more than 23,000 strikes.

The conflict between the idea of a harmonious economic world based on free labor and the idea of class

struggle pervaded late nineteenth-century politics and directly affected the question of African Americans’ role

in American life. . . .

In the fall of 1873, even the staunchly [firmly] pro-Grant and pro-freedmen Boston Evening Transcript ran a

letter . . . arguing that “the blacks, as a people, are unfitted for the proper exercise of political duties. . . . The

rising generation of . . . blacks needed a period of probation and instruction; a period . . . long enough for the

blacks to have forgotten something of his condition as a slave and learned much of the true method of gaining

honorable subsistence and of performing the duties of any position to which he might aspire. . . .”

Source H

Nast, Thomas. Colored Rule in a Reconstructed (?) State. Political Cartoon. New York: Harpers Weekly,

1874. Harp Week, Toward Racial Equality: Harper’s Weekly Reports on Black America, 1857-1874. Online.

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/usingprimarysources/chicago.html#newspapers. (January 2, 2018).

Source: Originally published on the cover of Harper’s Weekly, March 14, 1874.

(The members call each other thieves, liars, rascals, and cowards.)

Columbia. "You are Aping the lowest Whites. If you disgrace your Race in this way you had better take Back

Seats."

Northern artist’s portrayal of the South Carolina State Legislature during Reconstruction.

The only way the Reconstruction was going to succeed was if Northerners wanted it to do so. Resistance was

strong in the South as documents A and B show. The crusade of the Civil War left many Northerners willing to continue the aggressive Radical reconstruction policies for a while. But eventually, fatigue, money, and the

death of the most important radicals, left many in the North exhausted and frustrated.

One reason Northern tired of Reconstruction has been traced to the racism that existed in the North. As blacks

were being brutalized in the South, many Northerners turned a blind eye to the problem, and even began seeing blacks as the cause of their own problems. In her 2001 Book, Heather Richardson makes a convincing

case that Northern public opinion changed in the early 1870s. Newspapers and cartoonists, who had

originally portrayed the slave as a hardworking, freedom-seeking American, began to show blacks as lazy and corrupt and of low character in general. Richardson argues that the freedman was in part the victim of the

Northern middle class becoming increasingly fearful if immigrants and labor unions, may of whom advocated socialists-like ideas. This shift in attitude toward Southern blacks is not surprising given that many Northern

states had tight restrictions on black suffrage until the 15th Amendment was passed.

Source I

Source: Egerton, Douglas R. The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America's Most

Progressive Era. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014.

“Reconstruction, which was in fact far from radical, constituted the most democratic decades of the nineteenth

century, South or North, so much so that it amounted to the first progressive era in the nation’s history. Just

ten years after Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney endorsed the expansion of slavery into the western

territories and announced that black Americans, even if free born, could not be citizens of the republic, blacks

were fighting for the franchise in northern states; battling to integrate streetcars in Charleston, New Orleans,

and San Francisco; funding integrated public school; and voting and standing for office in the erstwhile

Confederacy. How black veterans, activists, ministers, assemblymen, registrars, poll workers, editors, and a

handful of dedicated white allies risked their lives in this cause, nearly brought down a racists president, but

ultimately lost their fight because of white violence. . .”

Source J

Source: Wineapple, Brenda. Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877. New York

City: Harper Collins Publishers, 2013.

“This was a jaundiced view of Reconstruction that took little account of such improvements as rebuilt bridges

and roads, the reorganization of judicial systems, and the ambitious establishing of schools. Nor did it take

into account Grant’s suppression of the Klan. But the South as in debt, raved, and distraught, and its

conditions were laid at the feet of the Republicans. Allegations of corruption were taken as fact, particularly

because the political ascent of blacks in state after Southern state worried Democrats, the planters, and the

white yeomen. Still, corruption did exist: bribes, kickbacks, inflated bills, huge expense accounts, and yes,

votes for sale. “I don’t pretend to be honest,” said Henry Clay Warmouth, the Republican governor of

Louisiana since 1868. “I only pretend to be as honest as anybody in politics.”

Yet Hayes and the so-called Compromise of 1877 did not cause the end of Reconstruction. After the death of

Thaddeus Stevens in 1868, of Stanton in 1869 (at age fifty-five), just after Grant had appointed him to the

Supreme Court, and of Sumner in 1874—and the failure of Ben Wade’s reelection campaign—there were very

few men in government of the old radical guard pushing for equal rights under the law or willing to change the

law to protect all citizens, all of them, or to enforce the civil rights laws as they existed. Liberal Republicans,

who had been nibbling away at the foundations of Radical Reconstruction, had no heart or stomach left for the

freedmen and freedwomen. The bloodshed in the South seemed the propaganda of old troublemakers. Carl

Schurz took Hayes aside to remind him that the Republican parties in the South were dishonest (he made no

mention of Democrats and their coercive tactics). Like most Liberal Republicans, Schurz was more interested

in civil service reform and western wealth than righting Redeemer wrongs. Righteous indignation about

slavery had given way to righteous indignation about alleged political corruption, and the complexities of

principle compromise—and of principle—had subsided into a largely bombastic politics of conciliation.

Besides, the Suprmer Court had been gutting enfrocement legislation. In the Slaghterhouse Cases of 1873, a

New Orleans butchers’ association had sued Louisiana when the state government had relocated its

slaughterhouses to the outskirts of the city, and it used the fourteenth Amendment to claim is was being denied

its rights without due process. The Suprome Court decided tha the federal gvonment ha dno juridction over

where the butchers slaughtered their animals; that was for the state to decide. In other words, the Fourteenth

Amendment could protect only the right of citiznshp; it couldn’t protect toeher rights,w hich were the state’s

preroatoive. In one of his last acts, Salmon Chase dieented; the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection

clause, he said, allowed the federal government to shield individuals from discrimination by the state.”

Source K

Source: Foner, Eric. Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. New York: Vintage

Books, 2006.

“By the 1890s, black political activity symbolized the growing danger of an un-American system of class

conflict taking over the nation. Northerners who rejected the idea of a conflict between labor and capital and

who wanted desperately to preserve a traditional American belief in working one’s way up the economic

ladder joined together during the last of decades of the century. Anxious to purge the nation of unbelievers,

they first acquiesced in black disfranchisement, then accepted the idea that African-Americans, who only

thirty-five years before had seemed to be ideal American workers on their way to prosperity, were instead

bound by race into permanent semi-barbarism.

A “counter-revolution” was now overtaking Reconstruction, lamented Vice President Henry Wilson, a veteran

Radical Republican. “Men are beginning to hint at changing the condition of the Negro.” Racism, of course,

had never been eliminated from northern life. As noted earlier, despite Reconstruction, the vast majority of

African Americans remained trapped in poverty, confined to menial and unskilled jobs. Nonetheless, as a

result of Reconstruction, the North’s public life had been opened to blacks in ways inconceivable before the

Civil War. In the 1860s, the Republican Party had not only given northern blacks the right to vote, but also

sought to ensure their access to public schools, and in many places worked against discriminatory practices on

streetcars and railroads; and in private businesses. In the economic crisis of the 1870s, however, as the nation

looked for scapegoats, racism increasingly reasserted its hold on northern thought and behavior. Engravings in

popular journals depicted the freed people not as upstanding citizens harassed by violent opponents (as had

been the case immediately after the Civil War) but as little more than unbridled animals. By the mid-1870s, it

was quite common in the North to write, in the words of the contemporary historian Francis Parkman, of “the

monstrosities of Negro rule in South Carolina.” Racism in other words, offered a convenient explanation for

the alleged “failure” of Reconstruction.

The idea of the natural superiority of some races to others, which before the Civil War had been invoked to

justify slavery in an otherwise free society, now reemerged, cloaked in the vocabulary of modern science. The

growing use language borrowed from Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, such as “natural selection,” “the

struggle for existence,” and “the survival of the fittest,” became part and parcel of social discourse in the

North. What came to be called Social Darwinism condemned any state inference with the “natural” workings

of society, especially misguided efforts to uplift those at the bottom of the social order. By and large, in this

view, the poor were responsible for their own conditions, and African Americans were consigned by nature

itself to occupy the lowest rung of the social ladder. Whether in the form of labor legislation or Radical

Reconstruction, governmental efforts to alter the natural working of society only impeded social progress.”

Source L

Source: Nast, Thomas. The Union as It Was. Political Cartoon. New York: Harper’s Weekly, 1974. Library

of Congress, Prints and Photograph Division. Online. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001696840/.

(January 2, 2018).

Source: Originally published in Harper’s Weekly 1874.

As more African Americans migrated North in the aftermath of the Civil War, some northerners’ opinions about freedmen changed. Political cartoons can be important evidence for historians investigating popular

opinion. In Source L and Source M, you can see the evolution of Northern attitudes toward freedmen during Reconstruction.

Source M

Source: Nast, Thomas. Franchise: And Not This Man? Political Cartoon. New York: Harper’s Weekly,

1865. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Divisions. Online.

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/91705053/. (January 2, 2018).

Source: Originally published in Harper’s Weekly 1865.

As more African Americans migrated North in the aftermath of the Civil War, some northerners’ opinions

about freedmen changed. Political cartoons can be important evidence for historians investigating popular opinion. In Source L and Source M, you can see the evolution of Northern attitudes toward freedmen during

Reconstruction.