- Aug 2024
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Depression of 1873
So since the U.S. was founded on free labor and not paying workers, it is not a big surprise that once they started paying their workers it became a very different situation economically.
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Black farmers often turned to sharecropping
Sharecropping was basically when newly freed slaves would enter contracts with their previous owners to get paid incredibly little to keep the farm going. These contracts would usually tie them to the land and basically be another form of slavery.
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Vagrancy laws enabled law enforcement to justify the arrest of innocent Black men and women, and the convict-lease system meant that arbitrary arrests often resulted in decades of forced, uncompensated labor.
Convict-lease basically meant that any company that would cough up the money could have convicted prisoners to work hard labor. The laborers were never compensated.
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Mound Bayou, Mississippi
Close to the end of Reconstruction there was a growing desire to make black populated towns a reality. M.B. Mississippi was one of the most famous examples. Property was owned by blacks, and inhabited by blacks.
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The federal government responded to southern paramilitary tactics by passing the Enforcement Acts between 1870 and 1871. The acts made it criminal to deprive African Americans of their civil rights. The acts also deemed violent Klan behavior as acts of rebellion against the United States and allowed for the use of U.S. troops to protect freedpeople.
The enforcement act basically said, "Hey you're killing people you need to stop." It made it illegal to deprive African Americans of their rights.
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They were terrorists and vigilantes, determined to stop the erosion of the antebellum South, and they were widespread and numerous, operating throughout the South. The Ku Klux Klan emerged in the late 1860s as the most infamous of these groups.
The Klu Klux Klan was basically a group of racist white criminals who wanted nothing but the death of all black people ever like I quite literally mean ever.
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Ladies’ Memorial Associations (LMAs) grew out of the Soldiers’ Aid Society and became the precursor and custodian of the Lost Cause narrative.
If I'm reading this right, the women suffrage movement or at least a subsection of theirs, tried rewriting history so that their husband's had honor and glory, rather than be labeled racists.
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After the Fifteenth Amendment ignored sex as an unlawful barrier to suffrage
The fifteenth amendment basically assured everybody that when the constitution says "every man." They quite literally mean that only men are free, not women.
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fter the Fifteenth Amendment ignored sex as an unlawful barrier to suffrage, an omission that appalled Stanton, the AERA officially dissolved. Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), while suffragists who supported the Fifteenth Amendment, regardless of its limitations, founded the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA).
The NWSA was the women's suffrage movement which disagreed with the 15th amendment. The AWSA was the women's suffrage movement who agreed with the 15th amendment.
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Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her partner in the movement, Susan B. Anthony, made the journey to advocate universal suffrage. Yet they soon realized that their allies were distancing themselves from women’s suffrage in order to advance Black enfranchisement. Disheartened, Stanton and Anthony allied instead with white supremacists who supported women’s equality. Many fellow activists were dismayed by Stanton’s and Anthony’s willingness to appeal to racism to advance their cause.
So Susan B. Anthony was Stanton's right hand lady in the suffrage movement. I should also mention the movement stopped working with African Americans, and started working with white supremacists.
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Thus, in 1866, the National Women’s Rights Convention officially merged with the American Anti-Slavery Society to form the American Equal Rights Association (AERA).
Stanton believed "equal rights for all." Because of this, the National Women's Rights Convention, and the American Anti-Slavery Society merged together to form the AERA in 1866.
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In the South, both Black and white women struggled to make sense of a world of death and change. In Reconstruction, leading women’s rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw an unprecedented opportunity for disenfranchised groups. Women as well as Black Americans, North and South, could seize political rights. Stanton formed the Women’s Loyal National League in 1863, which petitioned Congress for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.
A minority going up against all of the Country was unheard of before. However ECS seeing that Africans Americans did manage to make some progress was inspired to being her own reconstruction, ensuring the women of America gained their rights.
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Black churches provided space for conflict over gender roles, cultural values, practices, norms, and political engagement. With the rise of Jim Crow, Black churches would enter a new phase of negotiating relationships within the community and the wider world.
Even though Black churches were considered a safe haven for African Americans, it's also because that's the only place they were legally allowed to meet up at. Jim Crow made segregation law.
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In the 1930s, nearly 40 percent of 663 Black churches surveyed had their organizational roots in the post-emancipation era.18 Many independent Black churches emerged in the rural areas, and most of them had never been affiliated with white churches.
After many years African Americans started building their own versions of heavily white controlled associations. Black churches became not only a place of worship for African Americans, but also a place that symbolized how far they had come.
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Freedmen’s Bureau
Freedman's Bureau gave land that was abandoned or taken away from the original owners, and gave it to formerly enslaved people. However this land was then given back to the original owners who wanted it back.
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Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce were chosen as U.S. senators from Mississippi.
Both Revels and Bruce were two senators from Mississippi, they were also both African American.
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In the 1868 presidential election, former Union General Ulysses S. Grant ran on a platform that proclaimed, “Let Us Have Peace,” in which he promised to protect the new status quo.
Ulysses S. Grant was a former Union General when he ran in the 1868 presidential election. He ran home the message that everyone should live together equally in peace.
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The Fourteenth Amendment developed concurrently with the Civil Rights Act to ensure its constitutionality.
The 14th amendment basically overwrote the black codes, and ensured that all people born in the U.S. were citizens of the U.S.
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Many Republicans were keen to grant voting rights for freedmen in order to build a new powerful voting bloc. Some Republicans, like U.S. congressman Thaddeus Stevens, believed in racial equality, but the majority were motivated primarily by the interest of their political party.
Thaddeus Stevens was a U.S. congressman who wanted freeman to vote because he believed in racial equality. However most people just wanted more voters for more favorable political outcomes.
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But after winning a two-thirds majority in the 1866 midterm elections, Republicans overrode the veto, and in 1867, they passed the first Reconstruction Act, dissolving state governments and dividing the South into five military districts. Under these new terms, states would have to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, write new constitutions enfranchising African Americans, and abolish repressive “Black Codes” before rejoining the union.
After President Johnson tried to get rid of the fourteenth amendment, the Republicans managed to override the veto via vote. They passed the first reconstruction act, making it so that states HAD to ratify the 14th amendment or else they weren't welcomed into the union.
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Republicans in Congress responded to the codes with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first federal attempt to constitutionally define all American-born residents (except Native peoples) as citizens.
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 is so important because it was the first time the U.S. was labeling who was a citizen of the U.S. and who wasn't.
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. South Carolina and Mississippi passed laws known as Black Codes to regulate Black behavior and impose social and economic control. Other states soon followed. These laws granted some rights to African Americans, like the right to own property, to marry, or to make contracts. But they also denied fundamental rights. White lawmakers forbade Black men from serving on juries or in state militias, refused to recognize Black testimony against white people, apprenticed orphaned children to their former enslaver, and established severe vagrancy laws.
The black codes were supposed to make black people just a little bit more equal to white people. However it was 1 step forward and 3 steps back as for every right they gained it seemed like 3 were taken away.
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His Reconstruction plan required provisional southern governments to void their ordinances of secession, repudiate their Confederate debts, and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment.
Andrew Jackson did actually seem to honor Lincoln's wishes after his passing. However he also then let states do basically whatever they wanted so long as they followed the thirteenth amendment.
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The assassination of Abraham Lincoln propelled Vice President Andrew Johnson into the executive office in April 1865. Johnson, a states’-rights, strict-constructionist, and unapologetic racist from Tennessee, offered southern states a quick restoration into the Union.
Andrew Johnson was Lincoln's VP, after Lincoln's assassination he took over as President of the U.S. He was also basically the opposite of Lincoln.
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To cement the abolition of slavery, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865. The amendment legally abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”
The thirteenth amendment was passed by Congress to completely abolish slavery. It was passed on January 31, 1865.
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Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation committed the United States to the abolition of slavery. However, the proclamation freed only enslaved people in areas of rebellion and left more than seven hundred thousand in bondage in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri as well as in Union-occupied areas of Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia.
Even though the Emancipation Proclamation did free slaves, it only freed those who were in "areas of rebellion." Meaning it left a large number of slaves still enslaved.
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When just 10 percent of a state’s voting population had taken such an oath, loyal Unionists could then establish governments.
Lincoln knew that Union victory was close, so he issued a proclamation that if just 10% of voters from confederate states, they could create their own union based governments.
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