Unit 2: Chapter 5

Between 1865 and 1877, the federal government carried out a program to repair the damage to the South and restore the southern states to the Union. This program, known as Reconstruction, was hugely controversial at the time, and historians continue to debate its successes and failures to this day.

It offered a pardon, an official forgiveness of a crime, to any Confederate who would take an oath of allegiance to the Union and accept federal policy on slavery.

The group, known as the Radical Republicans, believed that the Civil War had been fought over the moral issue of slavery. The Radicals insisted that the main goal of Reconstruction should be a total restructuring of society to guarantee black people true equality.

Lincoln let the bill die in a pocket veto.

If Congress adjourns its session within ten days of submitting a bill to the President, and the President does not act, the bill dies. This is known as a pocket veto.

To help black southerners adjust to freedom, Congress created the Freedmen's Bureau in March 1865, just prior to Lincoln's death. It was the first major federal relief agency in United States history.

Concerned that courts might strike down the Civil Rights Act, Congress decided to build equal rights into the Constitution. In June 1866, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified by the states in 1868.

But moderates were less enthusiastic over the Radicals' goal of granting African Americans their civil rights, citizens' personal liberties guaranteed by law, such as voting rights and equal treatment.

The House drafted 11 articles of impeachment, including violation of the Tenure of Office Act and bringing "into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt, and reproach the Congress of the United States." Johnson became the first President in United States history to be impeached.

Northern Republicans who moved to the postwar South became known as carpetbaggers. Southerners gave them this insulting nickname, which referred to a type of cheap suitcase made from carpet scraps. The name implied that these northerners had stuffed some clothes into a carpetbag and rushed in to profit from southern misery.

In the postwar South, to be white and a southerner and a Republican was to be seen as a traitor. Southerners had an unflattering name for white southern Republicans as well: scalawag, originally a Scottish word meaning "scrawny cattle."

After the harvest, some dishonest planters simply evicted the sharecroppers without pay. Others charged the families for housing and other expenses, so that the sharecroppers often wound up in debt at the end of the year. Since they could not leave before paying the debt, these sharecroppers were trapped on the plantation.

Like sharecroppers, tenant farmers did not own the land they farmed. Unlike sharecroppers, however, tenant farmers paid to rent the land, just as you might rent an apartment today.

The region's infrastructure, the public property and services that a society uses, had to be almost completely rebuilt. That included roads, bridges, canals, railroads, and telegraph lines.

The Enforcement Act of 1870 banned the use of terror, force, or bribery to prevent people from voting because of their race.

In what became known as the Compromise of 1877, the Democrats agreed to give Hayes the victory in the presidential election he had not clearly won. In return, the new President agreed to remove the remaining federal troops from southern states.