Love, Peace, and Happiness: 

Peace Family, this is my understanding of history in America. As a poor righteous teacher in the Ghettos of Hell after an end to a group of people's empire, the beginning to the end is: 15000 AC = to 1914 AD, and the ending on or around, based on the Asiatic Calendar? A day in the eyes of this solar system is equivalent to 1000 years at the low point, and at its highest point can be anywhere from 2083.33 to 2160, or an era also seen a constellation or Zodiac sign.  

Race in White American Culture: During Reconstruction and thereafter, frequently, when Black descendants of the enslaved managed to achieve some degree of prosperity, their communities were destroyed by White massacres. The examples are too numerous to list here, but they include the infamous Tulsa massacre of 1921, when airplanes were used to firebomb "Black Wall Street" and its surrounding neighborhoods. In the 20th century, Black wealth denial was associated to a large degree with racist policies vis-à-vis home ownership, which led to reduced rates of Black homeownership and lower rates of appreciation for those homes purchased. The situation was exacerbated in the late 1940s when the GI Bill was introduced in a manner that overwhelmingly benefited White veterans. Ira Katznelson reported in his book, When Affirmative Action Was White, that in Mississippi, only two returning Black veterans received home-buying benefits from the GI Bill. Public policy has created the Black–White wealth gap, and it will require public policy to eliminate it. Therefore, as we argue in From Here to Equality, erasure of the racial wealth disparity must be a core objective of reparations for Black American descendants of U.S. slavery. We estimate, at a minimum, this will require $10 to $12 trillion in federal expenditures. Attaining long-denied full citizenship has a critical material dimension. That dimension will be achieved by closing the immense wealth gap between Black and White communities. "This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men," Andrew Johnson, U.S. President (1865-69). Reconstruction is a generic term to describe the rebuilding of any country after a war or natural disaster. For instance, there was Reconstruction after World War II, and in Afghanistan and Iraq. In American history, Reconstruction, with a capital R, refers to the rebuilding of the South after the Civil War, from 1865 to 1877.

Eighteen-Seventy-Seven doesn't mark a resolution of any critical issues; those are ongoing, but rather the end of the Union Army's occupation of the South. The end of the Civil War wasn't an opportune time to have a president assassinated, as Abraham Lincoln was, especially since his Vice President, Andrew Johnson, wasn't suited to the task of the top office. Whether things would've been better had Lincoln lived, we'll know, but even the Great Emancipator would've struggled mightily with the challenges presented by Reconstruction. Toward the beginning of the war, Lincoln hadn't wanted to ram abolition down Southerners' throats the way many GOP politicians wanted, saying that direct reform efforts wouldn't work any better than trying to "pen" penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. He "hoped, instead, to win them over to his cause by reaching their hearts—that didndidn'tpen. After the war, Southerners were demoralized, and they resented the formerly enslaved people and those who freed them. The southern economy was in tatters, the Union Army had wreaked havoc in some areas, and Confederate "greenback" back" cu currencyy was worthless. Black freedom translated into a sudden financial loss for Whites ~ $13 trillion in 2016 dollars. Even if the economy recovered and cotton exports survived and thrived, the regional psyche wasn't ready to heal quickly or easily. Slavery, the linchpin of the South's economy and social structure, had ended suddenly.

The southern U.S. in 1865 was hardly an ideal place for one of the modern world's experiments in interracial democracy, and, on that score, the North had nothing to offer but its own history of discrimination and segregation toward free Blacks. Places like Cincinnati's Sle Africa and Boston's Hill mainly symbolized that the North had only abolished slavery less than a century earlier. As historian C. Vann Woodward pointed out in The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), the antebellum North provided a rough template for what transpired more dramatically in the South in the century following the war. Two overlapping questions were at stake. The first was: how and under what conditions would southern states be allowed to rejoin the country? That may seem like an odd question since the Union had fought the war to prevent them from leaving. However, the Union acknowledged Confederate nationhood in 1863, and there'sa saying in war that to the victors go the spoils. The North had the leverage to make reentry conditional on Southerners either demonstrating loyalty to the U.S. or treating Blacks in accordance with new constitutional amendments. Either prospect was grim for many white Southerners. Lincoln advised forcing just 10% of citizens in any given state to sign loyalty oaths before readmitting that state, whereas congressional Republicans favored 50%. Toward the end of his life, Lincoln advocated suffrage for literate Blacks and veterans, and Congress agreed. That was John Wilkes Booth's motivation for killing him. But Congress was in recess in the summer of 1865, leaving President Johnson in charge. Johnson didn't grant fundamental civil rights to Black people. Johnson tellingly refused to use the term reconstruction, preferring restoration.

The extent of those civil rights, or lack thereof, was the second big question posed by Reconstruction: how would Freedmen, as formerly enslaved people were known, fit into society? By June 1865, word of the Confederate Confederacy's and the emancipation of enslaved persons had reached across the South. How would Southern states re-integrate into the U.S., and how would Freedmen be treated? Jim Crow: Seemingly getting the green light, with no direct communication from Congress otherwise, southern states passed laws called Black Codes, returning Freedmen to conditions as closely approximating slavery as possible without actually including ownership. It was illegal for Blacks to be unemployed, but they could only work jobs that Whites wanted them to work, mainly the same tasks they'dthey'das enslaved people. Blacks couldn't own guns, vote, or hold office. If Whites felt black parents weren't raising their children correctly, they could assume guardianship of the children and keep them as apprentice servants.

Jim Crow Jubilee, Lithograph by Bufford, John H., Boston, 1847. These laws varied by specific locale and state. Later, they were collectively known as the Jim Crow laws, after a popular character in black minstrel shows. The poster on the left isn't from South during Reconstruction; it's from 1847. In some places, there was political conflict. Republicans in Louisiana objected to Democrats passing a new constitution with strict black codes, and the ensuing Mechanics' Massacre of 1866 led to nearly 300 casualties, most of them Freedmen. Not only did Black Codes vary from place to place, but the black population was mobile. They experienced emancipation for the first time in many areas only when the war ended, not when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and they were traveling all over trying to locate relatives who had been sold to other plantations before the war. When Congress returned to Washington in the fall of 1865, Radical Republicans, led by. Thaddeus Stevens was disgruntled with the Black Codes and with Johnson, setting the stage for the biggest showdown between the legislative and executive branches to date. Republicans showed no mercy for "unreconstructed" ed rebels. Under a program known as Radical Reconstruction, they disenfranchised former Confederate leaders, confiscated some planters' land, and turned it over to the formerly enslaved people who'd worked for generations. With the 40 Acres-and-a-Mule plan initiated during the war, Sherman's land would be redistributed to Freedmen as small family farms. At least that was the idea behind Sherman's Special Orders No. 15 in South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida. Even when these transfers actually occurred, Blacks would unknowingly borrow money in the spring at 5000% interest (one of the many disadvantages of illiteracy) and then be virtually owned by the lender as debt, peons when they harvested in the fall. Either way, President Johnson revoked the redistribution policy before it ever transferred much land.

Cotton Sharecroppers, Greene County, Georgia, 1937, Photo by Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress: Most Blacks ended up as tenant farmers or sharecroppers, many in the same cotton fields they'd worked as they'ded people. There's nothing nThere'sily wrong with that, as long as they were being paid, but Whites blocked other jobs and any avenues of bettering one's station. In one instance, planters thumbcuffed Freedmen who wouldn't agree to their fields for $6/month (<$100 today). Similar to European peasants, sharecroppers worked others' land, kept others' portion of the crops for themselves (the tenant), and paid rent with the rest. This was the fate of most southern Blacks, at least those who escaped prison chain gangs, along with vast numbers of poor Whites. Cotton didn't go away because of the Civil War. Production expanded, in fact, though cotton never regained its status in proportion to the rest of the economy as northern industry grew. Meanwhile, the advent of mechanized agriculture in the early 20th century displaced sharecroppers, forcing many to seek factory work in cities. Radical Republicans also overcame Johnson's veto and Freedmen's Bureau to attain rudimentary healthcare and education, and to provide legal aid and help locate lost family members.​

Matthew Gaines: In some places, Black Codes held, while in others, the wealthy planters really did lose Power, and Blacks were elected to legislatures. Laws permitting black men to vote paved the way for the Fifteenth Amendment and defined the radical phase in the late 1860s, known as "Radical Reconstruction." There were 2k Blacks in southern statehouses from 1868 to 1875, more than at any time in history, including the present. In this topsy-turvy world, African-American Hiram Revels even replaced former Confederate President Jefferson Davis as a Senator from Mississippi. Since the federal government was granting land to states to build colleges, a former slave from Fredericksburg and Giddings, Texas, named Matthew Gaines, secured the charter to build Texas A&M University near a train stop later called College Station. A coalition of liberal history professors and College Republicans put the wheels in motion to finally get Gaines' statue built on campus in the early 2020s.

Amendments & Impeachment: To counter the Black Codes, Congress passed legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867, designed to support black citizenship but not consistently enforced. With the southern states not voting anyway, even though they had representatives in Congress, Northerners ensured those civil rights were more permanently protected by passing constitutional amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment had already passed in 1865, ending slavery. Now, the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, sometimes called the Civil Rights Amendment, granted fundamental rights of citizenship to all Americans by requiring states to honor most of the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Before the Fourteenth Amendment, the Bill of Rights applied only against the national government, not against state governments, meaning that states, especially the original thirteen, but also southern states after the Civil War, could abridge their citizens' rights to freedom of religion, speech, fair and speedy trials, etc. After Reconstruction, most of the Bill of Rights was gradually incorporated at the state level, with one initial exception: the Second Amendment, about which more later.

The Fourteenth, like the Civil War itself, profoundly strengthened the national government at the expense of the states, resetting American history as part of what professor Eric Foner called the Second Founding. The "Congress" ss shall make no law," resting" a strict-constructionist theme of the Constitution gave way to a looser "Congress shall have the Power to." This constitutional reboot is one of the most profound impacts of the Civil War. Whereas many Founders envisioned the states as the proper protectors of liberty and the national government as a necessary evil, they grudgingly accepted the Second Amendment as the ultimate expression of that outlook. It turns out the states were the real menace to democracy, and the national government was the emancipator and guarantor of civil rights. The Fourteenth Amendment transformed Reconstruction into an ongoing process that lasted from 1865 to 1877, and today it is the most essential amendment in court cases across a wide range of issues.

While the U.S. chose not to charge Confederates with treason or pursue war crimes against them for the most part, Andersonville P.O.W. Commandant, Henry Wirz, was an exception. The Fourteenth Amendment also punished the South directly, with its third section denying ex-Confederates the right to serve in office and its fourth section requiring that southern states pay the Union's debt. However, both objectives were dead letters by 1868, though they remain in the Constitution to this day as vestigial organs.

Complicating an already difficult period in American history, early Reconstruction unfolded under Andrew Johnson'sJohnson'spresidency. Johnson drank heavily and even suggested during his Swing Around the Circle speaking tour below with Ulysses S. Grant to his left that he wished the Confederacy had won the Civil War, all the while suppressing reports of southern black murders and tortures in the northern press. See the quote at the top of the chapter. Journalist Adam Serwer wrote that, convinced most of the country was on his side, the president gave angry peeches before raucous crowds, comparing himself to Lincoln, calling for some Radical Republicans to be hanged as traitors, and blaming a New Orleans riot on those who had called for Black suffrage in the first place, saying, 'Every drop 'f blood that was shed is upon their skirts and they are responsible. He blocked the measures that Congress took up to protect the rights of the emancipated, describing them as racist against white people. He told Black leaders that he was their 'Moses,' even as he'denied their aspirations to full citizenship.

Johnson opposed the Fourteenth Amendment and vowed to obstruct its passage, just as he'd gone out of his way to block the Freedmen's Bureau and not enforce the earlier civil rights laws while complaining loudly about the "Africanization" of the country. He also ddidn'tsupport any potential Fifteenth Amendment granting Blacks the vote, and even seemed to question the legality of Congress since representation hadn't been restored to all Southern states. Presidents don't have an actual Constitutional (legal, official) role in the amendment process, but their support or opposition can sometimes influence passage. President Johnson's position on civil rights was the real reason House Republicans impeached him. However, they trumped up technical charges concerning the illegal way he'he'dplaced one of LinLincoln'sbinet members, Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, in violation of their new Tenure of Office Act. Some Republicans also feared that President Johnson, as commander-in-chief, might lead a coup d'etat, restoring the Army to a new Congress of allied northern and southern Democrats, kicking out the Republicans. Of the eleven articles of impeachment drawn up against Johnson, nine concerned the Tenure of Office Act. The other two focused on Reconstruction and his general insubordination and abuse of Power — for bringing "disg" ace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach," ont" "the "ongress of the United States" and "for his "inte" perate, inflammatory and scandalous harangues, and therein utter loud threats and bitter menaces, as well against Congress as the laws of the United States duly enacted thereby, amid the cries, jeers, and laughter of the multitudes then assembled in hearing.

When Johnson backed down on his Reconstruction policy, the Senate allowed him to escape the trial in the next phase of the process after the House impeaches a president. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presides over the Senate trial, which requires a two-thirds vote to remove a president from office. Four presidents have been impeached in American history: Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump escaped conviction in the Senate trial phase, Johnson by just one vote and Clinton and Trump by huge margins, and Richard Nixon resigned before the House could draw up articles of impeachment. Besides passing the word that he was done opposing Reconstruction, another factor that saved Andrew Johnson was that the president pro tempore of the Senate, who stood to replace him, Benjamin Wade, favored women's suffrage, which most Senators didn't. There was no VP, as Lincoln'Lincoln'snation left that office vacant.

Since many southern states passed legislation to keep Blacks from voting, the Fifteenth Amendment was added to secure black suffrage in 1870. Northern Republicans needed the southern Black vote if enslaved people were freed; otherwise, they could potentially ally with southern Whites and constitute a threat to northern hegemony. It was important then for Blacks to know that northern Republicans had been the ones responsible for backing their suffrage. Conversely, one reason for Southerners' opposition to a constitutional amendment replacing the electoral college with a popular vote for president was their fear that northern politicians would more readily appeal directly to black voters if, that is, they could vote. In any event, the Fifteenth Amendment only secured black male suffrage, since women didn't have the right to vote yet. The Fifteenth Amendment stated that the vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The passage of these Civil War Amendments gets to the heart of why it was advantageous to keep the former Confederate states out of the Union temporarily. It requires ¾ of the states to pass an amendment, and none of them would have voted if the former Confederacy had voting seats in Congress after the war. In fact, the Thirteenth barely passed anyway. The Confederate states' readmission, then, was signing off on the new amendments, as Texas did in 1870. In the meantime, the ongoing, if limited, Union military occupation per the Military Reconstruction Act kept the South in line as the amendments were passed, and the southern states had only non-voting seats in Congress. The U.S. Army had fewer than 30k troops after the war, though most were in the West fighting Indians.