Reconstruction blog

Did Reconstruction grant equality?

 Reconstruction was based on the fundamental idea of Reconstructing the nation after the damage that the civil war had marked.Reconstruction brought forth several different topics to the question of what it meant to be America and who was American. For many, however, reconstruction was a matter of an experiment with no one really knowing what the outcome would be.

President Abraham Lincoln  proposed the Ten Percent Plan on December 1863, which stated that a Confederate state could return to the Union when ten percent of the 1860 vote-count from that state had taken the oath of allegiance to the United States and pledge to follow the emancipation. After doing such voters could decide to rewrite their state constitution and even make a new state government, with all Southerners being granted full pardon with the exception of high-ranking Confederate army officers and government officials.  In the Ten Percent Plan Lincoln reassured Southerners their private property but not their slaves. 1864 marked the year that Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas were re-integrated as Unionist governments. The Plan was meant to shorten the Civil War and insist the abolition of slavery at the same time.

President Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865)

After Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, just weeks after the end of the civil war, Andrew Johnson became president , Johnson believed that “national unity” and ending slavery had dictated that Reconstruction was over. It was only the beginning. Congress being run by Republicans refused to accept that reconstruction was over, they rejected the new Congressional appointees that had been elected by the South.

President Andrew Johnson (in office April 15, 1865 – March 4, 1869)

This lead into the creation of the black codes. Although the lack codes granted new opportunities to African-American Slaves it also asserted many oppressive laws, some of which violated the constitution. The Black codes discriminated against blacks in Southern States at the end of the Civil War to control the labor, migration and other activities of newly-freed slaves. The Mississippi Black Codes were most known for being the harshest Black codes in the nation during Reconstruction. One of the black Codes stated that couples that had been living together before the Civil War would know be considered legally married, white any white person involved in an interracial relationship would be fined or imprisoned betraying the American ideal of the “pursuit of happiness”. Another black code stated that any African-American person that did not have a house would be labeled as a vagrant and fined or imprisoned. Simply for not having a home., while another code stated that any black that would be working for more than a month needed a contract, and could not quit without a “reasonable reason”. If a worker quit and ran away, they would be hunted down and brought back to their employer. Any African American not able to pay the fine or go to jail a white person could pay the fine for them, the African-American would them have to work for that person in order to pay off their debt.

African-Americans in prisons worked in chain gangs under merciless conditions and jobs 

Women, who had been working closely with the Abolition movement grew infuriated when African-American MEN were granted the vote before white women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one such woman, in Home Life she stated that “There is no other human slavery that knows such depths of degradation as a wife chained to a man whom she neither loves nor respects, no other slavery so disastrous in its consequences on the race, or to an individual respect growth and development.” Here  Stanton conveys her anger saying that marriage is the worst type of slavery.

Women suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Reconstruction did not grant equality, it helped paved the way for equality.