Reconstruction: The South Strikes Back

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Reconstruction The South Strikes Back

• Sharecropping and the KKK

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How can the Southern economy survive without
slavery?

• Who will work the plantations?
• Would freedmen go North, or stay in the South?
• Planters had land and no workers
• Workers could offer labor, but had no land

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The Freedmen continue to be Slaves to the
Southern Economy

• Sharecropping
• A policy where Freedmen would farm the old
  masters land, and be paid with crops and some
  profit
• Share the crops
• Owner could provide living quarters

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Abuses of the Sharecropper System

• Sharecroppers were treated harshly
• Fined for missing work
• High rent for tools and housing
• Sharecroppers could not leave until all debt was
  paid
• New Slavery slave labor for slave wages

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Sharecropper Family 1867
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Central Texas Sharecroppers House
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Children working instead of going to school
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Mother teaching children numbers and alphabet in
home of sharecropper.
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Tenant Farming

• Former slave rented land and farmed it for
  themselves no sharing
• Chose crop, when to work, get all of the harvest
• Some economic independence
• Needed to get started
• Higher social status than sharecroppers

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Cycle of Debt

• Poverty becomes rooted in the Southern economy
• Very little industry
• Freedmen had difficulty improving their lives
• This years wages go to last years debt
• 1880 1 black family in 20 owned land

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Grant Becomes President

• 1868 Ulysses S. Grant is elected President
• Republican
• Union General of the Civil War
• Hero to the North, Villain in the South
• Congress and the President were allies, not
  enemies

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Another Reconstruction Success

• 15th Amendment is passed
• 1869
• Freedmen Vote
• No citizen may be denied the right to vote by the
  United States or any other state on account of
  race, color, or previous condition of servitude

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1870 Former Slaves Vote

• With federal troops in the South and the 15th Am.
  In place, southern black men voted
• Most voted republican
• Over 600 African-Americans were elected in the
  South
• Louisiana gained a black governor
• 16 Af.-Ams. Went to Congress
• Mississippi sent a former slave to the Senate

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The Klan is Born

• Southern retaliation to Radical Reconstruction
• 1866, Nathan Bedford Forest founds the Ku Klux
  Klan in Tennessee
• A Social Club, designed to honor and protect the
  Southern Gentlemen and Southern way of life

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Americas 1st Terrorist Organization

• Members were ex-confederates and former slave
  owners
• Men stripped of their right to vote
• Membership was secretive???

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Goals of the Klan

• Secret war against Radical Reconstruction
• End the Republican rule in South
• Put the former slaves back in their place
• End Reconstruction

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Southern Justice
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Tactics of the Klan

• Terrorize people at their homes
• White robes and covered faces appear as
  confederate ghosts
• Shoot at houses
• Break windows
• Burn property
• Burn crosses
• Harass, beat, torture, kidnap, murder

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Targets of the Klan

• All Republican Voters
• Carpetbaggers
• Freedmens Bureau
• Teachers
• Unionists and Scalawags
• Freedmen especially those who were exerting
  their newly found freedom
• U.S. Military
• Republicans
• As the Klan grew, it became extremely violent

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Is this a Republican form of government?
One Vote Less
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Let us clasp hands over the bloody chasm
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This is a White Mans Government
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Federal Government Takes on the Klan

• Anti-Klan laws passed in 1870-1871
• Banned the use of terror, force, or bribery to
  prevent people from voting
• KKK membership banned
• Military protects voters and hunts down the Klan

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End of the Klan

• By 1872, Klan almost wiped out
• Many escape prosecution
• Cant kill an idea
• As troops leave South, KKK comes back and black
  suffrage (voting) ends