Week 3 Notes

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School

California State University, Monterey Bay *

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Course

108

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History

Date

Oct 30, 2023

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pdf

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Uploaded by ConstableJay3598

The Cotton Pickers - Studies of rural life in virginia - Portrays two black women as dignified figures, not stereotyping so common in the era’s representations of former slaves - The expressions are ambiguous, might be conveying disappointment that eleven years after the end of slavery they are still at work in the fields New Labor Systems ❖ Toward a New South ➢ New systems of labor emerge ➢ Task system ➢ Closely supervised wage labor ➢ Sharecropping ❖ The White Farmer ➢ Losses during the war led to the crop-lien system ➢ Many farmers remain in debt ➢ Sharecropping not isolated to black farmers ❖ Lecture Script Notes ➢ New labor systems were born from the conflict on the plantations ➢ The task system was for the rice areas of South Carolina and Georgia, whereas supervised wage labor was used on the sugar plantations in Louisiana ➢ Sharecropping became the norm in the Cotton Belt and tobacco areas of Virginia and North Carolina ■ First developed as a compromise between black desires for land and planter’s insistence on labor discipline ■ Allowed each black family to rent part of a plantation and the crop was divided between the worker and owner at the end of the year

■ Gave planter a stable labor force and gave former slaves freedom from white supervision ■ Become increasingly oppressive overtime as crops were declining in price ➢ White farmers thought the end of the war and its aftermath was a loss of freedom ➢ Before the war most small white farmers had raised food for their families and grew little cotton ■ War and successive crop failures ruined many farmers ■ Forced to grow cotton and commit part of the crop as collateral ■ Crop lien - property the creditor can seize if a debt is not paid ➢ Since interest rates were high and the cotton price fell many farmers were in debt ➢ Black and white farmers found themselves caught in sharecropping and crop lien systems ➢ Census from 1880 to 1940 counted more white than black sharecroppers ❖ Why did sharecropping emerge as labor systems for both and white farmers in the postwar South? The New Social Classes ❖ The Urban South ➢ Southern cities experienced remarkable growth ➢ Railroads ➢ New urban missile class ❖ Aftermath of Slavery ➢ Many parallels between the united states and other places in the western hemisphere ➢ Most planters held narrow views of black freedom and encouraged employment on former plantations, whereas former slaves tried to carve out as much independence as possible ➢ Only in the United States did former slave secure the right to vote ❖ Lecture Script Notes ➢ Southern cities had considerable growth post war ➢ Railroads lines allowed south and north merchants to interact ■ Urban middle class of merchant, entrepreneurs, and banker benefited from the expansion of cotton production ➢ The debates over land, labor, and political power had also been in other societies ➢ Planters tried to make former slaves go back to the same working conditions and anyone who didn’t was considered lazy ➢ The US wanted to replace the labor with other foreigners such as Indians or Chinese ❖ How do experiences of slavery, emancipation, and reconstruction in the United States compare to other regions in the Western Hemisphere?

The Making of Radical Reconstruction ❖ What were the sources, goals, and competing visions of reconstruction? ➢ Add to this questions Johnson’s vision ❖ Andrew Johnson ➢ Strong defender of the Union, although from tennessee ➢ Republicans nominated him as vice president to extend the party into the South ➢ After lincoln's death, johnsons stubbornness and inability to compromise caused major issues ➢ He held deeply racist views and did not think that African-Americans should play any role in Reconstruction ❖ The Failure of Presidential Reconstruction ➢ Johnson’s Plan ■ Pardon nearly all white Southerners ■ Appointed provisions governors to establish local governments in the South ■ These governments only had to abolish and refuse to pay Confederate debt-otherwise free to manage local affairs ➢ Plan backfires when old Confederate elites return to power Responding to Johnson ❖ The Black Codes ➢ Laws passed by new southern governments to regulate the lives of former slaves ➢ Restricted voting, serving on juries, and testifying against whites ➢ Vagrancy laws and labor restrictions ➢ The death of slavery did not mean the automatic birth of freedom ❖ The Radical Republicans ➢ Called for the dissolution of new Southern governments and that “rebels” be excluded from power ➢ Supported black male suffrage ➢ Thasseus Stevens wanted to confiscate land from planters and redistribute it to former slaves but this proposal, which violated revered ideas of private property rights, failed to pass ❖ Selling a Freedman ➢ Blacks convicted of “vagrancy” were fined, and if unable to pay, auctioned off to work for the person who paid the fine Civil Rights ❖ The Origins of Civil Rights ➢ Civil Rights Bill of 1866 ■ All persons born in the United States were citizens ■ Equality before the law

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➢ Vetoed by Johnson who argued that national government should not have authority over states affairs and that blacks did not deserve the rights of citizenship ➢ Congress gets the necessary two-thirds majority, and the bill is passed over the presidential veto ❖ The Fourteenth amendment ➢ Birthright citizenship ➢ Federal government empowered to protect the rights of all Americans ➢ Equal protection of the laws ➢ Did not provided for black suffrage The Radical Victory ❖ The reconstruction Act ➢ Fourteenth Amendment became the central issues of 1866 political campaign ➢ Johnson loses public support for his policies ➢ Reconstruction Act ■ Divided the South into five military districts ■ Call for new state governments ■ Black male suffrage ■ Started period known as Radical Reconstruction ❖ Impeachment and the Election of Grant ➢ Tenure of Office Act ■ Barred the president from removing certain officeholders without consent of the Senate ■ Johnson’s impeachment places him on trial ■ Republicans nominate grant, the Union’s most prominent military hero, for the next president Constitutional Reform ❖ The Fifteenth Amendment ➢ Prohibited the federal and state governments from denying any citizen the right to vote because of race ➢ Left the door open to suffrage including literacy tests and poll taxes ➢ Did not extend the right to vote to women ➢ Still, the amendment was the culmination of the abolitionist movement ❖ The Second Founding ➢ Principle of equality of the law ➢ Transformed the relationship between the federal government and the states ➢ Transformed the Constitution into a vehicle for seeking freedom and protection ➢ Transferred the power to define citizen’s rights to the national government Women’s Freedom ❖ Boundaries of Freedom

➢ The Burlingame Treaty ■ Reaffirmed China;s national sovereignty ■ Provided for protection for religious freedom and against discrimination for citizens of each country emigrating or visiting the other ➢ Limits of the belief in universal rights ■ Discrimination against Asions becoming citizens until the twentieth century ❖ The Rights of Women ➢ Destruction of slavery led feminists to advocate for women’s right ➢ Liberalizing divorce laws ➢ Women's control over her own body ❖ Feminist and Radicals ➢ Apart from Wyoming, woman suffrage found few male allies ➢ Fifteenth amendment produced a bitter split between Radical Republicans and groups of feminist ■ Elizabeth Clay Stantom and Susan B. Anthony used racist and prejudicial language to oppose the amendment ■ Other feminist supported the amendment as a stepping stone to universal suffrage