Chapter 17: Assassination and Reconstruction

Chapter Focus Questions What were the competing political plans for reconstructing the defeated Confederacy? What were the competing political plans for reconstructing the defeated Confederacy? How difficult was the transition from slavery to freedom for African Americans? How difficult was the transition from slavery to freedom for African Americans? What was the political and social legacy of Reconstruction in the southern states? What was the political and social legacy of Reconstruction in the southern states? What were the post-Civil War transformations in the economic and political life of the North? What were the post-Civil War transformations in the economic and political life of the North?

Lincoln on April 10, 1865 – 5 days before his death

Lincoln with son Tad on February 9 th, 1864

John Wilkes Booth

Ford’s Theater – Lincoln assassinated while watching Our American Cousin

Artist’s portrayal of assassination – “sic semper tyrannis” [Thus always to tyrants]

Booth breaks leg when lands on Theater stage

Reward poster for the conspirators – Booth trapped two weeks later in a VA barn

Executions of Lewis Paine, George Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Surratt on July 7, 1865 – 8 were found guilt by a military tribunal, some went to prison

Lincoln’s funeral procession on Pennsylvania Avenue – a special funeral train took 2 weeks to Springfield, Illinois [1968 RFK – “Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water”]

Andrew Johnson – pardoned 13,000 former Confederates, impeached but found not guilty by one vote

Senator Charles Sumner of MA -- a chief architect of Congressional Reconstruction

Rep. Thaddeus Stevens – helped secure Civil Rights Act of 1866, helped draft 14 th Amendment, Military Reconstruction Act of 1867

Former slave pens in Alexandra, VA

Freedmen at Richmond, VA April 1865

1872 – African Americans in Congress [l to r] Sen Hiram Revels, Miss; Rep Benjamin Turner, AL; Rep Robert DeLarge, SC; Josiah Walls, FLA; Joseph Rainey, SC; Robert Brown Elliott, SC

Sen. Blanche Kelso Bruce, Mississippi elected in 1874, Oberlin graduate

Sen. Hiram Revels, US Senate from Mississippi in 1870

Primary school for Vicksburg freemen – Freedmen’s Bureau established March 3, 1865

Howard University law school, 1900 – Howard was established in Washington, D.C. in 1867 named after Oliver O. Howard, director of the Freedman’s Bureau

1876 voting cartoon

Ku Klux Klan members, 1866 Tennessee

Thomas Nast cartoon – Columbia is replacing the seceded states in the Union “Let us have peace”

“Reconstruction of the South” -- Federal generals leading towards peace

Thomas Nast cartoon shows freedmen as victims of Democratic Party

Edwin M. Stanton Lincoln’s Sec. of War, fired by Johnson

Impeachment Committee of the House [l to r] Benjamin Butler, James Wilson, Thaddeus Stevens, George Boutwell, Thomas Williams, John Logan, John Bingham

1868 Republican Convention in Chicago nominates Grant

Cartoon about carpetbagging

Frederick Douglass

1873 election of Georgia Democrat John Brown Gordon to Senate was “Redemption” because he had been officer with Lee

Henry Clay Warmoth, Carpetbagger governor of LA from

Thomas Nast cartoon “Solid South”

Horace Greeley – founded NY Tribune in 1841, ran against Grant in 1872 as a Liberal Republican and Democrat

Rutherford B. Hayes – Ohio governor who became Republican president in contested election of 1876

Painting of Electoral Commission of 1877 [Florida case]

Samuel J. Tilden denied presidency when several southern Democrats in Congress failed to support him in return for an end to Reconstruction