1. Reconstruction and Daily Life
Supplementary Notes for Reconstruction

2. Responding to Freedom African Americans immediately started migrating
Just because they can
Trying to get close to “freedom”
Reuniting their broken families
One man walked 600 miles to locate his family
Freedman’s Bureau aided African Families in reuniting

3. Starting Schools Freedmen’s Schools
Schools created to educate African American children
The children would then come home and teach the parents
By % of the African-American population could read
Southern Resistance
White southerners would . . .
kill school teachers that taught African-Americans
Burn down Freedmen’s Schools

4. 40 Acres and a Mule
A rumor that started because of some abandoned land in South Carolina that was split into 40 acre sections
“Give us our own land and we take care of ourselves, but without land, the old masters can hire us or starve us, as they please.”
Radical Republicans wanted to split up plantation land and give it to African Americans
Why?
“Our wives, our children, our husbands, [have] been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now [locate] upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land And then didn’t we clear the land, and raise the crops of corn, of cotton, of tobacco, of rice, of sugar, of everything.”

5. Contract System Southern Plantations needed labor
African Americans needed work and money
African-Americans would hire themselves to the highest bidder
Better than slavery because . . .
Choice for whom to work for
Planters could not split up families
Planters could not abuse African Americans
Drawbacks
Contracts paid very low wages
Many owners cheated workers out of wages
Laws punished workers for breaking contracts
Even if breaking that contract was because of abuse

6. Sharecropping and Debt
A worker rents a plot of land
Land owner provides seed, tools, and housing
At the end of the season, the worker (sharecropper) would give the owner a portion of his crop
Problems
Farmers wanted to grow food for their family
Owners wanted farmers to grow a cash crop of cotton
Inflation Cycle – Supply and Demand
Price of Cotton dropped
South increased the amount of cotton they produced to makeup for it
Increase in the supply of cotton, price of cotton dropped further
Increase in land use, the soil was ruined
South stayed in poverty for many years due to their dependence on a “one-crop system”

7. Sharecropping Cycle

8. The Ku Klux Klan Southerners started to fight violently to
restore white supremacy in the south
keep former slaves powerless
Clan attacked and killed African Americans and white republicans
Burned houses
Lynching
President Johnson appointed pro-southern generals in charge of reconstruction
The authorities in the south ignored the violence and rarely attempted to stop it
Many klansmen were the authorities