Analyze the goals, achievements, and failures of Reconstruction, the Reconstruction Amendments, and the rise of the segregated New South (Louisiana Student Standards for Social Studies, US History Standard 2: Western Expansion to Progressivism).

What this topic is asking

The LEAP US History story opens at the end of the Civil War: on what terms should the Confederate states rejoin the Union, and what would freedom mean for four million formerly enslaved people? Standard 2 (Western Expansion to Progressivism) wants you to analyze the goals of Reconstruction, the three Reconstruction Amendments, why it achieved real gains and then failed, and how the segregated New South took its place. Because the test is source based, expect to read an amendment, a cartoon, or a freedman's testimony and use it as evidence.

The goals and the plans

After the war the country debated how harshly to treat the South and how far to go in protecting freed people.

• Presidential Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson was lenient, letting Southern states rejoin quickly. They responded by passing Black Codes, laws that restricted African Americans and tried to force them back into a labor system close to slavery.
• Radical (Congressional) Reconstruction was the response of the Radical Republicans, who were outraged by the Black Codes. They divided the South into military districts and made ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment a condition of readmission.

The three Reconstruction Amendments

These three amendments are the most heavily tested content in this topic, because they are the permanent constitutional result of the war. Learn what each one did and in what order.

A useful memory hook: 13 freed, 14 made citizens, 15 gave the vote. The Fourteenth is the most far-reaching: its equal-protection clause later became the constitutional basis for the civil rights victories of the twentieth century.

What Reconstruction achieved, and why it failed

For a brief period the changes were real. Protected by federal troops and the Fifteenth Amendment, African American men voted and held office, sending Black representatives to Congress and Southern legislatures, while public schools spread. These gains proved a multiracial democracy was possible, which is why its enemies fought it. Several forces then undid it:

• White Southern resistance. The Ku Klux Klan used terror to stop African Americans from voting and to intimidate their white allies.
• Waning Northern will, worsened by the economic depression after 1873, and Supreme Court decisions that narrowed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
• The Compromise of 1877. The disputed 1876 election between Hayes and Tilden was settled by a bargain: Republican Rutherford B. Hayes became president, and in return the last federal troops were withdrawn. With the troops gone, the protection of Black rights collapsed.

The New South and the road to Jim Crow

The "New South" was a slogan for a more industrial Southern economy, but politically it meant the return of white supremacy. Southern states passed Jim Crow laws that segregated the races, and used poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses (which exempted men whose grandfathers had voted, that is, whites) to disenfranchise Black voters without openly violating the Fifteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a case that arose in Louisiana, upheld "separate but equal" and gave segregation a legal shield (see Louisiana in the Gilded Age and the rise of Jim Crow).

Try this

Q1. State what each of the three Reconstruction Amendments did. [3]

• Cue. Thirteenth: abolished slavery. Fourteenth: granted citizenship and equal protection. Fifteenth: barred denying the vote on the basis of race.