Which formerly enslaved

African Americans especially insisted that they may have been deprived of their rights after the Civil War but they had neither surrendered nor lost their claim to those rights. However impoverished and credit starved, the former Confederacy was integrated back into the national economy , laying the foundation for the future emergence of the most dynamic industrial economy in the world. African Americans would not be enslaved or assigned to a separate economic status.

But nor would African Americans as a group be provided with any resources with which to compete. Possible student perceptions of Reconstruction Aside from the challenge of organizing the complex events of the Reconstruction era into a narrative accessible to students, the biggest challenge is to help students understand what was possible and what was not possible after the Civil War. Students, for example, may be inclined to believe that white Americans were never committed to racial equality in the first place so Reconstruction was doomed to failure.

Some students may fixate on northern white hypocrisy; many white Republicans pressured southern voters to pass the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments even while they opposed its passage in the North. Yet others may emphasize that citizenship rights for blacks were hollow because blacks had no economic resources; blacks in postwar America could not easily escape an economic system that was slavery by another name. Each of these positions is worth discussion, but each tends to flatten out the motivations and behavior of the actors in the drama of Reconstruction.

And virtually all of these interpretations presumed that the outcome of Reconstruction was both inevitable and wholly outside the hands of African Americans. Ask students to design their own version of Reconstruction.

If your students are like mine, many will propose that Reconstruction should have guaranteed equal rights for all Americans. I then ask them to define what those rights should have been.

At this point, even students who are in broad agreement about the principle of equal rights for all Americans may differ on the specific content of those rights.

For example, some may stress economic equality whereas others may emphasize equality of opportunity. In any case, the next step is to ask the students to think about how they would have turned their principle into policy. Those who stress the need for equal opportunity may sketch out the need for public education for freed people and other southerners.

I next ask students where the requisite resources for these policies would come from. For example, where would the federal government have gotten the land and money to provide former slaves with land and livestock? If the federal government had expropriated land and resources from former slave masters, what consequences would that policy have had for private property elsewhere in the United States?

If the government could take lake and property from former slave masters, would it then have had precedent to later take land and property from former slaves? In response to students who propose universal public education, I ask them about the funding for these new schools. Who would pay for them? If taxes needed to be raised, what and whom should have been taxed?

Should the schools have been integrated? If so, how would the resistance of white southerners to integrated schools be overcome? If not, would separate schools for blacks and white have legitimized segregation? Through this exercise, students gain a better sense of how all of the facets of Reconstruction were interrelated and how any broad principle was shaped by the circumstances, constraints, and traditions of the age. Equally important, students will better appreciate how astute African Americans were in pursuing their goals during the Reconstruction era.

They recognized that the Civil War had ended slavery and destroyed the antebellum South, but it had not created a clean slate on which they had a free hand to write their future. Instead, black Americans were constantly gauging what was possible and who they might ally with to translate their long-suppressed hopes into a secure and rewarding future in American society.

The role of African Americans in Reconstruction The search by African Americans for allies during Reconstruction is the focus of another worthwhile exercise. It is essential for students to understand that African Americans were active participants in Reconstruction. They were not the dupes of northern politicians. Nor were they cowed by southern whites. This said, African Americans never had decisive control over Reconstruction.

Whatever their goals, they needed allies. With that fundamental reality in mind, Ask students to identify the major stakeholders in Reconstruction. Typically, students will identify the major actors as white northerners, white southerners and blacks.

I then press the students to break those groups down further. Were all white northerners alike in their attitudes toward blacks? Were all white southerners? And were there any sub-groups of African Americans that should be distinguished? After this revision, my students typically distinguish between pro- and anti-black white northerners, elite white southerners, middling white southerners, blacks who were free before the Civil War, and recently freed slaves.

Once we have identified the actors in Reconstruction, we then systematically work thorough this list and consider what interests each of these groups might have shared. Put another way, on what grounds could each any of these groups found common cause with African Americans? Take middling whites for example. Many students may wonder why poor white southerners did not forge an alliance with former slaves.

After all, they had poverty in common. I also point out that poor whites and poor blacks may both have been poor, but they were poor in very different ways so that they were at best tentative allies. Poor whites typically were land poor; that is, they owned land but usually not the other resources that would have allowed them to exploit their land intensively. Gum Springs was founded in by West Ford , a man who had been enslaved by Bushrod Washington who had inherited Mount Vernon from his uncle George Washington in Ford was likely the son of either Bushrod, his father, or one of his brothers.

The family emancipated Ford in , and in Bushrod bequeathed him a acre tract of land. Ford sold this property and used the money to purchase acres adjacent to Mount Vernon, near a stand of gum trees and a spring that gave the place its name. Visit the Gum Springs Museum. The Quander family has deep ties to Maryland and Virginia, tracing their history to the 17th century. Virginia law required that free African Americans register every three years to obtain a certificate of freedom proving they were not fugitive slaves.

Without proper documentation, they risked being arrested and sold back into bondage. Registration records consisted of name, age, a detailed physical description, and a report of how the individual became free whether by birth or manumission.

He was emancipated by Sambo Anderson. Many former Mount Vernon slaves and their children appear in these records.

A few free people continued to live on the Mount Vernon property after being emancipated. For some, Mount Vernon was the only home they had ever known. Show Me More. According to the bill of sale, Andrew Johnson purchased nineteen-year-old Dolly for five hundred dollars. Though the exact number of enslaved individuals owned by the Johnsons is unclear, there were four listed enslaved individuals in the slave schedules and five in the slave schedules.

In any case, the enslaved individuals owned by the Johnsons worked in a domestic capacity rather than on a plantation. At four in the morning I had to be up.

I stood by his side at the table and saw that all his wants were fulfilled. Then I washed all the dishes. Records also show that on occasion, the Johnsons hired Sam out to chop wood for neighbors, sometimes allowing him to keep the wages, though at other times they collected his pay. The Johnson family, like many other southern slave owners, claimed that they treated their enslaved property with benevolence—something historically misconstrued as compassion.

This tactic, of course, was designed by slave owners to keep the enslaved population subservient. It was not unusual for slave owners to enter into sexual relationships with their enslaved servants, the bulk of which were non-consensual. Johnson was proud of his status as slave owner, often mentioning it in political speeches. During this period, he was separated from his family and their enslaved domestic servants, who remained in hostile Confederate territory.

During his time as military governor, Johnson began to support emancipation—not due to his own ideas about racial equity, but for military expediency. His primary concerns were ending the war and crippling the Confederacy.

As a result, Johnson appeared before a gathering at the Tennessee State Capitol in and stated:. The system of negro Slavery [has] proved baleful to the nation by arraying itself against the institutions and interests of the people, and the time [has] clearly come when means should be devised for its total eradication from Tennessee.

Before his death in , he also penned several books and articles that highlighted the accomplishments of Black politicians during Reconstruction. Until as recently as , a onetime slave named Josiah Walls was the only Black congressman in Florida history. Born in Virginia in , Walls came of age on a plantation before being conscripted by the Confederacy during the Civil War.

He was later captured and set free by Union forces, and after a brief period as a student in Philadelphia, he joined a regiment of United States Colored Troops and served in Union-occupied Florida. Walls chose to stay in the Sunshine State after being mustered out of service in He soon prospered as a teacher and lumber worker, and by he was wealthy enough to buy a plantation that had once belonged to a Confederate general.

In , he squared off against an ex-Confederate named Silas Niblack in a race for a U. House of Representatives seat.

The campaign was notoriously heated. Even after Walls eked out a victory, Niblack contested the results and had them overturned.

Walls soon won a different seat in Congress, however, and went on to serve a total of three terms, during which he advocated for infrastructure improvements and federal programs to provide Black people equal access to education.

But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!