![]() Confederates who had held high civil or military offices during the war and those who had owned property worth $20,000 or more in 1860 had to apply individually for a presidential pardon. The president offered amnesty to individuals who would take an oath of loyalty to the United States, but there were exceptions. President Andrew Johnson issued guidelines for re-admittance of the former Confederate states into the Union based on the Reconstruction plans that Lincoln had developed during the war. In May 1865, a month after the end of the American Civil War and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, new U.S. According to historian Eric Foner, “Bureau schools nonetheless helped lay the foundation for Southern public education.” Presidential Reconstruction, 1865-1867 ![]() Faced with limited resources and resistance from many White southerners, the Bureau failed to accomplish many of its goals. It protected the civil rights of formerly enslaved people by offering them legal counsel. It helped to establish many of Mississippi’s first public schools. It distributed clothing, food, and fuel to freedmen and White refugees. The Bureau had many important responsibilities. To assist them and other southerners, the United States Congress in March 1865 established the Freedmen’s Bureau as part of the War Department. This position, within a state where the population was 55 percent Black, foreshadowed a difficult Reconstruction.īlack and White Mississippians grappled with a devastated economy and a new social structure. After emancipation and Confederate defeat, many White Mississippians still thought they had been right to own enslaved people and secede from the Union. They had enslaved their workforce for generations. Planters, who had produced cotton for the world market, emerged from the Civil War in a state of shock. Reconstruction, which went through two phases, lasted for eleven years in Mississippi.īeing the center of slavery and cotton culture, heavily agricultural places such as Mississippi seceded first and returned to the Union last. States with the longest and most divisive Reconstruction were states where most of the population was Black and whose White leaders had established the Confederacy, such as South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union, and Mississippi, the second to secede. Places with the shortest, perhaps most mild, Reconstruction experience were the Upper South states of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, where formerly enslaved people were a minority of the population, and White citizens had refused to join the Confederacy until after the war’s first military engagement at Fort Sumter. Reconstruction for Mississippi’s Black and White citizens was particularly intense. ![]() And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?” Du Bois wrote, "Nations reel and stagger on their way they make hideous mistakes they commit frightful wrongs they do great and beautiful things. Du Bois, the African American scholar who wrote Black Reconstruction in America (published in 1935) in order to challenge the racist interpretations of the period that dominated in the early 20th century, encouraged America to explore an honest history of the time. In many ways, Reconstruction is an unfinished revolution and an underappreciated period in history. Reconstruction is basically the first decade or so after the Civil War when Mississippi and the nation struggled with economic, social, and political challenges that arose from the military defeat of the South and the end of slavery. From the enforcement of the rights of citizens to the stubborn problems of economic and racial justice, the issues central to Reconstruction are as old as the American republic, and as contemporary as the inequalities that still afflict our society.” (Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1836-1877 (1988). The effort produced a sweeping redefinition of the nation's public life and a violent reaction that ultimately destroyed much, but by no means all, of what had been accomplished. “Over a century ago, prodded by the demands of four million men and women just emerging from slavery, Americans made their first attempt to live up to the noble professions of their political creed - something few societies have ever done.
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