Reconstruction, Part II

The Crop-Lien System

• A way for creditors to bridge the gap between urban merchants and rural planters
• Offered supplies, credit, etc to planters using next years crop as collateral
• Debts skyrocket, loans up to 50% of crop’s value
• Kept southern blacks locked in cycle of poverty and debt

Election of 1868

• Johnson was politically dead as a result of impeachment trials
• Republicans nominate war hero US Grant
• Democrats feebly nominate Horatio Seymour
• Grant wins in landslide
• Next 2 terms tainted by cronyism, corruption and major recession

Grantism

• A naïve politician
• Cabinet employees made up of friends and heads of business
• Scandals:
o Credit Mobilier
o Whisky ring
o Bribery
o Fraud
o Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall
• Some foreign success:
o Purchase of Alaska
o Settled Alabama Affair
• New splinter group, Liberal Republican Party forms and tries to take election in 1882

(Thomas Nast, famous cartoonist)

Liberal Republicans

• Supported free trade, laissez faire economy and reform of the civil service
• Believed that government corrupment was more important than southern black enfranchisement
• Nominate Horace Greeley (also supported by the Democrats
• Republicans renominate Grant, who wins

Panic of 1873

• Causes
o Rapid postwar industrialization
• Too much building too fast with not enough currency and specie to finance it
o Overspeculation
• Overbuying led to inflation of Railroad and public business stocks
• Led to collapse of the stockmarket, rr companies, national bank, and a decrease in property values
• Greenbacks taken out of circulation because they were not backed by specie
o And furthermore, those who lent the government money during the war (war bonds) were now being repaid in specie.
• Public Credit Act- Government repayment of bonds to the public
• Specie Resumption Act- back on the gold standard
o Both help restore confidence, but many Democrats want a switch to silver standard to have more abundant money supply
• Bland-Allison Act- Coinage based on silver
o Begins the split between the greenbacks and the silverbacks which will resurface in the 1890’s

Reconstruction and the Suprime Court

• Ex Parte Milligan (1866)-civil courts not military courts tried those guilty of crimes against freedmen as long as they were in the district of that court
• Texas Vs White (1869)- is reconstruction and the readmission of southern states even constitutional, since Union never dissolved in first place
• Slaughterhous cases (1873)- 14th amendment weakened on grounds that states have the right to impose limits not only on corporations but also on individuals within their jurisdictions
• Repeal of Civil rights act (1875) KKK Act (1871) and Enforcement act (1870)
• Supreme court felt Congress had overstepped it’s power.

Decline of the Republicans

• People tired of lack of progress in the south
• Radical Republicans died off
• More republicans believed blacks were inferior to whites
• Democrats fight back, winning previously Republican Southern states by 1876
o In south, they hold only SC, LA and FL

Decline of the Republicans

• Planter Aristocracy tries to kick republicans out of south
• The White League (1874) indimidated black voters
• Democrats use political system to further entrench blacks into sharecropping/ crop-lien system
o Some blacks flee north

Election of Hayes ends reconstruction- didn’t really win election but won by promising to remove troops from south