Laws: Radical Reconstruction

Document: 15th Amendment

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.^[2]

Document 2: Comments and Criticisms about the 14th Amendment 

Document 3: The Reconstruction Act

Presidential Reconstruction Documents

HW: Jourden Anderson Writes His Former Master

Page 1

Page 2

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The Meaning of Freedom

"Kate Stone: Conquered" and "What Did You Expect Them to Do"

Civil War Statistics

South Carolina's Declaration of Causes

Declaration of Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union

The people of the State of South Carolina…declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government…fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union…

The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall be…discharged [allowed to leave]…such service or labor…

…an increasing hostility [unfriendliness] on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution [established practice] of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations….

…Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety [rightness] of our domestic institutions [slavery]; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery…They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes…

A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery…

…The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy….

We, therefore, the People of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude [morality/goodness] of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved, and that the State of South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world.

Slavery Documents

Document 1: How Slavery Helped Build a World Economy

Howard Dodson

By 1850, 1.8 million of the 2.5 million enslaved Africans employed in agriculture in the United States were working on cotton plantations.

            The vast majority of enslaved Africans employed in plantation agriculture were field hands…Each plantation economy was part of a larger national…economy….By the 1830s, "cotton was king" in the South. It was also king in the United States, which was competing for economic leadership in the global…economy. Plantation-grown cotton was the foundation….

            But the American financial and shipping industries were also dependent on slave-produced cotton. Cotton was not shipped directly to Europe from the South. Rather, it was shipped to New York and then transshipped to England and other centers of cotton manufacturing in the United States and Europe.

            …banks and financial houses in New York supplied the loan capital and/or investment capital to purchase land and slaves….Enslaved Africans were legally a form of property—a commodity….They were also traded for other kinds of goods and services.

            The value of the investments slaveholders held in their slaves was often used to secure loans to purchase additional land or slaves. Slaves were also used to pay off outstanding debts. When calculating the value of estates, the estimated value of each slave was included. This became the source of tax revenue for local and state governments. Taxes were also levied on slave transactions.

…In sum, the slavery system in the United States was a national system that touched the very core of its economic and political life.

Document 2: Cotton and Slavery Statistics

Statistic # 1:

"All told, more than $600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States in 1836, derived directly or indirectly from cotton produced by the million-odd slaves -- 6 percent of the total US population -- who in that year toiled in labor camps on slavery's frontier."

Statistic # 2:

"Many enslaved cotton pickers in the late 1850s had peaked at well over 200 pounds per day," Baptist notes. "In the 1930s, after a half-century of massive scientific experimentation, all to make the cotton boll more pickable, the great-grandchildren of the enslaved often picked only 100 to 120 pounds per day."

Statistic # 3:

“The steady stream of large quantities of cotton was the lifeblood of textile mills in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and generated wealth for the owners of those mills. By 1832, Lowell mills consumed 100,000 days of enslaved people's labor every year…”

Anthony Johnson Reading