UNIT #4
Reconstruction:
The Nation Reunited
In this unit, students will learn how the United States reunited after the Civil War. Students will understand how beliefs and ideals of the North and South influenced changes to laws and the Constitution. The students examine the work of the Freedman’s Bureau to understand how individuals, groups, and institutions can affect society. Finally, by thinking about conflict and change and production, distribution, and consumption, students will learn the effects of the Civil War on the daily life and the economy of the North and South.Standards and Elements
SS5H1 The student will explain the causes, major events, and consequences of the Civil War.e. Describe the effects of war on the North and South.
SS5H2 The student will analyze the effects of Reconstruction on American life.
a. Describe the purpose of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.
b. Explain the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau.
c. Explain how slavery was replaced by sharecropping and how African- Americans were
prevented from exercising their newly won rights; include a discussion of Jim Crow
laws and customs.
SS5CG1 The student will explain how a citizen’s rights are protected under the U.S. Constitution.
c. Explain the concept of due process of law and describe how the Constitution protects
a citizen’s rights by due process.
d. Describe how the Constitution protects a citizen’s rights by due process.
SS5CG2 The student will explain the process by which amendments to the U.S. Constitution are made.
a. Explain the amendment process outlined in the Constitution.
b. Describe the purpose for the amendment process.
SS5CG3 The student will explain how amendments to the U. S. Constitution have maintained a representative democracy.
b. Explain how voting rights were protected by the 15th, 19th, 23rd, 24th, and 26th
amendments.
SS5E2 The student will describe the functions of four major sectors in the U.S. economy.
a. Describe the household function in providing resources and consuming goods and services.
SS5E3 The student will describe how consumers and businesses interact in the United States economy across time.
a. Describe how competition, markets, and prices influence people’s behavior.
b. Describe how people earn income by selling their labor to businesses
Enduring Understandings- Essential Questions
Beliefs and Ideals: The student will understand that the beliefs and ideals of a society influence the social, political, and economic decisions of that society.EU: The student will understand that people’s ideas and feelings influence their decisions.
- How did the beliefs and ideals of the North and South during the Civil War influence the social, political, and economic decisions of this time?
- How did the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments influence the beliefs and ideals of the country? What is due process of law?
- How does the Constitution protect a citizen’s rights by due process?
- Why did the treatment of African Americans in the South lead to the creation of the 14th Amendment?
- How does the 14th Amendment protect citizen’s rights?
EU: The student will understand that conflict causes change.
- How did conflict between the North and South lead to change in the country?
- How did the effects of Reconstruction change American life?
- How did the Jim Crow laws restrict the new freedoms of African Americans?
- How did Congress change the Constitution to protect the rights of African Americans?
EU: The student will understand that what people, groups, and institutions say and do can help or harm others whether they mean to or not.
- How did the actions of Congress affect society?
- How did the Freedman’s Bureau affect African Americans?
EU: The student will understand that the ways people make, get, and use goods and services may be different from how people in other places make, get, and use goods and services.
- How did people decide what goods and services to produce, distribute, and consume during Reconstruction?
- How did the destruction caused by the Civil War affect the production of goods and services?
- In what ways were slavery and sharecropping similar and different?
Vocabulary
Night 1 / Night 2 / Night 3 / Night 4 / Night 5Reconstruction / The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 / segregation / Carpetbaggers / Treason
The Civil War / impeachment / sharecropping / Impeach / Veto
Ford’s Theater / 15th Amendment. / Jim Crow laws / Radical / Andrew Johnson
13th Amendment / Freedmen’s Bureau. / Plessy vs. Ferguson / Ratify
Black Codes / Ku Klux Klan / Amnesty / Scalawags
14th Amendment / The Force Acts / Bribery / Traitor
Date:
Essential Question
Standards
Lesson One: Vocabulary 1 Day Class Instruction and 5 nights Homework
Using the Vocabulary Word Map strategy students will be introduced to the vocabulary associated with Unit 4 by completing a Frayer Model on each term. Due: ______
Definition / ExampleTerm
Characteristics / Illustration
Definition
Culture is how people think, act, celebrate, and make rules, and that it is what makes a group of people special. / Example
Native American culture
African American culture
Jewish culture
Hispanic culture
Culture
Characteristics
religion is similar
food is similar
clothing is similar / Illustration
Menorah (Hanukkah)
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Essential Question
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Lesson Two
Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor and Confederate sympathizer, fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln at a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. The attack came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln’s killer, John Wilkes Booth, was a Maryland native born in 1838 who remained in the North during the Civil War despite his Confederate sympathies. As the conflict entered its final stages, he and several associates hatched a plot to kidnap the president and take him to Richmond, the Confederate capital. However, on March 20, 1865, the day of the planned kidnapping, Lincoln failed to appear at the spot where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait. Two weeks later, Richmond fell to Union forces. In April, with Confederate armies near collapse across the South, Booth came up with a desperate plan to save the Confederacy.
Learning that Lincoln was to attend Laura Keene's acclaimed performance of "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., on April 14, Booth—himself a well-known actor at the time—masterminded the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward. By murdering the president and two of his possible successors, Booth and his co-conspirators hoped to throw the U.S. government into disarray
Lincoln occupied a private box above the stage with his wife Mary, a young army officer named Henry Rathbone and Rathbone’s fiancée, Clara Harris, the daughter of New York Senator Ira Harris. The Lincolns arrived late for the comedy, but the president was reportedly in a fine mood and laughed heartily during the production.
At 10:15, Booth slipped into the box and fired his .44-caliber single-shot derringer into the back of Lincoln's head. After stabbing Rathbone, who immediately rushed at him, in the shoulder, Booth leapt onto the stage and shouted, "Sic semper tyrannis!" ("Thus ever to tyrants!"–the Virginia state motto). At first, the crowd interpreted the unfolding drama as part of the production, but a scream from the first lady told them otherwise. Although Booth broke his leg in the fall, he managed to leave the theater and escape from Washington on horseback.
A 23-year-old doctor named Charles Leale was in the audience and hastened to the presidential box immediately upon hearing the shot and Mary Lincoln’s scream. He found the president slumped in his chair, paralyzed and struggling to breathe. Several soldiers carried Lincoln to a house across the street and placed him on a bed. When the surgeon general arrived at the house, he concluded that Lincoln could not be saved and would die during the night.
Vice President Andrew Johnson, members of Lincoln's cabinet and several of the president's closest friends stood vigil by Lincoln's bedside until he was officially pronounced dead at 7:22 a.m. The first lady lay on a bed in an adjoining room with her eldest son Robert at her side, overwhelmed with shock and grief.
The president's body was placed in a temporary coffin, draped with a flag and escorted by armed cavalry to the White House, where surgeons conducted a thorough autopsy. Edward Curtis, an Army surgeon in attendance, later described the scene, recounting that a bullet clattered into a waiting basin during the doctors’ removal of Lincoln’s brain. He wrote that the team stopped to stare at the offending weapon, “the cause of such mighty changes in the world's history as we may perhaps never realize.” During the autopsy, Mary Lincoln sent the surgeons a note requesting that they clip a lock of Lincoln's hair for her.
News of the president's death traveled quickly and by the end of the day flags across the country flew at half-mast, businesses were closed and people who had recently rejoiced at the end of the Civil War now reeled from Lincoln's shocking assassination.
The president’s corpse was taken to the White House, and on April 18 it was carried to the Capitol rotunda to lay in state on a catafalque. On April 21, Lincoln's body was boarded onto a train that conveyed it to Springfield, Illinois, where he had lived before becoming president. Tens of thousands of Americans lined the railroad route and paid their respects to their fallen leader during the train's solemn progression through the North. Lincoln and his son, Willie, who died in the White House of typhoid fever in 1862, were interred on May 4, 1865, at Oak Ridge Cemetery, near Springfield.
As the nation mourned, Union soldiers were hot on the trail of John Wilkes Booth, who many in the audience had immediately recognized. After fleeing the capital, he and an accomplice, David Herold, made their way across the Anacostia River and headed toward southern Maryland. The pair stopped at the home of Samuel Mudd, a doctor who treated Booth's leg. (Mudd’s actions earned him a life sentence that was later commuted). They then sought refuge from Thomas A. Jones, a Confederate agent, before securing a boat to row across the Potomac to Virginia.
On April 26, Union troops surrounded the Virginia farmhouse where Booth and Herold were hiding out and set fire to it, hoping to flush the fugitives out. Herold surrendered but Booth remained inside. As the blaze intensified, a sergeant shot Booth in the neck, allegedly because the assassin had raised his gun as if to shoot. Carried out of the building alive, he lingered for three hours before gazing at his hands and uttering his last words: "Useless, useless.”
Four of Booth’s co-conspirators were convicted for their part in the assassination and executed by hanging on July 7, 1865. They included David Herold and Mary Surratt, the first woman put to death by the federal government, whose boarding house had served as a meeting place for the would-be kidnappers
Date:Essential Question
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Lesson Three
Andrew Johnson
17th President of the United States
In office April 15, 1865 – March 4, 1869
Vice PresidentVacant
Preceded byAbraham Lincoln
Succeeded byUlysses S. Grant /
With the Assassination of Lincoln, the Presidency fell upon an old-fashioned southern Jacksonian Democrat of pronounced states' rights views. Although an honest and honorable man, Andrew Johnson was one of the most unfortunate of Presidents. Arrayed against him were the Radical Republicans in Congress, brilliantly led and ruthless in their tactics. Johnson was no match for them.
Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808, Johnson grew up in poverty. He was apprenticed to a tailor as a boy, but ran away. He opened a tailor shop in Greeneville, Tennessee, married Eliza McCardle, and participated in debates at the local academy.
Entering politics, he became an adept stump speaker, championing the common man and vilifying the plantation aristocracy. As a Member of the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 1840's and '50's, he advocated a homestead bill to provide a free farm for the poor man.
During the secession crisis, Johnson remained in the Senate even when Tennessee seceded, which made him a hero in the North and a traitor in the eyes of most Southerners. In 1862 President Lincoln appointed him Military Governor of Tennessee, and Johnson used the state as a laboratory for reconstruction. In 1864 the Republicans, contending that their National Union Party was for all loyal men, nominated Johnson, a Southerner and a Democrat, for Vice President.
After Lincoln's death, President Johnson proceeded to reconstruct the former Confederate States while Congress was not in session in 1865. He pardoned all who would take an oath of allegiance, but required leaders and men of wealth to obtain special Presidential pardons.
By the time Congress met in December 1865, most southern states were reconstructed, slavery was being abolished, but "black codes" to regulate the freedmen were beginning to appear.
Radical Republicans in Congress moved vigorously to change Johnson's program. They gained the support of northerners who were dismayed to see Southerners keeping many prewar leaders and imposing many prewar restrictions upon Negroes.
The Radicals' first step was to refuse to seat any Senator or Representative from the old Confederacy. Next they passed measures dealing with the former slaves. Johnson vetoed the legislation. The Radicals mustered enough votes in Congress to pass legislation over his veto--the first time that Congress had overridden a President on an important bill. They passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which established Negroes as American citizens and forbade discrimination against them.
A few months later Congress submitted to the states the Fourteenth Amendment, which specified that no state should "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
All the former Confederate States except Tennessee refused to ratify the amendment; further, there were two bloody race riots in the South. Speaking in the Middle West, Johnson faced hostile audiences. The Radical Republicans won an overwhelming victory in Congressional elections that fall.
In March 1867, the Radicals effected their own plan of Reconstruction, again placing southern states under military rule. They passed laws placing restrictions upon the President. When Johnson allegedly violated one of these, the Tenure of Office Act, by dismissing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, the House voted eleven articles of impeachment against him. He was tried by the Senate in the spring of 1868 and acquitted by one vote.
In 1875, Tennessee returned Johnson to the Senate. He died a few months later.
Visit to learn more on John Wilkes Booth.Date:
Essential Question
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Lesson Four
Reconstruction Plans:
Lincoln’s Reconstruction Plan / Johnson’s Reconstruction Plan / Congressional ReconstructionEven before the war ended, President Lincoln began the task of restoration. Motivated by a desire to build a strong Republican party in the South and to end the bitterness engendered by war, he issued a proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction for those areas of the Confederacy occupied by Union armies. It offered pardon, with certain exceptions, to any Confederate who would swear to support the Constitution and the Union. Once a group in any conquered state equal in number to one tenth of that state's total vote in the presidential election of 1860 took the prescribed oath and organized a government that abolished slavery, he would grant that government executive recognition.
Congress passed the Wade-Davis Bill, which required 50% of a state's male voters to take an "ironclad" oath that they had never voluntarily supported the Confederacy. Lincoln's pocket veto kept the Wade-Davis Bill from becoming law, and he implemented his own plan. By the end of the war it had been tried, not too successfully, in Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia. Congress, however, refused to seat the Senators and Representatives elected from those states, and by the time of Lincoln's assassination the President and Congress were at a stalemate.
/ Andrew Johnson, at first pleased the radicals by publicly attacking the planter aristocracy and insisting that the rebellion must be punished. His amnesty proclamation was more severe than Lincoln's; it disenfranchised all former military and civil officers of the Confederacy and all those who owned property made their estates liable to confiscation. The obvious intent was to shift political control in the South from the old planter aristocracy to the small farmers and artisans, and it promised to accomplish a revolution in Southern society.
With Congress in adjournment from April to Dec., 1865, Johnson put his plan into operation. Under provisional governors appointed by him, the Southern states held conventions that voided or repealed their ordinances of secession, abolished slavery, and repudiated Confederate debts. Their newly elected legislatures ratified the Thirteenth Amendment guaranteeing freedom for blacks. By the end of 1865 every ex-Confederate state except Texas had reestablished civil government. / On Mar. 2, 1867, Congress enacted the Reconstruction Act, which, supplemented later by three related acts, divided the South (except Tennessee) into five military districts in which the authority of the army commander was supreme. Johnson continued to oppose congressional policy, and when he insisted on the removal of the radical Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, the House impeached him (Feb., 1868). The radicals in the Senate fell one vote short of convicting him (May), but by this time Johnson's program had been effectively scuttled.
Under the terms of the Reconstruction Acts, new state constitutions were written in the South. By Aug., 1868, six states (Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida) had been readmitted to the Union, having ratified the Fourteenth Amendment as required by the first Reconstruction Act. The four remaining unreconstructed states—Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia—were readmitted in 1870 after ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment as well as the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed the black man's right to vote.