V. The Modern Period, 1789–1914 > H. North America, 1789–1914 > 1. The United States, 1789–1877 > d. Reconstruction > 1865–66
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  The Encyclopedia of World History.  2001.
 
 
1865–66
 
New labor relations. Freedmen refused to work under a gang labor system and forced a compromise, sharecropping, between their desire to work for themselves and the planters' desire to control the newly freed people.  1
 
1865–67
 
Black Codes. This series of rigid labor laws, passed throughout the South, were designed to keep freed people immobile, dependent, and lacking labor alternatives.  2
Former slave owners founded the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee as a means of fighting Reconstruction. By 1870, the group served the Democratic Party as a military force. The Klan murdered and terrorized African Americans and Republican politicians.  3
 
1866
 
The first women's rights convention in the post–Civil War era. Women formed the American Equal Rights Association and launched a campaign to gain universal suffrage on the state level, following defeat of such suffrage proposals on the federal level.  4
 
Feb
 
Johnson vetoed a measure extending the life of the Freedmen's Bureau, thereby increasing tension between himself and Congress.  5
 
April
 
Congress passed, over Johnson's veto, the Civil Rights Bill, declaring all persons born in the United States to be U.S. citizens and entitled to equality of treatment before the law. This was designed to guarantee equal treatment to African Americans in southern states.  6
 
June 13
 
FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT was sent to states for ratification. It was declared ratified on July 28, 1868. It incorporated in the Constitution the principle of the Civil Rights Act; gave the southern states the choice of African-American enfranchisement or reduced representation in the lower house of Congress; barred from political office those ex-Confederates who had been federal or state officials before the war, until they should be pardoned by a two-thirds vote of Congress; provided that the war debt of the South should never be paid or that of the Union repudiated; and that former masters should never be compensated for their slaves. It was generally assumed at the time that this amendment was designed solely to safeguard the civil rights of the freedmen, and it was so interpreted by the Supreme Court in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873). In 1886, however, in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the Supreme Court declared that a corporation was a “person” within the meaning of the amendment and thus entitled to its protection. From this time the courts began to apply the due process clause of the amendment more and more to shield business and corporations against hostile legislative action by the states. The amendment also disheartened many in the suffrage movement because for the first time in the Constitution the word male was used, effectively sanctioning the denial of female suffrage.  7
Efforts of federal troops to build an emigrant road from Fort Laramie along the Powder River to the mines of Montana and Idaho led to war with the Plains Sioux.  8
The Civil War years had witnessed the formation of a number of national trade unions, which William H. Sylvis (1828–69) attempted to federate into a single nationwide association known as the National Labor Union.  9
 
 
 
The Encyclopedia of World History, Sixth edition. Peter N. Stearns, general editor. Copyright © 2001 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Maps by Mary Reilly, copyright © 2001 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

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