Reconstruction Act Of March Essay

The Reconstruction Act of March, 1867 reorganized the South into five military districts, each under control of a Union general. The Act required universal male suffrage to elect delegates to conventions, required granting the vote to freed men, and the ratification of the 14th Amendment. The term “Negro Rule” came from the enfranchisement of freedmen and their participation in state and local government.16 Enfranchisement and office holding allowed another change in Southern politics that white Southerners opposed. After his enfranchisement was restored, Southern Democrat and former Confederate soldier Representative L. Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi, however, criticizes the allowance of African Americans to hold office, and Reconstruction as a whole. He said, “the suffering people on whom the taxes were laid could not exercise the slightest control, either as to the amount imposed or the basis on which they were laid.”17 Angered by Reconstruction policy, Lamar likens Reconstruction to
In her essay “Freedwomen’s Reconstruction of Life and Labor in Lowcountry South Carolina,” Leslie Schwalm describes land as critical to freedpeople’s freedom. She wrote, “land was critical to the freedom and independence they sought for themselves, their families, and their communities…freedom as their right not to simply survive, but to work and thrive without white intervention on the land they had worked as slaves.”19 Land, historically a prerequisite to voting, now became a symbol for independence and freedom. Mattie Curtis, a freedwoman, recalls her struggle after Emancipation, wrote, “De white folks hated de nigger den, ‘specially de nigger what was makin’ something, so I daren’t ax nobody whar de market wus.”20 Curtis exemplifies the ambition and desire to be able to have land and work for oneself, and the freedom it provides. The ability to work the land one owns without intervention of white people—that was