History

Melissa Fragoso
AP US History
Mr. Chude
Feb 13, 2012

1. They had no education and could not read or write as a result of the Slave Codes, job opportunities were extremely limited, Often the only skills a freed slave had was in farming and even then they usually only knew how to do the manual labor, not the actual running of a farm. They had no way of earning money. Slavery in some areasdidn't officially stop.
The Bureau helped solve everyday problems of the newly freed slaves, such as clothing, food, water, health care, communication with family members, and jobs. At the end of the war, the Bureau's main role was providing emergency food, housing, and medical aid to refugees, though it also helped reunite families. Later, it focused its work on helping the freedmen adjust totheir conditions of freedom.

2. Johnson announced his Reconstruction program in the form of two proclamations. The Amnesty Proclamation pardoned all participants in the rebellion, restored their property except slaves, and required them to take a loyalty oath. It excluded from amnesty the upper-echelon leaders of the Confederacy and all persons possessing over $20,000 in taxable property. Suchpeople would have to apply to the president for a restoration of their right to vote and hold office.
The other proclamation dealt with North Carolina, but its provisions set the pattern for all of the seceded states except Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. It stated that the president would appoint a provisional governor who would summon a convention to draw up a new constitution,whereupon the state would resume its normal relationship to the Union. Only those men who had been eligible to vote in 1861 and who had taken the loyalty oath could vote for delegates to the constitutional convention.

Three motives prompted Johnson's Reconstruction program. First, like Lincoln, Johnson wanted to restore the southern states as functioning members of the Union as soon aspossible. To him this was the supreme purpose of the Civil War, whereas the future status of blacks was a secondary matter that, for both constitutional and practical reasons, should be left to the states. Second, he wished to transfer political power in the South from the planter aristocracy to the "plebeian" democracy through the disfranchisement clauses of the Amnesty Proclamation. Black suffrage, ashe saw it, would thwart the achievement of this objective, because the majority of blacks even though free, would remain economically bound to the big planters and so would be controlled politically by that class. Third, he hoped to be elected president in 1868 in his own right by promoting what he was confident most Americans desired sectional reconciliation and opposing what he was sure few ofthem favored black equality.

3. The provisions of the Reconstruction Act of 1867 were that the South would be divided into 5 military regions, members of the ruling class before the war lost their voting rights, and in order for the Southern states to reenter the Union, they had to approve new state constitutions that gave the vote to all men including African Americans and they had to ratifythe Fourteenth Amendment.

4. Because they perceived him to be a Southern sympathizer who wanted to allow the Southern states that had seceded back into the Union immediately and almost unconditionally. They saw Johnson as a threat to their Reconstruction plans. The conflict over Reconstruction was the underlying reason for Johnson's impeachment; the stated reason for impeachment was that heviolated the 1867 Tenure of Office Act by (attempting to) fire Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, among other things. In February 1868, the US House of Representatives voted to bring eleven articles of impeachment against Johnson.
There was a sharp conflict between the new President and the Congress about the way that the South should be "re-constructed" in the wake of the just finished Civil...