![]() ![]() Between 18 blacks that owned land increased from less than 1 percent to 20 percent. Some traveled to find lost loved ones others went in search of jobs in towns or to find land to farm. By 1877, 600,000 children attended public schools in the South.Įventually, most freedpeople left the old homestead of their former owners. ![]() The result was a bounty for African Americans who flocked to schools. Each state adopted segregated public education, but in many cases this was the first time any state- supported schooling existed. Perhaps the most important addition to southern life was the institution of public education in every southern state. They invested funds in orphanages, institutions for the blind, deaf, and mentally handicapped and rewrote constitutions to include divorce (all except South Carolina) and married women’s property rights. They rebuilt southern bridges, roads, and harbors, especially those damaged by the war. The Reconstruction constitutions eliminated black codes, imprisonment for debt, and revamped the penalties for capital punishment. Antebellum legislatures had employed head taxes, but land taxes relieved poorer taxpayers. Most Reconstruction governments in the South instituted taxes on land, to which white southern landowners were unaccustomed. They wrote constitutions that modernized southern states and added provisions long established in the North. ![]() This contrasting group of political allies created the Reconstruction state constitutions and governments that stayed in power from 1867 to the 1870s. They saw their alliance with freedmen as a matter of convenience, yet they were willing to defend the rights of freedpeople to civil equality. Scalawag and Carpetbagger interests rested with revitalizing the South and bringing industry and ingenuity to southern economic life. They constituted a majority of the Reconstruction governments in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas. Native-born white Republicans, known as Scalawags, were more numerous but suffered the disgrace of turning traitor to their region and to the Confederate cause. Northern Republicans who lived in the South, known as Carpetbaggers, comprised no more than 2 percent of the population. Many were lawyers, businessmen, teachers, newspaper editors, and veterans of the Union Army. Both groups of whites were well educated and from the middle class. Known as “Scalawags” and “Carpetbaggers,” Republican whites in the South made up the majority of the states’ assemblies during Congressional Reconstruction. Cartoon of carpetbaggers heading South after the warĪmong those eligible to hold office in the South were freedmen and Union supporters, either native white southerners or northerners who came to the South to begin businesses or eventually to enter politics. ![]()
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