I got a couple of questions... ;D
1. What was presidential reconsturction? What policies concerning Freedmen are most associated with it?

2. What was congressional reconstruction? What are the greatest and/or enduring accomplishments of this era?

3. What were the black codes?

4. What is the Fifteenth amendment?

5. What were the knights of the White camelia, the pale faces, the white league of Louisiana, and the white brotherhood, and what was their purpose?

6. What was the motto of the democratic party in the election of 1868?

7. What was the long-standing republican party slogan, "Let us have peace," a euphemism for in the election campaign of 1874?

8. What are the black baptist and the african methodist episcopal/african methodist episcopal zion congregations, and what was their significance at the end of the 19th century (and through much of the 20th century)?

9. Did the united states government ever promise ex-slaves 40 acres and a mule? If so, when?

10. What was the southern homestead act of 1866, and what was its significance for former slaves?

11. What were the average monthly wages for a black farm laborer in the years following the civil war?

12. How much of a crop of cotton and/or corn was a black sharecropping family allowed to keep?

If you have any answers to this please reply... Txs :-*

9. Did the united states government ever promise ex-slaves 40 acres and a mule? If so, when?

Promises Unfulfilled: 40 Acres And A Mule, And Other Tales of Reparations

An Issue Rooted In History

By Martha L. Wharton, PhD
Special to the NorthStar Network




Excerpt


Sherman's Field Order Sets Standard

The controversy about reparations is rooted in General William Tecumseh Shermans January 16, 1865, Special Field Order No. 15, issued in Atlanta. According to the Order, when three respectable [N]egroes decide to settle on a plot of land, they shall be awarded a plot of not more than (40) forty acres of tillable ground. No mule is mentioned in the field order, but the mule or a horse would have been necessary to till the land, unless human power was used to pull the plow through the soil.

The devise of land was a reparation, a payment made for wrongs done to loyal refugees and freedmen, and overseen by the short-term congressionally authorized Freedmans Bureau. According to the Sherman's order, tracts in South Carolina Sea Islands, and near St. Johns River in Florida, were specifically reserved for Black occupation. By June 1865, 40,000 freedmen had claimed 400,000 acres of land. Nevertheless, by September of the same year, claims by former owners of the land began to erode freedmens rights of access, and the larger promise made by Sherman and Congress.

By 1869, President Andrew Jackson fully rescinded the bill, and a number of Black landowners were ejected from their tracts, thus ending the reparative homesteading program. In the years between 1865-69, reparation plans abounded. Many proposed to dispossess former slave owners of large tracts of land and redistribute them to former slaves. But, politicians of the day remained steadfastly committed to denying reparations to freedmen.

The cry for reparations was not vanquished in the 19th century. Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior called for them in 1963 in his book "Why We can't Wait." In it, he wrote:


"Few people consider the fact that, in addition to being enslaved for two centuries, the Negro was during all of those years robbed of wages of his toil. No amount of gold could provide adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on the unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for the American Negroes." (150-152).



Promises Unfulfilled: 40 Acres And A Mule, And Other Tales of... -... Promises Unfulfilled: 40 Acres And A Mule, And Other Tales of Reparations. An Issue Rooted In History. By Martha L. Wharton, PhD Special to the NorthStar Network...
http://www.thenorthstarnetwork.com/n.../181575-1.html