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Congressional Passage // Freedmen's Bureau Act // Race Riots
Early State Ratification // Congressional Elections // Southern Rejection
Congressional Reconstruction

While President Johnson and Congress were increasingly at odds over Reconstruction, violent race riots erupted in Memphis and New Orleans.  During the Civil War, the black population in Memphis had quadrupled, and racial tensions were high.  A carriage accident between a black man and a white man sparked a riot on May 1, 1866.  When it ended three days later, 46 blacks and two whites had been killed, five black women raped, and hundreds of black homes, schools, and churches had been vandalized or destroyed by arson.  Three months later, a riot in New Orleans began as a protest against the state constitutional convention called by Louisiana Governor James Madison Wells, who endorsed enfranchising black men and banning former Confederates from voting.  On July 30, 1866, white delegates and black supporters assembled at the constitutional convention.  A fight on the street outside the hall escalated into a riot, which left 34 blacks and three white Republicans dead, and over 100 others injured.   

A cartoon by Thomas Nast in the September 1, 1866 issue of Harper’s Weekly blamed President Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction policies for allowing anti-black and anti-Union violence in the postwar South.  The cartoonist incorporated images of the race riots in Memphis (upper-left) and New Orleans (upper-right) as symbols of the sustained and extreme violence against blacks committed by some Southern whites. 


Harper's Weekly References

1)  May 26, 1866, p. 321
illustrations, “Scenes in Memphis”

2)  August 25, 1866, pp. 536-537
illustrations, “The Riot in New Orleans”

3)  September 1, 1866, pp. 552-553
cartoon, “Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction and How It Works,” Thomas Nast


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Congressional Passage // Freedmen's Bureau Act // Race Riots
Early State Ratification // Congressional Elections // Southern Rejection
Congressional Reconstruction
 
 

     
 

 
     
 

 
     
 

 

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