President Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction plan appeared at first to be severe for former Confederates, but pardons quickly restored political rights. The Union slave states, far more than the former Confederate states, enacted proscriptive measures such as loyalty oaths, registry laws, and disfranchisement. But these measures proved difficult to maintain. The intransigence of the former Confederate states and the president’s leniency caused the swift return of former Confederates to power. In reaction, Congress promulgated the Fourteenth Amendment with its lengthy provisions to penalize former traitors. Congressional Republicans and Northerners moved closer to accepting black suffrage.

African Americans and their white allies insisted that enfranchisement was necessary to reward black men for their loyalty and military service. The vote would allow the freedmen to protect themselves and the Union from white Southerners. Despite arguments that the formerly enslaved were unqualified to vote, that only states could determine who voted, and that race war would ensue, black suffrage gained increasing support. Northerners, shocked at the swift return of former Confederates to power in Presidential Reconstruction and the anti-black riots in Memphis and New Orleans, blamed President Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policy and supported Congressional Republicans in the 1866 mid-term elections, setting the stage for Congressional Reconstruction.

The woman suffrage movement sought to capture Congressional Reconstruction for its own agenda. Having unsuccessfully opposed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments for creating what Elizabeth Cady Stanton called an “aristocracy of sex,” the woman suffragists now declared that women as well as black men were enfranchised under the Reconstruction amendments. This New Departure did not survive Supreme Court scrutiny. In fact, women who voted were tried under the Enforcement Acts passed to protect black men’s suffrage rights. As the federal government proved unable to protect black male suffrage, woman suffragists argued that Congressional Reconstruction had failed because it had been incomplete. Because Congressional Reconstruction had not enfranchised women, it had betrayed the natural rights tradition on which suffrage rights were based. The failure to include women had doomed universal manhood suffrage.

The woman’s movement used northern women’s loyalty and war service to claim the suffrage. However, their former allies in the abolition movement proclaimed the post-Civil War period “The Negro’s Hour” and feared that woman suffrage would prove an impediment to black male suffrage. In a major setback for women, the Fourteenth Amendment included the word “male.” The equal rights movement splintered in the post-war period, as became apparent in an 1867 campaign in Kansas over black and woman suffrage. White suffragists became increasingly racist and elitist in their rhetoric, alienating many black women. Democrats promoted woman suffrage to show the absurdity of black male suffrage. The woman’s movement proved unable to exploit the Civil War, as black men were doing, to advance their cause.

Having wrested control over Reconstruction policy from President Andrew Johnson, Congressional Republicans wrote their own Reconstruction Act. In addition to considerable confusion over who was eligible to vote, white Southerners often refused to participate in the elections and constitutional convention process. Border South states were seeing the erosion of their proscriptive measures. Former Confederate states varied in the severity of the political disabilities they imposed on former Confederates. Like blacks and women, former Confederates claimed they needed the vote to protect themselves and the Union from a centralizing and oppressive federal government. At the same time, Congress was relieving many former Confederates of their Fourteenth Amendment-imposed inability to hold office. Despite much white southern rhetoric about the horrors of bayonet rule under the Reconstruction and Enforcement Acts, white Southerners used violence and fraud to regain control of the former Confederate states.

Congressional Reconstruction enfranchised black men in the former Confederate states. The Fifteenth Amendment made that enfranchisement national, but stopped short of granting suffrage as a positive right. While black men’s enfranchisement had been premised on their loyalty, military service, and ability to use the vote to protect themselves and the Union, anti-black violence made it increasingly impossible to exercise their political rights. The memory of black men’s military service waned and increasingly the federal government was expected to protect black voters. Voting proved not to be self-enforcing, but to need the power of the federal government to protect voters. With diminishing northern support and increasing desire for reconciliation, federal government interference became politically untenable. African Americans and Republicans proved unable to preserve black suffrage.

This chapter introduces readers to the formative ideas and debates of nineteenth-century African American political thought. This period covers the era of antislavery activism before the US Civil War (1861–65), which abolished slavery, to the immediate aftermath of that period, known as Reconstruction (1865–77). It was in this latter period in which the US federal government intervened militarily and economically in the US South to ensure newly emancipated Black citizens would have their freedoms protected. Through figures such as David Walker, Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany, readers will learn how Black thinkers confronted slavery, racial hierarchy, and gender oppression while generating some of the most influential theories of freedom and equality in American history.

A central learning objective of this chapter is to show how political theory emerges not only from institutions but also from lived experience, moral outrage, and collective struggle. By the end of the chapter, readers will be able to explain how African American political thought identified the contradictions at the heart of American democracy and articulated powerful visions for racial justice and human liberation.

Tells the story of Andrew Johnson’s presidency and how he used the pardon power in an attempt to impose his vision of post-Civil War Reconstruction in place of the version of Reconstruction legislated by Congress.

Discusses the place of presidential clemency in the presidencies of Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes, particularly insofar as clemency was used by both presidents in winding down post-Civil War Reconstruction.

Part IV (Chapters 7, 8, and 9) argues that Congress, in crafting the Reconstruction Amendments, wanted to preserve its authority to exclude those it deemed undesirable from the political community of “We the Voters,” which significantly undermined later efforts to protect Black voters. The preservation of some elements of the pre–Civil War constitutional framework – i.e., the absence of an affirmative right to vote – when combined with the judicial invalidation of many key aspects of the Reconstruction project provided Congress with the exit for which the institution was searching as Reconstruction became less viable politically.

Following the Civil War, Congress used its power under the Elections Clause, the Guarantee Clause, Article I, Section 5, and the Reconstruction Amendments to rebuild southern political systems. Chapter 5 discusses the ratification debates surrounding Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment and the understanding that voting rights, which would now be exercised by a broader swath of the population in the post-war era, supplanted the natural right to alter or abolish government as the mechanism through which the people could express their sovereign authority. Section 2 not only reset expectations around what constituted a republican form of government consistent with the Guarantee Clause, but it is also provided a penalty – reduction of representation in Congress – for states that disenfranchised African American men now entitled to membership in the political community of “We the Voters.”

Part III (Chapters 5 and 6) discusses Reconstruction, focusing on Congress’s post–Civil War power over voting and elections, which was often at odds with the Supreme Court’s interpretation of that authority. Reconstruction was defined, in large part, by the marriage between the Constitutions of Political Structure and Political Rights. This synergy was necessary because the exigencies of war required the creation of new political norms regarding the right to vote, republicanism, and federalism. This expansion of federal power ultimately set Congress on a collision course with the Court as Congress liberally interpreted its constitutional obligation to ensure republican government in the southern states.

Bieral’s service in the Civil War, particularly at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, transformed his public image from thug to hero. The chapter chronicles his bravery, injuries, and subsequent court martial, revealing tensions between his violent past and military discipline. Bieral’s postwar activities – supporting Reconstruction, working in customs, and engaging in political violence – illustrate the persistence of private coercion in public life. His association with figures such as Boss Tweed and involvement in the Erie Railroad wars underscore the continuity of corruption and brutality. The chapter situates Bieral within the contested terrain of postbellum governance and reform.

As the war ended, politicians and educationalists saw the American Junior Red Cross as a means to promote American ideals abroad. Consequently, the American Junior Red Cross shifted its focus on a new form of Americanization, using children as part of a cultural diplomacy that positioned the United States as the global Good Samaritan. Children reached out around the globe, waged war against diseases, dedicated much of their spare time to rescue foreign "brothers" and "sisters," and sponsored children overseas.

This chapter introduces the three major themes of the book: relative clauses, Proto-Indo-European and syntax.

This section presents the author’s conclusions and offers some outlook for further research.

Relative clauses are generally introduced in the archaic Indo-European languages by a relative pronoun. In some languages, this pronoun is descended from a form *kwí-/*kwó-, while in others it is descended from a form *yó-. This chapter surveys the syntactic and semantic behaviour of the descendants of these pronouns in the attested languages. This includes a discussion of both their relative and non-relative uses. The author concludes that neither *kwí-/*kwó- nor *yó- can be excluded as a relative pronoun in Proto-Indo- European, and that together they reflect what was a unitary syntactic category in the proto-language: *REL.

This chapter reconstructs some principal features of relative clause syntax in Proto-Indo-European. Following the methodology outlined in Chapter 2, it pays close attention to the behaviour of the reconstructed relative pronoun, *REL (Chapter 4), and its position in the PIE left periphery (Chapter 5). Moving away from *REL, it then turns to the more general structures of, and relations between, ‘plain’ relative and correlative clauses in PIE. The chapter is rounded off by a discussion regarding the semantic types of relative clauses in PIE and their syntactic form.