Reference no: EM133311036

Questions

1. How would Bayley Wyat have answered the first question in the "Reconstructing the South" role play, about who should own the land?

2. Contrast the quote from Elias Yulee with Bayley Wyat. Do they contradict each other?

3. The authors of "The Promised Land" ask, "Should the United States take the land of the planters who waged war against the Union and give it to the ex-slaves?" How did you answer that question in the "Reconstructing the South" role play?

4. The chapter points out that there was a precedent for the federal government taking land away from one group and distributing it to another. For example, millions of acres had been taken from Native Americans and given to railroads. Why, then, was the federal government reluctant to take land from white plantation owners and give it to people who had formerly been enslaved?

5. Why do you think President Andrew Johnson failed to support giving land to the formerly enslaved people in the South and instead gave title to lands that had been abandoned or confiscated during the Civil War back to former Confederate leaders?

6. What do you think of Thaddeus Stevens's plan to confiscate and redistribute lands of the planter class in the former Confederacy?

7. Look at Document Three, excerpts from speeches by Thaddeus Stevens. What does he propose? Would Stevens have agreed with your actions in the "Reconstructing the South" role play?

8. Why does Stevens believe that "the whole fabric of Southern society must be changed . . ."? What would it mean to change the "whole fabric of Southern society"?

9. Who would favor Stevens's plan? Who would oppose it?

10. Why did Thaddeus Stevens's plan for confiscation and redistribution of plantation land not receive more support in Congress?

11. The New York Times argued in 1867 that if Southern land were confiscated from the former plantation owners and given to formerly enslaved people that this would strike "at the root of property rights in both sections" - the North and the South. Is that true? What is The New York Times worried about?

12. The chapter calls sharecropping a compromise. Was it a compromise or was it a defeat for freed people?

13. Explain why you agree or disagree with Frederick Douglass's criticism in Document Six, when he says that, "when you [the federal government] turned us loose, you gave us no acres. You turned us loose to the sky, the storm, to the whirlwind, and worst of all, you turned us loose to the wrath of our infuriated masters."