APUSH-15. Reconstruction 1863-1877
Lincoln's Policies During the war years, Lincoln hoped that the southern states could be reestablished (though technically, in his view, they had never left) by meeting a minimum test of political loyalty. Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction (1863). As early as December 1863, Lincoln set up an apparently simple process for political Reconstruction—that is, for reconstructing the state governments in the South so that Unionists were in charge rather than secessionists. The president's Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction provided for the following:
Full presidential pardons would be granted to most southerners who (1) took an oath of allegiance to the Union and the U.S. Constitution and (2) accepted the emancipation of slaves.
Black Codes. The Republicans became further disillusioned with Johnson when the southern state legislatures adopted Black Codes that restricted the rights and movements of the newly freed African Americans. The codes (1) prohibited blacks from either renting land or borrowing money to buy land; (2) placed freedmen into a form of semibondage by forcing them, as "vagrants" and "apprentices," to sign work contracts; and (3) prohibited blacks from testifying against whites in court. The contract-labor system, in which blacks worked the cotton fields under white supervision for deferred wages, seemed little different from slavery.
Appalled by reports of what was happening in the South, Republicans began to ask, "Who won the war?" In early 1866, Congress' unhappiness with Johnson developed into an open rift when the northern Republicans in Congress challenged the results of elections in the South. They refused to seat Alexander Stephens and other duly elected representatives and senators from ex-Confeder- ate states. Johnson's vetoes. Johnson alienated even moderate Republicans when, in early 1866, he vetoed two important bills: (1) a bill increasing the services and protection offered by the Freedmen's Bureau and (2) a civil rights bill that nullified the Black Codes and guaranteed full citizenship and equal rights to blacks.
Impeachment of Andrew Johnson Also in 1867, over Johnson's veto, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act. This unusual (and probably unconstitutional) law prohibited the president from removing a federal official or military commander without the approval of the Senate. The purpose of the law was strictly political. Congress wanted to protect the Radical Republicans in Johnson's cabinet, such as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who was in charge of the military governments in the South.
Believing the new law to be unconstitutional, Johnson challenged it by dismissing Stanton on his own authority. The House responded by impeaching Johnson, charging him with 11 "high crimes and misdemeanors." Johnson thus became the first president to be impeached. (Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998.) In 1868, after a three-month trial in the Senate, Johnson's political enemies fell one vote short of the necessary two-thirds vote required to remove a president from office. Seven moderate Republicans joined the Democrats against conviction, because they thought it was a bad precedent to remove a president for political reasons.
Johnson and Reconstruction Andrew Johnson's origins were as humble as Lincoln's. A self-taught tailor, he rose in Tennessee politics by championing the interests of poor whites in their economic conflict with rich planters. Johnson was the only senator from a Confederate state who remained loyal to the Union. After Tennessee was occupied by Union troops, he was appointed that state's war governor.
Johnson was a southern Democrat, but Republicans picked him to be Lincoln's running mate in 1864 in order to encourage pro-Union Democrats to vote for the Union (Republican) party. In one of the accidents of history, Johnson became the wrong man for the job. As a white supremacist, the new president was bound to clash with Republicans in Congress who believed that the war was fought not just to preserve the Union but also to liberate blacks from slavery.
The Election of 1866. Unable to work with Congress, Johnson took to the road in the fall of 1866 in his infamous "swing around the circle" to attack his congressional opponents. His speeches appealed to the racial prejudices of whites by arguing that equal rights for blacks would result in an "Africanized" society. Republicans counterattacked by accusing Johnson of being a drunkard and a traitor. They appealed to anti-southern prejudices by employing a campaign tactic known as "waving the bloody shirt"—inflaming the hatreds of northern voters by reminding them of the hardships of war. Republican propaganda made much of the fact that southerners were Democrats and, by a gross jump in logic, branded the entire Democratic party as a party of rebellion and treason.
Election results gave the Republicans an overwhelming victory. After 1866, Johnson's political enemies—both moderate and radical Republicans— would have commanding control of Congress with more than a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate.
Johnson's Reconstruction policy. At first, many Republicans in Congress welcomed Johnson's presidency because of his apparent hatred for the southern aristocrats who had led the Confederacy. In May 1865, Johnson issued his own Reconstruction proclamation that was very similar to Lincoln's 10 percent plan.
In addition to Lincoln's terms, it provided for the disfranchisement (loss of the right to vote and hold office) of (1) all former leaders and officeholders of the Confederacy and (2) Confederates with more than $20,000 in taxable property. However, the president retained the power to grant individual pardons to "disloyal" southerners. This was an escape clause for the wealthy planters, and Johnson made frequent use of it. As a result of the president's pardons, many former Confederate leaders were back in office by the fall of 1865.
Wade-DavisBill(1864). Many Republicans in Congress objected to Lincoln's 10 percent plan, arguing that it would allow a supposedly reconstructed state government to fall under the domination of disloyal secessionists. In 1864 Congress passed the Wade-Davis Bill, which proposed far more demanding and stringent terms for Reconstruction.
The bill required 50 percent of the voters of a state to take a loyalty oath and permitted only non-Confederates to vote for a new state constitution. Lincoln refused to sign the bill, pocket- vetoing it after Congress adjourned. How serious was the conflict between President Lincoln and the Republican Congress over Reconstruction policy? Historians still debate this question. In any case, Congress was no doubt ready to reassert its powers in 1865, as Congresses traditionally do after a war.
Freedmen's Bureau. In March 1865, Congress created an important new agency: the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, better known simply as the Freedmen's Bureau. The bureau acted as a kind of early welfare agency, providing food, shelter, and medical aid for those made destitute by the war—both blacks (chiefly freed slaves) and homeless whites. At first, the Freedmen's Bureau had authority to resettle freed blacks on confiscated farmlands in the South. Its efforts at resettlement, however, were later frustrated when President Johnson pardoned Confederate owners of the confiscated lands, and courts then restored most of the lands to their original owners.
The bureau's greatest success was in education. Under the able leadership of General Oliver O. Howard, it helped to establish nearly 3,000 schools for freed blacks, including several black colleges. Before federal funding was stopped in 1870, the bureau's schools taught an estimated 200,000 African Americans how to read.
Radical Republicans There had long been a division in Republican ranks between (1) moderates, who were chiefly concerned with economic gains for the white middle class, and (2) radicals, who championed civil rights for blacks. Although most Republicans were moderates, they shifted toward the radical position in 1866 partly out of fear that a reunified Democratic party might again become dominant. After all, now that the federal census counted blacks as equal to whites (no longer applying the old three-fifths rule for slaves), the South would have more representatives in Congress than before the war and more strength in the electoral college in future presidential elections.
The leading Radical Republican in the Senate was Charles Sumner of Massachusetts (now fully recovered from his earlier caning by Brooks). In the House, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania hoped to revolutionize southern society through an extended period of military rule in which blacks would be free to exercise their civil rights, would be educated in schools operated by the federal government, and would receive lands confiscated from the planter class. A number of Radical Republicans, including Benjamin Wade of Ohio, endorsed other liberal causes: women's suffrage, rights for labor unions, and civil rights for northern blacks. Although their program was never fully imple- mented, the Radical Republicans struggled for about four years, 1866 to 1870, to extend equal rights to all Americans.