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As the dispute between Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan and Congress’s Wade-Davis Bill showed, no one in American government was sure how to reincorporate the Confederacy into the Union. In addition to the problem of how to re-create southern state governments, two other important questions emerged by war’s end:
| Fundamental Dilemmas Associated With Reconstruction | |
|---|---|
| Scope | What should Reconstruction address? Should it focus only on politics—the readmission of southern states to the Union—or should it also address social issues, such as equality before the law, for African Americans and others? |
| Agents | Who should take the lead on Reconstruction—the president, Congress, or state governments? How much influence should local people have in Reconstruction? |
Upon the assassination of President Lincoln, the task of Reconstruction first fell to his vice president, Andrew Johnson (pictured below).
Like Lincoln, Johnson wanted to reincorporate the South in the Union quickly, and on terms that were perhaps even more lenient than Lincoln's. Historians refer to Johnson’s plans for Reconstruction as Presidential Reconstruction. Johnson issued his plan in May of 1865, while Congress was out of session.
Confederate governmental leaders, high-ranking military officers, and persons with taxable property worth more than $20,000 were excluded from amnesty. To regain their political and property rights (with the exception of enslaved people), this class of wealthy southerners had to request a pardon from the President.
Johnson excluded high-ranking Confederates and wealthy southerners from amnesty because he believed they were primarily responsible for the war between North and South.
Johnson’s plan also included straightforward requirements for the readmission of southern states to the Union. He appointed provisional governors for each state, who then called constitutional conventions.
Southern state constitutions had to reject secession and abolish slavery by recognizing the Thirteenth Amendment. Once they had done so, according to Johnson's plan, nothing more needed to be done: the Union would be restored.
Certain events in the South undermined Presidential Reconstruction.
Although Johnson pardoned many Confederate leaders and military officers, he did not anticipate that White southern voters would elect them to office. In elections held in 1865, a number of former Confederate officials and slaveholders were voted into important positions at the local, state, and federal levels. Following the elections, a number of them went to Washington, D.C. to reclaim seats in Congress.
In an expression of southern defiance, Presidential Reconstruction was further undermined by the passage of Black Codes in the former Confederate states.
While specific laws varied in content and severity from state to state, the goal of the Black Codes was consistent. They were enacted to maintain the social and economic structure of racial slavery in the absence of slavery itself. Although the codes granted certain freedoms, such as the right to marry, they outlawed interracial marriage and deprived former enslaved people of the rights to vote, serve on juries, own or carry weapons and, in some cases, even the right to rent or lease land.
The Black Codes included labor laws that reflected the pre-war economy, which had been based on enslaved labor, under the facade of a free-labor system.
Employers required formerly enslaved people to sign yearly contracts that prevented them from working for more than one employer. This restricted their ability to influence wages or working conditions by choosing to work for an employer who offered the best terms (as called for in a free-labor economy). Former enslaved people who violated a labor contract could be fined or beaten. Anyone who refused to sign a contract could be arrested for vagrancy, then made to work for no wages for a plantation owner—essentially re-enslaving them.
The image above illustrates the economic and political conditions that many former enslaved people experienced under Presidential Reconstruction. White Southerners and former Confederates, encouraged by the Johnson administration to quickly form southern state governments that only abolished slavery, implemented the Black Codes to control the lives and labor of former enslaved people.
The election of former Confederates to Congress, and the enactment of Black Codes, indicated to many Republicans in Congress that the southern states did not accept the outcome of the Civil War. Congress responded to southern defiance in ways that brought it into direct conflict with President Johnson.
Republicans (who held the majority in Congress) refused to recognize the southern state governments that President Johnson had authorized under his plan for Reconstruction. They also refused to allow Alexander H. Stephens and other Representatives and Senators elected by the former Confederate states to take their seats in Congress.
In addition, Congress waged a series of political battles against President Johnson over Reconstruction that ultimately resulted in impeachment proceedings against him. One of these battles centered on the Freedmen’s Bureau.
President Lincoln approved the creation of the bureau in March of 1865, granting it a one-year charter. The Bureau engaged in a number of activities to ease the transition from slavery to freedom in the South. Members delivered food to individuals, helped freedmen gain labor contracts, and provided assistance in legal disputes. They also coordinated with aid organizations and missionary societies to establish thousands of public schools that educated children of both races.
In the spring of 1866, Congress voted to renew the charter for the Freedmen’s Bureau. However, President Johnson vetoed the bill. The future of the Bureau was in doubt.
Another political battle revolved around the first Civil Rights bill, which challenged the infamous Dred Scott decision and responded to the Black Codes by formally establishing the citizenship of everyone born in the United States — including African Americans. The bill expanded federal authority to include the power to intervene in state affairs to guarantee citizens, including African Americans, equal protection under the law.
Johnson vetoed both bills on the following grounds:
The subsequent history of Reconstruction is a period that historians often refer to as Congressional Reconstruction.
Like Abraham Lincoln, the members of Congress that Johnson most often found himself at odds with were legislators known as Radical Republicans.
The Radical Republicans insisted that civil rights for freed enslaved people should take precedence over any other issue related to Reconstruction.
EXAMPLE
Sumner advocated for the integration of schools and giving Black men the right to vote. Thaddeus Stevens argued that the southern states had forfeited their rights as states when they seceded from the Union and, as a result, the federal government could organize new state governments as it wished.Radical Republicans were willing to use the power of the federal government, especially Congress, to implement their vision for the South: one in which the economy was based on free labor, and government protected the former enslaved people.
Led by Radical Republicans, and spurred by the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Congress took the final step in overturning the Dred Scott decision in July of 1866, when it sent the Fourteenth Amendment to the states for ratification.
The amendment grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States….” Furthermore, it guarantees citizens equal protection under state and federal law. In doing so, it effectively overturned the Dred Scott decision as well as the Three-Fifths Compromise written into the Constitution, which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a free White person.
To guarantee equal protection under the law, the Fourteenth Amendment declared that the federal government could intervene in state affairs if state governments failed to protect citizens’ constitutional rights. This part of the amendment gave Congress the ability to intervene directly in southern state politics.
Because all but one of the former Confederate states refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress went one step further in the spring of 1867 by enacting (over Johnson’s veto) the Reconstruction Act.
The Reconstruction Act accomplished the following:
The most radical aspect of Congressional Reconstruction was that it guaranteed that African Americans in the South could participate in the political process. Shortly after the passage of the Reconstruction Act, the Union Army began to register Black voters and organize elections for the state constitutional conventions.
By the fall of 1867, when the elections for new southern state governments were first held, the United States stood on the brink of significant social change. Throughout the South, one could view scenes that not even the American Revolution could have produced.
Consider the image below (“The First Vote”), which appeared on the cover of Harper’s Weekly on November 16, 1867.
The image above celebrates a significant expansion of American freedom. Three people — a laborer with tools in his pocket (a former enslaved man, perhaps), a well-dressed figure (who was likely free before the war), and a Union soldier — stand in line to cast their ballots in a state election. A federal military official stands watch behind the voting counter, and an American flag is displayed above everyone. Before the Civil War, the people in line did not have the right to vote, because suffrage was limited to White men. In November of 1867, however, they were voting for the first time because of Congressional Reconstruction.
The implications were significant. The individuals in the image were empowered to elect their representatives. By doing so, they could begin to change social and political restrictions entrenched in southern—and American—society since the Revolution.
Additional Resources
View key Civil War and Reconstruction primary documents held at the Library of Congress.
Source: This tutorial curated and/or authored by Matthew Pearce, Ph.D with content adapted from Openstax “U.S. History”. access for free at openstax.org/details/books/us-history LICENSE: CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION 4.0 INTERNATIONAL
