Reconstruction March 1865–April 1877
From:Civil War and Reconstruction, Eyewitness History.There were two views of how to deal with the political status of the defeated Confederate states, one view held by the executive and one by the Congress. Lincoln and Andrew Johnson believed strongly that the problem of Reconstruction was the responsibility of the executive department. Their view was that there had been an insurrection; the executive had called out troops to suppress it. It was up to the military to determine when the insurrection had been suppressed; it was up to the executive to exercise the power of pardon and amnesty. And it was up to the executive to determine what conditions had to be met to qualify for amnesty.
Some members of Congress held the view that the states had indeed seceded or at least destroyed their old relationship with the Union and that they had been defeated as conquered provinces. Another view held that, by removing their representatives from Congress and by dissolving their governments and replacing them with new ones, the seceding states had reverted to the status of territories. In either case, whether the seceding states became conquered provinces or territories, it was the constitutional job of Congress to guarantee a republican form of government in those states. Further, it was in the power of Congress whether or not to admit elected legislators to the House and Senate from those states.
The Constitution had no specific provisions for this situation, and there was little guidance as to what constituted the correct constitutional procedure. The executive department relied on those clauses of the Constitution concerning rebellion and treason; the legislative department relied on those clauses that spoke to the republican form of government of the states and the admission of representatives to Congress. Since president and Congress had such differing constitutional bases and such separate agendas, the two views led to inevitable conflict.
Lincoln's Reconstruction Goals
Lincoln, as a Republican politician, wanted reconstruction to progress in such a fashion that there would be a Republican Party in the South. Remembering his own Whig origins, he wanted a national party such as the Whigs had been, not a sectional party, such as the Republicans had been on the eve of the war. At least part of his mild reconstruction planning was based on a hope that the Union or Republican Party would be able to capture the support of the former Southern Whigs and create a truly national political base. Before Lincoln's death he made progress toward establishing loyal governments in Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas, all based on a combination of Whig-Unionists and those willing to take loyalty oaths to the Union. He attempted to get core Unionist governments set up in Louisiana and Tennessee to serve as a nucleus around which the new governments in those states could emerge. On December 8, 1863, he issued his proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction—the so-called 10 percent plan that would allow the establishment of governments once ten percent of the eligible voters signed a loyalty oath. In 1864, Congress passed the Wade-Davis plan, which required a majority (not 10%) to vote for state organizing conventions. However, to serve as a delegate to a state constitutional convention or to hold office in the newly established governments, under the congressional plan, individuals would also have to sign an "iron-clad" oath that they had never participated voluntarily in secession. This is the bill that Lincoln let go unsigned, or pocket-vetoed, but for which he also wrote a veto message in the summer of 1864.
Although the Confiscation Act of 1862 originally included a provision for the confiscation of the estates of Confederates, that provision was never enforced; Lincoln had not wanted to dispossess the planters of their land and believed that it was unconstitutional to deprive heirs of their property for the crimes of an individual ancestor. Lincoln hinted that the Emancipation Proclamation, as a war measure, only applied so far as it went during the war; he appeared to be suggesting that, if the South surrendered, emancipation would not be applied to areas under Confederate jurisdiction on the date of surrender. He urged the passage and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, partly because he believed that, without such an amendment, the wartime measures of emancipation might not be permanent.
From this evidence, it seems that Lincoln probably intended some sort of Reconstruction policy that would build on the old Whig and Unionist elements in the South to create a possibility of a Republican Party (or Union Party of some sort) with congressional delegations from the South. As to social policy, Lincoln was not nearly as egalitarian as the radicals in the Republican Party, and he probably would have endorsed only a program of gradual enfranchisement (perhaps with a literacy test). However, he was a superb politician and strategist and he might have understood that to achieve his goals he would have to yield in the radical direction of more rights and status for the former slaves, and he was certainly quite capable of matching wits with the radical strategists in Congress.
Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction
With Lincoln's death and his replacement by Johnson, who was politically incompetent, the chances of reconciling the natural divergence of viewpoints between the executive branch and the legislative branch were greatly diminished. Although many in Congress did not endorse a socially radical plan of Reconstruction, most Congressmen did believe that the question of how and under what terms the Southern states should be restored to political equivalency with the other states was in the jurisdiction of Congress.
Johnson talked tough in early 1865, and radicals thought he was with them. As a Tennessee-born, self-made man in the Jacksonian tradition, Johnson had always resented the power and arrogance of the wealthy planter class in the South. From his remarks and his acquiescence to the comments of others, Johnson appeared to support trials for leading Confederates and confiscation of their estates. He insisted that the states organized under his plan in 1865 had to exclude from positions of leadership former unpardoned Confederates. To be constituted as state governments with local jurisdiction, the defeated Confederate states had to endorse the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, and they had to repudiate the Confederate war debt. On their surface, these requirements imposed an implied transition that would bring the states into conformity with the Union, and, if rigorously enforced, would go far toward meeting the radical agenda. If he had coupled enforcement of his stated requirements for readmission with his indicated intention of confiscating planter estates of leading Confederates, radicals would have had little to complain about.
The reasons for his fall from grace with the radicals were several. Over the period 1865–66 he modified his views, accepting the fact that the former Confederate states did not actually abide by his own conditions. Secondly, he was a very poor politician and unsure of himself, often remaining silent when he should have given his opinion, and, at other times, making intemperate speeches off the cuff that insulted his supporters as well as his opponents. Furthermore, the radicals really never understood that Johnson was not a supporter of the emerging business culture in the North, and that he was willing to give the planter class power as long as they personally appealed to him for clemency. Nor did the radicals understand the degree to which Johnson shared the prevailing white view in the South that the African American was completely incapable of citizenship. As a Jacksonian, self-made man, as well as a racial bigot, he did support some socially democratic ideas such as public schools and the Homestead Act, but his social democracy was intended for whites only.
Johnson hoped to achieve Reconstruction between May and December 1865. The governments elected under his plan, however, were mostly dominated by ex-Confederates. Johnson may have expected the white underclass of the South to elect their own leadership, men like himself. However, the politically adept and experienced politicians were for the most part former Confederates. Many of those elected were in the very classes he had excepted from the effect of the amnesty, and they were elected in clear defiance of his explicit statement that they were not included in his blanket amnesty. But instead of refusing to allow them to hold office, he yielded and issued wholesale pardons. He issued 13,500 pardons, then pardoned all but a few hundred individuals on September 7, 1867. The pardons of ex-Confederate politicians and military officers pushed the Union men in the South to minority positions in the legislatures and in the state administrations. Furthermore, Johnson gave up on confiscation of estates, which he appeared to support at first, and was ready to recognize and accept the new governments even when they failed to meet his preconditions.
There are several explanations for why Johnson gave up on his attempt to exclude the former planter class from power and why he accepted the elections of those he had specifically excluded from the effect of his amnesty. His views on race were much closer to those of the Confederates than to those of the radicals in Congress. Perhaps he lacked the courage to enforce his restrictions on office holding, which would have required that he fly in the face of the electoral will of those who had voted. Such an action would have contradicted his proclaimed Jacksonian faith in the wisdom of the people expressed through the ballot. Perhaps he became converted to generous Reconstruction. It also seemed that he liked the personal power that came from making wealthy and formerly powerful aristocrats apply to him for pardon. It certainly seemed that planters and Confederates soon understood and exploited this personal weakness. In effect, the former Confederates were more adept at politics than he, and he found himself outflanked. By fall 1865, Johnson was in the position of having to defend the governments he had established, even though they were dominated by secessionists and even though they began to enact laws designed to keep African Americans in a status close to slavery. Stuck with his commitment, he had to stand by the governments he had encouraged and had to support them against attacks from Congress.
The governments established by the former Confederates under the Johnson rules in 1865 quite clearly set about establishing a caste system. Reports to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction described the failure of Reconstruction under Johnson to protect the freedmen; the Carl Schurz report was less critical of the social policies put in place under the Johnson governments, but still showed that the governments in the South were dominated by Confederate thinking. Schurz gave a candid report, indicating that token submission by the former planters was adopted as a necessity to get rid of federal troops. However, both the Joint Committee and Schurz noted that freedmen were being mistreated—any evidence of attempting to exercise rights was treated as "insolence" and often met with whipping, caning, or murder.
Furthermore, the reports showed, even Johnson's mild terms were not quite met. Some states repealed, but did not repudiate, the ordinances of secession; most appointed Confederates, rather than Southern Unionists or new Northern residents, to appointed positions. There were many other notable aspects of the resistance of the Johnson-sanctioned governments to the intent of the Johnson Reconstruction. Mississippi did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery; South Carolina did not repudiate Confederate debt, claiming it was so miniscule and so mixed with other debts that it could not be identified; Arkansas voted pensions for Confederate veterans. All the states rejected black suffrage; none of the Johnson governments established schools for blacks. Furthermore, the Johnson governments passed the Black Codes, intended to keep the slaves as propertyless workers. In short, the states disfranchised blacks, kept them in conditions resembling slavery, enacted segregation and legal discrimination, and empowered Confederate politicians and military officers to rule the states. About the only change from prewar conditions these states appeared to accept was the formal ending of the status of chattel slavery.1
In the Southern states where Johnson had allowed the establishment of governments, former secessionists, the most irresponsible class of leadership and the least willing to compromise, believed they had a free hand to establish a caste system to replace slavery. The social goal of these governments was to keep the freedmen as a subservient labor pool while denying them legal, political, and social advancement. That is, they did not expect blacks to be able to freely make their own contracts, to move about, to be able to use the courts to protect their rights, to vote, or to get an education. Radical goals on such topics seemed to them wrongheaded and liable only to raise the expectations of the former slaves, making them less tractable. In short, the secessionist-planter class leadership was willing to accept emancipation, but expected to replace it with a system that continued to make the freedmen available as laborers paid only at the subsistence level. They believed that removing slavery had worsened the position of African Americans, but that African Americans had no reason to expect, and no ability to utilize, the benefits of citizenship. Some were even reluctant to grant the former slaves the right to marry, but most may have been willing to yield on this point. The political leadership did not think it was appropriate to allow blacks to testify against whites in court, clearly assuming that blacks would be incapable of telling the truth. Johnson's program, if it had any intention of changing the social-political power structure in the seceded states, had failed.
Congressional Reaction to Johnson's Plan
When Johnson took over the administration of Reconstruction during the summer and fall of 1865, Congress felt he had usurped their prerogatives. After all, he could have called them into session before their regular meeting in December, or he could have consulted extensively with leading members of Congress. Furthermore, it was his generous application of the amnesty and pardon power that allowed former Confederates to assume power. As the investigations of the progress of Reconstruction under Johnson's terms were completed, Northern journalists and congressional leadership grew outraged, fully convinced that the president had abandoned some of the most important Republican goals. Some suspected that he hoped for a Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1868. For all of these reasons, by early 1866 Johnson had lost the support of Congress, and Republican newspapers and journals throughout the North rumbled with angry editorials.
Congress assembled in December for the 1865–66 session with four factions. One was the small group of Northern Democrats, who were disorganized. They tended to throw their support to Johnson when they saw the pattern of radical opposition to him emerging. Second was a group of conservative Republicans who tended to be partisan but not radical. Radicals, the third group, included among others Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, Benjamin Wade of Ohio, Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, and William Ashley of Ohio. Finally, there were some moderate Republicans, leaning toward Johnson, but wavering between radicals and conservatives. Although the Republicans were divided by factions, the radicals had the clearest vision of what the reconstructed South should be like. They believed that blacks should not only be freed from slavery, but also transformed into citizens, with access to education, some financial start on the path to prosperity, and guaranteed basic rights of equality in public and private matters. This egalitarian view, based on abolitionist views of the race issue, was far in advance of the views of the majority of both Southern and Northern whites. Nevertheless, it suggested a coherent agenda of what needed to be done; clearly, Johnson had done nothing to implement anything like such an agenda.
Because Johnson was stubborn and the Southern governments showed no sign of yielding over the course of the session from December 1865 to the summer of 1866, the moderates were driven into the camp of the radicals. Thus the egalitarian measures supported by radicals became attractive even to more moderate Republicans, if only as a way of punishing the recalcitrant rebels who had gained power under Johnson, and as a way of showing their opposition to Johnson himself.
The next two years saw a deep conflict between Congress and the president over three very fundamental issues. One was the relative power of the executive and Congress. A second was the relationship between state and federal responsibilities and powers. And third, underlying the other two, was a debate over exactly what terms should be imposed on the former Confederacy. Through these debates, the radicals continued to strive for measures that would protect the freedmen and elevate their status to that of full citizenship.