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Reconstruction, 1865–1877
Presidential Reconstruction
• Lincoln’s Approach
• The Constitution did not address the question of
secession or any procedure for Reconstruction, so it did
not say which branch of government was to handle the
readmission of rebellious states.
• Lincoln offered general amnesty to all but high-ranking
Confederates willing to pledge loyalty to the Union;
when 10 percent of a state’s voters took this oath—and
abolished slavery—the state would be restored to the
Union.
• Most Confederate states rebuffed the offer,
assuring that the war would have to be fought to
the bitter end.
• As some African Americans began to agitate for
political rights, congressional Republicans
proposed the Wade-Davis Bill, a stricter substitute
for Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan, which laid down
as conditions for the restoration of the rebellious
states to the union.
• The Wade-Davis Bill served notice that congressional
Republicans were not going to turn Reconstruction
policy over to the president.
• Rather than openly challenge Congress, Lincoln
executed a pocket veto of the Wade-Davis Bill by not
signing it before Congress adjourned.
• Lincoln also initiated informal talks with congressional
leaders aimed at finding common ground; Lincoln’s
successor Andrew Johnson, however, held the view
that Reconstruction was the president’s prerogative.
How might Reconstruction have been different if Lincoln had not been
assassinated?
• Lincoln would have allied himself with the
moderate Republicans in support of a program less
lenient than what he initially wanted but not as
severe as what the Radicals desired.
• Reconstruction would have been more consistent,
without changes in policy. Southerners would not
have been encouraged by battles between the
president and Congress, which would not have
occurred.
• Lincoln would have broken with congressional
Republicans and would have had struggles with
Congress similar to Johnson’s, although with less
personal hostility because of Lincoln’s more tactful
personality.
• Lincoln would have remained committed to full
citizenship for ex-slaves; he would not have backed
down before the Ku Klux Klan and would have used the
force necessary to root it out. He could have co-opted
Lee and other southerners with genuine honor to help
him rebuild the Union
Presidential Reconstruction
Johnson Seizes the Initiative
• A slave owner himself, he had little sympathy for
formerly enslaved blacks.
• The Republicans had nominated Johnson for vice
president in 1864 in order to promote wartime political
unity and to court southern Unionists.
• After Lincoln’s death, Johnson offered amnesty to all
southerners except high ranking Confederate officials
and wealthy property owners who took an oath of
allegiance to the Constitution.
• Johnson also appointed provisional governors for
the southern states and, as conditions for their
restoration, required only that they revoke their
ordinances of secession, repudiate their
Confederate debts, and ratify the Thirteenth
Amendment.
• Within months, all the former Confederate states
had met Johnson’s requirements for rejoining the
Union and had functioning, elected governments.
Presidential Reconstruction
Johnson Seizes the Initiative
• Within months, all the former Confederate states had met Johnson’s
requirements for rejoining the Union and had functioning, elected
governments.
• Southerners held fast to the antebellum order and enacted Black Codes
designed to drive the ex-slaves back to plantations; they had moved to
restore slavery in all but name.
• Southerners perceived Johnson’s liberal amnesty policy as tacit approval of
the Black Codes; emboldened, the ex-Confederates filled southern
congressional delegations with old comrades, even including the vice
president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens.
• Republicans in both houses refused to admit the southern delegations
when Congress convened in early December 1865, blocking Johnson’s
Reconstruction program.
• In response, some Black Codes were replaced with nonracial
ordinances whose effect was the same, and across the South a wave of
violence erupted against the freedmen.
• Republicans concluded that the South had embarked on a concerted
effort to circumvent the Thirteenth Amendment and that the federal
government had to intervene.
• Congress voted to extend the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau, gave it
direct funding for the first time, and authorized its agents to investigate
cases of discrimination against blacks.
• Lyman Trumbull, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, proposed a
Civil Rights Bill that declared all persons—regardless of race—born in
the United States to be citizens and gave them equal rights.
• Even the most moderate Republicans demanded that the federal
government assume responsibility for securing the civil rights of the
freedmen.
Presidential Reconstruction
Acting on Freedom
• Across the South, ex-slaves held mass meetings and formed organizations;
they demanded equality before the law and the right to vote.
• In the months before the end of the war, freedmen had seized control of land
where they could; General Sherman had reserved tracts of land for liberated
blacks in his March to the Sea.
• When the war ended, the Freedmen’s Bureau was charged with feeding and
clothing war refugees, distributing confiscated lands to “loyal refugees and
freedmen,” and regulating labor contracts between freedmen and planters.
• Johnson’s amnesty plan entitled pardoned Confederates to recover
confiscated property, battering the freedmen’s hopes of keeping the land on
which they lived.
• To try to hold onto their land, blacks fought pitched battles with
plantation owners and bands of ex-Confederate soldiers; generally the
whites prevailed.
• A struggle took place over the labor system that would replace slavery;
because owning land defined true freedom, ex-slaves resisted working
for wages as it implied not freedom, but dependency.
• To overcome any vestiges of dependency, formalizing marriage was an
urgent matter after emancipation as was resisting planters’ demands
that freedwomen go back to work in the fields.
• Many freed people abandoned their old plantations in order to seek
better lives and more freedom in the cities of the South; those who
remained refused to work under the gang-labor system.
• Whatever system of labor finally might emerge, it was clear that the
freedmen would never settle for anything resembling the old plantation
system.
The efforts of former slaves to control their own lives
challenged deeply entrenched white attitudes and resulted in
racial violence; the governments established under Johnson’s
plan only put the stamp of legality on the pervasive efforts to
enforce white supremacy.
Freedmen turned to Washington for help.
We Need to understand their dilemma
• The average ex-slave, freed by the
war and the 13th Amendment, was
to a degree childlike. Life under
the lash had unfortunately left him
immature-socially, politically,
emotionally.
De mass a run, ha! Ha!
De darky stay, ho! Ho!
It must be now dat de kingdom am a-comin'
And de year of jubalo.
"Black Codes" in the "Black Belt"
The crushed Cotton Kingdom could not rise
from its weeds until the fields were once
more put under the plow and hoe. This goal
could not be attained without a dependable
labor supply, which the now-restless black
was not providing.
The so-called "Black Codes" were the answer of the
white legislatures in the South to the problem of a
stable laboring force. The pre-Civil War laws
governing enslaved Negroes were no longer
binding, and substitute statutes had to be enacted.
The new codes were naturally more liberal than
the old ones, but they were not liberal enough in
the eyes of Northern anti-slaveryites and many
forward-looking Southerners
Titled "Selling a Freeman to Pay His Fine at Monticello,
Florida,” this 1867 drawing from a northern magazine
equates the black codes with the reinstitution of slavery.
The laws stopped short of re-enslavement but sharply
restricted blacks' freedom. In Florida, as in other southern
states, certain acts, such as breaking a labor contract, were
made criminal offenses, the penalty for which could be
involuntary plantation labor for a year. Congress passed
the Civil Rights Act in 1866 and ratified the 14th
Amendment to the Constitution (protecting the rights of
blacks) in 1868 to combat the black codes.
Presidential Reconstruction
Congress versus President
• In February 1866, Andrew Johnson vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and a
month later vetoed Trumbull’s Civil Rights Bill calling it discriminatory
against whites.
• Galvanized by Johnson’s attack on the Civil Rights Bill, Republicans
enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866; Congress had never before overridden
a veto on a major piece of legislation.
• As an angry Congress renewed the Freedmen’s Bureau over a second
Johnson veto, Republican resolve was reinforced by news of mounting
violence in the South.
• Republicans moved to enshrine black civil rights in the Fourteenth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
• Johnson urged the states not to ratify the amendment and began to maneuver
politically against the Republicans; the Fourteenth Amendment became a
campaign issue for the Democratic Party.
• Republicans responded furiously by decrying Democrats as traitors, a tactic
that came to be known as “waving the bloody shirt.”
• Johnson embarked on a disastrous railroad tour campaign
and made matters worse by engaging in shouting matches
and exchanging insults with the hostile crowds.
• Republicans won a three-to-one majority in the 1866
congressional elections, which registered
• overwhelming support for securing the civil rights of exslaves.
• The Republican Party had a new sense of unity coalescing
around the unbending program of the radical minority,
which represented the party’s abolitionist strain.
• For the Radicals, Reconstruction was never primarily
about restoring the Union but rather remaking southern
society, beginning with getting the black man his right to
vote.
Radical Reconstruction
Congress Takes Command
The Reconstruction Act of 1867 divided the
South into five military districts, each under the
command of a Union general
What do the dates that southern states were readmitted to the Union and the years that
Radical Reconstruction governments were defeated in the South tell us about the
success or failure of Reconstruction between 1867 and 1877?
• The price for reentering the Union was granting the vote to the
freedmen and disenfranchising the South’s prewar political class.
• Congress overrode Johnson’s veto of the Reconstruction Act and, in
effect, attempted to reconstruct the presidency with the Tenure of
Office Act, by requiring Senate consent for the removal of any official
whose appointment had required Senate confirmation and the president
to issue all orders to the army through its commanding general.
• After Congress adjourned in August 1867, Johnson “suspended”
Edwin M. Stanton and replaced him with General Ulysses S. Grant; he
then replaced four of the commanding generals governing the South.
• When the Senate reconvened, it overruled Stanton’s suspension, and
Grant, now Johnson’s enemy, resigned so that Stanton could resume
office.
• On February 21, 1868, Johnson dismissed Stanton; the House
Republicans introduced articles of impeachment against Johnson,
mainly for violations of the Tenure of Office Act.
• A vote on impeachment was one vote short of the required two-thirds
majority needed, but Johnson was left powerless to alter the course of
Reconstruction.
How would American political development have differed if President
Johnson had been removed from office?
• Reconstruction would not have changed much, since Congress took
control of policy anyway, and the North was ambivalent.
• Impeachment and conviction would have occurred more often in
American history because they would have resulted from a lack of
political support, not from criminal activity.
• Congress’s power would have increased even more than it did in the late
nineteenth century.
• Grant was the Republicans’ 1868 presidential nominee, and he won out
over the Democrats’ Horatio Seymour; Republicans retained two-thirds
majorities in both houses of Congress.
• The Fifteenth Amendment forbade either the federal government or the
states to deny citizens the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or
“previous condition of servitude,” although it left room fr poll taxes and
property or literacy tests. o
• States still under federal control were required to ratify the amendment
before being readmitted to the Union; the Fifteenth Amendment became
part of the Constitution.
Radical Reconstruction
Woman Suffrage Denied
• Women’s rights advocates were outraged that the Fifteenth Amendment did
not address women’s suffrage.
• At the 1869 annual meeting of the Equal Rights Association, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Susan B. Anthony spoke out against the amendment.
• The majority, led by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe of the American
Women’s Suffrage Association, accepted the priority of black suffrage over
women’s suffrage.
• Stanton’s new organization, the National Women’s Suffrage Association,
accepted only women, focused exclusively on women’s rights, and took up
the battle for a federal woman suffrage amendment.
• Fracturing of the women’s movement obscured the common ground of the
two sides, but the issues raised during radical Reconstruction planted the
seeds of the modern feminist movement.
By 1872, when this cartoon appeared
in Harper's Weekly magazine,
suffragist Victoria Woodhull had
gained considerable notoriety both
for her dramatic pro-suffrage
testimony before a congressional
committee and for her bold critiques
of sexual hypocrisy within the
marriage relationship. Her
proclamations and behavior won her
the label of America's foremost "free
lover." This image, created by the
great nineteenth-century political
cartoonist Thomas Nast, portrays her
as the devil incarnate. He contrasts
Woodhull to a heavily burdened
drunkard's wife, who will be further
weighted down by following her
lead.
Radical Reconstruction
Republican Rule in the South
• Between 1868 and 1871, all the southern states met the
congressional stipulations and rejoined the Union.
• Southern white Republicans were called “scalawags”
by Democratic ex-Confederates; white northerners
who moved to the South were called “carpetbaggers.”
• Some scalawags were former slave owners who
wanted to attract northern capital, but most were
yeoman farmers who wanted to rid the South of its
slaveholding aristocracy; some carpetbaggers were
motivated by personal profit and brought capital
and skills with them, while others were attracted
to the South’s climate, people, and economic
opportunities.
• Although never proportionate to their size in
population, black officeholders were prominent
throughout the South.
• Republicans modernized state constitutions,
eliminated property qualifications for voting, got
rid of the Black Codes, and expanded the rights of
married women.
• Reconstruction social programs called for
hospitals, more humane penitentiaries, and
asylums; Reconstruction governments built roads
and revived the railroad network.
• To pay for their programs, Republicans introduced
property taxes that applied to personal wealth as
well as to real estate, similar to the taxes the
Jacksonians had used in the North.
• In many plantation counties, former slaves served as tax
assessors and collectors, administering the taxation of their
onetime owners.
• Reconstruction governments’ debts mounted rapidly, and
public credit collapsed; much of the spending was wasted
or ended up in the pockets of state officials.
• Republican state governments viewed education as the
foundation of a democratic order and had to make up for
lost time since the South had virtually no public education.
• New African American churches served as
schools, social centers, and political meeting halls
as well as places of worship.
• Black ministers were community leaders and often
political officeholders; they provided a powerful
religious underpinning for the Republican politics
of their congregations.
Radical Reconstruction
The Quest for Land
• The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 was mostly
symbolic since the public land it made available to
former slaves was in swampy, infertile parts of the
lower South.
• After Johnson’s order restoring confiscated lands to the
ex-Confederates, the Freedmen’s Bureau devoted itself
to teaching blacks how to be good agricultural laborers.
• Sharecropping was a distinctive labor system for cotton
agriculture in which the freedmen worked as tenant
farmers, exchanging their labor for the use of land.
• Sharecropping was an unequal relationship, since
the sharecropper had no way of making it through
the first growing season without borrowing for
food and supplies.
• Storekeepers “furnished” the sharecropper and
took as collateral a lien on the crop; as cotton
prices declined during the 1870s, many
sharecroppers fell into permanent debt.
• If the merchant was also the landowner, the debt
became a pretext for peonage, or forced labor.
• Sharecropping did mobilize black husbands and
wives in common enterprise and shielded both from
personal subordination to whites.
• By the end of Reconstruction, about one quarter of
sharecropping families saved enough to rent with
cash, and eventually black farmers owned about a
third of the land they farmed.
• The battle over the South’s land was exceptional due to
politics; elsewhere, emancipation rarely meant civil or
political equality for freed slaves, but in the United States,
the civil rights, suffrage, and measure of political power
for freedmen allowed the development of sharecropping.
• While sharecropping beat laboring for their former slave
owners, it was devastating to Southern agriculture; it
committed the South inflexibly to cotton because it was a
cash crop and limited incentives for agricultural
improvements.
• It went too far. The attempt to give African
Americans political equality with white
southerners was fruitless. It could not, and did not,
last.
• It did not go far enough. Land redistribution alone
would have made a difference in the political and
economic relationship between white southerners
and freedmen.
• It was an impossible task. The North was never
prepared to support the extent of change that was
necessary in the South.
• African Americans who had been free
before the war were more conservative in
their goals for Reconstruction and were
more protective of private property.
• Freedmen often sought the confiscation and
redistribution of former Confederate estates.
• Freedmen enjoyed their new geographical
mobility, often seeking out relatives who
had been sold away.
• Planters successfully appealed to white
racism in order to prevent such an alliance.
• Freedmen and poor whites were in
competition for land in the distressed
southern economy after the war.
• Both groups distrusted each other and could
not overcome latent racism.
The Undoing of Reconstruction
• Counterrevolution
• The Acquiescent North
• The Political Crisis of 1877
COUNTERREVOLUTION
• One by one, the Reconstruction state
governments fell to counterrevolutions
• Could greater effort and commitment in
Washington have saved the Republicans?
Hearings on the Ku Klux Klan
• Testimony Taken by the Joint Committee to
Enquire into the Condition of Affairs in the
Late Insurrectionary States
• Public debt of the Southern states doubled
and trebled
• Disfranchised and propertied whites had to
stagger along under a tax burden that
sometimes rose ten or fifteen fold
• Corruption was also rampant in the North
Tweed Ring of New York City
The Rule of Night Riders
• Ku Klux Klan, founded in Tennessee in 1866 its
main purpose was to resist Reconstruction, and
it focused as much on intimidating
"carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" as on putting
down the freed slaves.
• A former slave trader and plantation owner who
lost all his wealth in the Civil War, Forrest was
the tough, respected figure who could impose
order on the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux
Klan and prevent it from spinning out of control.
In late 1866, he accepted the job and donned the
robes of Grand Wizard, the Klan's highest
office. For him, the Klan was politics by other
means, the vehicle by which disfranchised
former Confederates like himself might strike a
blow against the despised Republicans who now
ran the South
• By 1870 the Klan was operating almost
everywhere in the South as an armed force
whose terrorist tactics served the
Democratic Party
Striking fear in the hearts of its enemies was a favorite
tactic of Forrest's Ku Klux Klan-- hence this menacing
ceremonial flag from Tennessee, with its fierce dragon
and mysterious Latin motto, "Because it always is,
because it is everywhere, because it is abominable."
• The KKK quickly adopted violent methods. A
rapid reaction set in, with the Klan's leadership
disowning violence and Southern elites seeing the
Klan as an excuse for federal troops to continue
their activities in the South. The organization was
in decline from 1868 to 1870 and was destroyed in
the early 1870s by President Ulysses S. Grant's
vigorous action under the Civil Rights Act of 1871
(also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act).
Two armed Klansmen
pose in their disguises,
which they donned not
only to hide their
identity but also to
intimidate their black
neighbors. Northern
audiences saw a
lithograph based on
this photograph in
Harper's Weekly on
December 28, 1868.
• Many Negroes and carpetbaggers, quick to take a
hint, were scared away from the polls. But those
stubborn souls who persisted in their forward
ways were flogged, mutilated, or even murdered.
• Radicals in Congress, outraged by this nightriding lawlessness, passed the iron-toothed Force
Acts of 1870 and 1871 that authorized federal
prosecutions, military force, and martial law to
suppress conspiracies that deprived citizens of the
right to vote, hold office, serve on juries, and
enjoy equal protection of the law.
• Federal troops were able to stamp out much
of the “lash law,” but by this time the
"Invisible Empire" had already done its
work of intimidation.
• Large-scale disfranchisement of the Negro,
starting conspicuously about 1890, was
achieved by intimidation, fraud, and
trickery. Among various underhanded
schemes were the literacy tests, unfairly
administered by whites to the advantage of
illiterate whites.
• The Grant administration's assault on the Klan
illustrated how dependent African Americans and
southern Republicans were on the federal
government.
• Northern Republicans were growing weary of
Reconstruction and the bloodshed it seemed to
produce.
• Prosecuting Klansmen was an uphill battle with
U.S. attorneys, who usually faced allwhite juries
and lacked the resources to handle the cases; after
1872 prosecutions began to drop off and many
Klansmen received hasty pardons.
• Republican governments that were denied federal
help found themselves overwhelmed by the
massive resistance of their exConfederate
enemies; between 1873 and 1875, Democrats
overthrew Republican governments in Texas,
Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi.
• By 1876 Republican governments remained in
only Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida;
elsewhere the former Confederates were back in
control.
The Acquiescent North
• Sympathy for the freedmen began to wane, as the
North was flooded with onesided, often racist reports
describing extravagant, corrupt Republican rule and a
South in the grip of a "massive black barbarism.“
• The Civil Rights Bill introduced by Charles Sumner in
1870 was a remarkable application of federal power
against discrimination, but by its passage in 1875 it had
been stripped of its key provisions. The Supreme Court
finished its demolition when it declared the remnant
Civil Rights Act unconstitutional in 1883.
• The political cynicism that overtook the Civil Rights
Act signaled the Republican Party's reversion to the
practical politics of earlier days.
• Some Republicans had little enthusiasm for
Reconstruction, except as it benefited their party, and
as the party lost headway in the South, they abandoned
any interest in the battle for black rights. They
repudiated the wartime expansion of federal power and
refashioned themselves as liberals who believed in free
trade, market competition, and limited government.
• By 1877, however, three rights-defining
amendments had been added to the Constitution,
there was room for blacks to advance
economically, and they had confidence that they
could lift themselves up.
• Democrats controlled the House and set about
stalling a final count of the electoral votes, but on
March 1 they suddenly ended their delaying
tactics and Hayes was inaugurated. Reconstruction
had ended.
• Among the casualties of the poor economy was
the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company,
which held the small deposits of thousands of exslaves. When the bank failed in 1874, Congress
refused to compensate the depositors, and many
lost their life savings.
• In denying the blacks' plea for help with their
banking disaster, Congress signaled that
Reconstruction had lost its moral claim on the
country.
• The Constitution declares that Congress regulates
its own elections, so Congress appointed an
electoral commission; the commission awarded
the disputed votes to Hayes by a vote of 8 to 7.
The Political Crisis of 1877
• Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes as
their presidential candidate, and his Democratic
opponent was Samuel J. Tilden; both favored
"home rule" for the South.
• When Congress met in early 1877, it was faced
with both Republican and Democratic electoral
votes from Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana.
• Concerns about the economy and political fraud,
not Reconstruction, absorbed the northern voter as
another presidential election approached in 1876.
• Grant won a second term overwhelmingly against
Horace Greeley in the 1872 election.
• Charges of Republican corruption came to a head
in 1875 with a scandal known as the "Whiskey
Ring"; the scandal implicating Grant's cronies and
even his private secretary engulfed the White
House.
• The economy had fallen into a severe depression,
which was triggered in 1873 by the bankruptcy of
the Northern Pacific Railroad and its main
investor, Jay Cooke; many economically pressed
Americans believed that Republican financial manipulation had caused the depression.
The Political Crisis of 1877
• In early 1877 Congress was faced with
both Republican and Democratic electoral
votes from Florida, South Carolina, and
Louisiana.
• Democrats controlled the House and set
about stalling a final count of the electoral
votes, but on March 1 they suddenly ended
their delaying tactics, and Hayes was
inaugurated. Reconstruction had ended.