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CHAPTER 16
THE AGONY OF RECONSTRUCTION
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IMPEACHMENT
Students generally believe that the President is a far more powerful political force than the Congress.
There has even been talk of an “imperial presidency” developing in the United States. Students should
therefore be reminded that in any serious confrontation between Congress and the Executive, Congress
will win, as Richard Nixon can testify. The man who most bitterly learned that the Constitution gives
Congress ultimate authority in our system of government was Andrew Johnson, the first President to have
been impeached by the House of Representatives.
Johnson was not a weak president. He vigorously exercised the ample powers given the President
by the Constitution. Johnson, like Lincoln, used the power to pardon in order to reconstruct the South.
This power, granted to the president in Article II, section 2 of the Constitution, is virtually unlimited.
Johnson required Southerners to sign statements admitting their guilt in rebelling against the United
States and requesting forgiveness. Johnson then granted their requests. Having been pardoned, the former
rebels were legally innocent and should have been able to participate in all civic affairs, such as holding
public office. There was a kind of ironic common sense in Johnson’s position. Because secession was an
illegal act, no southern state had ever left the Union; the southern states, therefore, did not have to be
reconstructed. In other words, there had never been a secession; there had been a rebellion, an act by
individuals.
Congress did not believe that the problem of southern reconstruction could be accomplished by
having Confederate leaders admit or pretend to admit that they had committed a crime. Unless the social
and political system of the South was fundamentally altered, Congress believed, the old planter elite
would again come to power, and all the sacrifice of the Union army would have been in vain. Congress,
therefore, refused to seat men elected to the House and Senate from states that Johnson considered to be
reconstructed. Congress defended this exclusion on two interrelated grounds. First, Article I, section 5 of
the Constitution gives Congress the right to determine the legitimacy of the election of its members.
Congress ruled that all congressional elections in the South were invalid because, among other things, so
many adult males (African Americans) had been unable to vote. Second, Article IV, section 4 gives the
federal government the responsibility of ensuring that each state has a “republican” form of government.
When the Constitution was written, the word “republican” clearly meant a government in which there was
neither king nor hereditary aristocracy. By the early nineteenth century, the fear that any state might cease
to be “republican” had disappeared, and Article IV, section 4 seemed like a dead letter, but in the
sectional crisis of the 1850s, the Republican party began to argue that the southern states were not really
republican because slavery gave all power to a small minority. “The people” had no political voice. In
order to reconstruct the South so that it would be truly “republican,” Congress determined that totally new
conditions would have to be created. This in turn meant, not only the abolition of slavery, but also the
right of African Americans to vote.
Congress had the upper hand in its struggle with Johnson. He could pardon individuals, but no
Southerner would sit in Congress until Reconstruction was done the way Congress wanted. The president
tried to use his powers as chief executive to sabotage Radical Reconstruction, by vetoing bills and by
firing federal officials who did their jobs too well, but Congress proved again that it had superior powers.
The Republicans, after 1867, had sufficient strength in Congress to override the president’s vetoes, and
Congress rattled its ultimate weapon when it impeached Johnson. Altogether, Congress got its own way
during Reconstruction.
If fears linger that an “imperial” presidency is growing, it is well to be reminded that as long as
Americans allow the Constitution to determine the ground rules of political life most power lies in the
legislative branch of government, the one closest to the people.
RELIVING THE PAST
Reconstruction was lived most intensely by southern whites and blacks. African Americans learned of
their freedom in many different ways. One African American woman remembered encountering Union
troops when she was a little girl and being told, “Nigger! You is as free as us.” Another remembered that
the plantation mistress assembled all the slaves before the great house, where she informed them that they
were free, and then ordered them off her property. After emancipation, African Americans struggled
through the Reconstruction period, not without some victories. One former slave, Henry Banner of Little
Rock, Arkansas, summed it up this way: “In slavery I owns nothing and never owns nothing. In freedom
I’s own my home and raise the family. All that cause me worriment, and in slavery I has no worriment,
but I takes the freedom.” The best single collection of former slave narratives is that edited by George P.
Rawick, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1972),
19 volumes. A good sample of the narratives collected by the Federal Writers’‘ Project in the 1930s is B.
A. Botkin, editor, Lay My Burden Down (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945).
It should be remembered that Reconstruction failed to break the spirit of white Southerners, who
began to shape a society much like the one that existed before the war. There is an excellent collection of
letters sent to one another by members of a large and well-off Georgian family in The Children of Pride,
edited by Robert Manson Myers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972). Among the more
notable examples of the South’s defiant, “unreconstructed” attitude are the letters sent by Caroline Jones
to her mother, thanking God for the assassination of Lincoln, and the letter dated December 9, 1865, from
Mary Jones to her daughter, telling her about the troubles she was having with the Freedmen’s Bureau.
ROBERT SMALLS AND BLACK POLITICIANS DURING RECONSTRUCTION
The author demonstrates the frustrating failure of Reconstruction through the biography of Robert Smalls,
who escaped slavery in South Carolina, joined the Union military effort, and enjoyed a successful career
in business and politics after the war, until the return of white supremacy.
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THE PRESIDENT VERSUS CONGRESS
The North split on the question of reconstructing the South. Some Northerners, led by the White House,
wanted speedy Reconstruction with a minimum of changes in the South. Other Northerners, led by
Congress, wanted a slower Reconstruction and demanded that the freed African Americans be protected.
A. Wartime Reconstruction
Even Lincoln clashed with Congress over Reconstruction. Lincoln hoped to win Southerners from the
Confederate cause by announcing a lenient policy in 1863. Congress, however, resented Lincoln’s
assumption that he alone could determine policy, and some Congressmen wanted to make black suffrage
a precondition for taking the South back into the Union. Most of all, Congress did not trust white
Southerners. Lincoln and Congress could not agree on the issue and it was left to Lincoln’s successor to
work out a Reconstruction policy.
B. Andrew Johnson at the Helm
Johnson, a Southern Democrat, had remained loyal to the Union and was rewarded with the vicepresidency in 1864. At first, Radical Republicans felt enthusiastic about Johnson, because he had a long
record of hostility toward the great planter class. Gradually, however, Johnson split with the Republican
party. Johnson began the process of Reconstruction by instructing the Southern states to hold conventions
that would declare secession illegal, repudiate the Confederate debt, and ratify the Thirteenth
Amendment. The conventions did as ordered, but did so reluctantly, and none of them gave African
Americans the right to vote. In fact, the southern states passed “Black Codes” that put African Americans
into a kind of semislavery. Johnson approved of the actions of these conventions; Congress did not.
C. Congress Takes the Initiative
Congress insisted that African Americans be given the vote. In part, this insistence reflected political
partisanship, since the Republican party expected to get the black vote. For the most part, however, the
desire to give the franchise to African Americans grew from an ideological commitment to equal rights
and a fear that without black suffrage the South would again fall under the control of the great planters.
In 1866, when Johnson vetoed two bills designed to help the freedmen, Republicans felt betrayed.
In order to protect the rights of African Americans from a president they no longer trusted, the
Republicans pushed the Fourteenth Amendment through Congress. In the elections of 1866, Johnson
organized the National Union party, which ran against Republican congressmen. The results of the
election, however, strengthened the Radical Republicans in Congress.
D. Congressional Reconstruction Plan Enacted
Congress began enacting measures that are collectively called “Radical Reconstruction.” The South was
placed under military rule until black suffrage was fully secured. The more radical Republicans realized
that the African Americans needed a long period of federal protection, but the Republican party in general
felt uneasy about the military occupation and wanted it to be short.
E. The Impeachment Crisis
When Johnson sabotaged Radical Reconstruction in the way he administered it, Congress moved to
remove him from office. The House impeached him in February 1868, but the Senate refused to convict.
Popular opinion had begun to turn against the Radical Republicans, who seemed willing to subvert the
Constitution to accomplish what they wanted.
RECONSTRUCTING SOUTHERN SOCIETY
The South was an arena with three contending parties: Southern whites who wanted to keep the newly
freed blacks in an inferior position, Northern whites who moved to the South to make money
(“Carpetbaggers”) or to “civilize” the region, and blacks who wanted equality. Eventually, the forces of
reaction and racism won because the federal government did not sustain its interest in Reconstruction.
A. Reorganizing Land and Labor
Faced with a massive need to rebuild, the South had to find a new labor system. The ex-slaves preferred
to work their own land and were sometimes given land by the federal government. Under Johnson, most
of this land reverted to white ownership. The former slave-owners tried to impose a contract labor system
resembling slavery, but blacks insisted instead on sharecropping, which seemed like a first step toward
economic independence. Sharecropping soon proved to be a form of peonage.
B. Black Codes: A New Name for Slavery?
The South became an increasingly segregated society after the Civil War. As whites returned to political
power, they enacted “Black Codes,” harsh laws that reduced blacks to a condition little short of slavery.
The federal government often intervened to annul the Black Codes, but a reign of terror and unpunished
physical violence robbed blacks of the gains they had achieved in the years just after the war.
C. Republican Rule in the South
The Republican party was not organized in the South until 1867, and it never acquired much strength. At
first it attracted three groups, all with different aims: businesspeople, who wanted government aid, small
white farmers, who wanted protection from creditors, and blacks, who formed the majority of the party
and who wanted social and political equality. The Republican coalition was inherently unstable and broke
up when the whites left it.
D. Claiming Public and Private Rights
The Republican party in the South improved conditions in areas such as public education, welfare, and
transportation, but because too many Republican state legislatures were corrupt, although no worse than
those in the North, the entire Reconstruction effort was tarnished. Ironically, white Southerners mainly
blamed African Americans for crooked, inefficient government, even though blacks never controlled most
Southern legislatures during Reconstruction.
RETREAT FROM RECONSTRUCTION
Grant faced problems that might have defeated a better president, but he contributed to his own failure.
He was not a man with strong principles.
A. Rise of the Money Question
Grant won the election of 1868 because he was a war hero. There were no clear-cut issues in the
campaign, but after the Panic of 1873, the money question became paramount. Debtors, especially in the
Midwest, and business people everywhere, wanted the government to follow an inflationary policy by
allowing “greenbacks” issued during the Civil War to remain in circulation. Bankers, merchants, and
intellectuals supported a return to hard money. In 1874, Congress adopted a pro-greenback position, but
Grant opposed it. In 1875 the government committed itself to hard money, thereby arousing the anger of
those suffering most from the depression. A Greenback party was formed, and it did well in congressional
races.
B. Final Efforts of Reconstruction
In 1869, Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment to give equal rights to vote to black males. The
exclusion of women in the amendment created a split in the feminist movement, but seemed to assure
Republican political ascendency in the South for decades to come.
C. A Reign of Terror Against Blacks
Various loosely organized vigilante groups in the South, most notably the Ku Klux Klan, unleashed a
reign of terror against blacks and whites who joined the Republican party. At first, Grant and the northern
Republicans took a hard line against the Klan, but when the Democratic party began to make political
gains by criticizing the continued repression of Southern whites, the Republican Party became less
inclined to support blacks if it meant losing white votes. Without the federal government to protect them,
blacks were systematically excluded from political life, and by 1876 Republicans controlled only South
Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. Forceful measures would have quashed terrorism in the South
eventually, but the northern public grew tired of the effort.
D. Spoilsmen Versus Reformers
During Grant’s first term, stories of government corruption disturbed many Americans and discredited the
Republican party. In the election of 1872, a new party, the Liberal Republicans, was organized and
nominated Horace Greeley for president. The Democrats also nominated Greeley, but Grant won reelection easily. It was during his second term that the full story of government corruption unfolded.
REUNION AND THE NEW SOUTH
North and South reconciled after 1877, but only when it was agreed to strip African Americans of their
political gains and to favor the interests of big business over those of the small farmer.
A. The Compromise of 1877
Nobody knew who won the election of 1876. Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden got most of the
popular votes, but there was so much dispute about the electoral vote that Republican Rutherford B.
Hayes had a chance. Congress appointed a special commission to determine who should get the disputed
electoral votes. When it became clear that the commission would give the votes to Hayes, the southern
Democrats in Congress promised not to cause trouble if the Republicans would guarantee federal aid to
the South as well as removal of all remaining federal troops. When Hayes agreed, Reconstruction came to
an end.
B. “Redeeming” a New South
The men who replaced the Republicans in running the South, the “Redeemers,” were more interested in
commerce or manufacturing than in agriculture. They used the doctrine of white supremacy to gain and
hold power, but their chief interest was in making the South a modern, industrial society.
The Redeemer regimes, often corrupt, welcomed northern investment, and northern control of the
southern economy. These governments neglected the problems of small farmers, black or white, who
suffered from unpayable debts. Eventually, the small farmer organized his own political party in the
1890s.
C. The Rise of Jim Crow
The Redeemers also began the process of legal segregation and invented ways of denying blacks the right
to vote. Blacks trying to vote Republican were whipped or even lynched, but even blacks who wanted to
vote for Democrats were turned away by cynical rules enacted for the sole purpose of keeping elections
wholly white. Politically powerless, blacks were subjected to degrading segregation laws whenever they
used public facilities.
CONCLUSION: HENRY McNEAL TURNER AND THE “UNFINISHED
REVOLUTION”
The author ends the chapter with a capsule biography of a free black who, like Robert Smalls, enjoyed a
distinguished political career after the war, but who was eventually forced out of government by the
return of white supremacy. At one time convinced that blacks and whites would live together in equality,
Henry Turner, a Methodist bishop, ended by preaching that the only hope for American blacks was to
emigrate to Africa.