II.

Debate over Reconstruction

Reconstruction emerged as an inevitable issue early in the war, and attracted increased attention as Northern victory neared. As Union forces gained control of large areas of the South, both Union commanders and the federal government were forced to make decisions about how those areas should be administered. These decisions were made first for the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, for southern Louisiana, for northern Virginia, and then for much of the South. Federal officials supervised experiments in which Northern missionaries arrived to set up schools for blacks, former slaves were employed as contract labor, and whites loyal to the Union organized new state governments under federal control. By January 1, 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that freed all slaves in rebel-held areas, the North's war aims had shifted from preserving the Union to remaking the South.

Central to this shift was the conviction of increasing numbers of Northerners that the South should be remade into a society based on free labor, equal rights, and the republican form of government guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. This view was especially widespread within the Republican Party, which dominated national politics, in part because the Southern states, where the Democratic Party was dominant, had withdrawn their representatives from the Congress of the United States after secession. Those Republicans who took the lead in pressing for a far-reaching restructuring of the South came to be known as Radicals. Among the most prominent Radical Republican leaders were Senators Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, and Representatives Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and George W. Julian of Indiana.

During the second half of the war, several plans were proposed for the political organization of states captured from Confederate control. A proposal that enjoyed considerable support among Radicals was the Wade-Davis bill, which was proposed by Senator Wade and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland. It would have required one-half of a state's white male citizens to swear loyalty to the Constitution before a new state government could be formed; an alternative was President Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan, which allowed a government to be based on the loyalty of one-tenth of the white males. Although Lincoln vetoed the Wade-Davis bill in 1864, he regarded his Ten Percent Plan as experimental, and as a Republican who opposed slavery, he shared with Radicals the goal of establishing free labor in the South.

Early in 1865, before the war's end, three developments hinted at the depth of this emerging Northern commitment. In January Congress passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in December of the same year. The 13th Amendment expanded the scope of the Emancipation Proclamation by abolishing slavery throughout the United States. Also in January, General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, setting aside abandoned lands on the sea islands and coastal region of South Carolina and Georgia for exclusive use of the region's freed population. And in March, in order to help former slaves throughout the South in their transition to freedom, Congress established a new federal agency, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau. Designed as a relief agency for needy refugees, it provided food, clothing, and fuel for both blacks and whites. Its primary services, however, were for blacks; it established schools, supervised labor relations, and worked to protect blacks from intimidation and violence.

A.

Presidential Reconstruction

Despite these measures, the precise nature of the Reconstruction settlement remained undetermined when the war ended. Complicating the situation was the assassination of Lincoln, whose death on April 15, 1865, moved Vice President Andrew Johnson into the presidency. A Tennessee Democrat, Johnson soon made it clear that he did not share the Republican commitment to remaking the South. Blaming a small number of wealthy aristocrats for the Confederate rebellion, Johnson pursued a policy of leniency toward former rebels and one of neglect toward former slaves. He offered amnesty to all who would take the oath of allegiance, except for those with a post-war wealth valued at more than $20,000, who had to apply to him personally for pardon, which he almost always gave. In conjunction with these pardons, he abruptly reversed General Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15 and ordered that abandoned plantations be returned to their former owners. Meanwhile, he sought to restore political rights to the Southern states as quickly as possible. For each state he appointed a provisional governor who was required to call a constitutional convention that would draft a new constitution outlawing slavery and disavowing secession. No further changes would be required.

Cheered by the unexpected presence of an ally in the White House, Southern whites quickly reorganized their governments according to Johnson's plan. The new state governments also passed a series of acts known as black codes, which sharply restricted the rights of the newly freed slaves. The codes varied somewhat from state to state, but they typically included vagrancy laws, under which blacks who were viewed as unemployed could be hired out as forced labor; apprenticing laws, under which children without proper care, as defined by the courts, could be bound out to white employers; and severe limitations on black occupations and property holding. Because they seemed to represent an effort to provide blacks with a status in-between that of slave and free, the codes aroused dismay in a Northern public already unhappy with what increasingly appeared to be the president's sell-out of Union victory.

B.

Congressional Reconstruction

When Congress convened from a long recess in December 1865, President Johnson regarded his restoration policy as complete. Republican leaders in Congress wasted little time in revealing their disagreement. Determined that Union victory must stand for more than simply restoration of the status quo, the Republican majority in Congress refused to seat the representatives sent by the Southern states or to accept the legitimacy of the Southern state governments formed under Johnson's requirements.

Instead, Congress began a lengthy debate over Reconstruction policy. The program eventually enacted resulted from a series of compromises among Republican factions; the Radicals were never powerful enough to gain everything they sought. Still, fueled by anger at the president's refusal to compromise and at the appearance of former Confederates returning to power throughout the South, members of Congress moved increasingly toward the Radicals. The key Reconstruction measures enacted aimed to produce far more sweeping changes in the former Confederacy than had appeared likely at the war's end.

Instrumental in convincing Republicans that it was futile to seek a compromise with the president were his vetoes in early 1866 of two measures that won overwhelming Republican support and were eventually enacted over his vetoes. The first of these was the Freedmen's Bureau Bill, which continued the agency's operations for another year. The second was the Civil Rights Bill, which extended citizenship to blacks by defining all persons born in the United States as citizens. In denouncing these measures as illegal interference within the states by the federal government, Johnson clung to basic Democratic beliefs rooted in a pre-Civil War vision of states' rights, weak central government, and white supremacy.

The heart of the Reconstruction plan was laid out in two measures: the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and the Reconstruction Act. The 14th Amendment was passed in June 1866 and ratified in 1868. It was designed to protect the rights of Southern blacks and restrict the political power of former Confederates. It added into the Constitution the definition of U.S. citizenship that was enacted in the Civil Rights Bill; barred states from abridging “the privileges or immunities of citizens” or depriving “any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law”; encouraged Southern states to allow blacks to vote, without actually requiring it, by reducing the congressional representation of states that disfranchised male citizens; barred former officials who had rebelled against the Union from holding public office; and repudiated both Confederate war debts and claims of former slaveholders to compensation for the loss of their slaves.

The Reconstruction Act was passed in March 1867 over President Johnson's veto and was strengthened by three supplemental acts passed later the same year and in 1868. It provided for the organization of loyal governments in all former Confederate states except Tennessee, which, having ratified the 14th Amendment, was regarded as already reconstructed. The ten remaining states were divided into five military districts, each headed by a military commander. The military commander was responsible for seeing that each state under his command wrote a new constitution that provided for voting rights for all adult males, regardless of race. Only when the state had ratified its new constitution and the 14th Amendment would the process of political reorganization be complete.

Congressional Reconstruction activity continued after 1867. Among the most important acts were the impeachment proceedings against President Johnson, who in 1868 was spared conviction and removal from office by one vote in the Senate. Republicans in Congress disapproved of Johnson's dismissal of radical politicians and generals active in Reconstruction, and felt that he was obstructing implementation of the government's Reconstruction policy. In 1869 Congress passed the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1870. It broadened the 14th Amendment's protection of black suffrage by providing that no citizen could be denied the right to vote on the basis of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.” Another important act was the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which barred discrimination by hotels, theaters, and railroads. In 1883, however, it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States. Despite this continuing legislative activity, the basic course of Reconstruction was set with the passage of the Reconstruction Act in March 1867. Although this course constituted a major new departure for both the South and the country as a whole, it represented a compromise carefully pieced together by competing factions in Congress rather than a total Radical victory. Radical Republicans lacked the political power to secure two of their most cherished goals: redistribution of plantation lands to former slaves and poor whites, and a prolonged federal supervision of the former Confederate states. According to the Reconstruction compromise, those states would be required to provide equal civil and political rights to blacks, but once they complied with those requirements, the states would be free to govern themselves.