The Ordeal of Reconstruction

1. The Ordeal of Reconstruction

2. Introduction • Now that the battle was over, the North and South now face challenges of peace. How would the South be re-built? How will the liberated blacks fare as free men and women? Who is going to re-direct the Reconstruction process in the South, the President or Congress?

3. The Problems of Peace The question was what should be done with the captured Confederate ringleaders. All of the fellow leaders were released after imprisonment. All rebel leaders were finally pardoned by President Johnson in 1868. Congress did not remove all remaining disobediences, only until after a century later Davis’s citizenship was restored. Economic life had creaked to a halt. Banks and businesses had locked their doors, ruined by inflation. The transportation system had broken down completely. Agriculture the economic lifeblood of the South was crippled. The slave-labor system had collapsed. What did collapse was the spirited south. Conscious of no crime, former Confederates continued to believe that their view of secession was correct and that the lost cause was still a just war.

4. Freedmen Define Freedom • Tens of thousands of blacks took to the roads, some to test their freedom, others to search for long lost spouses, parents, and children. Others left for work in towns and cities. The church also became the focus of black community life in the years following emancipation. Many of them formed their own churches and were pastored by their own ministers. • Emancipation also meant education for many blacks. Learning to read and write had been a privilege, and up until now it was denied. Freedmen wasted no time establishing societies for self-improvement by building school houses, and hire teachers.

5. The Freedmen’s Bureau Emancipators were faced with the reality that the freedmen were overwhelming unskilled, unlettered, without property or money, and with scant knowledge of how to survive as free people. Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau which was intended to be a primitive welfare agency. It was to provide food, clothing, medical care, and education both to freedmen and to white refugees. The Bureau’s accomplishments were meager, and little land was actually put into African American hands. President Andrew Johnson who shared the white supremacist views of most white southerners, repeatedly tried to kill it, and it expired in 1872.

6. Johnson the Tailor President • Andrew Johnson came from humble beginnings. He never attended school but he was an apprentice to a tailor at age ten. He taught himself to read, and later his wife taught him to write and do simple math. Like many another self-made man, he was inclined to overpraise his maker.   • He was elected to Congress, and attracted much attention in the North, when he refused to secede with his own state. He was intelligent, able, forceful, and gifted with homespun honesty. He was a champion of state rights and the Constitution. He would often present a copy of the document to visitors, and he was buried with one as a pillow. • Yet, he was a southerner who did not understand the North, a Tennessean who had earned the distrust of the South, a Democrat who had never been accepted by the Republicans, a president who had never been elected to the office. He was hotheaded, contentious, and stubborn. Johnson was the wrong man and the wrong time.

7. Presidential Reconstruction Lincoln in 1863 created a plan which was called a 10 percent Reconstruction Plan. It said that a state could be put back into the Union when 10 percent of its voters in the presidential election of 1860 had taken an oath of allegiance to the United States and pledged to abide by the emancipation. Republicans did not like this bill, therefore Republicans therefore rammed Congress with a Wade-Davis Bill. The bill require that 50 percent of a state’s voters take the oath of allegiance and demanded stronger safeguards for emancipation than Lincoln’s as the price of readmission to the Union. Lincoln refused to sign this bill.

8. Presidential Reconstruction When Johnson came in, he agreed with Lincoln that the seceded states had never legally been outside the Union. He then issued his own reconstruction plan. His plan: It called for special state conventions which were required to repeal the ordinances of secession, repudiate all Confederate debts, and ratify the slave freeing 13th amendment. Those states that met with these conditions were swiftly admitted to the Union. But as the pattern of the new governments became clear, Republicans of all stripes grew furious.

9. The Baleful Black Codes Among the first acts that were sponsored by Johnson was the Black Codes. These laws were designed to regulate the affairs of emancipated slaves. Dire penalties were imposed because most blacks were jumping their labor contracts, which usually committed them to work for the same employer for one year. Violators could be made to forfeit back wages or could be easily dragged back to work by a paid Negro-Catcher. The black codes were free, but they prohibited such things as the right to marry, to serve on a jury, and some even barred from renting or leasing land. A black could be punished for idleness by being sentenced to work on a chain gain. Nowhere were blacks allowed to vote. The black codes contained terrible outcomes, because after all most of them were struggling to make their way as free people. The black codes made an ugly impression in the North. If the former slaves were being re-enslaved, people asked one another did they really win the war.

10. Johnson Clashes with Congress • The clash with the President and Congress exploded in 1866. The president vetoed the Freedmen Bill, and the Congress struck back by passing the Civil Right Bill which gave Blacks American citizenship and struck at the Black Code. President Johnson vetoed it and Congress steamrolled over his veto. The president was named Sir Veto. • The Republicans now undertook the civil rights bill: the 14th amendment. The amendment was sent to the states in June 1866 and ratified in 1868. • 1- It conferred civil rights, including citizenship by excluding the franchise, on the freedmen. 2- Reduced the representation of a state in Congress and in the Electoral College if it denied blacks the ballot. 3- It also disqualified from federal and state office former Confederates who as federal officeholders had once sworn to support the Constitution of the United States. 4- Guaranteed the federal debt, while repudiating all Confederate debts. • All Republicans agreed that no state should be welcomed without ratifying the 14th amendment. President Johnson advised the Southern states to reject it.

11. Reconstruction by the Sword Congress passed the Reconstruction Act which divided the south into five military districts, each commanded by a Union general and policed by soldiers, about 20 thousand all told. Congress also laid down harsh conditions for readmission of the seceded states. They were to ratify the 14th amendment, and guarantee in their state constitutions giving every adult male the right to vote. The radical Republicans were still worried, the only thing left was to incorporate black suffrage in the federal constitution. This goal was finally achieved by the 15th amendment, which was passed by Congress in 1869 and ratified by the states in 1870.

12. The Realities of Radical Reconstruction • Former slaves holding office deeply offended their onetime masters, who would lash out at white allies, labeling them scalawags and carpetbaggers. • Scalawags- were former Unionists and Whigs. The former Confederates accused them often with wild exaggeration, of plundering the treasuries of the Southern states through their political influence in the radical governments. • Carpetbaggers- they were sleazy Northerners who had packed all their worldly goods into a carpetbag suitcase at war’s end and had come south to seek personal power and profit.

13. The Ku Klux Klan • Many whites resented the success and ability of black legislators as much as they resented alleged corruption. The most secret organization was the KKK, which was founded in Tennessee in 1866. They were be-sheeted nightriders who were on their horses. Terror proved to be effective, many ex-bondsmen and carpetbaggers were quick to take the hint and never went to the polls. In one town in Louisiana in 1868 they would flog, mutilate, or even murder over 200 victims. The Klan became a refuge for numerous bandits and cutthroats. • Intimidation was achieved in 1890 through fraud, and trickery. Among various schemes were literacy tests, unfairly admitted by whites to the advantage of illiterate whites. In the eyes of white Southerners, the goal of white supremacy fully justified these dishonorable devices.

14. Johnson Walks the Impeachment Plank Radical meanwhile were sharpening their hatchets for President Johnson. Johnson provided the radicals with a pretext to begin impeachment process by dismissing Stanton early in 1868. The Tenure Office Act states that before he fires anyone, he has to be approved by Congress. The House of Representatives voted 126 to 47 to impeach Johnson for high crimes and misdemeanors as required by the Constitution. Charges: they charged him with various violations of the Tenure Office Act and verbally assaulting Congress calling them disgraceful, ridiculous, hateful and full of contempt and reproach.

15. A Not-Guilty Verdict for Johnson • On May 16, 1868, the day for the first voting in the Senate, the tension was electric, and heavy breathing could be heard in the galleries. By a margin of only one vote, the radicals failed to muster the 2/3’s majority for Johnson’s removal. Seven minded Republican senators, putting country above party, voted not guilty.

16. Reasons’ why he was not removed • Abuse of the Checks and Balances • The Vice Presidency remained unfilled and they didn’t want Senator Benjamin Wade to fill the position. • Also Johnson said that he would stop obstructing Republican policies in return for remaining in office.

17. The Heritage of Reconstruction Many white Southerners regarded reconstruction as more grievous wound than the war itself. The fact is that Lincoln, Johnson, and most Republicans had no clear picture at war’s end of what federal policy toward the South should be. Policymakers groped for the right policies, influenced as much by Southerners responses to defeat and emancipation as by any plans of their own to impose a specific program on the South. In the end they both wanted to protect the freed slaves and to promote the fortunes of the Republican Party. In the end their efforts backfired. Reconstruction helped with only minor benefits on blacks and virtually extinguished the Republican Party in the South for nearly 100 years.