1.1 Presidential Reconstruction: The First Experiment, 1864–1866

The war had devastated southern society. The countryside, said one observer, “looked for many miles like a broad black streak of ruin and desolation.” Most major cities, including Richmond and Charleston, were gutted by fire  (see Figure 1.1).  A northern visitor called Charleston a place of “vacant houses, of widowed women, of rotting wharves, of deserted warehouses, of weed-wild gardens, of miles of grass-grown streets, of acres of pitiful and voiceless barrenness.”

More than just razing cities, the Civil War shattered an entire generation of young men in the South. In Alabama 29 percent of the 122,000 men who bore arms died. One-third of Florida’s 15,000 soldiers failed to return. Many who survived were maimed in battle. In 1866 the state of Mississippi spent a fifth of its revenues on artificial arms and legs for Confederate veterans.

The war ruined the South’s economic life. The region’s best agricultural lands lay barren. It would take more than a decade for the staples of the southern economy—cotton, tobacco, and sugar—to recover from the wartime devastation. Union forces destroyed or dismantled most factories and tore up long stretches of railroad. Most unsettling of all the changes the war had brought to the economy of southern whites was the end of slavery. Slave property, which was estimated at over $2 billion in 1860, disappeared.

In contrast, the North emerged from battle with new prosperity and power. The Republicans who dominated the wartime Congress enacted a uniform system of banking and a transcontinental railroad. They also fueled the North’s economy through generous appropriations for internal improvements. Railroads thrived by carrying troops and supplies; the meatpacking and textile industries soared in response to demands from troops for food and uniforms. The per capita wealth of the North doubled between 1860 and 1870. In 1870 the per capita wealth of New York State was more than twice that of all eleven ex-Confederate states combined.

The war also ravaged the political landscape in America. War-born hostility shaped the competition between the two parties long after the war had ended. Republicans depended on hatred of southern rebels to cement their biracial coalition. “The Democratic party,” proclaimed Indiana Governor Oliver P. Morton, “may be described as a common sewer and loathsome receptacle, into which is emptied every element of treason, North and South.” Democrats appealed to their natural constituency of former slave owners by charging that Republicans were the defenders of economic privilege and political centralization and a threat to individual liberty. Stressing the potent message of white supremacy also drove an ideological wedge between freed slaves and poor whites.

The war had a long-term impact on the sectional balance of power in the nation. Before 1861 the slave states had achieved an extraordinary degree of power in the national government. In 1861 the United States had lived under the Constitution for seventy-two years. During forty-nine of those years, the country’s president had been a southerner—and a slave holder. After the Civil War, a century passed before another resident of the Deep South was elected president. However, southern whites continued to exercise considerable influence in national politics. When the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives in 1874, northern and southern party members joined forces to frustrate Republican lawmakers, beginning a twenty-year partisan stalemate in Congress.

The war gave birth to the modern American nation dominated by a federal government far more powerful than anything the nation had known previously. The federal budget for 1865 exceeded $1 billion (twenty times the budget for 1860), necessitating a  new army of clerks, tax collectors, and other officials and making the federal government the nation’s largest employer. The increased size and scope of government found expression in language: northerners replaced references to the country as a “union” of separate states with a new emphasis on a singular, consolidated “nation.”

The presence of nearly 3.5 million former slaves represented the most dramatic legacy of the war. The black abolitionist Frederick Douglass observed that the former slave “was turned loose, naked, hungry, and destitute to the open sky.” The new challenges that freedom presented forced experimentation by black and white. What labor system would replace slavery? Was freedom enough, or would blacks achieve equality and obtain the right to vote?

Though not committed to any single plan for Reconstruction, Lincoln favored a lenient and conciliatory policy toward the South. Lincoln hoped that a charitable approach would produce defections from the southern cause and hasten the war’s end. Beyond outlawing slavery, he offered no protection for freed slaves. He also insisted that the ultimate authority for Reconstruction of the states rested with the president, not Congress. Since the Union was “constitutionally indestructible,” Lincoln argued that the southern states had never officially left the Union but had merely engaged in military rebellion. Therefore, Lincoln’s power as commander-in-chief gave him control over the defeated states in the South.

In December 1863 Lincoln issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction declaring that southern states could organize new governments after 10 percent of those who had voted in 1860 pledged their loyalty to the Union and accepted the Union’s wartime acts outlawing slavery. Each state would then convene a constitutional convention and elect new representatives to Congress. Lincoln offered a general amnesty to all Confederate citizens except high-ranking civil and military officials. His plan did not extend the right to vote to freed people. Carrying out his policy, the president recognized reconstituted civil governments in Louisiana and Arkansas in 1864 and in Tennessee in February 1865.

Many congressional Republicans argued that by declaring war on the Union, the Confederate states had broken their constitutional ties and were “conquered provinces” subject to the authority of Congress. The most strenuous criticism came from a group of Radical Republicans. Led by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, the Radicals, many of whom had been abolitionists, wanted the North to impose a more punitive peace settlement. They planned to reshape southern society by confiscating southern plantations and redistributing the land to freed slaves and white southerners who had remained loyal to the Union. The North must, Stevens contended, “revolutionize Southern institutions, habits, and manners . . . or all our blood and treasure have been spent in vain.”

In 1864 the Radicals challenged Lincoln by passing their own, more stringent peace plan. The Wade-Davis Bill, sponsored by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, required 50 percent of white male citizens to declare their allegiance before a state could be readmitted to the Union. Moreover, only those southerners who pledged—through the so-called ironclad oath—that they had never voluntarily borne arms against the Union could vote or serve in the state constitutional conventions. The bill also required the state conventions to abolish slavery.

Lincoln killed the bill with a pocket veto, meaning that he “pocketed” it and did not sign it within the required ten days after the adjournment of Congress. The authors of the bill denounced Lincoln’s action in the Wade-Davis Manifesto, asserting that “the authority of Congress is paramount and must be respected.” Flexing its muscle, Congress refused to seat the delegates from states that applied for readmission under Lincoln’s plan.

The vast majority of congressional Republicans fell somewhere between Lincoln and the Radicals. Like the president, these so-called moderates wanted a quick end to the war and a speedy restoration of the Union. They showed little interest in Radical plans for social and economic Reconstruction. Many wanted to keep former Confederate leaders from returning to power and hoped to provide a minimum of political rights for freed people. All Republicans shared a determination to solidify their party’s power in the North and extend their influence in the South. Hostility toward former rebels and political expediency, more than reformist zeal, shaped their approach to the South.

Behind the scenes, Lincoln was working to find common ground among his fellow Republicans. In March 1865 the president and Congress agreed on the creation of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen’s Bureau) to provide “such issues of provisions, clothing, and fuel” as might be needed to relieve “destitute and suffering refugees and freedmen and their wives and children.” Over the next few years, the bureau built schools, paid teachers, and established a network of courts that allowed freed people to file suit against white people.

Whether Lincoln and his party could have forged a unified approach to Reconstruction is one of the great unanswered questions of American history. On April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated while attending a play at the Ford Theater in Washington. The killer, John Wilkes Booth, a popular actor and Confederate sympathizer, dashed into the president’s box, pulled a small pistol from his pocket, placed it within six inches of Lincoln’s head, and pulled the trigger. Lincoln died the next day. Investigators quickly discovered that Booth had not acted alone. On the same night that Booth shot Lincoln, his accomplices planned attacks on Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. Johnson escaped unharmed, but Seward suffered severe stab wounds. A military tribunal convicted eight people of conspiracy to kill the president. Despite often flimsy evidence, four were hanged (see Figure 1.2).

The bullet that killed Lincoln also changed the direction of Reconstruction. Lincoln’s death removed a masterful politician, emboldened those seeking to impose a punitive peace on the South, and elevated to the presidency a man unprepared for the bitter political debates that followed.

A few hours after Lincoln’s death, Vice President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee was sworn in as president. Johnson rose from humble origins, and modeled himself after his hero, Andrew Jackson, who had fought for “common people” against powerful interests. As a southern Democrat who had remained loyal to the Union, Johnson tried to continue Lincoln’s lenient policy while also appeasing the Radicals. Like Lincoln, he was more interested in “restoring” the Union than in “reconstructing” southern society. Unlike Lincoln, however, Johnson was a vain man consumed by deep suspicions and insecurities. He was ill-suited for the delicate compromising and negotiating that would be necessary to maintain the Republican coalition. Moreover, Johnson was openly hostile to former slaves and deeply skeptical of Radical plans to provide freedmen with political rights. “This is a country for white men,” the president said in 1865, “and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” Initially, he kept Radicals off balance with his strong denunciations of Confederate leaders. “Treason is a crime and crime must be punished. Treason must be made infamous and traitors must be impoverished,” he declared. The president’s rhetoric resulted from his populist hostility toward powerful southern planters, but Radicals interpreted it as support for their agenda.

During the summer of 1865 Johnson executed his own plan of restoration. He appointed a provisional governor for each of the former Confederate states (except those states that had begun Reconstruction under Lincoln) and instructed the governors to convene constitutional conventions. The president insisted that the new constitutions revoke their ordinances of secession, repudiate the Confederate debt, and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which declared that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime . . . , shall exist within the United States.”

Johnson also took a lenient approach to former rebels. He offered “amnesty and pardon, with restoration of all rights of property” to almost all southerners who took an oath of allegiance to the Constitution and the Union (see Figure 1.3). By October 1865 ten of the eleven rebel states claimed to have passed Johnson’s test for readmission to the Union. The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December. Satisfied with the South’s progress, Johnson told Congress in December that the “restoration” of the Union was virtually complete.

Initially, most Republicans supported Johnson’s policy, but as evidence of southern defiance mounted, many turned against him. The reality was that southern leaders were not interested in compromise or conciliation; they were committed to restoring the old racial order. The delegates who met to form the new governments in the South showed contempt for northern Reconstruction plans, rejecting even Johnson’s benign policy. In fact, the “restoration” governments looked much like the old Confederate government. The provisional governor of Alabama declared that “the State affairs of Alabama must be guided and controlled by the superior intelligence of the white man.” Southern voters defiantly elected to Congress the former vice president of the Confederacy, Georgia’s Alexander Stephens, four Confederate generals, eight colonels, six cabinet members, and a host of other rebels.

All of the newly constituted state governments passed a series of stringent laws called “Black Codes.” The codes varied from state to state, but all were designed to restrict the economic opportunities of freedmen and prevent former slaves from leaving plantations. Local officials who caught freedmen off the plantation without a current labor contract (renewed yearly) arrested and charged them with vagrancy, a crime that carried a fine, imprisonment, or involuntary servitude. Some states tried to prevent African Americans from owning land. Other laws excluded African Americans from juries and prohibited interracial marriages. Edmund Rhett of South Carolina summed up the purpose of the Black Codes: “The general interest both of the white man and of the negroes requires that he should be kept as near to the condition of slavery as possible, and as far from the condition of the white man as is practicable.”

Southern resistance angered Radicals and many moderates in Congress. When the Thirty-ninth Congress convened in December 1865, moderates and Radicals refused to allow the newly elected representatives from former Confederate states to take their seats. Immediately after the House of Representatives turned the southerners away, Thaddeus Stevens called for the appointment of a special Joint Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction “to inquire into the conditions of the States which formed the so-called Confederate States of America.” Radicals quickly seized control of the committee, which consisted of nine House members and six senators.

After public hearings that revealed evidence of violence against freed slaves, the committee recommended congressional passage of new legislation to protect them. In January 1866 Congress voted to extend the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and enlarge its powers. In February Johnson issued a stinging veto message. The following month Congress passed a civil rights bill that extended the authority of federal courts to protect blacks. Again Johnson angrily vetoed the measure.

A mix of ideological and political considerations led Johnson to take such a confrontational stance. He sincerely believed both bills to be unconstitutional, and he also hoped that by forcing a confrontation he could isolate the Radicals from moderate Republicans. But the president seriously miscalculated the lines of division within the party. In the words of the New York Herald, the president’s actions were “a windfall, a godsend. He [Johnson] gave them Johnson to fight instead of fighting among themselves.” The Senate vote to override his veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau bill should have given him pause. Though the attempt fell two votes short, thirty of thirty-eight Republicans voted in favor. In April moderates joined with the Radicals to override the presidential veto and enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Despite all their differences, Radicals and moderates now shared a common disdain for the president and his Reconstruction policies, which rewarded rebels and made disaffection respectable in the South. “I have tried hard to save Johnson,” observed moderate William Fessenden, “but I am afraid he is beyond hope.”

A number of violent incidents in the South strengthened the Radicals’ resolve to protect the rights of the freed people. In May a mob composed of white policemen and firemen invaded a black neighborhood in South Memphis, Tennessee. Before the riot ended, forty-eight people, all but two black, were dead; five black women had been raped; and hundreds of homes, churches, and schools had been torched. Three months later, in New Orleans, opponents of Radical Reconstruction went on a violent rampage when the Reconstruction governor attempted to reconvene the 1864 constitutional convention to reduce the growing power of former Confederates and to enfranchise blacks. The mob killed thirty-four blacks and three white Radicals. “It was not a riot,” declared the military commander of the region. “It was an absolute massacre by the police.”

The violence undermined Johnson’s claim that southern blacks did not need federal protection. In July Radicals and moderates joined forces again to pass the Freedmen’s Bureau bill over a second veto. By overriding two presidential vetoes, Congress asserted its control over Reconstruction.