1.2 Congressional Reconstruction: The Radical Experiment, 1866–1870

In June 1866 the coalition of moderates and Radicals passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment was the first national effort to define American citizenship. It declared that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” were “citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” and were guaranteed “equal protection” and “due process” under the law. The amendment reflected the growing consensus among Republicans that national legislation was necessary to force the South to deal fairly with blacks. By asserting that the national government played a role in guaranteeing individual rights, Republicans instituted a significant shift in the relationship between the federal government and the people. The amendment also established an important foundation for future challenges to the states’ rights doctrine.

The amendment was a compromise measure designed to enhance the Republican Party’s power. At the insistence of many moderates, it stopped short of enfranchising black men. But Radicals added a provision requiring a reduction in the representation in Congress of any state that denied adult males the vote. Either way the Republicans won control of Southern political affairs. Southern states would either extend the franchise to black voters, thus increasing the number of likely Republicans, or they would lose seats in Congress. The amendment also included a Radical demand that former Confederate leaders be prevented from holding federal or state offices; but moderates added a clause giving Congress the authority to override the disqualification in individual cases.

To take effect, the amendment had to be ratified by three-quarters of the states, and it became the central campaign issue during the fall 1866 congressional elections. Johnson denounced the amendment and urged southern states not to ratify it. Interpreting the elections as a referendum on the Fourteenth Amendment and his Reconstruction policy, the president planned an unprecedented campaign tour—called “a swing around the circle”—that took him from Washington to Chicago and St. Louis and back. He hoped the trip would exploit public sentiment against extending political rights to blacks and focus anger on Republican leaders. Instead, it further eroded support for presidential Reconstruction within his own party. Johnson alienated many moderate Republicans with his description of Radicals as “factious, domineering, tyrannical” men. “Why not hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips?” he shouted to an audience in Cleveland. 

On election night the voters appeared to repudiate the president. The Republicans won a three-to-one majority in both houses of Congress and gained control of the governorship and legislature in every northern state as well as in West Virginia, Missouri, and Tennessee. “This is the most decisive and emphatic victory ever seen in American politics,” exclaimed the Radical journal, The Nation.

The moderate Republicans interpreted the election results as a clear call for Radical Reconstruction. Congress moved rapidly and, on March 2, 1867, adopted the First Reconstruction Act; supplementary acts followed in 1867 and 1868. These acts reversed presidential restoration and established new requirements for southern states to gain entry into the Union.

The First Reconstruction Act declared that “no legal government” existed in the South. It divided the South (with the exception of Tennessee, which had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment) into five military districts, each under the command of a Union general (see Figure 1.4). To be considered reconstructed, the law required southern states to call new constitutional conventions with all male citizens eligible to vote. The convention delegates then had to draft and approve state constitutions that guaranteed black suffrage. Finally, after the newly elected legislatures ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, the states would be accepted into the Union. During 1868 six states—North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas—met the requirements and were readmitted.

The new plan was far tougher than Johnson’s policy, but many Radicals wanted to go further. They pressed for federal support for black schools and the disfranchisement of ex-Confederate leaders. A few Radicals called for the distribution of land to former slaves. Thaddeus Stevens advocated confiscating millions of acres of land from the “chief rebels” in the South and giving 40 acres to every adult male freedman. “How can republican institutions, free schools, free churches, free social intercourse exist,” he asked, in a “community” of wealthy planters and “serfs”?

Stevens was right in recognizing that without large-scale redistribution of land, blacks had little hope of achieving economic independence. But the Republicans failed to develop a systematic land distribution program. As Union armies occupied parts of the South during the war, Union commanders had developed a variety of plans for dealing with confiscated lands. General William T. Sherman set aside the Sea Islands off Georgia’s coast and land in South Carolina for African American refugees who burdened his army. There each family received 40 acres of land and the loan of army mules. By the summer of 1865 some forty thousand freed people had settled on “Sherman’s land.” In October, however, Johnson ordered Sea Island blacks to work out arrangements with the legal owners of the land. Angry blacks protested: “Why do you take away our lands? You take them from Us who have always been true, always true to the Government! You give them to our all-time enemies! That is not right!” When some of the Sea Islanders refused to deal with the white owners, Union soldiers forced them to leave or work for their old masters.

In 1866 Republicans tried to address the land problem by passing the Southern Homestead Act, which set aside 44 million acres of federal land for freedmen and loyal whites. But most freed people and many whites lacked the resources to buy the land or purchase the tools needed to work it. Despite their support for federally imposed Reconstruction, most Republicans clung to nineteenth-century notions of individualism and limited government. The federal government could guarantee equality of opportunity, but it could not confiscate private property to redress past wrongs. Doing so, most believed, would require an extraordinary expansion of federal power and result in a clear violation of individual liberty. “A division of rich men’s lands amongst the landless,” argued The Nation, “would give a shock to our whole social and political system from which it would hardly recover without the loss of liberty.”

Radicals may have been uncomfortable with land reform, but suffrage was at the heart of the Radical plan for Reconstruction. Most Radicals believed that once blacks had political rights, social and economic benefits would follow. To safeguard black votes, Republicans framed the Fifteenth Amendment. Section 1 forbade states to deny their citizens the right to vote on the grounds of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Section 2 gave Congress power to enforce the amendment by appropriate legislation.

The Republican authors carefully designed the Fifteenth Amendment to further their political ambitions. Like the Fourteenth Amendment, it was the result of compromises between moderates and Radicals. The amendment extended the vote to blacks, but it did not guarantee universal manhood suffrage, from which Republicans had little to gain. Republicans wanted to prevent former Confederates—most of whom were Democrats—from voting. Nor did the amendment, as Radicals proposed, prohibit the use of poll taxes and other methods to restrict black voting. Mainstream Republicans wanted to preserve voting restrictions against immigrants in the North, whom they considered unworthy of suffrage. Massachusetts and Connecticut used literacy tests to deny the vote to recent European immigrants. California used them to prevent Chinese immigrants from voting.

Ratification of the amendment in March 1870 produced widespread Republican jubilation. Frederick Douglass announced that blacks now would “breathe a new atmosphere, have a new earth beneath, and a new sky above.” White and black men marched in a large parade through Washington, D.C., waving banners that read “The Nation’s second birth” and “the fifteenth amendment, Uncle Sam’s bleaching powder.”

The debates over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments represented a turning point in the struggle for women’s suffrage. Nineteenth-century feminists had been closely tied to the antislavery cause, and many male abolitionists had been active in the movement for women’s rights. During the war, feminists had put aside the suffrage issue to support the Union cause in abolishing slavery. Once the war ended, feminist leaders hoped to refocus public attention on the question of women’s suffrage.

Potential allies, however, saw little political reward in extending the franchise to women. Most Republicans believed that black male votes were the key to gaining control of the southern states. Former abolitionists who had supported women’s suffrage in the past worried that pushing the issue now would distract attention from the most important question: political and economic rights for former slaves. As former abolitionist Wendell Phillips admonished women leaders, “One question at a time. This hour belongs to the Negro.”

Instead of supporting their former suffragist allies, Republicans sanctioned the denial of women’s suffrage. The Fourteenth Amendment, in fact, wrote the term male into the Constitution for the first time. Disappointed feminists accepted defeat at the federal level and focused on the reform of state constitutions. In 1866 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone created the Equal Rights Association to lobby and petition for the removal of racial and sexual restrictions at the state level, but their efforts were unsuccessful. As Republican men withdrew funding and support, many feminist leaders felt betrayed, convinced, as Stanton declared, that woman “must not put her trust in man” in seeking her own rights. “Standing alone, we learned our power,” Stanton and Anthony wrote later. “Woman must lead the way to her own enfranchisement and work out her own salvation.”

Angry with their former allies, Stanton and Anthony campaigned against ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Ratification, Anthony charged, would create an “aristocracy of sex.” They employed racist and elitist arguments in opposing the new amendment. Stanton argued that black men should not be elevated over “women of wealth, education, virtue, and refinement.” In 1869 she urged her followers to support women’s suffrage “if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with the low ideas of womanhood to make laws for you and your daughters.” That same year, these radicals formed the all-female National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA).

Another group of feminists led by Lucy Stone broke with Stanton and supported the amendment, conceding that this was “the Negro’s hour.” Women, they contended, could afford to wait for the vote. Their goal was to maintain an alliance with Republicans in the hope of enlisting Republican support for women’s suffrage after Reconstruction issues had been settled. To advance their cause, they formed the moderate American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which focused on achieving suffrage at the state level. This disagreement over strategy would divide the women’s movement for a generation to come.

Fearing that Johnson would subvert its plans for the South, Congress passed several laws in March 1867 aimed at limiting his presidential power. The Tenure of Office Act, the most important of the new restrictions, required the president to seek Senate approval before removing any officeholder who had been previously approved by the Senate. In this way, congressional leaders could protect Republican appointees, such as Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who openly collaborated with the Radicals. In August 1867 Johnson suspended Stanton, asking for Senate approval as required. When the Senate refused, Johnson had Stanton physically expelled from his office and appointed Union General Ulysses S. Grant as interim secretary of war.

On February 24 the House of Representatives voted to impeach the president. It charged him with eleven counts of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Of the eleven articles of impeachment, the first eight related to Johnson’s “illegal” dismissal of Stanton. Article X accused Johnson of bringing Congress into disgrace by “inflammatory and scandalous harangues” and of degrading his office “to the great scandal of all good citizens.”

The trial in the Senate, which the Constitution empowers to act as a court in impeachment cases, opened on March 5, 1868, and continued until May 26, with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding. To remove the president from office, two-thirds of the Senate—thirty-six of fifty-four senators—needed to vote for impeachment. The president’s attorney, Henry Stanbery, argued that Johnson’s removal of Stanton was not a criminal act but a test of the legality of a law that was probably unconstitutional. It was obvious that the vote would be close. “There is an intensity of anxiety here, greater than I ever saw during the war,” Representative James Garfield wrote two hours before the vote. At the last moment, seven moderate Republicans broke ranks, voting for acquittal along with twelve Democrats. The conviction of the president failed by one vote. The moderates agreed that Johnson had broken the law, but they believed that the violation did not warrant removal from office, fearing that such a move would establish a dangerous precedent and weaken the presidency.