Lincoln-Johnson campaign bannerCampaign banner for 1864 Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln and running mate Andrew Johnson, lithograph, 1864.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
The Radicals’ plan
Benjamin F. WadeCourtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Davis, Henry WinterHenry Winter Davis.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.Radical Republicans were outraged at these procedures, which savoured of executive usurpation of congressional powers, which required only minimal changes in the Southern social system, and which left political power essentially in the hands of the same Southerners who had led their states out of the Union. The Radicals put forth their own plan of Reconstruction in the Wade–Davis Bill, which Congress passed on July 2, 1864; it required not 10 percent but a majority of the white male citizens in each Southern state to participate in the reconstruction process, and it insisted upon an oath of past, not just of future, loyalty. Finding the bill too rigorous and inflexible, Lincoln pocket vetoed it; and the Radicals bitterly denounced him. During the 1864–65 session of Congress, they in turn defeated the president’s proposal to recognize the Louisiana government organized under his 10 percent plan. At the time of Lincoln’s assassination, therefore, the president and the Congress were at loggerheads over Reconstruction.
Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson
At first it seemed that Johnson might be able to work more cooperatively with Congress in the process of Reconstruction. A former representative and a former senator, he understood congressmen. A loyal Unionist who had stood by his country even at the risk of his life when Tennessee seceded, he was certain not to compromise with secession; and his experience as military governor of that state showed him to be politically shrewd and tough toward the slaveholders. “Johnson, we have faith in you,” Radical Benjamin F. Wade assured the new president on the day he took the oath of office. “By the gods, there will be no trouble running the government.”
Johnson, Andrew: oath of officeAndrew Johnson taking the oath of office in the parlour of the Kirkwood House, Washington, D.C., April 15, 1865. Newsprint from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 1866.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Johnson’s policy
Such Radical trust in Johnson proved misplaced. The new president was, first of all, himself a Southerner. He was a Democrat who looked for the restoration of his old party partly as a step toward his own reelection to the presidency in 1868. Most important of all, Johnson shared the white Southerners’ attitude toward African Americans, considering black men innately inferior and unready for equal civil or political rights. On May 29, 1865, Johnson made his policy clear when he issued a general proclamation of pardon and amnesty for most Confederates and authorized the provisional governor of North Carolina to proceed with the reorganization of that state. Shortly afterward he issued similar proclamations for the other former Confederate states. In each case a state constitutional convention was to be chosen by the voters who pledged future loyalty to the U.S. Constitution. The conventions were expected to repeal the ordinances of secession, to repudiate the Confederate debt, and to accept the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. The president did not, however, require them to enfranchise African Americans.
Johnson, AndrewAndrew Johnson pardoning Confederate soldiers at the White House, Washington, D.C.; Harper's Weekly, 1865.Harper's Weekly V. 9, No. 459, October 1865
“Black Codes”
Given little guidance from Washington, Southern whites turned to the traditional political leaders of their section for guidance in reorganizing their governments; and the new regimes in the South were suspiciously like those of the antebellum period. To be sure, slavery was abolished; but each reconstructed Southern state government proceeded to adopt a “Black Code,” regulating the rights and privileges of freedmen. Varying from state to state, these codes in general treated African Americans as inferiors, relegated to a secondary and subordinate position in society. Their right to own land was restricted, they could not bear arms, and they might be bound out in servitude for vagrancy and other offenses. The conduct of white Southerners indicated that they were not prepared to guarantee even minimal protection of African American rights. In riots in Memphis (May 1866) and New Orleans (July 1866), African Americans were brutally assaulted and promiscuously killed.
Civil rights legislation
Watching these developments with forebodings, Northern Republicans during the congressional session of 1865–66 inevitably drifted into conflict with the president. Congress attempted to protect the rights of African Americans by extending the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a welfare agency established in March 1865 to ease the transition from slavery to freedom; but Johnson vetoed the bill. An act to define and guarantee African Americans’ basic civil rights met a similar fate, but Republicans succeeded in passing it over the president’s veto. While the president, from the porch of the White House, denounced the leaders of the Republican Party as “traitors,” Republicans in Congress tried to formulate their own plan to reconstruct the South. Their first effort was the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed the basic civil rights of all citizens, regardless of colour, and which tried to persuade the Southern states to enfranchise African Americans by threatening to reduce their representation in Congress.
Andrew Johnson; photo from the Brady-Handy Collection.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
The president, the Northern Democrats, and the Southern whites spurned this Republican plan of Reconstruction. Johnson tried to organize his own political party in the National Union Convention, which met in Philadelphia in August 1866; and in August and September he visited many Northern and Western cities in order to defend his policies and to attack the Republican leaders. At the president’s urging, every Southern state except Tennessee overwhelmingly rejected the Fourteenth Amendment.
Victorious in the fall elections, congressional Republicans moved during the 1866–67 session to devise a second, more stringent program for reconstructing the South. After long and acrimonious quarrels between Radical and moderate Republicans, the party leaders finally produced a compromise plan in the First Reconstruction Act of 1867. Expanded and clarified in three supplementary Reconstruction acts, this legislation swept away the regimes the president had set up in the South, put the former Confederacy back under military control, called for the election of new constitutional conventions, and required the constitutions adopted by these bodies to include both African American suffrage and the disqualification of former Confederate leaders from officeholding. Under this legislation, new governments were established in all the former Confederate states (except Tennessee, which had already been readmitted); and by July 1868 Congress agreed to seat senators and representatives from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina. By July 1870 the remaining Southern states had been similarly reorganized and readmitted.
Suspicious of Andrew Johnson, Republicans in Congress did not trust the president to enforce the Reconstruction legislation they passed over his repeated vetoes, and they tried to deprive him of as much power as possible. Congress limited the president’s control over the army by requiring that all his military orders be issued through the general of the army, Ulysses S. Grant, who was believed loyal to the Radical cause; and in the Tenure of Office Act (1867) they limited the president’s right to remove appointive officers. When Johnson continued to do all he could to block the enforcement of Radical legislation in the South, the more extreme members of the Republican Party demanded his impeachment. The president’s decision in February 1868 to remove the Radical secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton from the Cabinet, in apparent defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, provided a pretext for impeachment proceedings. The House of Representatives voted to impeach the president, and after a protracted trial the Senate acquitted him by the margin of only one vote.