The Reconstruction Era is the period from 1865-1877. Our Civil War was fought between 1861-1865 so it took four years to fight the war and twelve years for the “Reconstruction” – Three times longer for “Reconstruction” than for the war. What was the plan?
To be fair, I must offer a disclaimer so that everyone knows I am White, I am male, and I grew up in Michigan, the North, and the Union side of the line where abolition was the majority part of the conversation. If I had grown up in the South where white supremacy was the more dominant part of the societal character, I suspect that my mindset would have evolved differently. Don’t get me wrong, there were white supremacists in the North, but they mostly kept their prejudice under wraps.
We’ll start with some basics. The first arrival of black Africans is credibly documented. Those first “twenty and odd” black Africans were taken from a Portuguese slave ship, San Juan Bautista, bound for Veracruz, by two British Privateers. In August of 1619 the Privateers, White Lion and Treasurer, landed at Point Comfort, near Jamestown Colony where the black Africans were traded for provisions. Slavery, as an institution, did not formally exist in the colonies at that time, but the mere fact of this trade tells us that the seeds had already been sown. The Colonists, at least some of them, understood chattel.
Two of the Black Africans, Anthony and Isabella were married and Isabella gave birth to the first Black child born in English America on January 3, 1624. The child, a boy, was baptized in 1624 and given the name William Tucker in honor of Point Comfort Commander William Tucker who they served at the time.
Please allow me to clarify my thoughts before I continue. Here I am on page one of my essay, and I already sound a bit judgmental, and I don’t want to do that. I have opinions and so does everybody else, but our opinions should not get in the way of our work here. History is history. History is a collection of facts that help us to figure out what has happened in the past. We may already think we have the facts, but we should not come to our research in arrogance thinking we know all the facts. As we do our research, we will learn new things that should cause us to change our opinions in one way or another. These opportunities are not good or bad. These opportunities are the fruits of our effort to gather a more complete set of facts and understand, better, what has already happened. We only have control of what we do with the new facts that we uncover.
Over the intervening years following 1619, enslaved Black Africans continued to be brought to the Colonies and in 1641, Massachusetts Colony passed its Body of Liberties, which first gave legal recognition to slavery. Other colonies followed the Massachusetts lead and over the next one hundred and thirty-five years the colonies grew and prospered to include the legalization and further expansion of what became known as that “peculiar institution” of slavery. The following tabulation is from https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/slave-population-of-the-early-united-states.html:
| YEAR | Slave Population |
| 1790 | 697,681 |
| 1800 | 893,602 |
| 1808 | Importation of slaves is Constitutionally ended. |
| 1810 | 1,191,362 |
| 1820 | 1,538,022 |
| 1830 | 2,009,043 |
| 1840 | 2,487,355 |
| 1850 | 3,204,313 |
| 1860 | 3,953,760 |
On April 19, 1775, the Revolutionary War was started at Lexington and Concord. The stated reason for the conflict was colonies objection to “taxation without representation” in the British Parliament. The quote has been written differently in other places where it appears: “taxation without representation is tyranny.” I ask my readers to hold this thought forefront and notice how often the relationship reappears over the course of our history. Take note of who is imposing their will in these situations and who is having someone else’s will imposed upon them.
Another quote often reenters our conversations about these times, and it is from the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” As we study these words, we see evidence of hypocrisy because we know that the founders did not mean “all men” in an inclusive interpretation. We should also take note of the fact that our Declaration of Independence was not and is not one of our governing documents, so the words do not carry anything actionable in our subsequent history.
By the mid-1780s five of the first thirteen states (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island) had abolished slavery in their state constitutions. Vermont was not yet a state, but slavery had already been abolished in its constitution as well.
Our first governing document for these United States was the Articles of Confederation, and it refers only to “free citizens” which, by exception, would exclude slaves. The Articles of Confederation only remained in effect for eleven years before the need for better governing guidance was necessary. There are many reasons for writing the Constitution of the United States and none of those reasons are relevant to our discussion here about reconstruction so we will simply take note of the fact that the document was passed by the Continental Congress on September 17, 1787, and was ratified on June 21, 1788.
At the time of the ratification of our new Constitution, we had no political parties or factions as they are often called. That said, it only took a few years for elected officials to recognize the power of collective bargaining. Our first political parties were called Pro-Administration and Anti-Administration. Essentially, they favored the thinking of President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson.
As the Constitution was being written, the issue of slavery was a hot button topic and threatened to scuttle the entire affair. The effort was to survive by the development and inclusion of the three-fifths compromise in the language of the Constitution.
Under the three-fifths compromise, each slave was counted as three fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning representation in the House of Representatives for each of the states. The slaves could not vote at that point, so the white population of the slave states had greater representation as a result. A bit further on we will see that ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments once again turned the spotlight onto this representation issue between Black Americans and White Americans. We are also reminded that in the summer of 1787, as the United States Constitution was being written, slavery had been in existence on the North American Continent for one hundred and sixty-eight years so, most of the North American slaves were born in North America.
During the years following the writing and ratification of our Constitution, slavery and abolition were continually a source of disagreement. Every time a new state was admitted to the Union as either a slave state or a free state, there was an attempt to balance that with a state of the other ideology.
In accordance with the Constitution, the importation of slaves came to an end in 1808. That did not mean that the demand for slave labor ended. As the market for planter industry crops continued to grow, so to the need for more slaves seemed insatiable. As that “peculiar institution” of slavery was waning in the North, slaves were sold to interests in the South. Indeed, there is evidence that free Black citizens in the North were sometimes kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. Capitalism being what it is, some of the slave trading interests in the so-called border states started breeding their slaves for domestic sale. In like manor, some of the slave holders also participated in the procreation of future slaves. These slave breeding activities took the immorality of slavery to a new low and even those who participated were often said to have been ashamed of their involvement. Be that as it may, the overall slave demographic grew as we see in the earlier tabulation.
During that period the slave population was shrinking in the North and growing in the South which was creating greater and greater imbalance of these two ideologies in the United States House of Representatives. The free population was also shifting towards the abolitionist ideology in the North. This was only an issue in the House due to the shifts of apportionment of congressional districts. It was not an issue in the United States Senate because every state has two senators. I wonder, perhaps you do as well, if this shift in the Northern thinking, towards abolition, had anything to do with the way the three-fifths compromise was administered.
From 1788 until 1861 the number of states increased as new states joined the Union and the balance of free states and slave states was maintained. In all, twenty-three more states joined during that period and eight of them were “slave states.” The real sensitivities were triggered in 1850 with the admission of California as a free state. At that time, the House of Representatives was already controlled by free states. With California’s admission to the Union, the Senate also became a free state majority. Allow me to point out here that the terms “free state” and “slave state” are assigned based on the legality of slavery in the state and has nothing to do with the proportion of the population made up by Black or White people in the state.
This is a point in time when we want to understand the mindset of the major actors of the day. The Southern actors were pro-slavery, and their leading proponents were persons from the planter aristocracy. The planter aristocracy only made up about seven percent of the White demographic, but their power was huge. The White demographic was about five and a half million strong and included lots of poor White people who were related to the planter industry as slavecatchers, slave drivers, overseers, and other lesser support rolls. These poor whites made up the majority of the White population in the South and they identified with the planter aristocracy.
The slavery demographic numbered about four and a half million with most involved, in some way, with the planter industry. The greatest number were field hands. We cannot be precise, but we can easily see that the apportionment distribution would be significantly different if the Freedmen were granted suffrage as opposed to if they were not.
For the people of the South, the issue was slavery. With it, the planter industry could flourish, the planter aristocracy could maintain their opulent lifestyle, and the economy of the United States could grow because almost everyone was connected in one way or another to the raw materials coming from the planter industry. Without it, the unemployed slave population would quickly plunge the nation’s economy into recessionary territory because the slaves were a critical component in the production of the planter industry crops. And the White population of the South could not imagine life without slaves.
President Abraham Lincoln, among others, did not think the Southern states could secede from the Union because there was no provision in the U.S. Constitution to support such an action and all the states had sworn to support the U.S. Constitution.
The people of the Northern states would suffer from the economic slow-down that would surely result from secession, but there was also a strong abolitionist sentiment in the North that could not be denied. The White population of the North was also conflicted by what to do with the slaves if they were freed. It was one thing to see abolition as a moral imperative, but quite another thing to have a Black man living next door. There were also lots of people who could only support half measures because making a slave fully equal with the White people just didn’t seem workable to them.
Last, but not least, was the mindset of the slaves themselves. Full equality was certainly the goal, and the highest priority was the vote. Nearly as high on that list was the ownership of land because without land there could be no manhood, no equality, and no justice.
President Lincoln was elected in November of 1860. His election marked the time in our national politics when the Legislative Branch and the Executive Branch were both controlled by elected officials from free states. The fears of this eventuality had been foreseen in the South and plans had been publicly discussed so there was no real surprise when South Carolina’s Legislature passed its Ordinance of secession on December 20, 1860. Hopes were shattered four days later when, on Christmas Eve, South Carolina’s Legislature passed their Declaration of Secession. President Lincoln was not even sworn into office and the first state was gone. During January of 1861, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana would follow South Carolina’s lead. Texas seceded in February and during his travel to Washington, D.C., President-elect Lincoln’s security is said to have thwarted an assassination attempt in Baltimore, Maryland. Bear in mind that the Constitution was still the law of the land and that meant that the three-fifths Compromise was still in play so President Lincoln would have been bound by the Constitution as written and any attempt to change Constitutional language would have required super-majority support. Be that as it may, the secessions continued and all of President Lincoln’s efforts to assuage the fears of the Southern states fell on deaf ears.
The “Civil War” effectively began with the Confederate force’s bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. The “Civil War” effectively ended with Confederate forces surrendering to the Union forces at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. Just six days later John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln and Vice President Andrew Johnson (a Tennessee slaveholder) was sworn in as our 17th President. Finally, on May 4, all remaining Confederate forces in Alabama and Mississippi surrendered and President Johnson officially declared an end to the insurrection on May 9, 1865.
As I write this, it is not clear to me exactly how the Union and the Confederate States were or were not related to each other during the Civil War or later during Reconstruction. I can find ample evidence of the various Confederate States voting on and passing resolutions and ordinances of secession from the Union, but I am not finding evidence of what the Union Congress did in response to those declarations. I find indications that there were people, President Lincoln among them, who believed that the various Confederate States were perpetually bound to the United States of America and, if we subscribe to that line of thinking, could not secede from the Union.
The battles of the Civil War were largely fought in the Southern states so the Southern infrastructure would suffer the greatest damage. Southern properties received the greatest destruction and, with that destruction, the greatest loss of wealth personally and collectively.
As battles were fought, the agricultural work of slaves was interrupted and, in many cases, ended. Therefore, as the Civil War progressed there were more and more ex-slaves with no way to support themselves or their families, so they began to follow the Union troops in the hopes of finding some small work to maintain themselves. It wasn’t through great agreement between the legislature and the command structure of the Union Army, but ex-slaves began being enlisted in the Union Army and fighting alongside the White troops.
On September 22, 1862, President Lincoln announced his intention to release his Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. His Proclamation was released as an Executive Order to his military officers regarding how to treat the slaves that were in the rebellious Southern states and being freed by the Civil War. It is important to understand that the Emancipation Proclamation had no impact on slaves residing in states that were not in rebellion. It was an order from the Commander and Chief and not the result of new legislation. The lines of communication were not as fast and as clear in those days so the fog of war was thicker than we might think. Imagine yourself with the responsibility of helping the ex-slaves find gainful employment – all four and a half million of them. Fire up your search engine and tell it to look for the Freedmen’s Bureau. You will find it enlightening. Somewhere within that period, you will find that over one hundred thousand Black troops were fighting for the Union Army and that without their participation there is good reason to believe that the Union Army would have lost the Civil War.
So, what was the plan for bringing the Union back together? The Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction (aka Ten Percent Plan), was a United States presidential proclamation issued on December 8, 1863, by President Lincoln. By this point in the war, the Union Army had pushed the Confederate Army out of several regions of the South, and some Confederate states were ready to have their governments rebuilt. Lincoln’s plan established a process through which this postwar reconstruction could be realized.
A component of President Lincoln’s plan decreed that a state in rebellion against the U.S. federal government could be reintegrated into the Union when 10% of the 1860 vote count from that state had taken an oath of allegiance to the United States and pledged to abide by Emancipation. Voters could then elect delegates to draft revised state constitutions and establish new state governments. All Southerners except for high-ranking Confederate army officers and government officials would be granted a full pardon. Lincoln guaranteed Southerners that he would protect their private property, though not their slaves. By 1864, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas had established fully functioning Unionist governments.
When the Radical Republicans in Congress got a look at the draft they were not impressed. From the point of view of their constituents the Southern states should be punished before they could be allowed to rejoin the Union. So, we have Radical Republicans in disagreement with a Republican President and the result of this dysfunction is inaction when it came to dealing with the reconciliation of the Civil War aftermath.
Congress reacted sharply to Lincoln’s plan. Most moderate Republicans supported the president’s proposal because they wanted to bring a swift end to the war, but radical Republicans feared that the planter aristocracy in the South would be restored, and the blacks would be forced back into slavery. Lincoln’s plan toward the South was lenient because he wanted to popularize his Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln feared that compelling enforcement of the proclamation could lead to the defeat of the Republican Party in the election of 1864, and that popular Democrats could overturn his proclamation.
Proposed congressional amendments of every sort poured into Congress concerning the national and Confederate debt, the civil rights of freedmen, the establishment of republican government, the basis of representation, payment for slaves and the future powers of Federal government and the states. Argument swirled. No matter where it started, and how far afield the debate might go, it always returned and had to return to two fundamental points: Shall the South be rewarded for unsuccessful secession by increased political power; and: Can the freed Negro be a part of American democracy?
But alas, the forefathers had conscientiously kept their work ill-defined and vague just so that future governments would have room to govern. The precision that the leaders of the 1860s were hoping to find had been left out with malice forethought.
I’ll quote from Du Bois, W. E. B., Black Reconstruction in America (The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois) (Kindle Locations 6897-6982). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition where he offers a couple of entertaining paragraphs. “They knew perfectly well that no such omniscient law existed or ever had existed. Yet, in order to conceal the fact, they twisted and distorted and argued: these states are dead; but states can never die. These states have gone out of the Union; but states can never go out of the Union, and to prevent this we fought and won a war; but while we were fighting, these states were certainly not in the Union, else why did we fight? And how now may they come back? They are already back because they were never really out. Then what were we fighting for? For union. But we had union and we have got union, only these constituent states are dead and we must bring them to life. But states never die. Then they have forfeited statehood and become territories. But statehood cannot be forfeited; conspirators within the states interfered, and now the interference has stopped. But as long as the interference lasted, there was surely no union. Oh, yes, only it did not function; we need not now provide for its functioning again, for the Constitution already provides for that.
“Where was the Constitution during the war? But the war is ended; and now the Constitution prevails; unless the Constitution prevails, this is no nation, there is no President; we have no real Congress, since it does not represent the nation. But who represented the nation during the war? And by that token, who saved the nation and killed slavery? Shall the nation that saved the nation now surrender its power to rebels who fought to preserve slavery? There are no rebels! The South is loyal, and slavery is dead. How can the loyalty of the South be guaranteed, and has the black slave been made really free? Freedom is a matter of state right. So was secession. Must we fight that battle over again? Yes, if you try to make monkeys equal to men. What caused the war but your own insistence that men were at once monkeys and real estate? Gentlemen, gentlemen, and fellow Americans, let us have peace! But what is peace? Is it slavery of all poor men, and increased political power for the slaveholders? Do you want to wreak vengeance on the conquered and the unfortunate? Do you want to reward rebellion by increased power to rebels?”
Radical Republicans believed that Lincoln’s plan for Reconstruction was not harsh enough because, from their point of view, the South was guilty of starting the war and deserved to be punished as such. Radical Republicans hoped to control the Reconstruction process, transform Southern society, disband the planter aristocracy, redistribute land, develop industry, and guarantee civil liberties for former slaves. Although the Radical Republicans were the minority caucus within the Republican Party in Congress, they managed to sway many moderates in the postwar years and came to dominate Congress in later sessions. In the summer of 1864, the Radical Republicans passed a new bill to oppose Lincoln’s plan. This new plan was known as the Wade–Davis Bill.
The Wade–Davis Bill of 1864 was a bill “to guarantee to certain States whose governments had been usurped or overthrown a new republican form of government,” as part of the Reconstruction of the South. In opposition to President Abraham Lincoln’s more lenient ten percent plan, the bill made re-admittance to the Union for former Confederate states contingent on a majority in each ex-Confederate state to take the “Ironclad Oath” to the effect they had never in the past supported the Confederacy. The bill passed both houses of Congress on July 2, 1864, but was pocket vetoed by Lincoln and never took effect.
The slavery question was the easiest part, and we know this by the early agreement and passage of the 13th Amendment of our Constitution.
It was January 31, 1865, and the 13th Amendment was sent to the states for ratification. There was continued dysfunction when it came to what rights the freedmen should have, going forward. The one thing that dysfunction tells us is that equality between the Black man and the White man was not generating serious consideration. President Lincoln’s Amnesty and Reconstruction Plan was in trouble. Imagine the trouble if the 13th Amendment were to fail ratification.
We should not lose track of the timeline. The thirteenth amendment to our Constitution was out for ratification by the states. As these Reconstruction plans were being worked on in the 38th Union congress, all the Representatives, one third of the Senators and the President and Vice President were up for election. President Lincoln and Vice President Johnson were elected and sworn into office on March 4, 1865.
We can’t know whether progress was being made when President Lincoln was assassinated on April 15, 1865. What we can say is that our new President, Andrew Johnson, was a member of the Democrat Party and was less likely to agree with those Radical Republicans than was President Lincoln.
As the 13th Amendment was progressing through the ratification process, the secessionist states began to pass new legislation which would be known as “black codes.” These “black codes” varied from state to state, but the intent was to incumber the rights of Black people and limit their rights, as nearly as possible, to their situation prior to the Civil War. The “black codes” were made possible by the exception to the 13th Amendment that was built right into the proposed amendment with the words, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This loophole is simple, hiding in plain sight, and probably placed there with intent.
The Civil War was essentially ended on April 9, 1865, when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant following the Battle of Appomattox Court House. Another notable surrender led to a now famous ceremony in Texas. On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger, standing on the balcony of Galveston’s Ashton Villa, read aloud the contents of “General Order No. 3”, announcing the total emancipation of those held as slaves in the State of Texas. The date has become known as “Juneteenth”, “Freedom Day”, and “Emancipation Day.” Other Confederate generals followed suit until the last surrender took place on June 23, 1865, when Brigadier General Stand Watie finally surrendered to Lieutenant Colonel Asa C. Matthews at Doaksville, Oklahoma.
Following the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency. He had been a leading Unionist in the South but now favored the ex-Confederates and became the leading opponent of the Radicals and the Freedmen. He intended to largely allow the returning states to decide the rights (and fates) of the former slaves in the South. While Lincoln’s last speeches showed a grand vision for Reconstruction, including suffrage for freedmen, Johnson and the Democrats adamantly opposed any such goals.
When the war was over and the casualties were tallied, there were three hundred and sixty-five thousand dead on the Union side of the battle and two hundred and ninety thousand dead on the Confederate side. Let that sink in for a moment. Six hundred and fifty-five thousand Americans were dead and the motivations for all that killing were male ego, slavery, Union integrity, and white supremacy. We can all decide for ourselves which of these were highest on the list of reasons for Americans fighting with each other, but our debate will not change the fact that a massive amount of blood and treasure had been lost to these motivations.
Reconstruction and Readmission
The final defeat of the Confederacy in 1865 brought an important and difficult problem for the federal government: how were the defeated states to be brought back into the Union? Most agreed that this should be accomplished as rapidly as possible, but not so rapidly that the planter elite that had led the South in secession would be able to renew the rebellion or reverse the results of the war. The South would have to remain under federal control until it was deemed safe to leave matters to the southern state governments. This probationary period of federal control was termed “Reconstruction.”
We need to spend a bit of our quality thought time to this because we will learn something about who we were in 1865 and who we might be today.
If the Confederate states could not secede from the Union, then the citizens of those states could not give up their U.S. citizenship by the act of secession. As I understand it, you can’t commit treason against the United States unless you are a citizen of the United States, so our civil war was characterized by citizens fighting with citizens of the United States. Citizens fighting citizens except when Black soldiers from the North fought against White soldiers from the South because the 13th Amendment was not yet ratified.
These relationships are important because they place boundaries around the way we handle the issues of punishment for the leaders of the Confederacy. President Lincoln and President Johnson both issued pardons to Confederate soldiers which avoided any need for law-and-order considerations. General Lee was indicted but he was pardoned by President Lincoln and never tried. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was never tried, but he was imprisoned at Fort Monroe for two years.
The 39th and 40th Congress could have spent some time in serious debate and cleared up much of the ambiguity we later faced as the civil war was coming to an end. That said, the 39th and 40th Congress ducked their responsibility and left us with the mess that now complicates our current situation. Fortunately, our current crop of insurrectionists did not complicate matters by trying to relinquish their citizenship.
To some contemporaries, the reconstruction of the Union was complete, and Reconstruction ended when the South’s representatives were readmitted to Congress in 1868. In modern parlance, however, the period of President Andrew Johnson’s control of the process of readmission is termed “provisional Reconstruction” or “Presidential Reconstruction.” The following period, marked by the control of southern policy by Congress, is termed “Congressional Reconstruction” or “Radical Reconstruction,” after the Radical Republicans who dominated Congress. The duration of the Reconstruction period varied among southern states, depending on when they were readmitted to the Union by Congress, or when they reestablished Democratic rule.
President Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction would have left the antebellum elite in control of the southern states and would not have included black suffrage. It did, however, require that southern whites accept the results of the war—the abolition of slavery. The plan did not sit well with Republicans in Congress, who considered it too lenient. Northerners blamed the war on southern planters, who used their control of black labor to control their states. In a serious miscalculation of northern sentiment, southern leaders passed Black Codes, laws restricting the activities and occupations of ex-slaves and remanding them to the control of their former owners. The Black Codes were invalidated by the state’s military governor, who saw them as reestablishing slavery in everything but name. South Carolinians then lost their last chance to avoid Congressional Reconstruction by refusing to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which among other provisions would have made ex slaves citizens of the state and punished the state if it did not give them the vote.
In the fall of 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau became active in administering the land program in Georgia and returned much Black labor to the fields, mediating a contract-labor system between White landowners and their Black workers, many of whom they formerly enslaved. Labor would never be the same, however. Field work—once the province of entire Black families—was transformed as the freedwomen withdrew their labor and their children’s labor to the household. Both children and adults began to take advantage of educational opportunities, usually offered by teachers from the North. Often education was associated with the burgeoning number of all-Black churches that also characterized Reconstruction.
The Eastern part of the State of Virginia and the Western part of the State were very different in terms of their economic interests and their slave populations. The Eastern part of the State was heavily involved in the Civil War to the point that many of the battles of the war were fought in that part of the State. The ultimate decision about the future of West Virginia was made by the armies in the field. The Confederates were defeated, the Union was triumphant, so West Virginia was born.
The Reconstruction Era technically began with the end of the fighting as marked by the last surrender of Confederate troops at Doaksville, OK on June 23, 1865. Practically speaking, no official plan for the process to follow existed so until that could be determined, everything was in limbo. In other words, the start of “Reconstruction” can be established and the end of “Reconstruction” along with the process to get there were undetermined.
President Johnson, in the absence of a formal plan, started with the draft plan that had been prepared by President Lincoln. President Johnson’s Reconstruction program had begun during a lengthy congressional adjournment that extended from March to December 1865. When the Thirty-ninth Congress convened at the end of the year, the Radical Republicans argued that Johnson had exceeded his power in restoring the former Confederate states, all of which but Tennessee they considered unworthy of restoration. Determining to start Reconstruction anew, the Republican majority in Congress created a Joint Committee on Reconstruction that held hearings from January to June 1866 on conditions in the former Confederacy.
At this point on the timeline of events, we need to remember that there was a difference of opinion as to whether the Confederate states were separated from the Union. It makes a difference. It makes a big difference how the subsequent steps of reconstruction would need to be framed and executed.
If the Confederate states were still part of the Union, the President could use his Executive power for the Reconstruction. If the Confederate states were not part of the Union, the President would need the authority of new legislation to define and execute the required changes. President Johnson chose to handle the matter from the perspective that the Confederate states were still part of the Union.
On December 6, 1865, the thirteenth amendment was ratified and became part of the law of the land. The ratification of the thirteenth Amendment meant that slavery was dead in America – dead, to rise no more. It also meant that roughly four and a half million members of the plantation economy could refuse their labor to that industry. As ratifications go, this one was fast, but when we look at it from the perspective of the aftermath of the Civil War the pace would have seemed slow. Think about all the competing social changes that were taking place at the time. Put yourself in the position of each of the major groups of citizens and imagine what your thinking would have been. If you had been a freedman, a Unionist, an ex-Confederate, a Republican, a Democrat what would have been the issues that were driving your day-to-day life? How would you have reacted to the new competing pressures facing you?
The 13th Amendment was ratified, but not without controversy. How would the plantation crops be produced? How would all those ex-slaves maintain themselves and their families? What would happen to all those collateral workers that were dependent on the agricultural industry for their livelihood?
The 13th Amendment was ratified, and the slaves were free, but were they citizens? Did they have civil rights equal to those of the White population? There were lots of questions and very few answers.
The Reconstruction Era lasted from 1865 to 1877 and marked a significant chapter in the history of civil rights in the United States. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was passed in March of 1866, but not without dysfunction – Congress passed it on March 13th, President Johnson vetoed it on March 27th and Congress overrode the President’s veto on April 9th. Then, the 14th Amendment was passed and sent to the states for ratification on June 13th.
On a parallel track, another bill designed to aid the integration of Freedmen into society as equals was undergoing transition. The Freedmen’s Bureau was first established by President Lincoln as part of the U.S. Army on March 3, 1865, with the goal of aiding former slaves dealing with food and housing, oversight, education, health care, and employment contracts with private landowners. Less than a year later, President Johnson vetoed a succeeding Freedmen’s Bureau Bill on February 19, 1866. Congress could not achieve the necessary two thirds vote to override that veto. Then, on July 3, 1866, Congress passed another Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and President Johnson vetoed it on July 16th. This time, the Congress overrode the veto on that same day. At this point in the Reconstruction process, we were over one year into the work and the Radical Republicans in Congress were becoming more and more deeply divided from the President on how to proceed. They wanted their pound of flesh and he wanted to be done with the whole affair.
The Freedmen’s Bureau bill that passed in 1866 provided many additional rights to ex-slaves, including the distribution of land, schools for their children, and military courts to ensure these rights were not infringed. The Freedmen’s Bureau Act gave ex-slaves “any of the civil rights or immunities belonging to white persons, including the right to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, and to have full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and estate, including the constitutional right of bearing arms.” This was in response to the Southern Black Codes, the KKK and other groups who were taking guns away from freedmen. We can see that the Reconstruction time was best characterized as one of Alexander Hamilton’s “furious storms.
Let’s return to the 14th Amendment for just a moment. When we study the first section of that amendment, we get a generalized look at the planned rights of the freedmen. Section 1 of the 14th Amendment reads as follows:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
As we read these words, we may think that the provisions they describe were already contained in the Constitution, but when we search for them, we come up empty. We do see that there is no exclusion from citizenship for any reason. If we didn’t know different, we would say that the ratification of the 14th Amendment would clearly make the freedmen citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside and they were to have equal rights with the White citizens. That said, those “black codes” remained on the books and those “black codes” were designed to “abridge the privileges or immunities” of those same freedmen. So, the first question of the day was whether, or not, the 14th Amendment would be ratified because ratification of the 14th Amendment should invalidate many of those “black codes.”
Looking back to the opening of the Civil War, each of the eleven secessionist states were a bit unique in terms of their economic interests and their societal pressures when it came to the Black population that was part of their community. Each of the secessionist states harbored different levels of racism and prejudice in their ideological character as the armed conflict started, but each of the secessionist states carried the same white supremacist philosophies into the battle. Namely, the White members of the secessionist population saw the Black members of the population as inferior to themselves in every imaginable way.
Reconstruction began in some states even as the Civil War was still being fought in other Confederate states. The United States government, including President Lincoln, had defined no explicit and coherent plan for the postwar South and, Lincoln’s assassination and Andrew Johnson’s rise to the presidency threw things into even greater uncertainty. Johnson, who had defended the Union as a United States Senator and wartime governor of Tennessee and who was elected Vice President with Lincoln in 1864 at the head of the Union Party, proved surprisingly lenient with white Southerners and unsympathetic to the people who had been held in slavery. Johnson hoped to create a national party devoted to the Union and sought the support of the former leaders of the South. He was unconcerned about sacrificing black Southerners’ interests in the process.
Under Johnson’s leniency, white Southerners seized all they could of the old order. They passed laws that narrowly defined the possibilities of life for the freed people, preventing them from renting land or owning firearms, placing their children in coercive “apprenticeships” to their former owners. Former Confederates violently attacked black people in cities and the countryside across the region. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized people who challenged white supremacy in any way. White Southerners resisted the Freedmen’s Bureau that aided impoverished whites and blacks with surplus United State Army material, used special courts to adjudicate conflicts between the freed people and their former masters, and tried to prevent violence against African Americans.
Coming out of the Civil War, that white supremacist ideology was no longer acceptable as part of the societal makeup going forward. Hearts and minds had to change, but the motivation to change them was missing in action. Like any belief we might hold, it can only be changed when we each personally decide to change it. Until that time, if society opposes our belief, we simply internalize our thoughts and avoid any conversation on the topic. And, so it was with white supremacy and slavery.
Economically, citizens had to address both the immediate impact of the war’s physical destruction and the long-term consequences of emancipation. Across the country, Confederate and Union veterans returned to their homes to find dilapidated buildings and fences, deteriorated soils, broken down work animals, and depleted food supplies. In addition, slaveholding families suffered financial losses due to the emancipation. In a sense, emancipation did not constitute a true loss of wealth to the slave holding states, but rather a redistribution of wealth from slaveholders to former slaves, who, for the first time, legally owned themselves.
The former slaves, for their part, sought first and foremost to own their own farms and to secure as much economic independence as possible from their former masters. In the short run, their vision could only be realized by the intervention of the federal government to break up and redistribute their former masters’ plantations. Any realistic hope of such a policy vanished abruptly with President Johnson’s offer of pardon and full restoration of non-slave property to all who would swear an oath of future loyalty to the United States.
Pres. Andrew Johnson gave ex-Confederates latitude to reestablish race relations on the terms they supported. He also opposed federally guaranteed civil rights protection or extending voting rights to freedmen. He favored rapid pardons for ex-Confederate leaders and quick reintegration into the Union for the 11 states formerly in rebellion. In 1867, the Republican-dominated Congress took control of the Reconstruction process and attempted to expand and protect the civil rights of the formerly enslaved.
President Johnson and the U.S. Congress clashed over Reconstruction policy. Congress wanted full citizenship and civil rights for freedmen, while Johnson did not. Congressional Republicans overrode Johnson’s veto to pass Reconstruction acts, which placed the southern states, except Tennessee, under military control, disenfranchised many former Confederates, and required states to revise their constitutions to enfranchise freedmen.
We should keep in mind the elements of the ratification process for a Constitutional Amendment. Specifically, it takes an affirmative vote from three quarters of the then existing states to achieve adoption. In 1866 there were thirty-six states and eleven of them were previously Confederate states. When we do the math, we see that the 14th Amendment was headed for trouble unless something changed and that something was the end of Presidential Reconstruction and the start of Congressional Reconstruction.
The Reconstruction Acts, or the Military Reconstruction Acts, were four statutes passed during the Reconstruction Era in the transition between the 39th and 40th United States Congress, addressing the requirements and procedures for Southern States to be readmitted to the Union. The Acts excluded Tennessee but did apply to the other ten secessionist Confederate states. On March 2, 1867, Congress passed the first of four Military Reconstruction Acts titled, An Act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States. Nearly three weeks later, on March 23rd, Congress passed the second Military Reconstruction act which was supplemental to the first Act. Then, on July 19, 1867, Congress passed the third of four Military Reconstruction Acts which was again supplementary to the first two Acts. This third Act is largely of a housekeeping nature dealing with the earlier two Acts.
So, as we arrive in the later months of 1867, the Civil War is two years back in the rearview mirror and the legislative branch is feuding with the executive branch. The devastated planter aristocracy in the South is busy searching for and implementing ways to return freedmen to their previous condition of servitude. Essentially there is dysfunction wherever we look, and that dysfunction only added confusion and complication to the process of readmitting the ten remaining Confederate states back into the Union. I would imagine that it also added to any animosity that might have been brewing.
The Congress didn’t pass the fourth and final Military Reconstruction Act until March 11, 1868, and this fourth Act is also largely of a housekeeping nature dealing with the first and second Acts passed a year earlier.
So, we are left to conclude that the language of the first and second Military Reconstruction Acts constitutes the statement of work for the secessionist states to qualify for readmission to the Union. In summary, their existing state constitution was suspended, and martial law put into effect; the state was required to ratify the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; the male inhabitants of the state who were eligible to vote had to take a special oath and get registered to participate in a constitutional convention wherein a new state constitution was to be written; the new state constitution would go through the ratification process and be submitted to the President of the United States for approval; the President would submit the new state constitution to the Federal Legislature for approval, and the Congress would essentially audit the process leading up to that point. If the Congress was satisfied with the new state constitution and the way that it was prepared, they would vote for approval and start the process for readmission of the state back into the Union.
Certainly, the ten remaining Confederate states were being compelled to make changes to their way of life that were deeply objectionable even though those changes were largely the principled result of their fighting and losing the Civil War.
As my mother used to say, “a man convinced against his will, remains of the same opinion still.”
Throughout this period of President Johnson’s administration, if Congress passed something, President Johnson probably vetoed it. We are not surprised to learn that on February 24, 1868, the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Johnson. The Senate chose one of the articles to test the mood of the Senate but fell short of convicting the President on May 16, 1868. The Senate decided to recess for a week to rethink their future course on the subject. The Senate called themselves back into order, tried the President on more of the Articles of Impeachment and again fell short, by one vote of a conviction on May 26, 1868.
I would like to offer another personal comment here. As I understand the elements of contract law, for a contract to be valid, it must be entered into with the “absence of duress.” What happened here is in the rearview mirror, but we should keep it in mind as we try to understand later behaviors. We can surely make a credible argument that the remaining ten Confederate states were operating under duress even though that duress was of their own ideological making.
The planter aristocracy managed to retain control of their land for the most part, but emancipation left them with little control of the labor force they needed to work their land. Following several attempted arrangements, the sharecropping relationship was the most chosen way forward. The task of supervising these contracts between planters and laborers and of providing food, shelter, education, and justice to the former slaves fell to a federal agency known as the Freedmen’s Bureau.
Across the South, as new state governments were being formed, the leadership of the various states was being arrested from the Democrats who had been in office before the war. These changes met with disapproval from both the previously elected leaders and from much of their constituency. Angered by the disfranchisement provisions of the new charter and frustrated by Republican control of the election machinery, many became convinced that their only hope for regaining control of the state government was by going outside the law. Those extralegal means were often carried out by the Ku Klux Klan or other terrorist organizations.
President Ulysses S. Grant, elected in 1868, was much more sympathetic to Congress’s view of Reconstruction than President Johnson had been. Debate continued with respect to voting rights for ex slaves. Republicans mostly wanted them, but Democrats didn’t. President Grant’s support of the measure helped to put it over the top. Congress passed the 15th Amendment, albeit a less comprehensive version than some hoped for, on February 26th, 1869, and sent it out for ratification. The ratification fight was not easy, but the Republicans prevailed and the 15th Amendment was ratified on March 30, 1870.
In 1871 Grant’s administration undertook an extensive effort to crack down on terrorism, and South Carolina was under scrutiny. Congress passed the Ku-Klux Act, making it a federal crime to “conspire or go in disguise for the purpose of depriving any person or class of persons of the equal protection of the laws.” Several upcountry counties were placed under martial law, and hundreds of arrests were made. Convictions were few since the federal prosecutors were overwhelmed by the number of cases and since most of the attacks had occurred before the passage of the Ku-Klux Act. Federal intervention certainly reduced the scale of terrorism, and the Ku Klux Klan as an organization was destroyed as many of its leaders fled the state. Nevertheless, the government’s assault on political violence was not a complete success. Attacks on leading Republicans continued throughout Reconstruction and beyond.
Complicating the situation, rumors suggested that the freedmen would soon be given freeholds and plowing animals. The widely anticipated “forty acres and a mule” for formerly enslaved individuals stemmed from Union General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, issued from Savannah in January 1865. Under that order, federal authorities confiscated “abandoned lands” along the coast and distributed them to freed people. This distribution proved temporary, however, as most of the land was soon restored to its original owners. Nonetheless, some Black families were able to buy or lease land from the government.
Looking back over Reconstruction, we can see that the effort to recast the postwar South was up against long odds from the outset. Reconstruction sought to complete one of the great revolutions of modern history and to do so without the benefit of overwhelming military force, modern tools of surveillance, or a contrite opponent. Slavery in the United States had been strong and growing stronger when it suddenly ended in a vast war waged over much of the continent. Southern slave-owners had held the largest slave population in the hemisphere. Southerners had dominated the presidency and the Supreme Court throughout the first three generations of United States history and had not hesitated to use that power to suppress abolition, to force northern complicity in returning fugitive slaves, and to lay legal claim to at least half of the nation’s territory. Changing all those power relations at one time was a massive undertaking.
In summary, reconstruction of the eleven secessionist states was a failure. In part, that failure was the result of an ill-defined plan presented by President Lincoln and later President Johnson. It also failed because the antebellum White population simply would not recognize the freed Black slaves as their equal on any level. The overzealous Radical Republicans and their determination to punish the White Southerners for their brutality of the Black population also helped to create a hostile atmosphere when it came to reconstruction. And, lastly, after decades of white supremacist beliefs and behaviors, Black equality was not going to be accepted by the White population over night.
We must conclude that President Johnson was far more sympathetic toward the White supremacist Southern ideology than the abolitionist Republican led Congress and the Freedmen were the losers as the result. President Johnson’s actions, or lack thereof, would have emboldened the pro slavery Southerners in their pursuit of a return to the way of life they had enjoyed before the war started.
We have considered the many secessionist states, but not all the slave states. Slave states that did not secede were known as border states and there were four of them. We will start with Delaware. Slavery was a divisive issue in Delaware for decades before the Civil War started. Opposition to slavery in Delaware, imported from Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania, led many slaveholders to free their slaves; half of the state’s black population was free by 1810, and more than 90% were free by 1860. During the Civil War, Delaware was a slave state that remained in the Union. Delaware voters voted not to secede on January 3, 1861.
The second border state we will examine is Maryland. Despite some popular support for the cause of the Confederate States of America, Maryland would not secede during the Civil War. However, several leading citizens put considerable pressure on the Governor call on the legislature for a vote on secession.
Responding to the pressure, on April 22 the Governor finally announced that the state legislature would meet in a special session in Frederick, a strongly pro-Union town, rather than the state capital of Annapolis. The Maryland General Assembly convened in Frederick and unanimously adopted a measure stating that they would not commit the state to secession, explaining that they had “no constitutional authority to take such action,” whatever their own personal feelings might have been. On April 29, the Legislature voted decisively 53–13 against secession.
Union troops had to go through Maryland to reach the national capital. Had Maryland also joined the Confederacy, Washington, D.C. would have been surrounded. There was popular support for the Confederacy in Baltimore as well as in Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore, where there were numerous slaveholders and slaves. Baltimore was strongly tied to the cotton trade and related businesses of the South. The Maryland Legislature rejected secession in the spring of 1861, though it refused to reopen rail links with the North, and it requested that Union troops be removed from Maryland.
Now, we will turn our attentions to the border state of Kentucky. Kentucky’s citizens were split regarding the issues central to the Civil War. In 1860, slaves composed 19.5% of the Commonwealth’s population, and many Unionist Kentuckians saw nothing wrong with the “peculiar institution” of slavery. The Commonwealth was further bound to the South by the Mississippi River and its tributaries, which were the main commercial outlet for her surplus produce, although railroad connections to the North were beginning to diminish the importance of this tie. The ancestors of many Kentuckians hailed from Southern states like Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, but many Kentucky children were beginning to migrate toward the North.
As border states go, Missouri was the best example of the time. During the American Civil War, Missouri was a hotly contested border state populated by both Union and Confederate sympathizers. It sent armies, generals, and supplies to both sides, maintained dual governments, and endured a bloody neighbor-against-neighbor intrastate war within the larger national war.
As we have been considering the condition of the many slave states, we have encountered three constitutional amendments. They are not long, and they are not complex, but the argument can be made that they are all inadequate for the purpose intended. The so called “black codes” that were passed by state legislatures throughout the South effectively nullified many of the provisions of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. To my way of thinking, the provisions of these constitutional amendments should take precedence over the black codes they are designed to counter.
White supremacist organizations and, more specifically, the Ku Klux Klan are important parts of our conversation here. The first Ku Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, on December 24, 1865, by six former officers of the Confederate army. It started as a fraternal social club inspired at least in part by the then largely defunct Sons of Malta. Although there was little organizational structure above the local level, similar groups rose across the South and adopted the same name and methods. Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement promoting resistance and white supremacy during the Reconstruction Era.
The complete end to reconstruction came because of more political dysfunction as the electoral votes from the Presidential election of 1876 were being counted. Four states suffered ambiguities and confusion with their slate of state electors. A committee was chosen to decide the matter and the outcome was a deal with Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, that if he were elected he would remove the remaining federal troops from the Southern states and bring “Reconstruction” to an end.
I am often asked if our current political dysfunction is the worst we have ever endured? I answer the question by asserting that our United States of America have endured two insurrections. The first insurrection started in December of 1860 with the secession of South Carolina and included the secession of ten other Southern states. That insurrection included four years of Civil War and twelve years of Reconstruction only to see the various state constitutions embrace equality for a short time and then to have the provisions of inequality to be put back into those same constitutions. I think it can also be argued that our current dysfunction is just an extension of the Reconstruction Era dysfunction that has never really been put to rest. White supremacy lives and the un-American and un-patriotic behaviors it engenders will continue to divide us until we take steps to comprehensively address the whole question of equality in America. We would all do well to get involved and do our best to sail our ship towards the calmer waters that Alexander Hamilton told us about.
I cannot clear my mind of the MAGA campaign hats we see today. The White supremacists are alive and well and still holding onto their prejudicial ideologies. They are undemocratic, they are un-American, they are autocratic, and they are willing to destroy the United States of America to hold political power. Their thirst for political power can only be described as unquenchable.
We have also seen evidence that while the events of Reconstruction are not the same as events today, there is a great deal of similarity. It is my opinion that the Civil War and Reconstruction were more dysfunctional than our current times if, for no other reason, the six hundred and fifty-five thousand souls who lost their lives during the conflict. That said, we can see in our Civil War and Reconstruction historical examples of how things could get worse in our current situation. One clear lesson involves the amount of time allowed for the “hearts and minds” to change and embrace true equality amongst all the members of our society. It doesn’t happen overnight.
In conclusion, Reconstruction following the Civil War did not achieve the popularly intended goals. True, the slaves were emancipated, but they were not permitted to enjoy the immunities and privileges of their emancipation equally with other members of society. True, the newly emancipated freedmen were awarded suffrage and included in the enfranchised group authorized to vote, but many of them were victims of racial terror and intimidation leading to their decision not to participate in the election process. True, the secessionist states rewrote their constitutions to embrace emancipation, black male suffrage and come into compliance with the Congressional Reconstruction Acts. But there was no prohibition against future constitutional revisions so at their earliest opportunities the secessionist states adopted new constitutions that contained language taking the state back to provisions like those of the antebellum period.