Even before the war had ended, Lincoln issued the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction in , his compassionate policy for dealing with the South. The Proclamation stated that all Southerners could be pardoned and reinstated as U.
High Confederate officials, Army and Navy officers, and U. Two congressional factions formed over the subject of Reconstruction. They wanted to effect sweeping changes in the south and grant the freed slaves full citizenship before the states were restored. The influential group of Radicals also felt that Congress, not the president, should direct Reconstruction. The bill also required that the state constitutional conventions abolish slavery.
Lincoln pocket-vetoed, or refused to sign, the proposal, keeping the Wade-Davis bill from becoming law. In the election, Lincoln chose Andrew Johnson as his vice presidential running mate as a gesture of unity.
Johnson was a War Democrat from Tennessee, a state on the border of the north-south division in the United States. Johnson was a good political choice as a running mate because he helped garner votes from the War Democrats and other pro-Southern groups.
Johnson was born to impoverished parents in North Carolina, orphaned at an early age, and moved to Tennessee. Self-educated, he rose through the political ranks to be a congressman, a governor of Tennessee, and a United States senator. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Johnson was the only senator from a seceding state who remained loyal to the Union.
Johnson's political career was built on his defense of small farmers and poor white southerners against the aristocratic classes. The Radical Republicans believed at first that Johnson, unlike Lincoln, wanted to punish the South for seceding. These wealthy Southerners were the ones Johnson believed led the South into secession. However, these Confederates were allowed to petition him for personal pardons.
Before the year was over, Johnson, who seemed to savor power over the aristocrats who begged for his favor, had issued some 13, such pardons.
These pardons allowed many of the planter aristocrats the power to exercise control over Reconstruction of their states. The Radical Republicans were outraged that the planter elite once again controlled many areas of the south.
Johnson also called for special state conventions to repeal the ordinances of secession, abolish slavery, repudiate all debts incurred to aid the Confederacy, and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. Suggestions of black suffrage were scarcely raised at these state conventions and promptly quashed when they were. On December 6, , Johnson announced that the southern states had met his conditions for Reconstruction and that in his opinion the Union was now restored. As it became clear that the design of the new southern state governments was remarkably like the old governments, both moderate Republicans and the Radical Republicans grew increasingly angry.
During Radical Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of , newly enfranchised Black people gained a voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces—including the Ku Klux Klan —would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South.
At the outset of the Civil War , to the dismay of the more radical abolitionists in the North, President Abraham Lincoln did not make abolition of slavery a goal of the Union war effort.
To do so, he feared, would drive the border slave states still loyal to the Union into the Confederacy and anger more conservative northerners. Emancipation changed the stakes of the Civil War, ensuring that a Union victory would mean large-scale social revolution in the South. It was still very unclear, however, what form this revolution would take. Over the next several years, Lincoln considered ideas about how to welcome the devastated South back into the Union, but as the war drew to a close in early , he still had no clear plan.
In a speech delivered on April 11, while referring to plans for Reconstruction in Louisiana , Lincoln proposed that some Black people—including free Black people and those who had enlisted in the military—deserved the right to vote. He was assassinated three days later, however, and it would fall to his successor to put plans for Reconstruction in place. Apart from being required to uphold the abolition of slavery in compliance with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution , swear loyalty to the Union and pay off war debt, southern state governments were given free rein to rebuild themselves.
These repressive codes enraged many in the North, including numerous members of Congress, which refused to seat congressmen and senators elected from the southern states. The first bill extended the life of the bureau, originally established as a temporary organization charged with assisting refugees and formerly enslaved people, while the second defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens who were to enjoy equality before the law.
After Johnson vetoed the bills—causing a permanent rupture in his relationship with Congress that would culminate in his impeachment in —the Civil Rights Act became the first major bill to become law over presidential veto. The participation of African Americans in southern public life after would be by far the most radical development of Reconstruction, which was essentially a large-scale experiment in interracial democracy unlike that of any other society following the abolition of slavery.
By about 2, black men had won local, state, and federal offices in the former Confederate states. Next Section. In his message to the Confederacy, the President announced his intention to free the slaves in the rebellious states; one hundred days later, he signed the official proclamation.
For more on the history of both proclamations, see James M. Johnson had the second-highest percentage of vetoes overridden Franklin Pierce, who had See Office of the Historian, U. Tennessee, which had rejoined the Union on July 24, , was exempt from the requirements of the Reconstruction Act.
Washington, D. Government Printing Office, Featured Search Historical Highlights of the House. The committee's proposal was accepted by Congress. The following was established:. Congress formed the Freedmen's Bureau, a temporary federal agency to help former slaves transition to freedom, by providing free food, clothing, medical care, and education to over 4 million freed slaves. Congress replaced civilian governments in former Confederate states with military rule, to force Southerners to obey the new laws, such as the 13th Amendment.
Congress refused to recognize any state constitution until it had been changed to include the right of male African Americans to vote. Congress did not allow any state to rejoin the Union until they had ratified the 14th Amendment, which further protected African American civil rights. Congress barred all former Confederates from holding political office until they had received a pardon from Congress.
When the press called their actions harsh, Congress responded by pointing out they had forgiven the massive Confederate war debt. They had established programs that provided free food, clothing, medical care, education, and jobs for millions of people. What more did the South want?
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