Southerners had long resented Reconstruction, and many Northerners hoping for reconciliation tire of the continued federal involvement in Southern politics.
Meanwhile, the federal withdrawal sparks large migrations of blacks out of the South and into the free state of Kansas in what is called the "exoduster movement. Skip to main content. The missouri-kansas conflict You are here Timeline. Tuesday, November 6, Harriet Beecher Stowe Meets Lincoln. There is considerable debate about how well Lincoln, had he lived, would have handled Congress during the Reconstruction process that took place after the Civil War ended.
The other camp believes that the Radicals would have attempted to impeach Lincoln, just as they did his successor, Andrew Johnson, in While Andrew Johnson favored punishment for Confederates after the Civil War, his policies toward the South softened during his presidency. Both Northern anger over the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln as well as the immense cost of human life during the Civil War led to vengeful demands for harsh policies in the South.
When he became president, however, Johnson took a much softer line and pardoned many of them. Additionally, no trials for treason took place. Only Captain Henry Wirz, commandant of the prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia, was executed for war crimes.
First, he sought a speedy restoration of the states, on the grounds that they had never truly left the Union, and thus should again be recognized once loyal citizens formed a government.
Unlike Radical Republicans, Johnson did not seek to make Southerners accountable for the war, but instead wanted to reintegrate them as easily as possible. Despite some of his rhetoric during his vice presidency, his actions as president reveal that he was not concerned with punishing the South. Second, to Johnson, African-American suffrage was a delay and a distraction; it always had been a state responsibility to decide who should vote. Without a focus on providing explicit legal equality for the freed slaves, Johnson overlooked the actions of white Southerners and blocked the actions of Congress.
Despite the abolition of slavery, many former Confederates were not willing to accept the social changes. Southern state governments quickly enacted the restrictive Black Codes. The Black Codes indicated that the freedmen would have more rights than they had before the war, but still only a limited set of second-class civil rights.
Additionally, freedmen were not granted voting rights or citizenship The Black Codes outraged Northerners, and were overthrown by the Civil Rights Act of , which gave freedmen full legal equality except the right to vote. This helped freedmen force planters to bargain for their labor.
Such bargaining soon led to the practice of sharecropping, which gave the freedmen both greater economic independence and social autonomy. However, because freedmen lacked capital, and because planters continued to own the tools, draft animals, and land, the freedmen were forced into producing cash crops, mainly cotton, for the landowners and merchants.
Widespread poverty, as well as the falling price of cotton, led to indebtedness among a majority of the freedmen, and poverty among many planters. Northern officials gave varying reports on conditions involving freedmen in the South. One harsh assessment came from Carl Schurz, who documented dozens of extra-judicial killings in states along the Gulf Coast.
He also reported that at least hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other African Americans had been killed in this area. In Selma, Alabama, Major J. Houston noted that whites who killed 12 African Americans in his district never came to trial.
Several other killings never culminated in official cases. Black women were particularly vulnerable at this time, as convicting a white man of sexually assaulting a black woman was immensely difficult. Because black women were considered to have little virtue, some in white society held that they could not be raped. This racist mindset contributed to numerous sexual crimes against black women. Black men were construed as being extremely sexually aggressive, and their supposed threats to white women often were used as a pretext for lynching and castrations.
During the autumn of , the Radical Republicans responded to the implementation of the Black Codes by blocking the readmission of the former rebellious states to Congress. Johnson, however, pushed to allow former Confederate states into the Union as long as their state governments adopted the Thirteenth Amendment which abolished slavery.
The amendment was ratified by December 6, , leading Johnson to believe that Reconstruction was over. Although Johnson had sympathies for the plights of the freedmen, he was opposed to federal assistance. An attempt to override the veto failed on February 20, In response, both the Senate and House passed a joint resolution, disallowing any congressional seat admittance until Congress declared Reconstruction finished.
Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull, leader of the moderate Republicans, recognized that the abolition of slavery was worthless without the protection of basic civil rights, and thus proposed the first Civil Rights Law. Congress quickly passed this Civil Rights bill. The impeachment of Andrew Johnson was one of the most dramatic events that occurred during the Reconstruction era in the United States, and was the first impeachment in history of a sitting U.
Johnson was impeached because of his efforts to undermine congressional policy; the impeachment was the culmination of a lengthy political battle between the moderate Johnson and the Radical Republicans who dominated Congress and sought control of Reconstruction policies. Johnson was acquitted by one vote. Johnson was impeached on February 24, , in the U.
Specifically, he had removed Edwin M. Stanton, the secretary of war whom the Tenure of Office Act was largely designed to protect , from office and attempted to replace him with Brevet Major General Lorenzo Thomas.
The House agreed to the articles of impeachment on March 2, Chase presiding. The first vote on one of the 11 impeachment articles concluded on May 16 with a failure to convict Johnson. A day recess was called before attempting to convict him on additional articles, but that effort failed on May The to votes were one short of the required two-thirds needed for conviction. The Fourteenth Amendment provided the foundation of equal rights for all U. 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.
Southern Black people won election to southern state governments and even to the U. Congress during this period. After , an increasing number of southern whites turned to violence in response to the revolutionary changes of Radical Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations targeted local Republican leaders, white and Black, and other African Americans who challenged white authority.
Though federal legislation passed during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in took aim at the Klan and others who attempted to interfere with Black suffrage and other political rights, white supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South after the early s as support for Reconstruction waned.
Racism was still a potent force in both South and North, and Republicans became more conservative and less egalitarian as the decade continued. In —after an economic depression plunged much of the South into poverty—the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War. When Democrats waged a campaign of violence to take control of Mississippi in , Grant refused to send federal troops, marking the end of federal support for Reconstruction-era state governments in the South.
In the contested presidential election that year, Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes reached a compromise with Democrats in Congress: In exchange for certification of his election, he acknowledged Democratic control of the entire South.
A century later, the legacy of Reconstruction would be revived during the civil rights movement of the s, as African Americans fought for the political, economic and social equality that had long been denied them. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
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