CHAPTER 14

2 Societies at War, 1861- 1865

The symbolic end of the war took place in Virginia.

In April 1865, Grant finally gained control of the crucial railroad junction at Petersburg and cut off Lee’s supplies.

Lee abandoned Richmond and retreated toward North Carolina to join up with Confederate forces there.

While Lincoln visited the ruins of the Confederate capital and was mobbed by joyful ex-slaves, Grant cut off Lee’s escape route.

On April 9, almost 4 years to the day after the attack on Fort Sumter, Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

By late May, all the Confederate generals had stopped fighting, and the Confederate army and government simply melted away.

Almost 260,000 Confederate soldiers had paid for secession with their lives. On the other side, more than 360,000 Northerners had died for the Union.

A “Gilded Age” of wealth and excess.

CHAPTER 15

Reconstruction1865-1877

In his 2nd inaugural address, President Lincoln spoke of the need to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” No one knew better than Lincoln how daunting a task that would be.

But what system of labor should replace plantation slavery?

What rights should the freedmen be accorded beyond emancipation?

How far should the federal government go to settle these questions?

And, most immediately pressing, on what terms should the rebellious states be restored to the Union?

Reconstruction, he said, had to be regarded as a practical problem, not a theoretical one.

It could be solved only if Republicans remained united, even if that meant compromising on principled differences that divided them, and only if the defeated South gave its consent, even if that came at a price of forgiving the South’s transgressions.

What course Reconstruction might have taken had Lincoln lived is one of the unanswerable questions of American history.

On April 14, 1865-- 5 days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox-- Lincoln was shot in the head at Ford’s Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, a prominent Shakespearian actor and Confederate sympathizer who had been plotting to abduct Lincoln and rescue the South.

John Wilkes Booth, hardened many Northerners against the South, and handed the presidency to a man utterly lacking in Lincoln’s moral sense and political judgment: Vice President Andrew Johnson.

Presidential Reconstruction

The problem of Reconstruction-- how to restore rebellious states to the Union– had not been addressed by the Founding Fathers.

In a constitutional system based on the separation of powers, the absence of clarity on so fundamental a matter made for explosive politics.

Lincoln’s Way

When 10% of a rebellious state’s voters had taken an oath of loyalty, the state would be restored to the Union, provided that it approved the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.

The Confederate states rejected Lincoln’s 10% Plan, however, and congressional Republicans proposed a harsher substitute.

The Wade-Davis Bill, passed on July 2, 1864, laid down, as conditions, an oath of allegiance to the Union by a majority of each state’s adult white men; new governments formed only by those who had never borne arms against the North; and permanent disfranchisement of Confederate leaders.

Lincoln’s Way cont.

The Wade-Davis Bill served notice that the congressional Republicans were not about to hand over Reconstruction policy to the president.

Lincoln pocket vetoed the Wade-Davis Bill by leaving it unsigned when Congress adjourned.

Andrew Johnson took the view that Reconstruction was the president’s prerogative. By an accident of timing, he was free to act on his convictions.

Johnson Seizes the Initiative

Loyal to the Union, Johnson refused to leave the Senate when his state seceded. In this, he was utterly alone; no southern colleague joined him.

Lincoln appointed Johnson Tennessee’s military governor.

Tennessee was bitterly divided– Unionist in the east and Rebel in the west.

Johnson’s assignment was to hold the state together, and he did so, with an iron hand.

He was rewarded by being named Lincoln’s running mate in 1864.

Johnson Seizes the Initiative cont.

In May 1865, just a month after Lincoln’s death, Johnson advanced his version of Reconstruction.

He offered amnesty to all Southerners wh0 took the oath of allegiance to the Constitution except for high-ranking Confederate officials.

Johnson appointed provisional governors for the southern states, requiring as conditions for their restoration only that they revoke their ordinances of secession, repudiate their Confederate debts, and ratify the 13th Amendment.

Within months, all the former Confederate states had met Johnson’s terms and had functioning elected governments.

Johnson Seizes the Initiative cont.

The newly seated legislatures moved to restore slavery in all but name.

They enacted laws– known as Black Codes– designed to drive the former slaves back to the plantations by imposing severe penalties on apprenticeship that came close to slavery.

Soon the ex-Confederates, emboldened by Johnson’s indulgence, were filtering back into the halls of power.

The southern states then backed away from the Black Codes, replacing them with regulatory ordinances that were silent on race yet, in practice applied only to blacks.

In March 1865 before adjourning the38th Congress had established the Freedmen’s Bureau to aid ex-slaves during the transition from war to peace. Now in early 1866 Congress voted to extend the Freedmen’s Bureau’s life gave it direct funding for the first time and authorized its agents to investigate mistreatment of blacks.

Acting on Freedom

While Congress debated, emancipated slaves acted on their own ideas about freedom.

Across the South, blacks held mass meetings, paraded, and formed organizations. Topmost among their demands was the right to vote.

No less than their former masters, ex-slaves intended to be actors in the savage drama of Reconstruction.

In Georgia and South Carolina, General William T. Sherman had reserved large coastal tracts for liberated slaves and settled them on forty acre plots.

When the South Carolina planter Thomas Pinckney returned home, his freed slaves told him: “We ain’t going to work here on the land where we were born and what belongs to us”

In early 1866, as planters prepared for a new growing season, a battle took shape over the labor system that would replace slavery. Convinced that blacks needed supervision, planters wanted to retain the gang-labor system of the past, but with wages replacing the food, clothing, and shelter that the slaves had once received. The Freedmen’s Bureau, although watchful against exploitive labor contracts, sided with the planters.

In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, after some kind of dispute with some freedmen whites set fire to their cabins and hanged 24 of the inhabitants---men women and children. The toll of murdered and beaten blacks mounted into untold thousands.

The governments established under Johnson’s plan put the stamp of legality on these efforts to enforce, white supremacy.

CHAPTER 22

The Ordeal of Reconstruction

1865-1877

No Women Voters

The passage of the 3 Reconstruction-era Amendments– the 13th, 14th, and 15th—delighted former abolitionists but deeply disappointed advocates of women’s rights.

Women had played a prominent part in the prewar abolitionist movement and had often pointed out that both women and blacks lacked basic civil rights, especially the crucial right to vote.

Feminist leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had temporarily suspended their own demands and worked wholeheartedly for the cause of black emancipation.

The Woman’s Loyal League had gathered nearly 400,000 signatures on petitions asking Congress to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting slavery.

Now, with the war ended and the 13th Amendment passed, feminist leaders believed that their time had come.

The Realities of Radical Reconstruction in the South

Blacks now had freedom, of a sort. Their friends in Congress had only haltingly and somewhat belatedly secured the franchise for them.

Both Presidents Lincoln and Johnson had proposed to give the ballot gradually to selected blacks who qualified for it through education, property ownership, or military service.

Having gained their right to suffrage, Southern black men seized the initiative and began to organize politically.

Their primary vehicle became the Union League, originally a pro-Union organization based in the North.

Though African American women did not obtain the right ot vote, they too assumed new political roles.

The Realities of Radical Reconstruction in the South cont.

They even showed up at the constitutional conventions held throughout the South in 1867, monitoring the proceedings and participating in informal votes outside the convention halls.

But black men elected as delegates to the state constitutional conventions held the greater political authority.

Though the subsequent elections produced no black governors or majorities in state senates, black political participation expanded exponentially during Reconstruction.

Between 1868 and 1876, 14 black congressmen and 2 black senators, Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, both of Mississippi, served in Washington, D.C. Blacks also served in state governments as lieutenant governors and representatives, and in local governments as mayors, magistrates, sheriffs, and justices of the peace.

The Realities of Radical Reconstruction in the South cont.

The so-called scalawags were Southerners, often former Unionists and Whigs.

The former Confederates accused them, often with wild exaggeration, of plundering the treasuries of the Southern states through their political influence in the radical governments.

The carpetbaggers, on the other hand, were supposedly sleazy Northerners who had packed all their worldly goods into a carpetbag suitcase at war’s end and had come South to seek personal power and profit.

The Realities of Radical Reconstruction in the South cont.

Despite these achievements, graft ran rampant in many “radical” governments. This was especially true in South Carolina and Louisiana, where conscienceless promoters and other pocket-paddlers used politically inexperienced blacks as pawns.

One “thrifty" carpetbag governor in a single year “saved” $100,000 from a slavery of $8,000. Yet this sort of corruption was by no means confined to the South in these postwar years.

The crimes in the Reconstruction governments were no more outrageous than the scams and felonies being perpetrated in the North at the same time, especially in Boss Tweed’s New York.

The Ku Klux Klan

Deeply embittered, some Southern whites resorted to savage measures against “radical” rule.

A number of secret organizations mushroomed forth, the most notorious of which was the “Invisible Empire of the South,” or Ku Klux Klan, founded in Tennessee in 1866.

Be sheeted nightriders, their horses’ hooves muffled.

Such tomfoolery and terror proved partially effective.

Many ex-bondsmen and white “carpetbaggers,” quick to take a hint, shunned the polls.

The Ku Klux Klan cont.

Those stubborn souls who persisted in their “upstart” ways were flogged, mutilated, or even murdered.

Congress, outraged by this night-riding lawlessness, passed the harsh Force Acts of 1870 and 1871.

Among various underhanded schemes were literacy tests, unfairly administered by whites to the advantage of illiterate whites.

In the eyes of white Southerners, the goal of white supremacy fully justified these dishonorable devices.

Johnson Walks the Impeachment Plank

As an initial step, Congress in 1867 passed the Tenure of Office Act– as usual, over Johnson’s veto.

Contrary to precedent, the new law required the president to secure the consent of the Senate before he could remove his appointees once they had been approved by that body.

One purpose was to freeze into the cabinet the secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, a holdover from the Lincoln administration.

Although outwardly loyal to Johnson, he was secretly serving as a spy and informer for the radicals.

A Not-Guilty Verdict for Johnson

“Not Guilty”Several factors shaped the outcome. Fears of creating a destabilizing precedent

played a role, as did principle opposition to abusing the constitutional mechanism of checks and balances.

“The Country is going to the Devil”

The Purchase of Alaska

Johnson’s administration, though largely reduced to a figurehead, achieved its most enduring success in the field of foreign relations.

The Russians by 1867 were in a mood to sell the vast and chilly expanse of land now known as Alaska.

They had already overextended themselves in North America, and they saw that in the likely event of another war with Britain, they probably would lose their defenseless northern province to the sea-dominant British.

The Purchase of Alaska cont.

They preferred the United States to any other purchaser, primarily because they wanted to strengthen further the Republic as a barrier against their ancient enemy, Britain.

In 1867 Secretary of State William Seward, an ardent expansionist, signed a treaty with Russia that transferred Alaska to the United States for the bargain price of $7.2 million. But Seward’s enthusiasm for these frigid wastes was not shared by his ignorant or uninformed countrymen, who jeered at “Seward’s Folly.”

The Purchase of Alaska cont.

Then why did Congress and the American public sanction the purchase? For one thing Russia, alone among the powers, had been conspicuously friendly to the North during the recent Civil War.