Andrew Johnson Reconstruction Plan

10 Key excerpts on "Andrew Johnson Reconstruction Plan"

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  The Reconstruction Era

  Primary Documents on Events from 1865 to 1877

  • Donna L. Dickerson(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R I Johnson's Presidential Reconstruction Plan, 1865-66 ix weeks after assuming office, President Andrew Johnson put for- ward in two proclamations his plan for restoring the South. His Amnesty Proclamation restored all property rights (except for slaves) to most Confederates who would take a loyalty oath. However, he excluded wealthy slaveholders and those who held high offices in the Confederate government or army. Those excluded classes were required to apply for par- dons directly from the president. His second proclamation established a Reconstruction plan for North Carolina, which would be the template for Reconstruction of all other Southern states. He appointed provisional gov- ernors in each state and required states to call constitutional conventions, rewrite prewar constitutions, and nullify secession. Johnson's announcements ended several months of uncertainty about how the South would be treated after the war. Initially, Johnson's presiden- tial Reconstruction plan was greeted favorably in both the North and South as a continuation of Lincoln's desires. It was sufficiently harsh on the lead- ers of the rebellion as well as on the old slavocracy, but it also allowed states great leeway in reorganizing their governments to suit themselves. Many citizens believed that this generous policy would lead to swift restoration of the South and a quick return to normalcy. Johnson declared on several oc- casions that there was no such thing as Reconstruction, believing that the term implied the rebuilding of something that had been torn down. Instead, he preferred to use such terms as "restoration" or "rehabilitation," sending a message that the South would be allowed to return to its former condition— except without slavery—as soon as possible. Southern states were quick to pledge their loyalty to Johnson and to abide by his policy, believing that the work of the Civil War had ended with abolition of slavery.

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  The Enduring Vision

  A History of the American People, Volume 1: To 1877

  • Paul Boyer, Clifford Clark, Karen Halttunen, Joseph Kett(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  This purge of the plantation aristocracy, Johnson said, would benefit “humble men, the peasantry and yeomen of the South, who have been decoyed . . . into rebellion.” Poorer whites would now be in control. Presidential Reconstruction took effect in the summer of 1865, but with unforeseen consequences. Disqualified Southerners applied in droves for par-dons, which Johnson handed out liberally—some thirteen thousand of them. Johnson also dropped plans to punish treason. By the end of 1865, all seven states had created new civil governments that, in effect, restored the status quo from before the war. Confederate army officers and large planters assumed state offices. Former Confederate generals and offi-cials—including Alexander Stephens of Georgia, the former Confederate vice president—won election to Congress. Some states refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment or to repudiate their Confederate debts. Most infuriating to Radical Republicans, all seven states took steps to ensure a landless, dependent black labor force: They passed “black codes” to replace the slave codes, state laws that had regulated slavery. Because Johnson’s plan assured the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, all states guaran-teed the freedmen some basic rights—to marry, own property, make contracts, and testify in court against other blacks—but the codes harshly restricted freedmen’s behavior. Some estab-lished racial segregation in public places; most prohibited racial inter-marriage, jury service by blacks, and court testimony by blacks against whites. All codes included Presidential Reconstruction Andrew Johnson’s plan to par-don ex-Confederate leaders and readmit former Confederate states to the union on lenient terms. “black codes” Laws passed by southern states to limit the rights of freedmen. Radical Republicans in Congress, however, envi-sioned a slower readmission process that would bar even more ex-Confederates from political life.

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  A People and a Nation

  A History of the United States

  • Jane Kamensky, Carol Sheriff, David W. Blight, Howard Chudacoff(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Congressional Reconstruction The process by which the Republican-controlled Congress sought to make the Reconstruction of the ex-Confederate states longer, harsher, and under greater congressional control. Table 14.1 Plans for Reconstruction Compared Johnson’s Plan Radicals’ Plan Fourteenth Amendment Reconstruction Act of 1867 Voting Whites only; high- ranking Confederate leaders must seek pardons Give vote to black males Southern whites may decide but can lose representation if they deny black suffrage Black men gain vote; whites barred from office by Fourteenth Amendment cannot vote while new state governments are being formed Office holding Many prominent Confederates regain power Only loyal white and black males eligible Confederate leaders barred until Congress votes amnesty Fourteenth Amendment in effect Time out of Union Brief Several years; until South is thoroughly democratized Brief 3–5 years after war Other change in southern society Little; gain of power by yeomen not real- ized; emancipation grudgingly accept- ed, but no black civil or political rights Expand education; confiscate land and provide farms for freedmen; expansion of activist federal government Probably slight, depending on enforcement Considerable, depend- ing on action of new state governments Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. CHAPTER 14 Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution | 1865–1877 426 until in 1874 there were only 4,000 in the southern states out- side Texas.

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  Liberty and Union

  A Constitutional History of the United States, volume 1

  • Edgar J. McManus, Tara Helfman, Edgar McManus(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  XIReconstructing the Nation

  “[E]very man, no matter what his race or color; every earthly being who has an immortal soul, has an equal right to justice, honesty, and fair play with every other man; and the law should secure him those rights.”

  — Thaddeus Stevens, in Congress (1867)

  Lincoln’s differences with Congress over Reconstruction flared into political warfare after his assassination in April 1865. His successor, Andrew Johnson, lacked the tact and political skill needed to lead the nation during the difficult postwar years. A Tennessee Democrat and opponent of secession, he had stayed in the Senate when his state seceded. Johnson served with distinction as military governor of Tennessee, and he was nominated as Lincoln’s running mate on the National Union Party ticket in 1864. Republicans felt comfortable with a vice president who had urged Tennesseans to abolish slavery “because in the emancipation of slaves we break down an odious and dangerous aristocracy. I think we are freeing more whites than blacks in Tennessee.” So it came as a shock when Johnson issued an amnesty proclamation in May 1865 pardoning former rebels who took an oath of future allegiance to the United States. The only persons excluded from the offer were high-ranking Confederate officials and persons owning more than $20,000 worth of taxable property. But those excluded from the general amnesty could apply to the president for individual pardons which would be considered separately. At the stroke of a pen, Johnson wiped the slate clean for the vast majority of southerners.

  Johnson’s Plan of Reconstruction

  Johnson’s plan for restoring civil government in the South accompanied his amnesty proclamation. Provisional governors appointed by the president would enroll the loyal voters in every southern state for the election of a state constitutional convention, and all pardoned rebels would be eligible to vote and participate in the process. The reconstructed state would be readmitted to the Union as soon as the new government repudiated the Confederate debt, abolished slavery as a domestic institution, and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. When these conditions had been met, full control over internal affairs would be restored to the state along with the right to representation in Congress. His plan called for getting the South back into the Union quickly without sweeping political or social changes.

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  Liberty and Union

  A Constitutional History of the United States, concise edition

  • Edgar J. McManus, Tara Helfman, Edgar McManus(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Johnson’s plan for restoring civil government in the South accompanied his amnesty proclamation. Provisional governors appointed by the president would enroll the loyal voters in every southern state for the election of a state constitutional convention, and all pardoned rebels would be eligible to vote and participate in the process. The reconstructed state would be readmitted to the Union as soon as the new government repudiated the Confederate debt, abolished slavery as a domestic institution, and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. When these conditions had been met, full control over internal affairs would be restored to the state along with the right to representation in Congress. During the next few months Johnson recognized the reconstructed governments established by Lincoln in Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Virginia. His plan called for getting the South back into the Union quickly without sweeping political or social changes.

  Figure XI.1 Portrait of Andrew Johnson (c. 1855—1865).

  Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-13017

  The Radicals in Congress initially assumed that Johnson sided with them, and that Congress and the president would now work closely together to reconstruct the South. When the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War called on Johnson shortly after the assassination, Senator Wade, its chairman, declared: “Johnson, we have faith in you. By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government.” Johnson’s reply probably reassured the Radicals: “I hold that robbery is a crime; rape is a crime; murder is a crime; treason is a crime and must be punished. Treason must be made infamous and traitors must be impoverished.” A president who compared rebels with rapists and murderers would not likely bring the South back into the Union without major changes.

  But Johnson’s rhetoric did not accurately reflect his political views. The president actually had nothing in common with Republicans whose political agenda called for internal improvements, a national banking system, and high protective tariffs. A Jackson Democrat, he had spent his political life representing the small farmers and poor whites of Tennessee against the wealthy slaveholding interests. His distrust of the latter explains the $20,000 exception in his amnesty proclamation. He remained at heart a states’ rights Democrat opposed to the nationalizing tendencies of the war years. He hoped to restore the Union essentially as it had been before secession but without slavery. Power would be transferred to the small farmers and nonslaveholding whites of the South, but the traditional relationship between the states and the federal government would remain unchanged. Moreover, the political and civil rights of the ex-slaves were matters for the southern states to settle for themselves without federal interference. To make voting rights for blacks a part of Reconstruction struck him as the height of folly.

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  Legacies of Losing in American Politics

  • Jeffrey K. Tulis, Nicole Mellow(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  5

  Radical Republicans in Congress and their supporters were initially optimistic that Johnson would impose an aggressive reconstruction plan on the South, largely owing to a misinterpretation of the intent behind some of his first comments after assuming the presidency (including, for example, his telling a group of Radical congressmen that “treason must be made infamous, and traitors must be impoverished”). Raised in poverty in the mountains of Tennessee, Johnson disliked the white planter elites who dominated southern politics before the war and who had led the rebellion. He had also recently been the target of an assassination attempt. The combination fueled his interest in punishing treason; it did not, as Radicals believed, extend to a principled commitment to Radical ideas.6

  Radical Republicans were quickly disabused of their expectation. Johnson’s first move was to institute a “restoration plan” for the South that was far more lenient than that desired by congressional Republicans. Reminiscent of Lincoln’s assertion of executive authority at the outset of the Civil War, Johnson enacted his plan while Congress was in recess. Because the war was over, Johnson could easily have chosen to reconvene Congress for the purpose of establishing a jointly negotiated postwar agenda. He chose, instead, to preempt it. This decision to claim executive authority and preempt Congress was seen as a usurpation of power that was different from Lincoln’s, precisely because hostilities between the states were over at the time of Johnson’s action. And while Johnson cast his action as temporary, “the Southern States did not view the action of President Johnson as of a temporary character; on the contrary, it had the appearance of being, and it was treated as being, of a permanent character.”7

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  Liberty, Equality, Power

  A History of the American People, Concise Edition

  • John Murrin, Paul Johnson, James McPherson, Alice Fahs(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Recon-struction had achieved the two great objectives inherited from the Civil War: to reincorporate the former Confederate states into the Union, and to accom-plish a transition from slavery to freedom in the South. That transition was marred by the economic inequity of sharecropping and the social injustice of white supremacy. And a third goal of Reconstruction, enforcement of the equal civil and political rights promised in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amend-ments, was betrayed by the Compromise of 1877. In subsequent decades the freed slaves and their descendants suffered repression into segregated second-class citizenship. filibuster Congressional delaying tactic involving lengthy speeches that prevent legislation from being enacted. Q U I C K R E V I E W END OF RECONSTRUCTION • Growing northern weariness with the “ Southern Question ” • Renewal of southern white resistance • Supreme Court limited federal government ’ s enforcement powers • Federal troops removed from South after disputed election of 1876 404 C H A P T E R 1 7 RECONSTRUCTION, 1863 – 1877 Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-300 CHAPTER REVIEW 405 C H A P T E R R E V I E W Review Questions 1. What were the positions of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson and of moderate and radical Repub-licans in Congress on the issues of restoring the South to the Union and protecting the rights of freed slaves? 2. Why was Andrew Johnson impeached? Why was he acquitted? 3. What were the achievements of Reconstruction? What were its failures? 4. Why did a majority of the northern people and their political leaders turn against continued federal involvement in southern Reconstruction in the 1870s? Critical Thinking Questions 1. The two main goals of Reconstruction were to bring the former Confederate states back into the Union and to ensure the equal citizenship and rights of the former slaves.

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  High Crimes and Misdemeanors

  A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump

  • Frank O. Bowman III(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  For some, particularly southerners themselves, it conveyed merely a literal physical rebuilding with minimal social modification. For others, true reconstruction required refashioning southern society along lines less parochial and more national, less aristocratic and racialist and more egalitarian, less agrarian and more industrial and mercantile than that which existed before the war. the failure of “presidential reconstruction” Had it not been for John Wilkes Booth, Andrew Johnson’s views on the post-Civil War world would now be only a matter of antiquarian curiosity. But Booth hit what he aimed at and on April 15, 1865, Johnson’s opinions became central. Indeed, in one way at least they were more central then than they would be now. Article 1 of the constitution as it then existed provided that Congress must meet once a year and that it should convene on the first Monday in December unless otherwise provided. 51 In 1865, Congress held a brief special session in March, but then adjourned until December. 52 Lee surrendered in early April and hostilities would sputter on in odd spots through the summer, but by early June the Union had total military control of the entire Confederacy. 53 Therefore, in the first six months of the peace, Congress was not an active participant in the reconstruction and reintegration of the defeated South. The Constitution decrees that a president “may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses or either of them.” 54 It would be hard to imagine an occasion more extraordinary than the end of a four- year civil war, and Johnson could have called Congress back into session and made it a partner in a joint project of postwar rebuilding. He did not. The body that mattered in those crucial first months was the Union Army that held the ground and administered the occupied South, and with Lincoln’s death it passed into the command of Andrew Johnson.

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  The American Pageant, Volume II

  • David Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  He was intelligent, able, forceful, and gifted with homespun honesty. Steadfastly devoted to duty and to the people, he was a dogmatic champion of states’ rights and the Constitution. He would often present a copy of the document to visitors, and he was buried with one as a pillow. Yet the man who had raised himself from the tailor’s bench to the president’s chair was a misfit. A Southerner who did not understand the North, a Ten-nessean who had earned the distrust of the South, a Democrat who had never been accepted by the Re-publicans, a president who had never been elected to the office, he was not at home in a Republican White House. Hotheaded, contentious, and stubborn, he was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. A Reconstruction policy devised by angels might well have failed in his tactless hands. • 21-5 Presidential Reconstruction Even before the shooting war had ended, the political war over Reconstruction had begun. Abraham Lincoln believed that the Southern states had never legally withdrawn from the Union. Their formal restoration to the Union would therefore be relatively simple. Accordingly, Lincoln in 1863 proclaimed his “10 percent” Reconstruction plan . It decreed that a state could be reintegrated into the Union when the equivalent of at least 10 percent of its total voters in the presidential election of 1860 had taken an oath of allegiance to the United States and pledged to abide by emancipation. The next step would be formal erection of a state government. Lincoln would then recognize the purified regime. Lincoln’s proclamation provoked a sharp reaction in Congress, where Republicans feared the restoration of the planter aristocracy to power and the possible re-enslavement of blacks. Republicans therefore rammed through Congress in 1864 the Wade-Davis Bill .

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  Shapers of the Great Debate on the Civil War

  A Biographical Dictionary

  • Dan Monroe, Bruce Tap(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Instead, it would do well to simply allow the people to decide whether they would or would not have slavery. "It is for the people and not the Congress of the United States to decide," Johnson told his Senate colleagues. For Johnson, as for Douglas, the nation could exist half free and half slave. To break up the Union for either the defense of slavery or its abolition made little sense. 31 Reconstruction "General, there is no such thing as reconstruction," Johnson told John A. Logan in an interview in May 1865. "These states have not gone out of the Union, therefore, reconstruction is unnecessary." This simple state- ment provides the pivotal clue to understanding the debate over Recon- struction between Andrew Johnson and his Republican antagonists. What confused many Republican radicals were the numerous statements John- son made at the end of the war that suggested a desire to impose a pun- ishing peace on the rebellious states. "But, I say treason is a crime—the highest crime known to the law," Johnson told a delegation of Pennsylva- nians led by Simon Cameron. The pivotal mistake here was to interpret Johnson's heartfelt desire to punish some of the principal leaders of the re- bellion as a desire to affect a radical social and political revolution in the South—something that offended the conservative, Jacksonian instincts of the president. Throughout the struggle over Reconstruction, Johnson be- lieved that he represented the views of Lincoln. "The Executive (my pred- ecessor as well as myself) and the heads of all the Departments have uniformly acted upon the principle that the Union is not only undissolved, but indissoluble." 32 Many Republicans mistook Johnson's transformation on the emancipa- tion issue during the war as an indication that he might be willing to en- tertain basic social and political rights for newly freed slaves, perhaps even suffrage.

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