Presidential Reconstruction

10 Key excerpts on "Presidential Reconstruction"

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  A People and a Nation, Volume I: to 1877

  • Jane Kamensky, Carol Sheriff, David W. Blight, Howard Chudacoff(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Reconstruction would bring revolutionary circum- stances, but revolutions can also go backward. The Civil War and its aftermath wrought unprecedented changes in American society, law, and politics, but the underlying realities of economic power, racism, and judicial conserva- tism limited Reconstruction’s revolutionary potential. As never before, the nation had to determine the nature of federal-state relations, whether confiscated land could be redistributed, and how to bring justice to both freedpeople and aggrieved white southerners whose property and lives had been devastated. Americans were about to try to re- define citizenship, fundamental civil and political rights, and equality before law against unrelenting opposition. A disunited country faced the harrowing challenge of psycho- logical healing from a bloody and fratricidal war. How they would negotiate the tangled relationship between healing and justice would determine the fate of Reconstruction. Nowhere was the turmoil of Reconstruction more evi- dent than in national politics. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, fought bitterly with Congress over the shaping of Reconstruction policies. Although a southerner, Johnson had always been a foe of the South’s wealthy planters, and his first acts as president suggested that he would be tough on “traitors.” Before the end of 1865, however, Johnson’s policies changed direction, and he became the protector of white southern interests. Johnson imagined a lenient and rapid “restoration” of the South to the Union rather than the funda- mental “reconstruction” that Republican congressmen favored. Between 1866 and 1868, the president and the Republican leadership in Congress engaged in a bitter power struggle over how to put the United States back together again. Before the struggle ceased, Con- gress had impeached the president, enfranchised freed- men, and given them a role in reconstructing the South.

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  Interpreting American History: Reconstruction

  • John David Smith(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • The Kent State University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER TWO

  Presidential Reconstruction

  KEVIN ADAMS

  Formal studies of Presidential Reconstruction—that is, the period of federal Reconstruction policy that preceded the advent of Congressional or Radical Reconstruction in 1867—have been rare in recent years, a neglect that becomes especially clear when considering the series of impressive studies exploring Reconstruction’s final stages that appeared in the first decade of the twentieth-first century.1 Yet even a cursory glance at the recent literature makes it quite clear that historians have not ignored the crucial timespan between the Emancipation Proclamation and the commencement of Congressional Reconstruction with the seating of the Fortieth Congress’s Republican supermajority in the spring of 1867. Indeed, works almost too numerous to list constitute this past generation’s contribution to historical knowledge concerning the fraught transition from war to peace in the former Confederacy.2 This outpouring of research has done a marvelous job of exploring the nuances of the time span that constituted Presidential Reconstruction, but remarkably few of these studies have attempted to say very much about Presidential Reconstruction itself.

  In large part, this development reflects the evolution of the historical profession since debates over Presidential Reconstruction animated historians of the United States some fifty years ago. As methodological trends favoring studies devoted to sweeping sociocultural constructs (for example, the free labor ideology), specific places, or particular (often marginalized) social groups became more standard, fewer and fewer historians examined Presidential Reconstruction from the perspective of policy formulation or implementation.3 Not even the resurgence of political history, most evident in the analyses of American state power and institutional development produced by historians, political scientists, and sociologists working in the thriving subfield of American Political Development, has prompted a reconsideration of Reconstruction. Leading works in this field have either dismissed Reconstruction as a “decidedly uncharacteristic period” comprised of “sufficiently peculiar” circumstances to justify passing it by or have portrayed Reconstruction as a moment whose revolutionary potential “was tightly circumscribed” by conservative notions of state power.4

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  U. S. History

  • P. Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, Paul Vickery, Sylvie Waskiewicz(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Openstax

    (Publisher)

  The South, which had experienced catastrophic losses during the conflict, was reduced to political dependence and economic destitution. This humiliating condition led many southern whites to vigorously contest Union efforts to transform the South’s racial, economic, and social landscape. Supporters of equality grew increasingly dismayed at Reconstruction’s failure to undo the old system, which further compounded the staggering regional and racial inequalities in the United States. Chapter 16 | The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 451 16.1 Restoring the Union By the end of this section, you will be able to: • Describe Lincoln’s plan to restore the Union at the end of the Civil War • Discuss the tenets of Radical Republicanism • Analyze the success or failure of the Thirteenth Amendment The end of the Civil War saw the beginning of the Reconstruction era, when former rebel Southern states were integrated back into the Union. President Lincoln moved quickly to achieve the war’s ultimate goal: reunification of the country. He proposed a generous and non-punitive plan to return the former Confederate states speedily to the United States, but some Republicans in Congress protested, considering the president’s plan too lenient to the rebel states that had torn the country apart. The greatest flaw of Lincoln’s plan, according to this view, was that it appeared to forgive traitors instead of guaranteeing civil rights to former slaves. President Lincoln oversaw the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, but he did not live to see its ratification. THE PRESIDENT’S PLAN From the outset of the rebellion in 1861, Lincoln’s overriding goal had been to bring the Southern states quickly back into the fold in order to restore the Union (Figure 16.3). In early December 1863, the president began the process of reunification by unveiling a three-part proposal known as the ten percent plan that outlined how the states would return.

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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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  A House Divided

  The Civil War and Nineteenth-Century America

  • Jonathan Wells(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  11 Reconstruction Begins Topics Covered in this Chapter:

  • ■ African Americans and the Freedmen’s Bureau After the War
  • ■ Andrew Johnson and Presidential Reconstruction
  • ■ Politics and Elections
  • ■ Congressional Reconstruction, 1866–1872
  • ■ Johnson’s Impeachment
  • ■ White Southern Retrenchment

  Introduction

  The end of the Civil War settled key questions that had been vexing the nation since its inception. Slavery, an American institution since the earliest days of Virginia‘s Jamestown colony, would no longer be permitted. Although the effects of bondage would last for generations, and though the end of slavery did not mean the end of racism or the establishment of racial equality in either the North or the South, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ensured that slavery could no longer haunt the Republic. Yet the end of the war also meant that four million freedpeople now needed protection, food, shelter, education, and work. Much of Reconstruction, the period between 1865 and 1877, would be devoted to assessing and trying to meet the needs of the newly freed African Americans. The Freedmen‘s Bureau, the American Missionary Association, and thousands of northern “carpetbaggers” (a derisive term southern whites used for northerners who moved to the South) worked hard to provide for the freedpeople. Formerly enslaved men and women also worked tirelessly to take action themselves. Thousands of African Americans across the South joined mutual aid societies, established schools, and formed organizations of all kinds to ease the transition to freedom.

  But the need was great, and so was white southern resentment at northern interference in their region, although many white southerners saw the end of the war as the chance to remake the South. Thousands of white southerners joined the Republican Party and tried to work toward a New South without slavery; and for a time it appeared that southern Republicans, both white and black, might indeed be able to put the region on a different path, one that was not free of racism or social injustice but perhaps a New South that would move in the direction of a more progressive economy and society. It was not to be. Just as congressional Republicans determined to remake the South, so too did white southern political leaders dig in their heels to keep the region under white control. So while the war ended long-standing debates about the legitimacy of slavery, profound questions and issues remained: What role would the millions of former slaves play in a reconstructed Union? Would blacks and whites be able to live and work peacefully in the same nation? How much would racism undermine the progress of freedpeople? Would the former slaves be able to vote and enjoy the full civil rights of white citizens?

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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)

  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 of 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 of 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 that 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. 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.

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  Reconstruction in the United States

  An Annotated Bibliography

  • David Lincove(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Foner concentrates on class differences but not in the context of revolutionary class stmggle. 112. Jones, Robert H. Disrupted Decades: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973. 543p. Bibl. Ills. Maps. Jones believes that Reconstmction was unsuccessful because it failed to secure a promising future for American blacks. Politics, compromise, business, white opposition, and judicial decisions broke down the promise of emancipation and reform. (See also Jones' Fields of Conflict: The Civil War and Reconstruction in America, Krieger, 1998.) 113. Kennedy, Stetson. After Appomatox: How the South Won the War. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995. 321p. Bibl. Ills. Although the South was defeated in war, it won the peace by vigorously refusing to change its racist attitudes and successfully convincing the North that the two regions could get along fine based on their mutually accepted notions of white supremacy. The result of the white South's violent opposition to Reconstmction was the vimtal restoration of the antebellum South as far as blacks were concerned. Kennedy describes the tme nature of Reconstmction and the "Big Lie" taught by white Americans about the era. 114. Johnson, Ludwell H. Division and Reunion: America 1848-1877. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978. 301p. Bibl. In his coverage of both wartime and postwar Reconstmction, Johnson is partial to the restrained, pragmatic approach of Lincoln, and he is critical of the Republican governments in the South due to their corruption and manipulation of black voters. He explains that the forced changes implemented in the South by congressional Radicals were responsible for violence and contributed to postwar sectional animosity that remained for decades. 115. Killian, Lewis M. "The Ambivalent Position of the Negro in the South 1867-1900." Negro History Bulletin 23 (January 1960): 81-86.

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  Race and Reunion

  The Civil War in American Memory

  • David W. Blight, David W. BLIGHT(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  Commercial, to allow any level of soldiers’ mutual sentiment to “put the hands of the dial back a few years.” Reconstruction as reconciliation, a pro-cess already latent in the postwar culture, was not yet politically acceptable. The Cincinnati editor captured the stakes of the 1868 election: “recognizing the citizenship of all the people of the United States . . . and lodging in the Constitution other results growing out of the conºict of arms.” 15 Within a decade or so, however, soldiers’ memories profoundly inºuenced political af-fairs and helped forge a level of popular forgetting that enabled the Rosecrans-Lee script for reconciliation to reach a new consensus. Grant’s election victory in 1868 gave Republicans an unwarranted sense of permanence and optimism. Especially with the passage in February 1869 of the Fifteenth Amendment (declaring the right to vote regardless of race, but not outlawing qualiªcation tests), Northern Republicans seemed ready to de-clare Reconstruction over. In April 1869, Henry Adams wrote that Recon-struction, due to Southern acquiescence in the election results as well as to a growing prosperity, “has lost much of its old prominence in politics.” In the aftermath of the election, Republicans felt released to engage in triumphal retrospection. According to Greeley in the New York Tribune, all the issues of the war—the permanence of the Union, black freedom, and equal civil and political rights—were “settled forever by the election of Grant.” The Chris-tian Recorder celebrated Grant’s election as the “day of burial” not only for “slavery . . . , treason,” and “the doctrine of State Rights,” but “of that, which like a demon has vexed the nation more than all these, the burial of the demon of American prejudice against the negro.” 16 Given the strong belief in America that the solutions to all problems are essentially political, such faith in the doctrine of guaranteed rights before law is understandable in 1868–69.

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  We the People

  • Bruce Ackerman(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  Both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments were revolutionary reforms, committing the national government to intervene when the states trampled upon newly deªned rights that adhered to Americans as Americans. Such strong afªrmations of nationhood proved to be un-achievable within the medium of an Article Five partnership with the states. How, then, were the Unionists to proceed? Like the Federalists before them, they were unwilling to allow the state-centered medium to discredit their vision of a “more perfect presidential leadership 121 Union.” At the same time, they were unwilling and unable to impose their evolving vision by military ªat. As at the Founding, Reconstruc-tion would emerge only after it had been vigorously tested through a higher lawmaking system that provided opponents with ample oppor-tunities to mobilize their political forces in the country. The difference between the Founding and Reconstruction lies in the institutions used by the Unionists to generate consent. To put my thesis in a single line: rather than calling a second Philadelphia convention, the Unionists adapted the separation of powers between Congress, President, and Court as a great new engine for reªning the constitutional will of the American people. In retrospect, this development may be seen as an organic response by the constitutional system. Long before the Civil War, the separation of powers had been thoroughly entrenched in normal democratic government, providing all political participants with familiar patterns of engagement. What changed in 1860 is not the separation of pow-ers, but the national political agenda. Before Lincoln’s election, gov-ernment was dominated by leaders who tried to defuse the slavery issue through a series of compromises.

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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)

  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 434 the world, especially in the Caribbean. This brand of liberal imperialism mixed with the pursuit of commerce and naval coaling stations, animated American expansion for the rest of the century. Seward and his successor, Hamilton Fish, also resolved troubling Civil War grievances against Great Britain. Through diplomacy they arranged a financial settlement of claims on Britain for damage done by the Alabama and other cruisers built in England and sold to the Confederacy. They recognized that sectional reconciliation in Reconstruction America would serve new foreign ambitions. 14-6g Judicial Retreat from Reconstruction Meanwhile, the Supreme Court played a major part in the northern retreat from Reconstruction. During the Civil War, the Court had been cautious and inactive. Reaction to the Dred Scott decision (1857) had been so vehement, and the Union’s wartime emergency so great, that the Court had avoided interference with government actions. The justices breathed a collective sigh of relief, for example, when legal West reinforced the new nationalism and the reconciliation of North and South based on a resurgent white supremacy. 14-6f Foreign Expansion Following the Civil War, pressure for expansion reemerged, and in 1867 Secretary of State William H. Seward arranged a vast addition of territory to the national domain through the purchase of Alaska from Russia (see Chapter 19). Oppo- nents ridiculed Seward’s $7.2 million venture, calling Alaska “Frigidia,” “the Polar Bear Garden,” and “Walrussia.” But Seward convinced important congressmen of Alaska’s eco- nomic potential, and other lawmakers favored the dawning of friendship with Russia. Also in 1867, the United States took control of the Midway Islands, a thousand miles northwest of Hawai’i.

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