A More Perfect Union? 1865-77 » Andrew Johnson and the Reconstruction Act of 1867

Johnson takes over

The Civil War ended in April 1865 with the Union victorious. The South was in ruins, four million enslaved people were free, and nobody agreed how the defeated states should come back into the country. This rebuilding is called Reconstruction. Then, on 14 April 1865, Abraham Lincoln was shot. He died the next morning, and his vice-president, Andrew Johnson, became president.

Johnson was a self-taught tailor from Tennessee who had risen to be a senator. He was the only Southern senator who refused to leave the Senate when his state seceded, so the North trusted him as a loyal Unionist. He also disliked the rich planters who had led the South into war. But Johnson was a Southern Democrat who accepted that slavery was over without believing in equality for black people. He opposed black men getting the vote.

Key terms:

• Reconstruction: the years after the Civil War when the North and South argued over, and carried out, plans to bring the Southern states back into the Union and rebuild the South.
• Pardon: an official forgiveness for a crime, which here gave former rebels back their rights and property.
• Radical Republicans: members of Congress, such as Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, who wanted tough terms for the South and full rights for freed black people.
• Veto: the president's power to refuse to sign a law. Congress can overrule a veto if two-thirds of both houses vote again for the law.
• Impeachment: a charge of serious wrongdoing against a president, brought by the House of Representatives and tried by the Senate.
• Military district: an area of the South ruled by an army general during Reconstruction.

Johnson's lenient plan, 1865

Congress was not meeting between the spring and December 1865, so Johnson acted alone. He wanted the Southern states back in the Union quickly. On 29 May 1865 he offered a pardon to most Southerners who took an oath of loyalty to the United States. Only a few groups, such as top Confederate leaders and men with property worth more than $20,000, had to ask him for a personal pardon, and he granted many of them.

He then appointed a governor for each Southern state and told it to hold a convention. To rejoin, a state had to cancel its secession, abolish slavery and refuse to pay the Confederacy's debts. It did not have to give black men the vote.

The results shocked many Northerners. Southern states chose men who had led the Confederacy to represent them in Congress. Georgia's legislature picked Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy's former vice-president, as a US senator. Southern states also passed laws to keep black people under tight control (these are covered in the lesson on the Freedmen's Bureau and the Black Codes). When Congress met in December 1865, it refused to let the newly chosen Southern members take their seats.

Johnson against Congress

Many Republicans in Congress thought the South had been let off too lightly. The Radical Republicans wanted the Southern states to protect black people's rights before they came back. Moderate Republicans did not want to go as far as the Radicals, but they too were angry at the way Johnson had acted without them.

The quarrel grew in 1866. Johnson used his veto against Republican laws to protect freed people, and in 1866 Congress overruled him and passed the Civil Rights Act (see the lesson on the Civil Rights Acts and the Amendments). That was a sign of how little the president now controlled Congress. In the autumn 1866 elections, voters in the North backed Congress, and Republicans won more than two-thirds of the seats in both houses. That gave Congress enough votes to overrule any veto Johnson made.

The Reconstruction Act of 1867

With its big majority, Congress took charge. On 2 March 1867 it passed the First Reconstruction Act over Johnson's veto. Tennessee had already rejoined, so the Act applied to the other ten former Confederate states. It made these changes:

• The ten states were divided into five military districts, each ruled by a Union general with soldiers to keep order.
• Each state had to write a new state constitution. All adult men, black and white, could vote for the delegates, but leading ex-Confederates were kept out.
• The new constitutions had to give black men the vote.
• Each state had to approve the 14th Amendment, which is covered in the lesson on the Civil Rights Acts and the Amendments.

Once a state had done all this, Congress would let it back into the Union. Several states were readmitted in 1868, and by 1870 all were back. Black men voted in large numbers for the first time in the South. In effect, the Act took Reconstruction out of the president's hands and put Congress and the army in control.

Johnson's impeachment, 1868

On the same day as the Reconstruction Act, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act. It said the president could not dismiss important officials without the Senate's approval. The aim was to protect Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, who backed the Radicals and was in charge of the army that enforced Reconstruction. In February 1868 Johnson dismissed Stanton anyway.

The House of Representatives responded by impeaching Johnson on 24 February 1868. He was the first president ever impeached. The Senate held his trial in the spring. Conviction needed two-thirds of senators, which was 36 votes. On the main charge the vote was 35 to 19. Johnson was found not guilty by a single vote, mainly because some Republicans thought removing a president over a political quarrel was dangerous.

Johnson stayed in office until March 1869, but his power over Reconstruction was gone. The Reconstruction Act stayed in force.

Change and continuity

This lesson links to the big themes of the unit. Reconstruction showed the argument about the relationship of the states to the whole being settled: the Southern states were brought back under the control of the federal government, with soldiers on their soil. It also showed government policy changing sharply, from Lincoln's and Johnson's quick return to a tougher Congress plan. What changed was that black men gained the vote and were no longer ruled as slaves. What stayed the same was the Southern white leaders' wish to keep control, and many white Southerners kept resisting.

Exam-style question

Explain TWO ways in which the rebuilding of the Southern states under Johnson's plan in 1865 was different from the rebuilding under the Reconstruction Act of 1867. [6 marks]