Unto a Good Land: A History of the American People, Volume 2: From 1865

By David Edwin Harrell, Edwin S. Gaustad, John B. Boles and Sally Foreman Griffith

Introducing a New U.S. History Text That Takes Religion Seriously

Unto a Good Land offers a distinctive narrative history of the American people -- from the first contacts between Europeans and North America's native inhabitants, through the creation of a modern nation, to the 2004 presidential election. Written by a team of highly regarded historians, this textbook shows how grasping the uniqueness of the "American experiment" depends on understanding not only social, cultural, political, and economic factors but also the role that religion has played in shaping U. S. history.

While most United States history textbooks in recent decades have expanded their coverage of social and cultural history, they still tend to shortchange the role of religious ideas, practices, and movements in the American past. Unto a Good Land restores the balance by giving religion its appropriate place in the story.

This readable and teachable text also features a full complement of maps, historical illustrations, and "In Their Own Words" sidebars with excerpts from primary source documents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Aug 23, 2005
• ISBN: 9781467425537

David Edwin Harrell

 David Edwin Harrell Jr. (1930–2021) was an American historian and the Daniel F. Breeden Eminent Scholar at Auburn University. He published several books on American religious history, including the two-volume Social History of the Disciples of Christ and such pioneering studies of the Pentecostal and charismatic movements as All Things Are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America and Oral Roberts: An American Life. He also coedited a series entitled Religion and American Culture by the University of Alabama Press. A respected authority on American history, religion, and politics, Harrell appeared on such TV news programs as Good Morning America, Nightline, and CNN News, and he was quoted in Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, The Economist, and The Nation.

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16

Reconstruction and the New South

Chapter 16 at a Glance

Wartime Reconstruction

The Thirteenth Amendment

Andrew Johnson and Restoration

A Defiant South

The First Congressional Reconstruction Plan

The Fourteenth Amendment

The Second Congressional Reconstruction Plan

The Impeachment of Johnson

The Fifteenth Amendment

The Supreme Court and Reconstruction

Forming Reconstruction Governments in the South

The New Southern Electorate

Republican Governments in Action

White Violence

The Disputed Election of 1876

Democratic Governments in a Redeemed South

The Populist Challenge and the End of Black Voting

The Rise of Jim Crow

The Supreme Court and Jim Crow

Black Exertions for Freedom

The Church

The School

Booker T. Washington and Self-Help

Land and Labor

The New South Promise

Conclusion: The South at Century’s End

THE WAR WAS over, but no one yet knew what kind of Union had been saved by blood and arms. Clearly the United States of 1865 differed in fundamental ways from that of 1861. Slavery had died so that the Union might live. Many northerners also had gained new confidence in the latent power of the nation, and like Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg and in other public addresses, now spoke of the United States in the singular rather than the plural. So, too, the way the Union had won reconfirmed the vitality of democratic processes and institutions, not only in defeating secession, which Lincoln had properly called the antithesis of democracy, but also in the fact that in the North elections and party politics had continued uninterrupted during the war. To those northerners who had made The Battle Hymn of the Republic their anthem, victory also reaffirmed their belief in America as a land chosen by God—how else explain, they asked, the trial by fire that led to the promise of a new birth of freedom? Such experiences also fostered hope that, as Lincoln had prayed in his second inaugural address, in March 1865, the nation might finish its task With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right. But no one in 1865 quite knew how such confidence and conviction would bring seceded states back into the fold while securing the newly won freedom of the emancipated slaves, the Republican wartime legislation promoting westward expansion, education, and economic growth, and the sense of common purpose among different people the war had encouraged (political, ethnic, and racial partisanship notwithstanding). On such questions hung the meaning of the war—and the fate of the republic.

WARTIME RECONSTRUCTION

Questions about reconstructing the South began before the war was over. The emancipation of the slaves meant that Union victory would bring fundamental social and political changes to a defeated South. The days of plantation slavery were past, gone with the wind. But the scope of those changes remained unclear during the war. The need to win the war overrode considerations about building a postwar society. Until Union victory was assured, Reconstruction remained largely an instrument of military policy, a way to gain support for the Union and emancipation and undermine the Confederacy. As long as military exigency drove Reconstruction policy, the president held the initiative in his capacity as commander in chief, but in 1864, with Confederates in retreat across a broad front, Congress sought a larger role.

For two years, President Lincoln had tried to nurture Unionism in those areas of the South that came under federal control. In the Border States, western Virginia (which became the separate state of West Virginia in 1863), and occupied parts of Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, and elsewhere, Lincoln used political patronage and advice in an effort to move southerners toward accepting the end of slavery and making friendly governments. These were, in Lincoln’s words, experiments adapted to the circumstances of each state rather than mandates or a uniform policy. As Republican James G. Blaine observed, Mr. Lincoln had no fixed plan for the reconstruction of the States.

On December 8, 1863, President Lincoln laid out his first comprehensive proposal for Reconstruction when he issued his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction. Lincoln’s proclamation established a process whereby a seceded state might return to the Union. It proposed that when, in any such state, the number of qualified voters taking an oath of allegiance to the Union and pledging to accept the abolition of slavery equaled 10 percent of the number of people in that state who had voted in the 1860 presidential election, that minority might create a new state government. The constitution of that government had to be republican in form (as required in the Constitution), abolish slavery, and provide for African American education. Upon completion of these terms, the president would recognize the new civil government.

Lincoln hoped a conciliatory approach would win over former Whigs and southern Unionists as a way to shorten the war and lay the groundwork for a Republican Party in the South. Thinking that we would sooner have the chicken by hatching than smashing the egg, Lincoln foreswore a punitive policy. To be sure, his Ten Percent Plan, as it became known, prohibited high-ranking Confederate civil and military officers, persons who had resigned from Congress or federal commissions, and persons who had mistreated Union prisoners of war from taking the loyalty oath, but it did not exclude them from public life once loyal governments had been established and did allow them to regain their full citizenship with a presidential pardon. To those who took loyalty oaths and received presidential pardons, Lincoln also promised a restoration of all property, except slaves or confiscated property already transferred to third parties, and even hinted that some compensation for slave property might be possible. On the other side, he ruled out any blanket enfranchisement of former slaves, although in one instance he later suggested to the Unionist governor of Louisiana, where a large class of educated free blacks lived, that it would be good politics generally to enfranchise the very intelligent [black men] and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. But Lincoln did not push the idea lest he alienate the whites he was courting.

Lincoln’s plan proved too radical for conservatives and too conservative for radicals. The first signs of opposition came from states unaffected by Lincoln’s proclamation—West Virginia and the four slave states that stayed in the Union. There, slaveholders clung to their human property even after its liberation was evident, and Unionists, many of them nonslaveholders resentful of slaveholders’ antebellum political and economic dominance, demanded more power and a proscription of former Confederates. One of the first political lessons of the war was that Reconstruction would require a difficult balancing act that had to include the competing interests of former slaves, former slaveholders, and white small farmers in each state.

Meanwhile, abolitionists bristled at the easy terms Lincoln promised for readmission and especially for failing to make explicit provisions for black enfranchisement and civil rights. Lincoln’s plan, said abolitionist Wendell Phillips, frees the slave and ignores the negro. But, with the war in doubt, most Radical Republicans in Congress held their criticism until they saw the plan in operation. Lincoln’s experiments, meanwhile, failed to rally much white Unionist support or to protect blacks. By summer 1864 such Radicals as Congressman George W. Julian and Senator Charles Sumner had seen enough of southerners’ intransigence and Lincoln’s Reconstruction in practice. They demanded more rigorous terms for readmission. Also, as Union armies advanced, so, too, did Congress’s interest in establishing Reconstruction policy. The Congress was no longer willing to concede that function to the president’s prerogative alone. Whereas Lincoln had exercised his authority in emancipating the slaves and issuing his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction largely under his war-making power, the Congress now insisted on a preeminent role because of its constitutional responsibility to ensure republican government in the states.

Freed Slaves This group of newly freed slaves was photographed in Richmond immediately after the war. Some of the ruins of the city after the disastrous fire, which broke out at the time of its fall to the Union army, are visible in the background. Freed slaves often tested their liberty by seeking jobs for wages, marrying, looking for relatives and spouses who had been separated by sale, or simply moving about and socializing as they pleased—all forbidden actions while they had been in bondage.

In July 1864, Congress passed the Wade-Davis Bill, which summed up the minimum terms most Republicans, and likely the majority of northerners, demanded of former Confederate states for readmission to the Union. Whatever differences Republicans had among themselves over matters of the tariff, banking, and other policies, they were united in their belief that Reconstruction must give southern Unionists the upper hand in establishing new governments in the former Confederate states, that the Republican Party should get a fair chance to organize in the South, and that the abolition of slavery and the repudiation of secession should be accepted as facts. On those matters, Lincoln and his party agreed. Radical Republicans wanted more. They also pressed for assurances that the former planter class would not return to power and that the newly freed slaves (called freedmen) would be secure in their basic civil rights. Arguing variously that the seceded states had committed state suicide or should be treated as conquered provinces, the Radicals insisted that the former Confederate states would be readmitted on such terms as Congress established. Radicals determined to slow the readmission process until they had secured their objectives.

The Wade-Davis Bill spoke to such concerns by providing that each former Confederate state would be ruled by a military governor until it could be organized under a two-stage process of oath-taking and constitution-making. Under the congressional plan, no state could begin the Reconstruction process until all resistance to the Union had ceased there and a majority of eligible voters in that state took an oath of allegiance to the Union. At that point, only those southern whites who swore an iron-clad oath that they had never voluntarily aided or supported the Confederacy could vote for delegates to a state constitutional convention. Once convened, such a convention had to repeal secession, repudiate all debts incurred by the Confederate government, and abolish slavery. The Wade-Davis Bill guaranteed blacks equality before the law but was silent on African American suffrage and made no provision for either education or land for the freedmen.

Lincoln pocket-vetoed the Wade-Davis Bill,¹ claiming he did not want to be bound to one policy, though he added that any loyal state might still choose to accept it. None did. The Republican-controlled Congress, in turn, refused to accept the governments formed under Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan, and several Radicals blasted him for overstepping his authority. The president and Congress stood at loggerheads. But, with the war all but over, Lincoln suggested in cabinet meetings that he might accept more demanding terms for readmission. On April 11, 1865, in what became known as his last speech, he gave a qualified endorsement of limited black suffrage. He also acknowledged that Reconstruction would be fraught with great difficulty, because southerners remained disorganized and discordant while northerners disagreed as to the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction. Four days later he was dead.

Inline-image The Thirteenth Amendment

While Lincoln and the Radicals differed over the pace and punitiveness of Reconstruction, they did agree that the abolition of slavery had to rest on more secure constitutional footing than the Emancipation Proclamation and wartime confiscation acts. Lincoln strongly supported an amendment that would definitively end slavery everywhere. In January 1865, amid shouting and jubilation during which some congressmen wept like children, Congress finally approved such an amendment and sent it to the states for ratification, which was achieved in December 1865. In one sentence, the Thirteenth Amendment did away with an institution that had existed since the dawn of the republic and had cost untold misery to millions. In its second sentence the amendment did more by authorizing Congress to have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. Therein lay the concept of positive liberty that some abolitionists, Radical Republicans, and even Lincoln had claimed was government’s responsibility. Where the Founding Fathers and most nineteenth-century Americans had viewed the relationship of liberty and government in negative terms—that is, government had to be kept from encroaching on liberty—wartime emancipation had shown that government might expand freedom. How government might do so—and for many detractors, whether government ought to do so—became the burning political question of Reconstruction, and one that has survived to this day.

For some, the Thirteenth Amendment settled the question of the age. In 1865 abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called on the American Anti-Slavery Society to disband because its work was done; thank God, he exulted, the vocation of abolitionist is ended. Others disagreed. Most abolitionists and Radical Republicans pointed to much work left undone, especially the need to guarantee the freedmen equal rights before the law and the franchise. As Frederick Douglass warned, Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot. The politics of Reconstruction now superseded the moral issue of slavery.

The assumed power of the Thirteenth Amendment itself remained more a promise than a recognized constitutional and political principle. Did the amendment confer citizenship on African Americans and effect a constitutional revolution by bringing a reunited nation under one law impartial over all, as some Radicals claimed? Did it demand special efforts to lift the ex-slaves to equality? Or did it merely end the institution of slavery and leave the freedmen to their fate? And what was government’s proper role in securing rights during peacetime? Although Radicals believed that the nation, as the custodian of freedom, required more strength, most northerners, including many reformers, who had accepted an expansion of federal governmental authority in order to save the Union expected that authority to shrink when the troops came home. Laissez-faire principles, after all, still governed American thought. So, too, from some blacks’ perspective, a dependency on government and white benefactors would limit blacks’ freedom and likely incite a white backlash if blacks were seen as wards of the state. Frederick Douglass thus answered the question of what government should do for the ex-slave by saying, Do nothing…. Give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! He believed that with the ballot and basic civil rights, African Americans could make their own way.

Inline-image Andrew Johnson and Restoration

The need to define citizenship, defend freedom, and determine the Reconstruction of seceded states soon forced the government to do something. Through the spring, summer, and fall of 1865, that task fell to a southerner, the new president, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee. Because he refused to call Congress into special session, Johnson claimed for himself the principal role of communicating the terms of readmission expected by northerners. Unfortunately for all concerned, Johnson proved unsuited to the complex issues before him.

Despite a surface similarity to Lincoln, Johnson lacked Lincoln’s political skills and moral vision. Both had grown up in poverty without formal education, but Lincoln’s humble origins had taught him humility, while Johnson’s bred resentments and insecurity. Born in North Carolina and early orphaned, Johnson moved to Tennessee at age seventeen and worked as a tailor before acquiring land and slaves. He entered politics as a Jacksonian and rose rapidly to become governor and then United States Senator. He reveled in the rough-and-tumble politics and stump-speaking style of eastern Tennessee, promising to raise up the honest yeomen by knocking down the purse proud aristocrats. When Tennessee seceded, Johnson refused to resign his Senate seat. He stood with the Union, and alone. His action was based on principle, but it also spoke to his own political history. Throughout his life, Johnson was a political maverick even within his own party. Stubborn and overbearing, he was unable to make compromises. Where Lincoln had acquired the ability to study human nature and put ego behind interest in his years riding the Illinois circuit as a lawyer, Johnson remained unbending in his conviction that he alone knew the right way. As one biographer observed, Johnson seemed happy only in opposition.

Johnson’s actions during the war belied his rigid personality and later troubles with Republicans. While serving as military governor of Tennessee, he called for harsh treatment of secessionists. In 1864 he thundered that treason was a crime that must be made odious and traitors must be punished and impoverished. Although Johnson had no interest in antislavery except to strip slaveholders of their wealth and power, he accepted the abolition of slavery and during the war assured blacks in Tennessee that he would be their Moses. Lincoln, the former Whig, liked what he saw in Johnson and added the lifelong Democrat to the presidential slate to create a National Union ticket for the 1864 presidential election.

Within a month of being sworn in as president, Johnson announced his own plan for Reconstruction, and in principle stuck to that course over the next three years. Johnson believed that the war had been fought to save the Union and end slavery, not to ensure blacks’ equality before the law. Slavery was dead, so that, to Johnson’s mind, the main goal of Reconstruction was restoring loyalty to the Union. He also thought that revenge served no purpose once the war was over. Rebuilding the nation should take precedence over all considerations, he argued, and a speedy restoration of government in the former Confederate states would achieve that end. Significantly, in describing the readmission process, Johnson preferred the term restoration rather than the implicitly more sweeping term Reconstruction. He also viewed the restoration process as primarily an executive responsibility—thus his decision not to call Congress into special session. Most important, Johnson was a strict constructionist. The former tailor gave the Constitution a snug fit in arguing for limited government and rejecting the Radical Republicans’ broad claims of federal authority to extend protection to the freedmen and remake the South.

Thaddeus Stevens A veteran abolitionist, Stevens became the leader of the Radical Republicans in the House of Representatives and the advocate of remaking the conquered South into a yeoman society. He was also one of the relatively few Northern politicians to have a genuine sense of social justice toward African Americans.

Insisting that he was continuing Lincoln’s plan, Johnson issued two proclamations in May. The first required that white southerners would have to take loyalty oaths to regain their civil and political rights and their property, except slaves. His plan followed Lincoln’s in excluding various categories of ex-Confederate civil and military officials from the general pardon; to those, Johnson added all ex-Confederates with taxable property worth $20,000 or more, hoping thereby to give the humble men of the South control of the new governments. Those excluded from the general pardon would have to apply individually to the president for special pardons. The second proclamation outlined the terms of readmission. A provisional governor in each state, appointed by the president, was charged with calling a convention to amend the state’s antebellum constitution to ensure republican government and provide for regular elections. Privately, Johnson later urged state conventions to repudiate secession and any Confederate debts and to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, but initially he did not insist on those terms as a condition of readmission. Once states had complied with his terms, Johnson would recognize their governments and restoration would be complete. He also accepted the governments organized under Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan as already having completed the process of readmission.

Johnson’s mild terms sent the wrong message to white southerners. At war’s end, the South lay prostrate and pliable, though still hostile. Hatred of northerners did not abate, but few southerners were so extreme as the old Virginia fire-eater Edmund Ruffin who committed suicide rather than be ruled by damn Yankees or those former Confederates who fled to Brazil to set up a new plantation society in that slaveholding country. In 1865 most southerners simply wanted to get the Reconstruction process over and gritted their teeth expecting the worst. Tell us what we must do, General Wade Hampton of South Carolina wrote Radical Thaddeus Stevens in an acknowledgment that a defeated South would have to submit to the victor’s terms. In the critical year of 1865, Johnson’s plan answered the question.

Inline-image A Defiant South

Offered generous terms for readmission, white southerners seized the moment to try to recover as much power as possible. Johnson helped them along by being overly solicitous of their requests and blind to the needs of Unionists and freedmen. Prominent ex-Confederates and planters flattered Johnson by praising his policy as in the best interests of a true re-union and by begging his favor, to which he responded by issuing pardons liberally (on average 100 a day in September 1865 and almost 13,500 over two years). They appealed to Johnson for a restoration of property seized during the war. Johnson obliged them by instructing army officers to return abandoned lands to former Confederates, which led to the ouster of many African American farmers from fields they had been working. When blacks resisted, as they did along the Georgia coast, Johnson ordered them forcibly removed. He backed the provisional governor of Mississippi, over the protests of the Union general there, when the governor used Confederate veterans to organize the state militia, thereby humiliating the general and endorsing the rearmament of white southerners.

Johnson ignored warnings that, far from easing tensions and fostering loyalty, his lenient approach was inspiring southern truculence. In summer 1865 Governor W. W. Holden of North Carolina wrote Johnson that much of a rebellion spirit persisted there, and a North Carolina innkeeper echoed the sentiments of many southerners when he told a northern journalist that although the Yankees had killed his sons and destroyed his property, they had left him one inestimable privilege—to hate ’em. I git up at half-past four in the morning, and sit up till twelve at night, to hate ’em. Later in 1865 Republican leader Carl Schurz, whom Johnson had sent south on a fact-finding mission, reported that he found the region teeming with incorrigibles who opposed any progressive ideas, glorified their southern past, and, most worrisome, insisted that, emancipation notwithstanding, the blacks at large belong to the whites at large. Still, Johnson refused to adjust his policy.

The evidence of an unreconstructed South cropped up everywhere in 1865. In launching new governments under Johnson’s plan, southerners thumbed their noses at Republican conditions for readmission. Led by South Carolina, several states merely repealed their ordinances of secession rather than disavow the principle; South Carolina and Mississippi refused to repudiate the Confederate debt; Mississippi and Texas failed to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment; and Georgia reserved the right to claim compensation for emancipated slaves. Northern public anger, even from some Democrats, at such rebellion feeling forced Johnson to wire several southern governors instructing them to insist that the conventions formally repudiate secession and Confederate debts and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. When he did so, the southerners complied, suggesting that a more forceful policy would have been accepted in 1865 if Johnson had made it an unequivocal condition of readmission.

Also troubling was the new southern governments’ treatment of the freedmen. Southern whites feared emancipation threatened complete social upheaval and economic chaos. Beginning with Mississippi in November 1865, each southern state passed a series of laws known as black codes to regulate the labor and civil arrangements of the freedmen. The codes varied from state to state, but they followed a similar pattern everywhere of wanting to ensure a ready supply of dependent black labor and blacks’ subservience to whites. The codes did permit blacks to sue and be sued in state courts and to testify in court cases involving other blacks, to legalize marriages, and to hold certain kinds of property. But the codes excluded blacks from juries, generally prescribed more severe punishment for blacks than whites for similar crimes, prohibited blacks from suing or testifying in interracial legal actions, and in some places segregated public facilities. The codes also prevented blacks from owning weapons and horses and limited their rights of assembly. Criminal offenses included using insulting language and preaching the gospel without a license. Many similar restrictions also existed in northern states, so that southerners could rightly claim they were simply following accepted practice in limiting blacks’ civil rights. But the zeal with which the southerners rushed such codes into law worried Republicans.

Rather than moving African Americans toward responsible citizenship, the southern states seemed hellbent, as one Alabaman confessed, on keeping them in their place as the bottom rail of society. Revealingly, the southern states made no provision for black education. More ominous were the harsh laws on vagrancy, labor, and land that all reeked of slavery. Most whites believed that only physical force and close supervision could move blacks to productive labor. The attitude was summed up by a planter in Georgia who scoffed at Republican intentions to aid the freedmen by saying that moral elevation, social equality and political superiority do not increase the African’s capacity to weed a row. White southerners wrote the black codes accordingly. South Carolina and Mississippi led the way with laws limiting blacks to agricultural and domestic service and requiring blacks to sign year-long labor contracts or be subject to arrest as vagrants; any vagrant unable to pay his or her fine could be bound over to work on a chain gang or hired out to a planter to pay off the debt. Apprenticeship laws bound out black minors to work for planters without pay. Mississippi forbade blacks from buying or renting farmland, and several states made it a crime for employers to offer wages that might entice black workers away from other jobs. Fence laws requiring livestock owners to fence their animals rather than let them graze freely, as was the practice before the war, made it virtually impossible for landless blacks to raise pigs or cattle. Many of the racially discriminatory parts of the black codes did not go into force because the Union army and the Freedmen’s Bureau suspended them wherever possible, but the labor provisions revealed how little freedom white southerners would tolerate for supposed freedmen.

Finally, from the northern point of view, southern voters under Johnson’s plan spat defiance by electing governors, state legislators, and members of Congress who were prominent ex-Confederates, some of whom had not even taken loyalty oaths to the Union and one of whom, Alexander Stephens, former vice president of the Confederacy, was still in prison. When a small army of ex-Confederate military officers and political leaders marched to Washington in December 1865 to claim their seats in Congress, northern public opinion rebelled. Seeing the black codes as a brazen attempt to undo the crowning achievement of the war, the Chicago Tribune warned that the men of the North will convert the State of Mississippi into a frog pond before they will allow such laws to disgrace one foot of the soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves. In surveying southern responses to Johnson’s plan, a Boston newspaper warned, What can be hatched from such an egg but another rebellion?

Inline-image The First Congressional Reconstruction Plan

When the thirty-ninth Congress gathered in December 1865, Republicans decided to take Reconstruction into their own hands. The Republican-controlled Congress refused to seat the delegates from the restored states and created a Joint (House and Senate) Committee on Reconstruction to formulate a Reconstruction policy. Republicans could at least agree on a holding action until they sorted out their own priorities regarding Reconstruction and worked out an accommodation with the president. Beyond that, Republicans did not yet know what to do.

A small group of conservative Republicans, who feared a break with Johnson and wanted a speedy reunion to facilitate commerce, joined with Democrats in arguing for Johnson’s plan. Radical Republicans, meanwhile, had given up on Johnson, whom some decried as a traitor. They called for the thorough overhaul of southern institutions and equal rights and the franchise for the freedmen, lest, in the words of Thaddeus Stevens, all our blood and treasure have been spent in vain. But the Radicals were a minority within the party. Moderate Republicans such as Senators William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, John Sherman of Ohio (General William Tecumseh Sherman’s brother), and Lyman Trumbull of Illinois made up the largest bloc in the Congress and controlled the key committees. Nothing could be done without their support, as was made clear when Fessenden rather than the Radical Charles Sumner was named chairman of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. Moderates found Johnson’s plan defective, but they wanted to find ways to cooperate with him on a policy that would ensure basic civil rights for the freedmen, favor Unionists in the South, and build a national Republican Party. On the latter point, they were especially concerned because, with the abolition of slavery, the readmitted ex-Confederate states would gain fifteen extra seats in Congress from reapportionment (former slaves now counting as whole persons for purposes of representation). Moderate Republicans feared that without a Republican foothold in the South, southerners would join hands with northern Democrats to overturn all the Republican wartime legislation on land, education, banking, and transportation.

Inline-image IN THEIR OWN WORDS

Letter to Freedmen’s Bureau, 1865

Ex-slaves protested the black codes that threatened to return them to bondage. Union veterans, such as this author, Private Calvin Holly, often took the lead in demanding the federal government win the war by securing the peace.

Suffer me to address you a few lines in reguard to the colered people in this State. From all I can learn and see, I think the colered people are in a great many ways being outraged beyond humanity. Houses have been tourn down from over the heades of women and Children—and the old Negroes after they have worked there till they are 70 or 80 yers of age drive them off in the cold to frieze and starve to death….

Some are being knocked down for saying they are free, while a great many are being worked just as they ust to be when Slaves, without any compensation. Report came in town this morning that two colered women was found dead [be]side the Jackson road with their throats cot lying side by side…. The Rebbles are going a bout in many places through the State and robbing the colered peple of arms, money and all they have and in many places killing.

So, General, to make a short of a long story I think the safety of this country depenes upon giving the Colered man all the rights of a white man, and especialy the Rebs. and let him know that their is power enough in the arm of the Govenment to give Justice, to all her loyal citizens.

The question of African American rights forced everyone’s hand. Witnesses trooped before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction telling of growing lawlessness and violence against blacks and Union officials in the South. Clara Barton, for example, reported in painful detail seeing a pregnant black woman lashed mercilessly. The testimony convinced Republicans that additional federal legislation was necessary to protect blacks, restore order, and foster loyalty. Moderate Republicans, led by Lyman Trumbull, drafted two bills in early 1866 to destroy the discriminations of the black codes and establish respect for law.

The first bill extended for three years the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a War Department agency largely staffed by army officers, which had been created in March 1865 to aid refugees (black and white) and put ex-slaves to work on abandoned or confiscated lands. The bill also authorized the Bureau to build and support schools in the former Confederate states and to establish special courts to settle labor disputes involving freedmen. Despite almost unanimous Republican support for the Freedmen’s Bureau bill, Johnson vetoed it on the grounds that it illegally established military courts for civilians in peacetime. Johnson also dismissed the bill as an immense patronage that would bankrupt the government and breed indolence among the freedmen. Four days after his veto, Johnson harangued a crowd outside the White House with a speech accusing Radical Republicans of treason and conspiring to kill him.

The second bill, known as the Civil Rights Act of 1866, was Congress’s first attempt to define freedom under the Thirteenth Amendment. Intended to nullify the Dred Scott decision and the black codes, the bill defined as national citizens all persons (except Indians) born in the United States and guaranteed them full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property as is enjoyed by white citizens. The bill also gave the federal government the right to intervene in state courts if they discriminated against black citizens. In constitutional terms, the Civil Rights Act signaled a dramatic potential change in federal-state relations. It retained the traditional conception of states having the primary responsibility for law enforcement but introduced a federal claim to monitor state actions on behalf of national citizens. Johnson vetoed the bill charging that it gave black citizens greater protection than white citizens and that it violated the exclusive jurisdiction of state courts.

Johnson’s vetoes dismayed Republicans, especially because they believed the laws expressed the majority thinking among northerners regarding fairness and because they thought the laws enforced the basic provisions of presidential Reconstruction. Johnson had complained that no such legislation should be passed while southerners were excluded from Congress, but his argument won over no Republicans now distrustful of Johnson’s intentions and suspicious of his allies. Johnson’s vetoes made him the darling of southerners and Democrats. If his purpose was to build a broad coalition of conservatives and moderates that would isolate Radicals, the strategy failed. The vetoes dashed the moderate Republicans’ hopes of working with the president.

The extent to which Johnson had miscalculated Republican unity was made clear when Congress easily overrode his veto of the Civil Rights Act, the first time in American history that a major bill became law over a presidential veto. Congress then passed an amended Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, which Johnson vetoed and Congress then repassed with a two-thirds majority vote. Johnson, soon dubbed Andy Veto, thereafter assumed an obstructionist role, vetoing congressional measures on Reconstruction, only to have his vetoes overturned. More important, Johnson’s actions pushed moderate Republicans toward more radical positions. The moderate Republicans’ dominant presence meant congressional Reconstruction never became truly radical—there was no confiscation of land, trials of ex-Confederates for treason, or wholesale, permanent political excommunication of southerners—but Reconstruction did become more radical than it otherwise would have been had Johnson and white southerners not been so obstinate.

Inline-image The Fourteenth Amendment

In an effort to put basic civil rights beyond nullification by the Supreme Court or simple repeal should Republicans lose control of Congress, and to settle outstanding issues with the president, in April 1866 Republicans proposed a sweeping constitutional amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment, which Congress passed in June and sent to the states for ratification, consisted of five parts, each addressing a particular concern of Reconstruction. The most important, and the one that has occasioned the most litigation over time as to its meaning and application, was Section One. The first section defined American citizenship in such a way as to include blacks: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. It then prohibited any state from making or enforcing any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, and from denying to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. The ambiguity of some of the language over time led to an expansion of the amendment’s application—for example, the due process clause was invoked by corporations (legal persons) in the late nineteenth century to limit state regulation and the equal protection clause was used by civil rights advocates during the twentieth century to attack racial and other discrimination. In 1866, however, the first section was directed at the black codes and discriminatory treatment in the courts, not against segregation in schools, public places, or public transportation. At the same time, there was no ambiguity about the framers’ intent to prevent the states from abridging the basic rights of citizens.

The remaining sections of the amendment addressed a host of Reconstruction issues. Section Two provided for proportional reduction in a state’s congressional representation if it denied suffrage to any adult male citizens. Section Three disqualified from state and national office all ex-Confederates who had violated their prewar oaths to uphold the U.S. Constitution, though Congress might remove any such disability by a two-thirds vote. Section Four guaranteed the national debt, repudiated the Confederate debt, and disallowed all claims for loss of property, including slaves. Section Five empowered Congress to enforce the amendment by appropriate legislation.

Sections Two and Three provoked immediate controversy. The handiwork of moderates who wanted to avoid alienating northern voters, the two sections were intended to build loyalty, and the prospects for a Republican Party, in the South by changing the southern electorate. Their effect was to anger Radicals who complained that they did not go far enough to remake the South and Democrats and southerners who thought they went too far in asserting a federal role in defining suffrage at all. Radicals had sought a blanket enfranchisement of blacks, but moderates preferred the formula that would allow northern states, with their small black populations, to continue to restrict black suffrage at little cost while forcing southern states, with their large black populations, to enfranchise blacks or risk significant loss of representation. Radicals denounced the second section as a swindle and a wanton betrayal of justice and humanity, but moderates had their way. Meanwhile, women reformers felt betrayed because the clause explicitly limited suffrage to males. Elizabeth Cady Stanton warned that the introduction of the word male into the Constitution threatened an antagonism between black men and all women and showed that woman must not put her trust in man. Rather than conceding that Reconstruction was, as Frederick Douglass insisted, the negro’s hour and that women’s rights had to yield to black rights lest black suffrage be lost altogether, many women reformers began to think of separating their cause from Reconstruction. The Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 would finally push them in that direction (see below). Democrats and white southerners, in turn, decried the second and third sections of the Fourteenth Amendment as vengeful and called any effort at black suffrage an insulting outrage. Southern legislatures refused to ratify the amendment.

President Johnson denounced the Fourteenth Amendment and urged southern legislatures to reject it. With the amendment the central issue, he made the congressional elections in the fall of 1866 a referendum on his versus Congress’s Reconstruction policies. In August, Johnson embarked on a whistle-stop train tour to rally opposition to the amendment and to persuade northern voters to throw the Radicals out of office. Johnson’s swing around the circle brought out the worst in the president’s character and revealed the extent to which he had completely misread northern public opinion. During the summer of 1866, northern feelings regarding southern attitudes and lawlessness had hardened after news of murderous white mob attacks on African Americans in Memphis and New Orleans. Clearly, under Johnson’s plan southern whites could not be trusted to respect blacks’ basic freedom. Union veterans especially felt betrayed by events and organized the Grand Army of the Republic, in part to deliver the soldiers’ vote to Republicans and also to lobby for their pension claims. Johnson responded by saying Radicals had instigated the riots to embarrass him and by calling Radicals traitors. Intemperate in language, humorless, and self-pitying, Johnson traded insults with hecklers who taunted him with chants of Don’t get mad, Andy. In reverting to his Tennessee stump-speaking style of personal invective, he lost both his dignity and his following. Johnson’s hope of forging an alliance of Democrats and conservative Republicans into a new National Union Party was stillborn, and even his supporters shied away from him in public. As one southerner lamented, Johnson’s speeches and actions had cost him the moral power of his position, and done great damage to the cause of Constitutional reorganization.

President Johnson Squashed This cartoon in Harper’s Weekly, a staunchly Republican journal, taunts Johnson as a foolish boy who was handling books above his capacity—such as the United States Constitution. Most Republicans quickly realized that it had been a mistake to make Johnson, a Unionist Democrat, Lincoln’s running mate in 1864.

Northern voters overwhelmingly rejected Johnson and embraced the Republican appeal to Stand by Congress. Republicans rolled up more than a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, gaining thereby a veto-proof Congress to forge their own Reconstruction policy. Republicans also won every northern governor’s race, majority control of every northern legislature, and significant power in West Virginia, Missouri, and Tennessee. As one Republican in Tennessee gloated, Johnson was now a dead dog in the White House. Johnson’s ineptness and intransigence and southern rebelliousness did more than win the day for Republicans. They ensured that congressional Reconstruction policy would be more radical than what had been proposed, and rejected, earlier. The minimum terms for readmission now included the Fourteenth Amendment.

Inline-image The Second Congressional Reconstruction Plan

Fortified by the election returns, Republicans determined to have their own Reconstruction plan in 1867, two years after Appomattox. They did so in a flurry of legislative activity on March 2, 1867. The Republicans first pushed through the Reconstruction Act, which invalidated the state governments formed under the Lincoln and Johnson plans and divided the ten remaining unreconstructed states (Tennessee had been readmitted to the Union after ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment) into five military districts, each under the command of a major general with authority over civil and judicial matters. The army officers, though backed by only 20,000 soldiers, were charged with maintaining order, supervising the administration of justice, and protecting the civil rights of all persons. The act also established the procedure whereby a state might be readmitted to the Union. The officers were to enroll all eligible voters (adult black men and white men who had not been disqualified under the Fourteenth Amendment), who could elect delegates to a state convention to write a new state constitution that must guarantee universal manhood suffrage and might disqualify prominent ex-Confederates from office. Once a state presented an acceptable constitution to Congress and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress would admit the state’s elected representatives and military rule would end in that state. Congress also passed the Habeas Corpus Act, which expanded the rights of citizens to remove cases from state to federal courts.

Congress then moved to limit Johnson’s ability to obstruct the enforcement of the laws. As president, he still had the power to appoint and remove military and civil officers. To ensure congressional control over the army, Congress added a rider to the Army Appropriations Act, directing the president to issue all orders to the five military commanders in the South only through the general of the army, Ulysses S. Grant, who could not be dismissed without the Senate’s consent. In an effort to stop Johnson from removing Republican officeholders who supported congressional Reconstruction and to protect Edwin M. Stanton, the secretary of war who endorsed the congressional plan and was responsible for administering much of it, Congress enacted the Tenure of Office Act, which required the Senate’s consent for the dismissal of cabinet officers and anyone else who originally had been appointed with the Senate’s approval.

Congressional Reconstruction did not take immediate effect because most white southerners preferred to remain under military rule rather than participate in a constitution-making process that guaranteed black suffrage. They refused to trade their honor and manhood for readmission on Republican terms. President Johnson also slowed enforcement of the new law by replacing army officers sympathetic to the congressional plan with more conservative men. Congress remedied the defects in its Reconstruction Act by passing three subsequent Reconstruction acts that required the military commanders in the South to register eligible voters and made it easier for a simple pro-Unionist majority in any state to set in motion the constitution-making machinery. The passage of those acts cleared the way for a combination of southern blacks, Unionist southern whites, and northerners in the South to organize state governments and begin forming local Republican Party structures. Congress dealt with Johnson by impeaching him.

Inline-image The Impeachment of Johnson

Radicals had been trying to impeach Johnson for some time, but moderates had balked at so extreme a measure. By early 1868, however, many moderates also came to believe that congressional Reconstruction would never succeed as long as Johnson stood ready to block it. During the summer 1867 congressional recess, Johnson tried to test the constitutionality of the Tenure of Office Act by removing Secretary of War Stanton, but in early 1868 Congress did not concur with Stanton’s removal. Johnson dismissed Stanton anyway and named the more conservative General Lorenzo Thomas in his place. Stanton, in turn, refused to leave his post; he barricaded himself in his office and for two months lived off the encouragement of Republicans and food sent up in a bucket. Johnson’s defiance of Congress opened the door to his impeachment. An exasperated Austin Blair spoke for moderate Republicans when he charged that Johnson has thrown down the gauntlet to Congress, and says to us plainly as words can speak it: ‘Try this issue now betwixt me and you; either you go to the wall or I do.’

On February 24, 1868, the angry Republican majority in the House voted unanimously to impeach Johnson for high crimes and misdemeanors in office. Nine of the eleven articles of impeachment against Johnson dealt with the removal of Stanton and violations of the chain of command in issuing military orders. The crux of the Republicans’ indictment was the tenth article charging Johnson with obstructing congressional Reconstruction and attempting to bring Congress into contempt and reproach. The eleventh article summed up the previous ten charges. In his trial before the Senate, Johnson’s lawyers argued that Johnson could only be tried for an indictable crime and added that he technically had not broken the Tenure of Office Act in any case because Lincoln, not Johnson, had appointed Stanton so that Johnson was free to replace him. Radical Charles Sumner replied that impeachment was, as the Founding Fathers intended, political in character and thus not limited to criminal offenses.

For eleven weeks, the trial packed the Senate galleries with onlookers. Finally, in mid-May, the Senate voted 35-19 to convict, one vote short of the two-thirds majority necessary to remove the president. Seven Republicans had broken party ranks to vote for acquittal. They did so because they feared Johnson’s removal would weaken the constitutional balance of powers in the federal government. They also recoiled from the prospect of the rabidly Radical women’s rights and labor supporter Bluff Benjamin Wade of Ohio, the president pro tempore of the Senate, succeeding to the presidency upon Johnson’s removal. Johnson helped his own cause by conducting himself with uncommon dignity during the trial. Chastened by impeachment, he promised to enforce the laws, which he thereafter did. Although the Radicals lost in their effort to drive Johnson from office and use impeachment as a political club, they gained in finally subduing their nemesis. At last, congressional Reconstruction could go forward unharried by the president.

Inline-image The Fifteenth Amendment

But by 1868 many northerners had grown tired of the wrangling over Reconstruction and worried about too much power passing into black and Radical hands. In elections for state offices in 1867, Democrats made impressive gains in several northern states by using race as an issue. Republican editor Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune conceded that we have lost votes in the Free States by daring to be just to the Negro. The election of 1868 pointed to further erosion of general support for the Republicans. Northerners who wanted to get on with other issues resented the Radical Republicans’ constant harping on moral obligations to the freedmen. During the presidential contest, the Democrats and their candidate Horatio Seymour of New York found a responsive chord among many northerners by interlacing the themes of race, Republican constitutional excesses in Reconstruction, and the corruption of politics by black enfranchisement in the South, which they mixed with promises to issue cheap money, called greenbacks, to help debt-ridden western farmers. The Republican candidate, Ulysses S. Grant, rode his popularity as a military hero into office, handily winning the electoral vote. But the general’s popular vote margin was surprisingly thin, only 300,000 out of roughly 6 million votes cast. Newly enfranchised southern African Americans had delivered 450,000 votes to the Republicans, which meant that a majority of white voters had preferred Seymour. Shocked Republican leaders scurried to save the day by retreating from Radical positions (see below) and by locking in black enfranchisement.

For two years, Radical Republicans had argued for universal African American suffrage as a basic right, but moderates had rejected such pleas as too radical. Northern voters might accept black enfranchisement in the South as necessary for freedmen to protect themselves, but they wanted none of it at home. In a democratic society, enfranchisement implied social as much as political equality. For that reason, white southerners considered black suffrage to be complete degradation and never forgave Republicans for forcing it on them. Likewise, between 1867 and 1869, white northerners defeated nine referenda on enfranchising blacks in their own states. But the 1868 election returns also awoke moderate Republicans to the possibility of losing control of Congress and the presidency if they did not have black votes. Close elections in such key states as Indiana suggested that black votes might assure Republican majorities. And, as one Republican noted, by making the voting right national, party expediency and exact justice coincide for once. Moderates thus backed a constitutional amendment to enfranchise blacks generally.

Johnson’s Impeachment Trial The galleries were always packed with ticket-holding spectators during Andrew Johnson’s trial, and the nation followed events closely through newspaper accounts. The trial itself was conducted with dignity, and Johnson refrained from his characteristic public outbursts of bad temper.

In 1869 Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. Bitter battles over ratification ensued. Democrats howled that the amendment was the ultimate federal usurpation of states’ rights, and opponents of ratification in mid-Atlantic, midwestern, and border states with large African American populations warned of black over white if the amendment became law. Whether out of justice, a desire to settle the Reconstruction question once and for all, partisan self-interest, or (as in the four ex-Confederate states that voted for it) a condition of readmission, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870. Church bells rang across New England where support for the amendment was strongest, and Republicans cheered the victory as proof that God had willed the outcome as the way to end prejudice. Most Republicans thought they had now fulfilled their duty to the freedmen, and themselves, and had freed national politics from the vexing Negro question. As the New York Tribune concluded in April 1870, in assaying a quarter century of sectional strife ending with the enfranchisement of blacks, Let us have done with Reconstruction. The country is tired and sick of it…. LET US HAVE PEACE.

In fact, the amendment proved flawed and peace did not come. Instead of barring discrimination in suffrage based on race, color, nativity, property, education, or religious beliefs, as Radicals had proposed, the amendment the moderates crafted simply forbade the states from denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Moderates believed a more sweeping guarantee of the franchise would infringe on northern states’ suffrage qualifications, which kept the Chinese from voting in California and forced immigrants and the poor to meet literacy and property tests in other states. The amendment also left women out—the final indignity to women’s rights advocates, who then went their own way. A disgusted Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued against the amendment because it allowed unlettered foreign-born and black men access to the ballot box while denying the same right to educated women: Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Ung Tung, who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence … making laws for Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble. The irony of the amendment was that by allowing for inequalities affecting whites, it did not even protect blacks. Before the century closed, southern whites would use literacy tests, property qualifications, and poll taxes to deny blacks the vote.

Inline-image The Supreme Court and Reconstruction

Congressional Reconstruction went into place without any sustained challenge from the Supreme Court. In 1866, to be sure, the Supreme Court had seemingly nullified the Freedmen’s Bureau courts when it unanimously ruled in Ex parte Milligan that civilians could not be tried in military courts when the civil courts were open. Republicans derided the decision as a piece of judicial impertinence which we are not bound to respect, and, in fact, the Freedmen’s Bureau courts continued to operate for several years. The Court also invalidated the use of loyalty oaths in two 1867 cases. Congress, in turn, attempted to reduce the Court’s size, limited its jurisdiction in certain civil rights cases, and even talked of abolishing the Court altogether. But the Court avoided a collision with Congress by dismissing suits intended to prevent enforcement of the Reconstruction Acts and by ruling in Texas v. White (1869) that secession was illegal and that Reconstruction was a political rather than a constitutional problem. The Court left it to Congress to guarantee republican governments in the states.

Inline-image Forming Reconstruction Governments in the South

Republican Reconstruction in the South began in 1867. In 1868 all but Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas had been readmitted to the Union, and by 1870 all the former Confederate states had completed the process of constitution-writing under Republican eyes and rejoined the Union. (Georgia was readmitted in 1868, then disqualified for unseating elected African American legislators, and readmitted in 1870.) Republican rule, however, lasted less than a decade. In some states, Democrats regained power within a few years, and in all states, conservative white resistance to Republican ideas and programs limited their application. However brief and incomplete, Republican Reconstruction did lead to constitutional reform and a new biracial southern electorate.

The conventions that met in 1867 and 1868 to draft new constitutions signaled a potential revolution in politics because blacks participated in them. Nowhere else in the world where slaves had gained their freedom did ex-slaves acquire democratic political rights so soon or fully. At the same time, the fact that blacks had any political say caused conservative southern whites to reject the new constitutions and the Republican governments formed under them as illegitimate. Indeed, from the outset, conservative whites hurled racial slurs at what they called the Bones and Banjoes Conventions. They disparaged the delegates as baboons, monkeys, and mules and their handiwork as a base conspiracy … of ignorant Negroes co-operating with a gang of white adventurers. Anyone associating with blacks became suspect. Conservative whites sneered at southern whites who joined the process as scalawags (a term for scrawny, worthless livestock) and northern whites as carpetbaggers (a term for interloping hustlers who carried all their possessions in a cheap bag made of carpet), or used other terms such as white Negroes and black Republicans to mark all white Republicans as racial turncoats, or worse. They were, in the words of one Democrat, the mean, lousy, and filthy kind that are not fit for butchers or dogs. The caricatures of the delegates and southern Republicans stuck in the public mind—and thereafter much historical writing about the period—and suggested how difficult it would be to build a broad base of public support for the new constitutions and governments.

In fact, the delegates and supporters of the Republican Party were anything but the vultures, ragamuffins and jailbirds the conservative white southerners would have contemporaries believe. The scalawags largely consisted of wartime Unionists from small farm up-country regions who wanted to improve their economic prospects and who, despite their own misgivings about allying with African Americans, risked social ostracism for supporting Republicans. As one Georgian remarked, It costs nothing for a Northern man to be a Union man, but the rebuff and persecution received here [by scalawags] … tells a horrible tale. Scalawags also included former Whigs who opposed secession and a few prominent planters and politicians eager to promote railroad and industrial improvements in a new South. Carpetbaggers were mostly Union veterans, businessmen, teachers, and missionaries who came south willing to invest capital in land, factories, and railroads and reputation in encouraging reform, or to improve their health in a warmer climate. Most African American delegates were literate, many having been free before the war. They were drawn largely from the clergy and the artisan class and included several college graduates. Despite differences in background and interest that eventually would undermine the Republican alliance, black and white came together in their initial forays into constitution-writing and government-making to demand a new politics and a new South. The modern, democratic constitutions they wrote were hardly products of disorder and demagoguery, as the conservatives claimed. Indeed, some of their constitutional provisions stood long after the Republicans fell from power.

The new constitutions, in historian James McPherson’s estimation, ranked among the most progressive in the nation. All the constitutions provided for statewide public education for both races. Many states assumed responsibility for such previously local or private concerns as hospitals, asylums, and charity. Several states reformed their criminal codes and penal systems. The rights of women also gained in several states. South Carolina, for example, instituted its first divorce law, and most other states guaranteed property rights to women. The constitutions redistributed political power. Legislative districts were redrawn to give more representation to small farmers, many previously appointed offices were made elective, and property qualifications for voting or holding office were abolished or reduced. Voting reforms led to universal adult manhood suffrage in much of the South. The constitutions were generally non-punitive toward former rebels. Black delegates especially insisted that no further penalties be imposed on ex-Confederates. Five states refused to disqualify ex-Confederates outright for their participation in the rebellion, and two others repealed their disfranchisement clauses in 1868. Also dramatic were the changes in taxation. States shifted the tax burden to real property while providing homestead exemptions and other protection to small property holders. For the first time, large landholders would have to carry a significant portion of taxation. Yet no state authorized any confiscation or redistribution of land, fearing that any attack on property rights would scare off needed investment.

The new constitutions were not so progressive as to attack racial discrimination fully. White delegates, and later elected officials, showed little interest in using government to encourage social equality. Only South Carolina and Louisiana, where blacks were well organized politically, prohibited segregation in public schools, though in practice the ban largely went unenforced. Up-country whites everywhere opposed any proposals explicitly forbidding segregation. The prevailing thinking