UNIT 5 TOPIC 10

Reconstruction H E I M L E R S H I S T O R Y. C O M

THEME : Politics and Power

LEARNING OBJECTIVE : Explain the effects of government policy during Reconstruction on society from 1865 to 1877.

At long last, the Civil War is over , and that means it’s time for the era of Reconstruction. I’d love to tell you
that the war itself settled all the problems between the North and the South. But that’s not what happened.

RIVAL RECONSTRUCTION PLANS

The first thing you need to know is that there were two major competing plans for how the process of
Reconstruction should play out. At the highest level, the main difference between the two plans is
how each one viewed the defeated Southern states. First was Abraham Lincoln’s Ten-Percent Plan and
this plan was very lenient and set the bar pretty low for Southern states reentering the Union. That’s because
Lincoln’s view of Southern secession was that it was never a constitutional possibility to begin with.
Therefore, by Lincoln’s reckoning, the Southern states never actually broke away and formed their own
nation, but rather, they were rebellious states that remained in the Union throughout the war. So even as
early as 1863, Lincoln was working with his advisors on a plan to rebuild after the war, and he laid out those
plans in the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction , which came to be known as the Ten-Percent Plan,
and it basically had two requirements. First, it declared that a state could assume its rightful place
in the Union when ten percent of its eligible voters pledged an oath of loyalty to the United States. And
those were voters who were eligible to vote in 1860, by the way. Additionally, the state had to agree to
abolish slavery. Of course, there were other nuances and it was a little more complicated than that,
but on the whole, Lincoln’s plan for reuniting the North and South was exceedingly lenient .

The rival plan was not so lenient. A group of Radical Republicans in Congress did not view
the Southern states as long lost family members , but rather as conquered foes who needed to be
punished. As a reminder, the Radical Republicans were the ones who supported abolition and civil rights
for black Americans. Viewed that way, these Republicans laid out a plan for Reconstruction that
required a more heavy -handed approach, and needless to say, the bar was much higher. To that end, in

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 UNIT 5 TOPIC 10

Reconstruction H E I M L E R S H I S T O R Y. C O M

THEME : Politics and Power

LEARNING OBJECTIVE : Explain the effects of government policy during Reconstruction on society from 1865 to 1877.

RIVAL RECONSTRUCTION PLANS cont’d

1864, Congress passed the Wade-Davis Bill which, like Lincoln’s plan, required a state to abolish slavery, but
it also mandated that a majority of southern voters, 51%, to pledge oaths of loyalty to the United
States. Lincoln ultimately killed the bill with a pocket veto because he believed it would destroy the delicate
political relationships he had worked to maintain among moderates and in the border states. In case
you don’t remember, the border states were made up of four slave states that had remained in the
Union. Because Lincoln believed that keeping these slave states in the Union was crucial to a Northern
victory in the war, he didn’t want to press them too hard on the slavery issue and send them running
for the Confederacy. The plan laid out by the Radical Republicans represented a desire for Reconstruction
to be carried out with overwhelming federal power to the detriment of state power.

SUMMARIZE the notes from the previous page in your own words. (2-4 sentences)

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 UNIT 5 TOPIC 10

Reconstruction H E I M L E R S H I S T O R Y. C O M

THEME : Politics and Power

LEARNING OBJECTIVE : Explain the effects of government policy during Reconstruction on society from 1865 to 1877.

LINCOLN OUT, JOHNSON IN

Whether Lincoln’s plan would have worked better than the congressional plan, we’ll never know, because in
April of 1865, Lincoln was assassinated . He was attending a play at Ford’s Theater and a Confederate
sympathizer named John Wilkes Booth entered Lincoln’s box and shot him. Lincoln died the next
morning, literally six days after the Civil War had ended. According to the Constitution, if the president
dies, then his vice president assumes the office, and in this case, it was Andrew Johnson . If Lincoln’s
spirit animal was a wizened owl, then Johnson’s was more like a drunken, racist hyena . Lincoln
added Johnson to the ticket in his bid for reelection in 1864 not because they agreed with each other
on all that much. Johnson was a pro -Union Southern Democrat from Tennessee who had himself been an
enslaver . But since Lincoln was deeply concerned about keeping the border states in the Union,
making Johnson his vice president was a way to satisfy the interests of those states.

Regardless, once he became president, Johnson channeled his drunk hyena energy and was pretty reckless
in executing Reconstruction plans , which led to a bitter rivalry between him and Congress . To be
fair, Johnson did attempt to carry out Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan, but since he seemed to lack any skill to
persuade and negotiate with congressional Republicans, it did not go well. Furthermore, Johnson seemed
to view the whole process of Reconstruction as an annoyance that he wanted to complete as fast as
possible and let Southerners rebuild and tend to their own affairs.

In fact, Johnson seemed to be using his power as president to enact personal vengeance on elite
southern planters. Even though he had been an enslaver himself, Johnson grew up poor and resented the
political and social control wielded by the planter elite in the South. Therefore, while Johnson administered
mass pardons to southerners who took the required loyalty oath, he required wealthy planters to
petition him personally to secure their pardons. It seemed like he was giddy to have all this power over

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 UNIT 5 TOPIC 10

Reconstruction H E I M L E R S H I S T O R Y. C O M

THEME : Politics and Power

LEARNING OBJECTIVE : Explain the effects of government policy during Reconstruction on society from 1865 to 1877.

LINCOLN OUT, JOHNSON IN cont’d

the elite planters and relished making them come beg for their citizenship. Johnson was using his
presidential power to carry out personal vengeance, and that ultimately made a significant contribution to
the failure of Reconstruction and all the national griefs that followed.

Only eight months after the war had ended, Johnson believed that the goals of Reconstruction had been
accomplished and it was time to move on. However, congressional Republicans strongly disagreed on
account of the Southern states looked an awful lot like they did before the Civil War, with the exception
that slavery was now abolished. For example, newly formed state legislatures had elected former
Confederate leaders to guide policy matters, and some even sent Confederate leaders to Congress.
Maybe the craziest example here is that Georgia elected Alexander Stephens to the House of
Representatives. I hope that name rings a bell, because Stephens was the vice president of the Confederacy.
He was the guy who gave his Cornerstone Speech reveling in the fact that the foundational principle on
which the Confederacy was erected and sustained was a fundamental inequality between the white
and black races. This is the guy Georgians sent to represent them in Congress. Additionally, several southern
states passed a series of Black Codes that severely restricted the civil rights of black Americans,
which in some cases differed very little from the condition of slavery.

President Johnson looked at all of those developments and thought it was time to move on. But the
Radical Republicans were having none of it, and they were about to take control of Reconstruction
quick, fast, and in a hurry.

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 UNIT 5 TOPIC 10

Reconstruction H E I M L E R S H I S T O R Y. C O M

THEME : Politics and Power

LEARNING OBJECTIVE : Explain the effects of government policy during Reconstruction on society from 1865 to 1877.

SUMMARIZE the notes from the previous page in your own words. (2-4 sentences)

CONGRESSIONAL RECONSTRUCTION
In the midterm elections of 1866, Radical Republicans won and as a result held two- thirds of the
seats in Congress. In case you’re a little fuzzy on Article I Section 7 of the Constitution, two-thirds is the
amount needed for Congress to override a presidential veto. With that power now in their hands, Radical
Republicans were ready to take Reconstruction away from the president and make it entirely a congressional
process . Moreover, they sought to continue Reconstruction by means of federal power since allowing
states such leniency was clearly not getting results under Johnson. And moreover, these Republicans further
consolidated their power by refusing to seat former Confederates who had been elected to Congress by
southern states.

There were two strategies they used to complete their vision of Reconstruction. First was the
passage of three amendments to the Constitution. The 13th Amendment formally abolished slavery
in the United States, and it was ratified in 1865. As I mentioned before, ratifying this amendment was a
requirement for Southern states reentering the Union. Technically this amendment was ratified before
the whole congressional takeover of Reconstruction. However, it turned out that Southern states
could ratify an amendment abolishing slavery and then go right back to stripping black Southerners

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 UNIT 5 TOPIC 10

Reconstruction H E I M L E R S H I S T O R Y. C O M

THEME : Politics and Power

LEARNING OBJECTIVE : Explain the effects of government policy during Reconstruction on society from 1865 to 1877.

CONGRESSIONAL RECONSTRUCTION cont’d

of their rights like we saw with the passage of the Black Codes. So the next two amendments sought to
correct this kind of nonsense.

The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 and established birthright citizenship for the formerly
enslaved while also mandating that Americans’ civil rights could not be infringed upon by states. That
last part is important because prior to the passage of this amendment, the civil liberties outlined in the
Bill of Rights were only protected from federal intrusion, not state intrusion. This amendment
was important to the Republicans since some of the major civil rights legislation they had passed was
vetoed or otherwise frustrated by an embittered President Johnson. For example, they had passed
two Civil Rights Acts which defined the terms of citizenship and outlawed racial discrimination.
But seeing how easily such legislation could be ignored and thwarted, Republicans worked to include the
substance of these laws into the Constitution itself where they would be much harder to sidestep .
Then the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870 which guaranteed voting rights for black men. And yes,
just black men , and I’ll tell you more about that in a moment.

The second tactic Republicans used to carry out Reconstruction was to impose martial law in the
South. In 1867, they passed the Military Reconstruction Acts which divided the South into five military
districts. Soon after, federal troops were sent to occupy the South in order to ensure that the requirements
for Reconstruction were being upheld and that racial discrimination resulting from policies like Black
Codes could not occur. As a result of these heavy handed tactics, all states of the former Confederacy had
met the requirements and rejoined the Union by 1870, but they resented such disciplinary tactics.

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 UNIT 5 TOPIC 10

Reconstruction H E I M L E R S H I S T O R Y. C O M

THEME : Politics and Power

LEARNING OBJECTIVE : Explain the effects of government policy during Reconstruction on society from 1865 to 1877.

SUMMARIZE the notes from the previous page in your own words. (2-4 sentences)

WOMEN’S RIGHTS
Let’s come back to the 15th amendment for a moment. Remember that it recognized the right of black
men to vote, and this was pretty universally cheered by America's black population. But some women’s rights
advocates were not so giddy about it. Recall that women played a significant role in the abolitionist
movement before the war. Then after the war, advocates for abolition, many women included, created
the American Equal Rights Association and its members worked to ensure emancipated black
Americans had equal access to their rights.

However, when the association met to consider how best to support the ratification of the 15th
amendment, things got ugly in a hurry. And that’s because the 15th amendment protected voting rights from
racial discrimination but not gender discrimination. So, women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued
against the 15th amendment because she believed that by furthering the rights of black men, the rights of
women would be further ignored and eroded. She even used racial arguments to make her point.
She said it was an outrage that even the poorest and least educated black, Irish, Chinese , or German
citizens could vote. Shouldn’t the vote of an educated and white woman count for more than that? On

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 UNIT 5 TOPIC 10

Reconstruction H E I M L E R S H I S T O R Y. C O M

THEME : Politics and Power

LEARNING OBJECTIVE : Explain the effects of government policy during Reconstruction on society from 1865 to 1877.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS cont’d

the other side of the debate were folks like Frederick Douglass who argued that extending the franchise
to black men was a necessity and would likely speed up the process for opening the franchise to women.

As it turned out, Stanton and her ally Susan B. Anthony refused to back down on this issue and broke away
to form the National Woman Suffrage Association . This all-female organization protested loudly
against the ratification of the 15th amendment, but once it passed, they got to work advocating for another
constitutional amendment that would recognize women’s right to vote. I’m sad to tell you that it would be
something like fifty years before that became a reality.

SUMMARIZE the notes from the previous page in your own words. (2-4 sentences)

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 UNIT 5 TOPIC 10

Reconstruction H E I M L E R S H I S T O R Y. C O M

THEME : Politics and Power

LEARNING OBJECTIVE : Explain the effects of government policy during Reconstruction on society from 1865 to 1877.

RESPOND to the learning objective with an evidence-based, argumentative thesis.

LEARNING OBJECTIVE : Explain the effects of government policy during Reconstruction on society from 1865 to 1877.

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