Reconstruction had a long, important history. By 1865, about 180,000 black people served in the Union Army or 1/5 of the adult black male population under 45 years old. By May 1865, President Johnson announced his plan of Presidential Reconstruction. It calls for general amnesty and restoration of property -- except for slaves -- to all Southerners who will swear loyalty to the Union. No friend to the South's large landowners, Johnson declares that they and the Confederate leadership will be required to petition him individually for pardons. This Reconstruction strategy also required states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery. The president's plan is implemented during the summer. By August and September 1865, President Johnson showed more leniency to the white former Confederacy of the South. He ordered the restoration of land to its former owners, including the land provided to freed slaves by General Sherman's January field order. Freedmen are especially reluctant to leave the land they have started farming in South Carolina and Georgia. The president started aligning himself with the Southern elite, declaring, "white men alone must manage the South." So, President Johnson was a stole cold racist. By the Fall of 1865, Southern states elect former Confederates to public office at the state and national levels, dragged their feet in ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, and refused to extend the vote to black men. Southern legislatures begin drafting "Black Codes" to re-establish white racist policies against black Americans. The laws impose restrictions on black citizens, especially in attempts to control labor: freedmen are prohibited from work except as field hands, black people refusing to sign labor contracts can be punished, unemployed black men can be seized and auctioned to planters as laborers, black children can be taken from their families and made to work. The new laws amount to slavery without the chain. From November to December 1865, at the request of President Johnson, victorious Union general Ulysses S. Grant tours the South, and is greeted with surprising friendliness. His report recommends a lenient Reconstruction policy. By December, President Johnson falsely considered the Reconstruction process complete. Radical Republicans were outraged. Radical Republicans refuse to recognize new governments in the Southern states. More than sixty former Confederates arrive to take their seats in Congress, including four generals, four colonels, and six Confederate cabinet officers -- even Alexander H. Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy. The Clerk of the House refused to include the Southern representatives in his roll call, and they were denied their elected seats. The Union Army is quickly demobilized. From a troop strength of one million on May 1, only 152,000 Union soldiers remain in the South by the end of 1865. Southern towns and cities start to experience a large influx of freedmen. Over the next five years, the black populations of the South's ten largest cities will double. By February of 1866, President Johnson vetoed a supplemental Freedmen's Bureau Bill, which Republican moderates had designed to extend protection to Southern black people.
By April 1866, there was another piece of moderate Republican legislation, the Civil Rights Bill, which grants citizenship and the same rights enjoyed by white citizens to all male persons in the United States "without distinction of race or color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude." It passes both houses of Congress by overwhelming majorities, and when President Johnson vetoes it, Congress overrides the veto, making the bill the first major piece of legislation enacted over a presidential veto. The rift between Congress and the president is complete. By May 1, 1866, racial violence happened in Memphis, Tennessee. On June 13, 1866, Congress sends the Fourteenth Amendment to the states. It writes the Republican vision of how post-Civil War American society should be structured into the U.S. Constitution, out of the reach of partisan politics. The amendment defines citizenship to include all people born or naturalized in the U.S. and increases the federal government's power over the states to protect all Americans' rights. It stops short of guaranteeing blacks the right to vote. The 14th Amendment will take over two years to be ratified. By July 1866, Congress re-passes its supplemental Freedmen's Bureau Bill. President Johnson vetoed it again, and Congress again overrode the veto, making the bill a law. On July 21, 1866, the Southern Homestead Act of 1866 was passed which opened 46 million acres of land in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi. African Americans had priority access until January 1, 1877. Tennessee was the first Confederate state readmitted to the Union on July 24, 1866.
On July 30, 1866, riots break out in New Orleans, Louisiana. A white mob attacked black people and Radical Republicans attending a black suffrage convention, killing 40 people. By August 28, 1866, with Congress demanding that Southern states ratify the Fourteenth Amendment to gain re-admittance to the legislature, President Johnson begins a disastrous speaking tour of the North to bolster support for his policies in the mid-term elections. He asks popular Union general Ulysses S. Grant to come along. When crowds heckle the president, Johnson's angry and undignified responses cause Grant -- and many Northerners -- to lose sympathy with the president and his lenient Reconstruction policies. Following the president's ruinous campaign, the mid-term elections become a battleground over the Fourteenth Amendment and civil rights. Johnson's opponents are victorious, and the Republicans occupy enough seats to guarantee they will be able to override any presidential vetoes in the coming legislative session. This was in the Fall of 1866. Union troops are demobilized to the point that only 38,000 troops are in the South by the fall. February 14, 1867, was when Augusta Institute was created in the basement of Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia. It would later be called Morehouse College. By March 2, 1867, Howard University was founded in Washington, D.C. On March 1, 1867, the new session of Congress began to pass additional reconstruction laws, overriding President Johnson's vetoes and beginning a more hard-line attitude toward the South. Known as Radical Reconstruction, the new policies divide the South into military districts and require the states to adopt new constitutions, introduce black suffrage, and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. By July 31, 1867, President Andrew Johnson tells Ulysses S. Grant that he intends to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who has been a consistent opponent of the president and is close to the Radical Republicans who dominate Congress. Stanton has refused to resign and Congress has supported him through the Tenure of Office Act, which requires the consent of Congress to removals. At the same time, Congress has weakened the president's control of the army through the Command of the Army Act, which requires that all military orders of the President have the approval of the general of the army (Grant). Johnson believes the Tenure of Office Act is unconstitutional, and hopes to defeat the effort to force Stanton upon him by employing the popular Grant. By August 11, 1867, Johnson ordered Grant to take over the War Department temporarily.
By January 14, 1868, Grant resigned his position as interim Secretary of War after Congress insisted upon Stanton's reinstatement. President Johnson believes that Grant has betrayed him; Grant now openly breaks with Johnson. During the winter of 1868, black and white lawmakers begin to work side by side in the Southern states' constitutional conventions, the first political meetings in American history to include substantial numbers of black men. By May 16, 1868, having infuriated the Republicans, Andrew Johnson becomes the first president to be impeached by a house of Congress, but he avoids conviction and retains his office by a single vote. He will not get the Democratic nomination in the upcoming presidential election. On May 21, 1868, the Republican National Convention at Chicago nominated Grant for president and Schuyler Colfax of Indiana for vice president; Grant adopted the conciliatory slogan, "Let us have peace." Arkansas was readmitted to the Union on June 22, 1868. June 25, 1868, was when Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina were readmitted to the Union. Alabama was readmitted to the Union on July 14, 1868. The Democrats nominated Horatio Seymour, former Governor of New York, for president, and Francis P. Blair, Jr., formerly one of Grant's commanders, for vice president. This was on July 9, 1868. On July 28, 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, defining citizenship to include all people born or naturalized in the U.S., was finally ratified. In September 1868, black elected officials are ousted from the Georgia state legislature; "The Negro is unfit to rule the State," the Atlanta Constitution declared. The Atlanta Constitution is wrong. The black legislators appealed to President Grant to intervene to get them readmitted, which took a year.
By November 3, 1868, Grant was elected President, winning an electoral college majority of 214-80 over his Democratic opponent. But the popular majority is only 306,000 in a total vote of 5,715,000. Newly enfranchised black men in the South cast 700,000 votes for the Republican ticket. By 1869, the Freedmen's Bureau had almost 3,000 schools, serving over 150,000 students, in the South. On February 26, 1869, Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment, which attempts to address Southern poll violence by stating that the right to vote can not be denied based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." It is sent to the states for ratification. On April 1869, in the 5-3 Texas v. White decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Radical Reconstruction constitutional, stating that secession from the Union was illegal. On September 24, 1869, Black Friday on the New York gold exchange. Financiers Jay Gould and Jim Fisk attempt to corner the available gold supply and try unsuccessfully to involve President Grant in the illegal plan. By the fall of 1869, there was violence against black people all over the South. In October 1869, Georgia legislator Abram Colby was kidnapped and whipped. By January 1870, Grant proposed a treaty of annexation with Santo Domingo in an attempt to find land for freed slaves to settle. Under Grant's plan, freed slaves would be able to relocate to the Caribbean Island (the Dominican Republic today). The treaty is opposed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, headed by Charles Sumner, and will never be confirmed. On January 26, 1870, Virginia was readmitted to the Union. The 15th Amendment was ratified on February 3, 1870. The first of the two Enforcement Acts were passed in 1870 to protect African Americans' right to vote, hold office, serve on juries, and receive equal protection of laws. President Ulysses S. Grant passed the laws.
On February 25, 1870, Hiram Rhodes Revels was the first black member of the U.S. Senate. Mississippi was readmitted to the Union on February 23, 1870, and Texas was readmitted to the Union on March 30, 1870. By July 15, 1870, Georgia was the last former Confederate state to be readmitted to the Union. By October 1871, Congress heard testimony from victims of Klan violence. Grant cracks down on anti-black violence in South Carolina. October 10, 1871, was when Octavius Catto, a civil rights activist, was murdered during Election Day in Philadelphia.
By May 1, 1872, there was a meeting of the Liberal Republican Convention at Cincinnati. Leaders of the group include many prominent Republicans unhappy about Reconstruction policies and corruption in government, which they call Grantism. New York newspaperman Horace Greeley receives their nomination. Greeley's earlier radicalism, high tariff views, and well-known eccentricity repel many who oppose Grant. The Democrats, on July 9, also nominated Greeley. On May 22, 1872, Grant signed an amnesty bill he had advocated. Although the final legislation is less generous than Grant had wanted, now only a few hundred former Confederates are excluded from political privileges. On June 5, 1872, the Republican Convention met in Philadelphia. It will renominate Grant on the first ballot. On September 5, 1872, the New York Sun charged that Vice President Colfax, Vice-Presidential nominee Henry Wilson, James Garfield, and other prominent politicians were involved in the operations of the Credit Mobilier, a corporation established by the promoters of the Union Pacific railroad to siphon off the profits of transcontinental railroad construction. Ultimately, two congressmen will be censured for their part in the swindle and many other politicians will be damaged in reputation. By November 5, 1872, Grant was reelected with an electoral college majority of 286-66, and a popular majority of 763,000. P.B.S. Pinchback was sworn in as the first black member of the U.S. House of Representatives on December 11, 1872.
By the winter of 1873, racists in the New York Tribune accuse black lawmakers of corruption in South Carolina. There was the Colfax Massacre on April 13, 1873. This was when the White League, a paramilitary group intent on securing white rule in Louisiana, clashed with Louisiana's almost all-black state militia. The resulting death toll is staggering: only three members of the White League die, but some one hundred black men are killed. Of those, nearly half are murdered in cold blood after they surrender. By September 18, 1873, there was the panic of 1873 with the failure of a Wall Street banking firm, spread to the stock exchange, and eventually leads to widespread unemployment.
By the fall of 1874, the political tide had turned in the Democrats' favor; they won control of Congress as stories of black political corruption, continued Southern violence, and a terrible economic depression occupied public attention. On March 1, 1875, as one of its last acts, the Republican-led Congress passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1875, prohibiting segregation in public facilities. The law will stand only until 1883, when the U.S. Supreme Court will strike it down. On March 4, 1877, after a bitterly disputed presidential contest between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden, in which both candidates claimed victory, Hayes is declared president. In a back-room political deal, the Republicans agree to abandon Reconstruction policies in exchange for the presidency. Reconstruction policies officially end. The South codifies and enforces segregation. By the Spring of 1879, thousands of African Americans who refused to live under Jim Crow apartheid in the South migrated to Kansas. They are known as the Exodusters. Black people will fight back, and progressive civil rights legislation would never exist in America until after World War II. Reconstruction was one of the greatest political experiments in American history that had many positive changes. The problem was that Reconstruction fully wasn't completed, and it was stopped by capitalist interests, racists, and other oligarchy who wanted the status quo instead of real freedom, justice, and equality for all people.
By Timothy
