United States

Such Radical trust in Johnson proved misplaced. The new president was, first of all, himself a Southerner. He was a Democrat who looked for the restoration of his old party partly as a step toward his own reelection to the presidency in 1868. Most important of all, Johnson shared the white Southerners’ attitude toward African Americans, considering black men innately inferior and unready for equal civil or political rights. On May 29, 1865, Johnson made his policy clear when he issued a general proclamation of pardon and amnesty for most Confederates and authorized the provisional governor of North Carolina to proceed with the reorganization of that state. Shortly afterward he issued similar proclamations for the other former Confederate states. In each case a state constitutional convention was to be chosen by the voters who pledged future loyalty to the U.S. Constitution. The conventions were expected to repeal the ordinances of secession, to repudiate the Confederate debt, and to accept the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. The president did not, however, require them to enfranchise African Americans.

Johnson, AndrewAndrew Johnson pardoning Confederate soldiers at the White House, Washington, D.C.; Harper's Weekly, 1865.Harper's Weekly V. 9, No. 459, October 1865

“Black Codes”

Given little guidance from Washington, Southern whites turned to the traditional political leaders of their section for guidance in reorganizing their governments; and the new regimes in the South were suspiciously like those of the antebellum period. To be sure, slavery was abolished; but each reconstructed Southern state government proceeded to adopt a “Black Code,” regulating the rights and privileges of freedmen. Varying from state to state, these codes in general treated African Americans as inferiors, relegated to a secondary and subordinate position in society. Their right to own land was restricted, they could not bear arms, and they might be bound out in servitude for vagrancy and other offenses. The conduct of white Southerners indicated that they were not prepared to guarantee even minimal protection of African American rights. In riots in Memphis (May 1866) and New Orleans (July 1866), African Americans were brutally assaulted and promiscuously killed.

Civil rights legislation

Watching these developments with forebodings, Northern Republicans during the congressional session of 1865–66 inevitably drifted into conflict with the president. Congress attempted to protect the rights of African Americans by extending the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a welfare agency established in March 1865 to ease the transition from slavery to freedom; but Johnson vetoed the bill. An act to define and guarantee African Americans’ basic civil rights met a similar fate, but Republicans succeeded in passing it over the president’s veto. While the president, from the porch of the White House, denounced the leaders of the Republican Party as “traitors,” Republicans in Congress tried to formulate their own plan to reconstruct the South. Their first effort was the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed the basic civil rights of all citizens, regardless of colour, and which tried to persuade the Southern states to enfranchise African Americans by threatening to reduce their representation in Congress.

Andrew Johnson; photo from the Brady-Handy Collection.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The president, the Northern Democrats, and the Southern whites spurned this Republican plan of Reconstruction. Johnson tried to organize his own political party in the National Union Convention, which met in Philadelphia in August 1866; and in August and September he visited many Northern and Western cities in order to defend his policies and to attack the Republican leaders. At the president’s urging, every Southern state except Tennessee overwhelmingly rejected the Fourteenth Amendment.