United States

Victorious in the fall elections, congressional Republicans moved during the 1866–67 session to devise a second, more stringent program for reconstructing the South. After long and acrimonious quarrels between Radical and moderate Republicans, the party leaders finally produced a compromise plan in the First Reconstruction Act of 1867. Expanded and clarified in three supplementary Reconstruction acts, this legislation swept away the regimes the president had set up in the South, put the former Confederacy back under military control, called for the election of new constitutional conventions, and required the constitutions adopted by these bodies to include both African American suffrage and the disqualification of former Confederate leaders from officeholding. Under this legislation, new governments were established in all the former Confederate states (except Tennessee, which had already been readmitted); and by July 1868 Congress agreed to seat senators and representatives from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina. By July 1870 the remaining Southern states had been similarly reorganized and readmitted.

Suspicious of Andrew Johnson, Republicans in Congress did not trust the president to enforce the Reconstruction legislation they passed over his repeated vetoes, and they tried to deprive him of as much power as possible. Congress limited the president’s control over the army by requiring that all his military orders be issued through the general of the army, Ulysses S. Grant, who was believed loyal to the Radical cause; and in the Tenure of Office Act (1867) they limited the president’s right to remove appointive officers. When Johnson continued to do all he could to block the enforcement of Radical legislation in the South, the more extreme members of the Republican Party demanded his impeachment. The president’s decision in February 1868 to remove the Radical secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton from the Cabinet, in apparent defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, provided a pretext for impeachment proceedings. The House of Representatives voted to impeach the president, and after a protracted trial the Senate acquitted him by the margin of only one vote.

Johnson, Andrew: impeachment trialThe impeachment trial of Pres. Andrew Johnson, illustration from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, March 28, 1868.U.S. Senate

The South during Reconstruction

In the South the Reconstruction period was a time of readjustment accompanied by disorder. Southern whites wished to keep African Americans in a condition of quasi-servitude, extending few civil rights and firmly rejecting social equality. African Americans, on the other hand, wanted full freedom and, above all, land of their own. Inevitably, there were frequent clashes. Some erupted into race riots, but acts of terrorism against individual African American leaders were more common.

During this turmoil, Southern whites and blacks began to work out ways of getting their farms back into operation and of making a living. Indeed, the most important developments of the Reconstruction era were not the highly publicized political contests but the slow, almost imperceptible changes that occurred in Southern society. African Americans could now legally marry, and they set up conventional and usually stable family units; they quietly seceded from the white churches and formed their own religious organizations, which became centres for the African American community. Without land or money, most freedmen had to continue working for white masters; but they were now unwilling to labour in gangs or to live in the old slave quarters under the eye of the plantation owner.

Sharecropping gradually became the accepted labour system in most of the South—planters, short of capital, favoured the system because it did not require them to pay cash wages; African Americans preferred it because they could live in individual cabins on the tracts they rented and because they had a degree of independence in choosing what to plant and how to cultivate. The section as a whole, however, was desperately poor throughout the Reconstruction era; and a series of disastrously bad crops in the late 1860s, followed by the general agricultural depression of the 1870s, hurt both whites and blacks.