5.10 Reconstruction

Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan (1863) offered pardons to most Confederates and let a state rejoin the Union once 10 percent of its 1860 voters swore loyalty and accepted emancipation. Radical Republicans in Congress thought this too lenient and passed the Wade–Davis Bill (1864), which required a majority to swear loyalty, but Lincoln blocked it with a pocket veto.

After Lincoln's assassination, Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat who had stayed loyal to the Union, became president. Johnson disliked the planter elite but believed in white supremacy and states' rights. He pardoned thousands of former Confederates, returned land to them and let Southern states form new governments with few conditions beyond abolishing slavery. Voters in those states elected many former Confederate leaders, including the Confederacy's vice president, to Congress.

In 1865–1866 the new Southern governments passed Black Codes, laws that restricted freedpeople's lives and tried to force them back into plantation labor. They required Black workers to sign yearly labor contracts, punished 'vagrancy' (being unemployed) with fines or forced labor, and limited Black people's rights to own or rent land, testify against whites and own guns.

Freedpeople, meanwhile, worked to make freedom real. They searched for family members separated by sale, legalized marriages, founded churches and schools, and sought land of their own. General Sherman's Field Order No. 15 (January 1865) had set aside coastal land in 40-acre plots for freed families, but Johnson returned most of it to its former owners.

The Freedmen's Bureau, created by Congress in March 1865, provided food, medical care and legal help, oversaw labor contracts and helped found more than a thousand schools and supported new Black colleges, such as Howard and Fisk Universities. It was underfunded and ended most operations by 1869.

Radical Republicans, led by Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, wanted to protect freedpeople's rights and transform the South. Congress refused to seat the South's new representatives, passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over Johnson's veto, and proposed the Fourteenth Amendment. After Republicans won big in the 1866 elections, Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which divided ten Southern states into five military districts and required them to write new constitutions guaranteeing Black men the vote and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before rejoining the Union.

When Johnson fired his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, in apparent violation of the Tenure of Office Act, the House impeached him in 1868. The Senate fell one vote short of the two-thirds needed to remove him from office.

Under the new state constitutions, Black men voted and held office in large numbers. Some 2,000 African Americans held public office during Reconstruction, and sixteen served in Congress, including Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi in the Senate. Southern Republican governments, made up of freedpeople, white Southern Republicans (called 'scalawags' by opponents) and Northerners who moved South (called 'carpetbaggers'), created the South's first public school systems.

The Fifteenth Amendment split the women's rights movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opposed it because it did not include women, while others, including Lucy Stone and Frederick Douglass, supported it, arguing that securing Black men's votes could not wait.