Reconstruction

Juneteenth

June 19, 1865

By June 1865 the war was over. The line of freedom had one place left to reach.

Union troops had come to Galveston. Their general issued an order.

A Union officer The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, 'all slaves are free.'

About 250,000 enslaved Texans were free. The news was two and a half years late.

For many, the news came months later, when their owners chose to pass it on.

A Union officer The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages.

Free. And told to stay put.

Freedom had come. Who got to decide what it meant? The president, Congress, the men who had just lost the war, or four million people just freed?

Apply Personally

1863–1865

Three days before he was shot, Lincoln backed the vote for some Black men.

Abraham Lincoln I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.

His successor, Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee tailor, hated the planters.

Andrew Johnson …that treason must be made odious, that traitors must be punished and impoverished.

His amnesty left out Confederate leaders, and anyone with more than $20,000 in taxable property. They could apply to him personally.

They did. He said yes, more than seven thousand times.

Johnson had a real argument, and it was Lincoln’s: the states never left the Union. So each state could decide who voted.

In January 1866, Georgia’s legislature elected the Confederacy’s vice president to the U.S. Senate.

That fall, the new Southern legislatures wrote Black Codes. Mississippi’s was titled “An Act to confer Civil Rights on Freedmen.”

It barred them from renting land, except in towns and cities.

Every January, each freedman had to show written proof of a home or a job.

Without it, he was a vagrant: fined, then hired out to whoever paid the fine. Galveston’s advice was now the law.

In December, the 13th Amendment was ratified. Some of its last votes came from Johnson’s new Southern legislatures.

Read the exception. A vagrancy conviction was a crime.

Congress met that month. Freedpeople hadn’t waited for it.

To Test Your Sincerity

1865–1866

A year after Galveston, Texas freedpeople gathered to celebrate June 19. They picked the day themselves. They kept it every year.

In 1865, Jourdon Anderson's old master wrote to him from Tennessee, asking him to come back and work.

Jourdon Anderson We have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you.

Jourdon Anderson I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years.

Jourdon Anderson At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy,

Jourdon Anderson our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars.

We checked his math. It's right.

Jourdon Anderson Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

Couples whose marriages slavery never recognized lined up to make them legal.

Others went looking for family sold away. Their notices ran in Black newspapers. Some asked ministers to read them to their congregations.

Kansas Lee wishes to learn the whereabouts of her children, four girls and one boy.

Booker T. Washington It was a whole race trying to go to school.

Booker T. Washington Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn.

The Freedmen's Bureau helped open thousands of schools. Freedpeople built many schools of their own. By 1880, a third of Black children were in school.

Over the Veto

December 1865 – November 1866

December 4, 1865. The Clerk of the House called the roll and skipped the South.

Edward McPherson The Clerk rules, as a matter of order, that he cannot recognize any gentleman whose name is not upon his roll.

Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens wanted the South remade. Most Republicans were moderates. All of them could count: without the three-fifths rule, the South would return with more seats.

Moderates wrote a Civil Rights bill and another to extend the Freedmen's Bureau. Johnson vetoed both.

Andrew Johnson In fact, the distinction of race and color is by the bill made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.

Test the claim against the evidence. The bill gave freedpeople the same rights 'as is enjoyed by white citizens.' The evidence refutes it.

On April 9, Congress passed it over his veto. Before Johnson, only six vetoes had ever been overridden. He'd have fifteen.

That May, white mobs in Memphis, police among them, killed 46 Black people and burned four churches and twelve schoolhouses.

In July, police and a mob attacked a meeting for Black suffrage in New Orleans. At least 34 Black men and three white allies were killed.

Congress answered with the 14th Amendment. Anyone born here was a citizen.

No state could take life, liberty or property without due process, or deny 'the equal protection of the laws.'

Section 2 used a word the Constitution had never used before: 'male.'

Johnson advised the former Confederate states to reject it. Every one but Tennessee did.

That fall Johnson took his case to the voters, by train.

Andrew Johnson If I have played the Judas, who has been my Christ that I have played the Judas with?

Andrew Johnson Was it Thad. Stevens? Was it Wendell Phillips? Was it Charles Sumner?

In November, voters gave Republicans two-thirds of both houses. From then on, Congress could override him every time.

The First Vote

1867–1868

Thaddeus Stevens, seventy-four and dying, gave Congress his reasons.

Thaddeus Stevens …I am for negro suffrage in every rebel State.

Thaddeus Stevens If it be just, it should not be denied; if it be necessary, it should be adopted; if it be a punishment to traitors, they deserve it.

One reason was winning elections. He said so before anyone else could.

Thaddeus Stevens Do you avow the party purpose? exclaims some horror-stricken demagogue. I do.

Historians still weigh his motives. He never pretended to have only one.

In March 1867 the Reconstruction Acts put ten Southern states under military rule, in five districts. To rejoin, each state had to write a new constitution and ratify the 14th Amendment. The delegates would be chosen by Black and white men alike.

Army boards registered the new voters. In five states, most of them were Black.

That fall, hundreds of thousands of men who had been enslaved cast the first votes of their lives.

In South Carolina the voters chose 124 delegates to write a new constitution. Seventy-six were Black. Many had been enslaved.

The Charleston Mercury called it the 'Ring-Streaked and Striped Negro Convention.' Its claim: these men couldn't govern.

Voters ratified it, 70,558 to 27,288. It's still the only South Carolina constitution ever put to a popular vote. The Democrats who took back the state kept it until 1895.

That November, South Carolinians voted for president for the first time. The legislature had always picked the electors before.

One Vote Short

1867–1868

In February 1868, Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton anyway. Stanton refused to leave. He slept in his office for weeks.

Johnson's replacement, General Lorenzo Thomas, came for the office. By his own sworn testimony, Stanton split a spoonful of whisky with him.

He held the glasses to the light to check they matched.

Gen. Lorenzo Thomas 'Now,' said he, 'this, at least, is neutral ground.'

The House impeached the president, 126 to 47. One article charged him with his speeches.

Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase Mr. Senator Ross, how say you? Is the respondent, Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, guilty or not guilty of a high misdemeanor, as charged in this article?

Sen. Edmund G. Ross Not guilty.

Thirty-five guilty. Nineteen not guilty. Removal took thirty-six.

Seven Republicans voted to acquit. Several called the charges thin. Next in line was Benjamin Wade, a Radical some senators distrusted. Johnson had signaled he would stop fighting Congress.

He finished his term. Congress ran Reconstruction.

That fall, Ulysses Grant won the presidency by about 300,000 votes. About half a million Black men voted, most of them for him.

In September, Georgia's House expelled 25 Black members. The majority argued that a right to vote was not a right to hold office.

Henry McNeal Turner I am here to demand my rights, and to hurl thunderbolts at the men who would dare to cross the threshold of my manhood.

Republicans decided the vote needed an amendment of its own.

Two Great Oceans

1866–1869

In February 1869, Congress sent the states the Fifteenth Amendment. No denying the vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

A stronger Senate draft also barred discrimination by property, education and birthplace. It protected the right to hold office, too. Congress dropped both.

It mattered in the North, too. White voters in state after state had just voted against Black suffrage.

In 1866, abolitionists and women’s rights leaders formed one group for everyone’s vote.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.

Then the 14th Amendment wrote in “male.” Abolitionist allies told women to wait: “This is the negro’s hour.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton My question is this: Do you believe the African race is composed entirely of males?

May 1869. The Equal Rights Association met in Steinway Hall, New York. The question: whether to back the amendment.

The question from the gallery didn’t refute Douglass. It modified his claim, and he accepted that in three words.

Two days later, Stanton and Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, which opposed the amendment as written. In November, Lucy Stone and others founded the American, which backed it.

That December, Wyoming Territory gave women the vote. No American government had let women vote in general elections since New Jersey took the right away in 1807.

Mr. Revels Takes His Seat

1870

February 1870. Hiram Revels of Mississippi came to take his seat in the Senate. A minister, born free in North Carolina.

For three days, Democrats argued he hadn't been a citizen for nine years. Dred Scott had said Black Americans couldn't be citizens at all.

The 14th Amendment answered them. The Senate seated him, 48 to 8.

Sixteen Black Americans served in Congress during Reconstruction. More than 1,500 held office across the South.

On March 30, 1870, the 15th Amendment was declared part of the Constitution.

The next day, in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, a handyman named Thomas Mundy Peterson voted in a town election.

He's remembered as the first Black man to vote under the amendment. That February, New Jersey's legislature had voted against it.

The new citizenship had edges. In July 1870 the Senate voted to open naturalization to all races, then reversed itself over Chinese immigrants.

Most Native Americans would wait until 1924 for citizenship. Women were still waiting for the vote.

By July 1870 every Confederate state was back in the Union, and the army's lines came off the map.

In 1865 an order told freedpeople to stay put and work for wages. By 1870 they were voting, and writing laws.

The amendments said what freedom meant. Whether anyone would enforce them was the next fight.