Reconstruction in two minutes
- Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan (1863) was lenient, and the stricter Wade–Davis Bill (1864) died by pocket veto. In 1865 Andrew Johnson pardoned thousands of ex-Confederates and let new Southern governments form.
- Southern legislatures passed Black Codes that limited freedpeople's work and movement. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, allowed involuntary servitude as punishment for crime, and vagrancy laws exploited that exception.
- On June 19, 1865, General Granger told Texans slavery had ended. Freedpeople built schools and churches, sought family members sold away, and worked with the Freedmen's Bureau.
- Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over Johnson's veto, then proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, which defined citizenship and guaranteed equal protection. Republicans won two-thirds of Congress in the 1866 elections.
- The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 placed ten Southern states under military rule and required Black male suffrage. The House impeached Johnson in 1868, and the Senate fell one vote short of removal.
- The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, barred denying the vote because of race. It split the women's suffrage movement, and Hiram Revels became the first Black senator that year.
- On the exam: this topic tests change and continuity and comparison of the presidential and congressional plans. Link the Reconstruction Amendments to the Civil War's results and to later civil rights struggles.
Topic 5.10 key terms
- Emancipation Proclamation
Lincoln's order of January 1, 1863, declaring enslaved people free in the states in rebellion. It was a war measure that worked only where Union armies advanced, and few had reached Texas. It did not free anyone in the Union's border states.
- Free labor
The Northern belief that free workers sign contracts and earn wages, instead of being owned or forced to work. Army officers applied it to freedpeople in 1865, as General Orders No. 3 did when it called the new relation 'employer and hired labor.'
- Reconstruction
The years after the Civil War (1865–1877) when the nation decided how to bring the Confederate states back and what freedom would mean for four million formerly enslaved people. Presidents, Congress, white Southerners and freedpeople all pushed their own answers.
- Ten Percent Plan
Lincoln’s plan of December 1863. Most Confederates who swore loyalty to the Union and accepted emancipation were pardoned. A state could form a new government once 10 percent of its 1860 voters took the oath.
- Wade-Davis Bill
Congress’s tougher plan, passed July 1864. A majority of a state’s white men had to take a loyalty oath, and only men who swore they had never backed the Confederacy (the “ironclad oath”) could vote on a new constitution. Lincoln let it die by pocket veto.
- Presidential Reconstruction
Johnson’s plan, 1865–66: quick pardons, new state governments chosen by white voters, and no guarantee of Black suffrage or civil rights. Congress took control of Reconstruction in 1867.
- Black Codes
Laws passed by Southern states in 1865–66 to control freedpeople’s labor and movement. They limited renting land, demanded proof of a job, fined “vagrants” and hired them out, and in Mississippi let courts apprentice Black children to their former owners.
- 13th Amendment
Ratified December 1865. It abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, “except as a punishment for crime.” The Southern states’ own ratifications helped put it over the top.
- Juneteenth
June 19 + nineteenth. Freedpeople in Texas began holding celebrations on that date in 1866, and the name is first attested around 1890. In 1866 people called the day Emancipation Day or Jubilee.
- Independent Black churches
After emancipation, freedpeople left white-controlled congregations and built their own, including the AME and Black Baptist churches. They also served as schools and meeting halls.
- Freedmen's Bureau
Created March 3, 1865, to help freedpeople with food, medical care, labor contracts, courts, and above all schools. Howard University is named for its commissioner, Oliver Otis Howard.
- Radical Republicans
Republicans, led by Thaddeus Stevens in the House and Charles Sumner in the Senate, who wanted Congress to remake the South and guarantee equal rights to freedpeople before readmitting the states.
- Civil Rights Act of 1866
The first federal law to define citizenship (everyone born in the U.S.) and guarantee citizens equal legal rights. It answered Dred Scott and the Black Codes, and it was the first major law passed over a president's veto: Senate 33–15, House 122–41. An override takes two-thirds of each house.
- 14th Amendment
Ratified in 1868. It made everyone born or naturalized in the U.S. a citizen and barred any state from denying due process or the equal protection of the laws.
- Due process
The rule that government must follow fair, lawful procedures before it takes a person's life, liberty or property. The 14th Amendment applies it to the states.
- Equal protection
The 14th Amendment's promise that a state must apply its laws to everyone within its borders on equal terms. Courts later used it against segregation and other discrimination.
- Congressional Reconstruction
Reconstruction on Congress's terms, from 1867. After President Johnson's plan let white Southerners rebuild the old order, Congress took over: army rule, new state constitutions and votes for Black men.
- Reconstruction Acts (1867)
Four laws passed in 1867–68. The first, passed over Johnson's veto on March 2, 1867, put ten Southern states under army generals in five military districts until they wrote new constitutions and ratified the 14th Amendment.
- Union League
Republican clubs that met at night in Southern churches and schoolhouses. Members explained the ballot to newly registered voters and got them to the polls.
- Carpetbaggers and scalawags
Insults for Republicans in the South. Enemies called Northern-born Republicans 'carpetbaggers' and white Southerners who joined the party 'scalawags,' to say the new governments were foreign or disloyal.
- Tenure of Office Act (1867)
Passed over Johnson's veto on March 2, 1867. The president could not remove an official the Senate had confirmed unless the Senate agreed. Congress wanted to keep Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, its ally in running Reconstruction, at his desk.
- Impeachment
The House votes to charge an official with wrongdoing. That is the accusation, not the removal. The Senate then holds the trial, with the Chief Justice presiding when the president is charged, and removal takes a two-thirds vote.
- Myers v. United States (1926)
The Supreme Court struck down a law requiring Senate consent to remove a postmaster. Chief Justice Taft, a former president, wrote that Johnson's Tenure of Office Act had been invalid too. Congress had repealed it in 1887.
- Election of 1868
Republican Ulysses Grant beat Democrat Horatio Seymour, 214 to 80 in the Electoral College. It was the first presidential election in which Black men across much of the South could vote, and Seymour's party ran against Reconstruction.
- 15th Amendment
Ratified 1870. Bars the United States and every state from denying the vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It does not mention sex.
- American Equal Rights Association (1866)
Founded by abolitionists and women’s rights leaders to win the vote for Black men and for all women together. Its members split over the 15th Amendment.
- Modifies (Skill 3.D)
Evidence can support a claim, modify it or refute it. CLAIM: the ballot is a matter of life and death for Black men. EVIDENCE from the floor: Black women face the same violence. VERDICT: modifies.
- NWSA
National Woman Suffrage Association, founded 1869 by Stanton and Anthony. Sought a federal amendment for women, took up a broad reform agenda and had women-only officers. Opposed the 15th Amendment as written.
- AWSA
American Woman Suffrage Association, founded 1869 by Lucy Stone and others. Worked state by state, supported the 15th Amendment, and had men and women as members and officers.
- Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
The Supreme Court ruling that Black Americans, free or enslaved, could not be citizens of the United States. The 14th Amendment (1868) overturned it by making everyone born here and subject to its jurisdiction a citizen.
- 15th Amendment (1870)
Bars the United States and every state from denying the vote 'on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.' It doesn't guarantee anyone the vote, and it says nothing about sex. Later, states used literacy tests and poll taxes to work around it.
- Naturalization Act of 1870
Signed July 14, 1870. It extended naturalization to 'aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent,' but Congress kept the old whites-only rule for everyone else, so Chinese immigrants stayed ineligible for citizenship.
- Military Reconstruction
Under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, Congress put ten former Confederate states under army districts until each wrote a new constitution allowing Black men to vote and ratified the 14th Amendment. Georgia came back last, on July 15, 1870.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Juneteenth
June 19, 1865
Key terms: Emancipation Proclamation, Free labor, Reconstruction
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
Key terms: Ten Percent Plan, Wade-Davis Bill, Presidential Reconstruction, Black Codes, 13th Amendment
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
Key terms: Juneteenth, Free labor, Independent Black churches, Freedmen's Bureau
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
Key terms: Radical Republicans, Civil Rights Act of 1866, 14th Amendment, Due process, Equal protection
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
Key terms: Congressional Reconstruction, Reconstruction Acts (1867), Union League, Carpetbaggers and scalawags
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
Key terms: Tenure of Office Act (1867), Impeachment, Myers v. United States (1926), Election of 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
Key terms: 15th Amendment, American Equal Rights Association (1866), Modifies (Skill 3.D), NWSA, AWSA
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
Key terms: Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), 15th Amendment (1870), Naturalization Act of 1870, Military Reconstruction
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.