The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877

This is Unit Sixteen, part one, on Reconstruction from Lincoln's plan to the Fourteenth Amendment. Unit Fifteen closed at Appomattox, with six hundred thousand dead and a peace still to be decided. This unit is that decision. Carry one clause. The Thirteenth Amendment bans slavery and involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. Hold that phrase, because the southern Black codes made refusing a labour contract an arrest for vagrancy, punishable by unpaid forced labour. That is not a violation of the amendment. It is an application of it, and the anchor never quotes the clause that makes it work. By the end you will be able to explain what the two Reconstruction plans disagreed about. To state that excepting clause and its relation to the codes. To explain what a Pennsylvania campaign poster argues. To state what section one of the Fourteenth does. And to say what the gap to Galveston measures.

Three entries on two plans, and the third reduces the disagreement to two numbers.

Lincoln's plan.

USH1 2251 The Ten Percent Plan

Lincoln's plan of December eighteen sixty-three offered a general pardon to most southerners, excepting high-ranking Confederate government and military officials, with ten percent of a state's eighteen sixty voters swearing allegiance to the Union and to emancipation. Once sworn, the restored state would draft a new constitution. Lincoln believed leniency would speed resolution and make emancipation more acceptable nationally.

Who thought that too generous.

USH1 2252 The Wade-Davis Bill

Radical Republicans demanded harsh terms for the defeated Confederacy and strong protections for formerly enslaved people, beyond anything the president had proposed, and Benjamin Wade and Henry Winter Davis countered in February eighteen sixty-four. Their bill required a majority to swear the Ironclad Oath, that they had never supported the Confederacy, with refusers barred from southern political life.

What the two plans really disputed.

USH1 2253 Ten Percent Versus a Majority

Lincoln's ten percent plan required that ten percent of a rebel state's eighteen sixty voting population swear oaths of allegiance to the United States and to emancipation, after which the state would draft a new constitution. In eighteen sixty-four senator Benjamin Wade and representative Henry Winter Davis countered with a bill requiring a majority of voters and officials to take the Ironclad Oath, swearing they had never supported the Confederacy, with refusers excluded from southern political life. Lincoln killed it with a pocket veto. Ten percent against a majority, and an oath about what a man will do against an oath about what he has already done. That contrast holds the whole Reconstruction argument in two numbers. Lincoln's oath looks forward and can be sworn by anyone willing to accept the outcome. The Ironclad Oath looks backward and cannot be sworn by anyone who fought, which is most of the South. Lincoln vetoed it knowing no southern state could meet it.

Two entries on the amendment, and the second is the clause I flagged at the start.

The amendment.

USH1 2254 The Thirteenth Amendment

The Emancipation Proclamation had left slavery's legal status unresolved, and the eighteen sixty-four Republican platform demanded its utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic, that platform naming slavery as the cause, and the strength, of the Rebellion. The Senate passed the amendment in April eighteen sixty-four, the House concurred in January eighteen sixty-five, and it was ratified that December.

The clause inside it.

USH1 2255 The Punishment Clause

The Thirteenth Amendment holds that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States. The Senate passed it in April eighteen sixty-four, the House concurred in January eighteen sixty-five, and it was ratified in December eighteen sixty-five, the first amendment added to the Constitution since eighteen oh four. The excepting clause is the most consequential clause in the amendment and the one students read past — a constitutional ban on forced labour that names, in the same sentence, the one condition under which forced labour remains lawful. Set it beside the Black codes you will meet shortly. Those codes made refusing a labour contract an arrest for vagrancy, punishable by unpaid forced labour. That is not a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment. It is an application of it. The anchor never quotes the excepting clause, and this course does.

Two entries on the assassination, and the second corrects the usual picture.

The killing.

USH1 2256 The Assassination

John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate supporter, shot Lincoln at Ford's Theater on April fourteenth, eighteen sixty-five, during Our American Cousin, and Lincoln died the following day, five days after Appomattox. The anchor says Booth acted defending the Confederacy and white supremacy. Union troops killed him on April twenty-sixth in a Virginia barn.

How much larger the plot was.

USH1 2257 The Wider Conspiracy

Booth acted as part of a larger conspiracy to eliminate the heads of the Union government, not as a lone assassin taking revenge for the war, and Secretary of State William Seward was stabbed and wounded the same night. The planned assassination of Vice President Andrew Johnson was abandoned. Eight conspirators were convicted by military tribunal and four were hanged.

Two entries on Texas, and the distance between two dates is the lesson.

Juneteenth.

USH1 2258 Juneteenth

Slavery endured after the amendment because news travelled slowly and because some slaveholders deliberately withheld it from the people they held, and Major General Gordon Granger arrived at Galveston, Texas, on June nineteenth, eighteen sixty-five. He announced that the people of Texas are informed that all slaves are free. Juneteenth became the most popular annual slavery-end celebration.

What the gap measures.

USH1 2259 The Two-and-a-Half-Year Gap

The objective asks whether the Thirteenth Amendment succeeded or failed, and the anchor answers with the distance between the Proclamation and Galveston, with the order facing resistance and many freed people captured or killed while trying to exercise freedom. The amendment succeeded in law and had to be announced, enforced and survived in fact. Austin's first Juneteenth came in eighteen sixty-seven.

Four entries on the president who inherited it, and note what his quarrel was actually about.

Who he was.

USH1 2260 Andrew Johnson

Johnson was born into North Carolina poverty without formal education, was taught to read by his wife, and was apprenticed as a tailor, rising in Tennessee as a speaker and defender of poor southerners. When Tennessee seceded he alone stayed loyal in the Senate, and Republicans nominated him for vice president to appeal to War Democrats.

The terms he offered.

USH1 2261 Johnson's Amnesty

Johnson's Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction of May eighteen sixty-five offered sweeping pardon and returned property, except enslaved people, on affirmation of support for the Constitution, following Lincoln's position that secession was legally invalid so states retained their rights of self-government. Johnson wanted quick, lenient reincorporation and rejected federal provision of voting rights for formerly enslaved people, which is what angered the Radicals.

Who he left out.

USH1 2262 The Twenty Thousand Dollar Clause

The amnesty exempted Confederate political leadership, high-ranking officers, and anyone with taxable property over twenty thousand dollars — a category aimed squarely at the planter class, who now had to seek personal pardons from Johnson. This satisfied Johnson's long grudge against the planters. Note that his quarrel with them was about class and never about slavery.

What readmission required.

USH1 2263 Readmission

Johnson required conventions repealing secession ordinances and ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, and by early eighteen sixty-six declared every former Confederate state had complied, with former Confederate leaders seeking congressional seats by late eighteen sixty-five. Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy's vice president, recently jailed in Boston, was among them. Johnson declared the Union restored.

Four entries on the response, and the last is a piece of campaign material worth studying.

What Congress said.

USH1 2264 Congress Refuses

Congress refused to recognise the state governments Johnson had permitted, and barred former Confederate senators and representatives from taking their seats, creating a joint committee on Reconstruction in place of the readmissions. Radicals took control of the House in the eighteen sixty-six elections. The anchor says Johnson lacked Lincoln's political skills and was stubborn and confrontational.

The Bureau.

USH1 2265 The Freedmen's Bureau

Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March eighteen sixty-five, approved by Lincoln for one year only, with freed people seeking land, financial security, education and political participation. Congress renewed the charter in eighteen sixty-six and Johnson vetoed the re-chartering, still insisting that restoration was already complete.

What it did.

USH1 2266 What the Bureau Did

The Bureau distributed food to Black and White southerners, helped freed people obtain labour contracts, reunited separated families, and established numerous schools, with Fisk, Hampton and Dillard universities among its legacy. The American Missionary Association partnered with it, and women teachers, White and Black, participated significantly because higher education was largely closed to them.

How its opponents drew it.

USH1 2267 The Clymer Poster

The eighteen sixty-six campaign poster for Hiester Clymer, the Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate, shows a caricatured Black man reclining while White men labour, saying what is the use for him to work as long as they make these appropriations. Behind him a building is labelled Freedman's Bureau, Negro Estimate of Freedom, inscribed Freedom and No Work, Candy, and Rum, Gin, Whiskey. The caption reads that the Freedman's Bureau is an agency to keep the Negro in idleness at the expense of the White man. So a state campaign poster argued that public assistance produces laziness, printed one year after the people it depicts were freed from forced labour. The argument that relief makes people lazy arrives in American politics fully formed, in eighteen sixty-six, aimed at people who had spent their lives working without pay. Note also that this is a northern poster, in a Pennsylvania governor's race, which locates the argument outside the South from the beginning.

Two entries on the codes, and the second shows the clause working.

The codes.

USH1 2268 The Black Codes

Southern states enacted laws in eighteen sixty-five and sixty-six that maintained slavery's structure without slavery, restricting voting, jury service, weapon ownership and land rental — a body of law written to reach every activity a free person would undertake. These codes endured and formed the foundation of the Jim Crow segregation policies that impoverished generations of African Americans.

The machinery inside them.

USH1 2269 How the Codes Worked

The codes required labour contracts preventing work for more than one employer, which eliminated wage negotiation, and workers accumulated debt through low wages and employer loans, with contract violation punished by fines or beating. Refusing a contract brought arrest for vagrancy and unpaid forced labour, which is the Thirteenth Amendment's own exception put to work.

Two entries to close, and the last is the largest constitutional entry after Dred Scott.

The Civil Rights Act.

USH1 2270 The Civil Rights Act of 1866

The Joint Committee recognised that the Thirteenth Amendment had not been enough, and in April eighteen sixty-six Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act, establishing the citizenship of African Americans and directly contradicting Dred Scott. It gave the federal government the right to intervene to protect citizens' rights. Johnson vetoed it and Congress overrode the veto.

The amendment written to make it stick.

USH1 2271 The Fourteenth Amendment

Because Dred Scott raised constitutional doubts about the Civil Rights Act, the Radicals wrote its provisions into an amendment and sent it to the states in July. Section one holds that all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. It forbids any state to abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens, to deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Those clauses overturn Dred Scott directly. The amendment also eliminates the three-fifths compromise, reduces representation for states denying adult male suffrage, bars from office anyone who engaged in insurrection or rebellion unless pardoned by two-thirds of Congress, and voids all Confederate war debts and all claims for the loss or emancipation of any slave. This is the course's largest constitutional entry after Dred Scott, and the two belong together. One decision held that Black Americans could not be citizens; one amendment was written specifically to erase it, and it erased it by defining citizenship in a way no court could narrow, namely by birth. Note the debt clause as well. Voiding claims for the loss or emancipation of any slave means no former owner could ever be compensated for the people they had held, and it put that beyond the reach of any later Congress. Every former Confederate state except Tennessee refused to ratify in eighteen sixty-six, and refusing is what brought the army back.

Look at what you can now do. You can explain what the two plans disagreed about: ten percent against a majority, and an oath about what a man will do against an oath about what he has already done, which no one who fought could swear. You can state the Thirteenth Amendment's excepting clause, and say that the Black codes' vagrancy machinery is an application of it rather than a violation, because refusing a contract made a person a convict and a convict could be forced to work. You can explain what the Clymer poster argues — that relief produces idleness — and say that it was printed in a Pennsylvania governor's race, one year after the people it caricatures were freed from forced labour. You can state what section one of the Fourteenth does: it makes citizenship a matter of birth, and forbids any state to abridge privileges or immunities, to deny due process, or to deny equal protection. And you can say what the gap to Galveston measures, which is the distance between succeeding in law and being enforced in fact.