Reconstruction

The Reconstruction period (1865-1877) during which the states that had seceded to the Confederacy were controlled by the federal government before being readmitted to the Union.

Since the main goal of the North in the war was to preserve the Union, and the Rebel states were now within Union control, all that was left to do was to bring the Rebel states back into the Union. This was the main issue in the period of Reconstruction following the war¹.

This all sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Lincoln thought it would be, and implied before he was assassinated that he would allow the Confederacy’s states back into the Union with minimal hassle from the Federal government. However, as Lincoln died, so did this idea.

The US Congress was heavily populated with Radical Republicans - a group of the Republican Party that believed the South should be punished for its actions. Since the Southern states weren’t going to be allowed back into the Union right away, they had no representation in US Congress, which meant that their fate was to be decided by President Andrew Johnson and a Congress dominated by Radical Republicans. Johnson came from Tennessee, so the Southerners were somewhat optimistic that he would treat them fairly in readmitting them. He believed that he should follow the plan of Abraham Lincoln, which was moderate. However, the Radical Republicans used the death of Lincoln to try to incite hatred against the south.

Johnson was in fact possibly the worst person one could choose as President to run a moderate Reconstruction proposal through Congress. Northerners didn’t trust him because he was from Tennessee. People from border states (those slave states that didn’t join the Confederacy) weren’t happy with him either. He was personally not a very nice person, being stubborn, arrogant, and sometimes outright mean. This didn’t earn him many friends in Congress. And finally, he didn’t possess any great political skills, and those he had he wasn’t able to use effectively.

However, Johnson firmly believed that the President, and not Congress, should run Reconstruction. Congress was naturally inclined to believe it should be in charge of Reconstruction. With this conflict, Johnson had yet another thing working against him - the Constitution. It provided that if the President vetoed any bill from the Congress, Congress would be able to override that veto with two-thirds of the vote and the bill would pass - and luckily for them, the Radical Republicans had nearly two-thirds of the vote in Congress. Johnson couldn’t simply ignore the Constitution, which he had promised to preserve, honour and defend shortly before.

Lincoln had managed to begin a Reconstruction Plan relatively early in the war. It said that amnesty would be granted to all ex-Confederates who would pledge loyalty to the US and that states would be recognised if 10% of the population took oaths of loyalty. Lincoln didn’t believe that the Confederate states had ever really left the Union, because they didn’t have the right to secede. As Johnson extended this offer to the Rebel states, he considered them to have rejoined the Union and recognised their governments.

Congress wasn’t so sure though. Even when Rebel states elected Congressmen to Washington, they refused to recognise that the Confederate states had rejoined the Union and turned them away. They set up a joint committee of 15 Congressmen to come up with proposals suitable to Congress.

Johnson was unable to accomplish much early on, and problems were mounting. Mississippi enacted the notorious Black Codes, which allowed for discrimination. The Thirteenth Amendment had already been passed, banning slavery, and a Freedmen’s Bureau was established to help freed slaves adjust. In 1866, the Civil Rights Act gave rights to all men, over Johnson’s veto and protest². The Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional, and it didn’t take effect.

( http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/A3347020 - again Kurasovskaya)

Literature of that period:

In popular literature two novels by Thomas Dixon—The Clansman (1905) and The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden – 1865–1900 (1902)—romanticized white resistance to Northern/black coercion, hailing vigilante action by the KKK. Other authors romanticized the benevolence of slavery and the happy world of the antebellum plantation. These sentiments were expressed on the screen in D.W. Griffith's anti-Republican 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation. Joel Chandler Harris was particularly instrumental in swaying southern opinion to support the Union. His literary works, as well as his role as the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, helped persuade other southerners that they should embrace Reconstruction and Northern influence and infrastructures. Ultimately, it was these sorts of ideas, in conjunction with popular literature, that spawned several romantic stories about Lincoln's role as a hero in the south. This lost hero, separated by death from the realities of slavery in the Confederacy and the stark truths faced by the South following the end of the Civil War, was made out by some to be exactly what the south needed. Through this logic, white supremacists could both embrace the positive changes offered by the north as well as continue to believe that had Lincoln survived, he would have permitted the oppression of African Americans.