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What do we know about Lincoln’s postwar plans for the South?
While we can’t say for sure how Lincoln would have carried out his postwar policies towards the South if he had not been assassinated, his actions during the war do offer us strong clues that suggest that he would have been at odds with the Radical Republicans. In 1863, Lincoln wanted to end the Civil War as quickly as it could plausibly be done. He feared that strong northern public support for the war would wane if the fighting continued and knew that the war was also taking a huge toll on northern families and resources. Lincoln worried that if the war dragged on, a settlement would be reached that would leave the North and South as two separate nations.
Lincoln’s fears had justification. By late 1863, an increasing number of Democrats were calling for a truce and peaceful resolution to the conflict. As a result, in the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction of 1863, Lincoln drafted lenient specifications for secessionist states for readmission into the Union—an attempt to entice Unionists and those tired of fighting in the South to surrender. Lincoln’s Ten-Percent Plan, part of the proclamation, called for southern states to be readmitted into the Union after 10 percent of the voting public swore a loyalty oath to the United States. In addition, he offered to pardon all Confederate officials and pledged to protect southerners’ private property. Lincoln did not want Reconstruction to be a long, drawn-out process; rather, he wanted the states to draft new constitutions so that the Union could be quickly restored.
How were the Radical Republicans’ postwar plans different from Lincoln’s?
Unlike Lincoln, Radical Republicans wanted the South to pay a steep price for secession and believed that Congress, not the president, should direct the process of Reconstruction. The Radical Republicans saw serious flaws in southern society and were adamant that the South needed full social rehabilitation to more resemble the North. Many Republicans in Congress also aimed to improve education and labor conditions to benefit all the oppressed classes in southern society, Black and white. Once Lincoln was dead and the weak-willed Andrew Johnson had replaced him, Congress passed a series of progressive legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the First and Second Reconstruction Acts, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution to quicken this transformation of the South.
Do Johnson’s postwar policies reflect what Lincoln’s would have been had he lived?
While it is not possible to say for sure, it is likely that Lincoln, as the hero of the nation and a far more gifted politician than his vice president (a southerner and a Democrat) would have approached Reconstruction far differently than Johnson. For one thing, it’s extremely likely that Lincoln would have led rather than merely reacted to the powerful Republicans in Congress and in his own cabinet. As it turned out, Johnson merely countered and obstructed what the true leaders of the postwar nation—the Radical Republicans in Congress—were creating.
Thus, it probably not too surprising that the Radical Republicans in the House impeached Andrew Johnson in 1868 after he had repeatedly blocked their legislation. Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Freedmen’s Bureau charter, and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, all of which were progressive, “radical” bills. Had Lincoln remained alive, he could have been impeached too, since he wanted Reconstruction to end quickly, and had not indicated that he favored progressive legislation to reform the South, but it is almost impossible to envision Lincoln behaving as ineptly as Johnson actually did.
Reconstruction is rightfully considered a failure, but in what ways did it succeed?
Although its failures were far greater than its successes, Reconstruction did achieve its goal of restoring the United States as a unified nation. By 1877, all the former Confederate states had drafted new constitutions, acknowledged the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and pledged their loyalty to the U.S. government. Also, while Reconstruction did not fully resolve the states’ rights versus federalism debate that had been an issue since the 1790s, it—along with the Civil War that preceded it—did establish once and for all the primacy of the laws of the federal government over the laws of the individual states.
It must be pointed out, however, that even the few “successes” of Reconstruction come with a caveat, since much of the impact of the progressive postwar constitutional amendments that the former Confederate states had been forced to acknowledge were soon diminished by a series of unfavorable rulings by the conservative U.S. Supreme Court.
What are some of the ways that Reconstruction failed Black Americans?
At the core of Reconstruction’s failure was its inability to engender fundamental changes in thinking about race relations within the social fabric of the South. Reconstruction massively failed Black American, whose protection from white persecution had been one of its primary goals. For a short time, Radical Republican legislation backed up by occupying federal troops on the ground did provide legal protections for former slaves, but these quickly began to fall away and were then disappeared completely when President Rutherford B. Hayes removed federal troops from the South in 1877, former Confederate officials and slave owners almost immediately returned to full power. With the support of a conservative Supreme Court, these newly empowered white southern politicians ushered in the Jim Crow era by passing Black codes, voter qualifications, and other anti-progressive legislation to reverse the rights that Black residents had gained during Radical Reconstruction.
Yet another way that the Reconstruction era failed Black Americans in the South was in the rise the sharecropping system in which kept blacks tied to back-breaking work on land owned by rich white farmers as virtual vassals, with no rights and hope for economic advancement.
In what ways was the U.S. Supreme Court culpable for the rise of the Jim Crow era?
The U.S. Supreme Court bolstered the anti-Black and anti-progressive movement with dubious decisions in the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Civil Rights Cases, and United States v. Cruikshank. that effectively repealed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. In 1896, the Supreme Court’s infamous Plessy v. Ferguson ruling gave legal justification to “separate but equal” doctrine that legitimized forced segregation for the next 60 years.
Why did the North capitulate to the South on Reconstruction?
With little economic power, Black Americans in the South ended up having to fight for civil rights almost entirely on their own, since northern whites had largely lost interest in Reconstruction by the mid-1870s. They wearied of the long period in which troops occupied the southern states, of the rhetoric of radical Reconstructions supporters, and of the many scandals and economic woes of the Grant administration. The Crédit Mobilier scandal, the Depression of 1873, and the Resumption Act of 1875 focused attention away from the South and onto political and economic problems in the North. All three thus played a role in ending Reconstruction, as did the re-emergence of the anti-Reconstruction Democratic Party during the 1870s.
But it must be pointed out too that most Americans living in the northern states were never truly committed to the cause of Black civil rights—in spite of their having just emerged victorious from a long and bloody civil war that had increasingly become a war to end slavery. This is borne out by the fact that after Reconstruction ended, many of the racist, anti-Black policies of the “Jim Crow South” were prevalent in Northern states as well.
What were the effects of Crédit Mobilier scandal and other scandals?
In the 1860s, executives of the Union Pacific Railroad created a dummy construction company called Crédit Mobilier and then hired themselves out as contractors at high rates to earn large profits. The executives bribed dozens of Congressmen and cabinet members in Ulysses S. Grant’s administration, including Grant’s vice president, to allow the scam to work. The scheme was eventually exposed, and many politicians were forced to resign. Along with other scandals, such as the Fisk-Gould gold scandal and the Whiskey Ring, Crédit Mobilier distracted northern voters’ attention away from southern Reconstruction and toward corruption and graft problems in the North.
How did the Depression of 1873 impact the nation?
When the Depression of 1873 struck, the interest of northern voters in pursuing Reconstruction efforts took a severe hit. Unemployment climbed to 15 percent, and hard currency became scarce. With pressing economic problems, northerners’ commitment to maintaining an occupying army to help former slaves and punish the Ku Klux Klan in the South (which was never anywhere near as strong among the general public as it was among Radical Republican leaders to begin with) quickly evaporated.
How did the 1875 Resumption Act and the 1876 Election finish off Reconstruction?
The Republican Party’s adherence to unpopular, strict monetary policies in response to the Depression of 1873—including the Resumption Act of 1875—opened the door for the Democratic Party to make large political gains, accelerating the end of Reconstruction. The Resumption Act reduced the amount of currency circulating in the economy in an attempt to curb inflation caused by the depression. Although the act improved economic conditions in the long run, it made for harder times in both the North and South in the short run. The Act was sponsored by Republicans, so Democrats—who had already taken control of the U.S. House of Representatives after the 1874 elections—were able to capitalize on its unpopularity to rally additional support for their party. This increased popularity translated into election victories that enabled Democrats to take a tight electoral grip on the South that would last until the Civil Rights era in the 1960s.
The newly resurgent Democrats nominated Samuel J. Tilden of New York for president in 1876, and he performed surprisingly well against the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. By most accounts, Tilden and the Democrats were the rightful winners of the election. However, some votes in the Southern states were disputed. After a protracted process to sort out the competing claims, an agreement was reached in which Hayes would be allowed to assume the presidency if Republicans would agree to act swiftly to remove the occupying federal troops from the South. Hayes took the oath of office in March 1877, and fulfilled his end of the bargain—thus bringing Reconstruction to its ignominious end.
