No blood can be squeezed from a turnip. You can not pour anything out of an empty cup.
We have no money even for taxes or to be confiscated.
Mary Boykin Chestnut, 19 April 1865
‘This ends the job’ was Abraham Lincoln’s comment when he signed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The Amendment, which outlawed slavery, had been passed by Congress on 31 January 1865. It would be three more months before Lee would surrender to Grant at Appomattox in Virginia. But Lincoln was already planning how he would set the country to rights.
As Confederate states fell to the control of Union forces, new administrations had to be established in order to govern if the Union was to maintain control. Lincoln appointed military governors in Arkansas and Tennessee. Such aggressive action was criticized and Democrats felt that Lincoln was using the army to establish Republican-dominated governments in the South.
On 8 December 1863, Lincoln’s Amnesty Proclamation offered pardons to anyone who had not held office in the Confederate government, who had not abused Union prisoners, and who was willing to sign an oath of allegiance to the Union. Lincoln also urged speedy elections with generous terms of office that would last the remainder of the war.
Under Lincoln’s Ten Per Cent Plan, a state would be allowed to reintegrate back into the Union when 10 per cent of the 1,860 secessionist voters had taken the oath of allegiance and pledged to abide by emancipation. A second condition of the plan was to elect governments that would write state constitutions abolishing slavery. By 1864, Arkansas, Tennessee and Louisiana had met the requirements of the plan.
John Wilkes Booth
Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre on 14 April 1865 put an end to any hope of an amiable reconciliation between North and South. It was four years to the day since the bombing of Fort Sumter in South Carolina when an actor named John Wilkes Booth (pictured above) slipped into the president’s box at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC, put a gun to the back of the president’s head and fired. Lincoln lingered for several hours without regaining consciousness, dying at 7.22 a.m. on 15 April 1865.
In the North the assassination of President Lincoln incited a hatred and a desire for retribution against all Southerners that had been simmering since the war started. As vice- president, Andrew Johnson inherited the presidency and the problem of reconstituting the Union and he tried to follow the plans Lincoln had laid out. On 25 December 1868, Johnson granted amnesty and full pardons to any and all involved in the ‘late resurrection and rebellion’.
But Republicans in Congress refused to grant leniency for Southern states and newly elected members of Congress from the South were hindered from attendance. Those who did manage to arrive were refused entrance. After the 1866 elections, a breakaway group calling themselves the Radical Republicans gained control of Congress and proceeded to remove civilian governments in Southern states and to impose martial law. The Radical Republicans had first begun to separate themselves from other republicans in 1863 when Reconstruction began in the South. The Radical Republicans wanted the South punished for the war and set about pushing legislation that would disenfranchise Anglo-American Southerners, removing them from office and replacing them with free African-Americans. The army held new elections that allowed freed slaves to vote. But former Confederate government officials were not only denied the right to run for office, they were also denied the right to vote.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, adopted on 9 July 1868, was intended to further punish the South. While the first section defined citizenship and guaranteed equal protection of law, and was intended to secure civil rights for freed slaves, the second, third and fourth sections of the Amendment were more acts of retribution against the South.
Section two of the Amendment required states to allow African-Americans to vote or lose seats in the House of Representatives. Section three banned former political leaders from public office unless they first took an oath supporting the Constitution. Section four disavowed any war debts for the Confederacy, validated all war debt for the Union, and disallowed all claims for loss of property ‘incurred by insurrection or rebellion’.
Reconstruction was considered a failure. The war had ended slavery, but now freed slaves were pushed back toward oppression. One of the causes of the failure was the way the Radical Republicans established new governments in the South.
Coalitions of immoral self-interest groups worked with the Radical Republicans to form governments riddled with corruption. Their elections took freedoms and rights from qualified individuals and gave them to people with no experience in running governments. These unqualified office holders were then manipulated by opportunists, many of whom took advantage of the situation to promote economic self-interests. Known as ‘carpetbaggers’, they had begun to invade the South the moment the fighting was done using the inexperience of office holders and the inability of landowners to pay taxes for their own financial gain and plunging a devastated South even deeper into economic ruin.
It was the disputed presidential elections of 1876 that finally brought Reconstruction to an end. Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden won 184 votes whilst Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, had 185. Twenty electoral votes, however, were disputed and therefore uncounted and ultimately the presidency was awarded to Hayes. But many believed that it took an unofficial and unwritten compromise between the Democrats and Republicans to do so.
It was known as the Compromise of 1877 which not only settled the question of who would be president but also ended Reconstruction. Hayes had already announced that, if elected, he wanted to return the South to ‘home rule’, and would allow it control of its own governments. In return for surrendering the White House to Hayes, the Democrats asked for four things. First, the removal of Federal troops occupying the South. Second, that one Democrat be appointed to Hayes’ cabinet. Third, the construction of a transcontinental railway that would include the Texas and Pacific Railroad in the South. Fourth, that Congress should pass legislation to help industrialize the South.
The American Civil War had given African-Americans more than their freedom. They now had the right to vote. In 1869, the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution declared that the right to vote ‘shall not be denied because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.’ The fight for freedom was over. But the fight for equality was just beginning.