Phase 1: Presidential Reconstruction

• Andrew Johnson assumes presidency

  • unionist democrat from Tennessee

  • staunch racist, but hated planter elite

• Johnson’s Reconstruction Policy, May 1865:

  • goals:

    • limit black american’s gains

    • empower the lower class white southerners

  • to rejoin the Union, rebel states had to:

    • void secession ordinances

    • refuse to pay CSA war debt

    • ratify the 13th Amendment

  • for individual rebels:

    • anyone owning under $20,000 pardoned automatically

    • elites request pardons (thousands granted)

• by October 185:

  • new civil governments in all rebel states but Texas

  • many former Confederates in leadership

Presidential Reconstruction on Ground

• white southerners tried to regain power

• tool #1: labor contracts

  • encouraged by Freedmen’s Bureau

  • often with former enslavers

  • often led to debt peonage

White Southerners Reclaim Control

• tool #2: black codes passed 1865-66 in most former CSA states, MD and KY

  • acknowledged some civil rights:

    • property ownership

    • contracts

    • marriage

  • echoed pre-war slave codes

    • banned black service on juries or militias

    • banned black court testimony against white people

  • vagrancy laws

    • 13th amendment loophole: “except as punishment for a crime”

    • once convicted, state could compel/sell labor

    • effectively outlawed being a cashless or mobile African American

  • apprenticeship laws

    • same purpose for black children

    • black families resisted

• black codes sought to keep African Americans stationary and dependent

• tool #3: legal and extralegal violence

  • Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups

  • sometimes with support/participation of white officials

• goals: intimidate African Americans and their allies

• continued throughout Reconstruction and beyond