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

white southerners tried to regain power
tool #1: labor contracts
- encouraged by Freedmen’s Bureau
- often with former enslavers
- often led to debt peonage

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