Presidential Reconstruction

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