Reconstruction Era - A Dark Age

¶ … era after the Civil War that came to be known as the Reconstruction Era. The author of this report is to focus on several different things. This essay will describe the plans of President Lincoln and President Johnson and how they differed from the plans of Congress. There will also be a focus on the impact of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

The author of this report will respond to the notion offered by many historians that the post-Civil War era was one of the "darkest" times of American history. Finally, the author of this report will answer the question of whether anything could have or should have been done differently. While many of the stains of the Reconstruction Era are gone, that time period was in many ways the worst period of American history and that includes the slavery that occurred pre-1861.

Summary In terms of what the Congress did instead of and in spite of what Lincoln and Johnson were doing, there are a couple of things that can be pointed to. First, there were three Reconstruction bills passed in 1867. All three of them were passed in spite of vetoes by President Johnson. Tennessee was readmitted to the Union given its ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment but other ten Confederates states were rejected and were instead split into military districts.

Those states had to prepare new Constitutions and had to allow black suffrage as part of their new government structures. About seven states had complied by 1868. However, some other laws were much more dubious and aggressive. For example, the Tenure of Office Act actively forbid the President from removing civil officials, and that included members of the President's own Cabinet, without the consent of the Senate.

This was seen as an obvious ploy to protect Secretary of War Edwin Stanton who was coopering with the "Republican Radicals." They also made a move to require that two thirds of the Supreme Court would have to vote in favor of anything that was a contravention of a law of Congress. This was done mostly in reaction to the Supreme Court asserting that military tribunals could not be used as the justice mechanism in areas with functional civil courts.

This flew in the face of the military district system mentioned earlier in this essay. Lincoln's involvement in Reconstruction and the planning thereof was fairly limited given his rather untimely death via assassination not long after the Civil War ended. However, there were some details First, Lincoln asserted that a state convention could be summoned to come to a new Constitution after only ten percent pledged allegiance to the union. Congress asserted that it should be half of all the voters.

There was also the detail that Congress would only allow, via what was called the Ironclad Oath, that only people who had never taken up arms against the United States could be elected into office. Finally, there was the Wade-Davis bill, a concoction of Congress that left it to the states what political rights blacks had. This was something else that Lincoln opposed.

As for Johnson, he was actually a man who changed from Democrat to Republican and once openly stated that "white men alone must manage the South." Johnson referred to his plan to rebuild America as "restoration" rather than "reconstruction." He offered amnesty to southerners that would offer an oath of allegiance, just like Lincoln did. The primary purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to give equal citizenship standing to blacks, which had obviously been neglected and been left undone prior.

It did so by declaring that all people born in the United States or that were naturalized as citizens had the right to vote. It also declared that any state that disallowed a citizen to vote, black or white, would receive diminished representation in Congress and/or the Electoral College. However, the wording of the bill specifically noted that this all pertained to men and not women. The amendment had the effect of emboldening the Republic Radicals when many states initially balked at ratifying the amendment.

It also led to racially charged blowback in the form of Jim Crow laws and the Black Codes.