Reconstruction, Expansion, and the Triumph of Industrial Capitalism 3After Lincoln’s assassination, his successor, President Andrew Johnson,
took a similarly soft approach, which he called “restoration.” Johnson
demanded only that the Confederate states accept the 13th Amendment and
renounce secession, and offered limited voting rights to some Blacks. Even
then, southerners complained and refused to go along with that program.
Finally, Congress stepped into the political vacuum caused by Lincoln’s death,
Johnson’s weakness, and southern stubbornness, and created its own
Reconstruction plan. Southern states were readmitted with only the
Confederate leaders barred, in effect the “soft” approach Lincoln and Johnson
had taken. Also, in March, 1865, just as the war was ending, Congress estab-
lished the Freedmen’s Bureau, which would distribute food to ex-slaves, give
them some modest educational opportunities, and create some limited means
for Blacks to get land. This issue, land, in retrospect was the focal point of
Reconstruction. If one possessed land, he could become independent. A
program of land reform was thus radical, for it would essentially require that
the government would take property from those with power [like southern
Planters in this case] and give it to the most powerless of people, ex-slaves
[the law extended some rights to poor whites as well]. Indeed, in the span
of U.S. history, the American ruling class has always been hostile toward land
reform.
The Freedmen’s Bureau was only created to last one year, though, so
Congress extended its influence over Reconstruction in 1866-67 as the South
refused to renounce its past and continued its discrimination and violence
against African-Americans. Within Congress, Radical Republicans [most nota-
bly Senators Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner] led the crusade for
Reconstruction. The Republicans were the anti-slavery party, and the South
remained almost totally Democratic, so the radicals enacted the Military
Reconstruction Act to set up Union military control of the South [so-called
Martial Law], create new state constitutions to allow Blacks to vote, and rati-
fied the 14th Amendment, while also extending the life of the Freedmen’s
Bureau. Johnson vetoed that bill but it was overridden, and Congress even
passed a law to prevent the president from removing cabinet members who
supported Radical Reconstruction. In fact, when he dismissed radical Secretary
of War Edwin Stanton, Johnson survived impeachment by Congress by just a
single vote.