410 Chapter 15 Reconstruction and the South
blacks, the southern states would have none of it.
Without them the necessary three-fourths majority of
the states could not be obtained.
President Johnson vowed to make the choice
between the Fourteenth Amendment and his own
policy the main issue of the 1866 congressional
elections. He embarked on “a swing around the
circle” to rally the public to his cause. He failed dis-
mally. Northern women objected to the implication
in the amendment that black men were more fitted
to vote than white women, but a large majority of
northern voters was determined that African
Americans must have at least formal legal equality.
The Republicans won better than two-thirds of the
seats in both houses, together with control of all
the northern state governments. Johnson emerged
from the campaign discredited, the Radicals
stronger and determined to have their way. The
southern states, Congressman James A. Garfield of
Ohio said in February 1867, have “flung back into
our teeth the magnanimous offer of a generous
nation. It is now our turn to act.”
13th, 14th, and 15th Amendmentsat
http://www.myhistorylab.com
Reconstructionatwww.myhistorylab.comThe Reconstruction Acts
Had the southern states been willing to accept the
Fourteenth Amendment, coercive measures might
have been avoided. Their recalcitrance and contin-
uing indications that local authorities were perse-
cuting blacks finally led to the passage, on March 2,
1867, of the First Reconstruction Act. This law
divided the former Confederacy—exclusive of
Tennessee, which had ratified the Fourteenth
Amendment—into five military districts, each con-
trolled by a major general. It gave these officers
almost dictatorial power to protect the civil rights
of “all persons,” maintain order, and supervise the
administration of justice. To rid themselves of mili-
tary rule, the former states were required to adopt
new state constitutions guaranteeing blacks the
right to vote and disenfranchising broad classes of
ex-Confederates. If the new constitutions proved
satisfactory to Congress, and if the new govern-
ments ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, their
representatives would be admitted to Congress and
military rule ended. Johnson’s veto of the act was
easily overridden.
Although drastic, the Reconstruction Act
was so vague that it proved unworkable. Military
SeetheMapReadtheDocumentcontrol was easily established. But in deference to
moderate Republican views, the law had not spelled
out the process by which the new constitutions
were to be drawn up. Southern whites preferred
the status quo, even under army control, to enfran-
chising blacks and retiring their own respected
leaders. They made no effort to follow the steps
laid down in the law. Congress therefore passed a
second act, requiring the military authorities to
register voters and supervise the election of dele-
gates to constitutional conventions. A third act fur-
ther clarified procedures.
Still white Southerners resisted. The laws
required that the constitutions be approved by a
majority of the registered voters. Simply by staying
away from the polls, whites prevented ratification in
state after state. At last, in March 1868, a full year
after the First Reconstruction Act, Congress changed
the rules again. The constitutions were to be ratified
by a majority of the voters. In June 1868 Arkansas,
having fulfilled the requirements, was readmitted to
the Union, and by July a sufficient number of states
had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to make it
part of the Constitution. But it was not until July
1870 that the last southern state, Georgia, qualified to
the satisfaction of Congress.Congress Supreme
To carry out this program in the face of determined
southern resistance required a degree of single-
mindedness over a long period seldom demon-
strated by an American legislature. The persistence
resulted in part from the suffering and frustrations
of the war years. The refusal of the South to accept
the spirit of even the mild reconstruction designed
by Johnson goaded the North to ever more over-
bearing efforts to bring the ex-Confederates to heel.
President Johnson’s stubbornness also influenced
the Republicans. They became obsessed with the
need to defeat him. The unsettled times and the
large Republican majorities, always threatened by
the possibility of a Democratic resurgence if “unre-
constructed” southern congressmen were readmit-
ted, sustained their determination.
These considerations led Republicans to
attempt a kind of grand revision of the federal gov-
ernment, one that almost destroyed the balance
between judicial, executive, and legislative power
established in 1789. A series of measures passed
between 1866 and 1868 increased the authority of
Congress over the army, over the process of amend-
ing the Constitution, and over Cabinet members