Reconstruction and the Gilded Age 157received into either house from any of the said so-called confederate
states.” Whereupon the representatives from several of the southern
states who had shown up when this Congress convened quietly with-
drew from the House chamber. Although the Joint Committee had
Stevens as one of the members, it was essentially moderate in composi-
tion and was chaired by Senator William P. Fessenden of Maine. Dur-
ing their meetings together the committee members heard repeated
testimony from an assortment of witnesses hostile to the Johnson am-
nesty policy and insisted that if representatives from the rebel states
were readmitted “the condition of the freedmen would be very little
better than that of the slaves.”
As a matter of fact, several Confederate states had already passed a
series of “Black Codes” defining the condition of the freedmen in such
a way as to keep them bound to the land. Although they were freed,
these codes virtually restored them to slavery. In the House of Repre-
sentatives Thaddeus Stevens railed against these codes, insisting that
the South should be treated as “conquered provinces.” “We have turned
over, or about to turn loose, four million slaves without a hut to shelter
them or a cent in their pockets. The infernal laws of slavery have pre-
vented them from an education, understanding the commonest laws of
contract, or of managing the ordinary business of life. This Congress is
bound to provide for them until they can take care of themselves.”
In the Senate, Charles Sumner, having recovered from the beating
inflicted by Bully Brooks, essentially agreed with Stevens, only he in-
terpreted secession as an act in which the South had committed “state
suicide.” As such only Congress could set the conditions by which
these states could be admitted back into the Union.
In approaching the problem of Reconstruction, Congress faced a
section of the country that lay in ruins: cities and plantations burned,
transportation wrecked, and billions invested in slavery wiped out. Ste-
vens expected to transform the South through a redistribution of land
in an effort to destroy the power structure of the planter aristocracy,
and provide the former slaves, now freedmen, with enough land from
the forfeited property of the enemy so that they could support them-
selves and their families. Congress rejected this proposal. Instead, it
passed the Freedmen’s Bureau on March 3 , 1865 (and repassed the mea-
sure on July 16 over a presidential veto), and a supplementary act in