Why did Congress still refuse to readmit Southern states into the Union in 1865?

Lincoln’s successor, Vice-President Andrew Johnson, had his own plan of Reconstruction and, following Lincoln’s assassination, he attempted to implement it.  Johnson was a southerner who began his career as a tailor in Tennessee but entered politics as a promoter for the common man. He was elected to the House, the governorship, and the Senate, but when Tennessee seceded from the Union on May 6, 1861, Johnson became the only southerner to stay in the Senate.  He was chosen to run with Abraham Lincoln on the Republican Party ticket in 1864. 

When Lincoln died, Johnson proposed to pardon any Confederate who took an oath of allegiance except for high-ranking government and military leaders.  Johnson had always resented the wealth and social prominence of the large plantation owners, so he declared that any Confederate who had held more than $20,000 in property prior to the war had to apply for a pardon directly from the president.  Beyond that, Johnson’s plan mimicked Lincoln’s.  The seceded southern states had to create new state governments with new constitutions and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery.  Johnson did not agree with Radical Republican designs to offer blacks legal equality, but he did urge southern legislatures to grant limited voting rights to freedmen. Still, Johnson made no provision for the freedpeople, except guaranteeing their freedom.  And like Lincoln, Johnson assumed that the president was in charge of Reconstruction. Congress soon informed him that he was mistaken.

Congress Responds

Illustration of Northern woman working for the Feedmen’s Bureau teaching school

Johnson made his proposals, granted amnesty to wealthy Confederates in person, and invited southern states to write new constitutions and elect federal representatives. While this happened, members of Congress, who sat continuously during the war years, took an eight-month break. When the members reconvened in December 1865, they found that southern states seeking readmission to the Union had elected representatives without congressional approval. 

Among them were four Confederate generals, six Confederate cabinet officers, and CSA Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens.  It seemed to northerners as if very little had changed; southerners sought readmission to the Union without considering the toll that secession had taken on the nation.   

The Thirteenth Amendment, enacted in 1865, officially abolished slavery within the United States.

By the end of 1865 every state had fulfilled Johnson’s demands for readmission except Texas, but when the Thirty-Ninth Congress met, Edward McPherson, Clerk of the House, did not call the names of the southern congressmen when he took the roll. Congress refused to readmit the states under Johnson’s plan. On December 13, 1865, both houses of Congress created the Joint Committee on Reconstruction to investigate conditions in the South and to determine if Congress had to accept the newly elected representative from southern states under Johnson’s plan.  While waiting to hear the results of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, the ideology of the Republican Party shifted toward civil rights for freedpeople, thus in March 1866 Congress passed a Civil Rights Act that bound the states to uphold the rights of all citizens, and voted to extend the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau. President Johnson vetoed both acts, forcing Congress to override his veto. The Civil Rights Act became law in July 1866.

Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, or the Freedmen’s Bureau, on March 3, 1865 to administer “for the use of loyal refugees and freedmen, such tracts of land within the insurrectionary states as shall have been abandoned,” by white land owners. The Bureau allowed slaves in Union occupied territory to rent up to forty acres and keep the profits. The Bureau also distributed “provisions, clothing, and fuel. . . . and temporary shelter [for] destitute and suffering refugees and freedmen and their wives and children. . . .”  It established Congress’s commitment to former slaves in their transition to freedom, and it proved that freedpeople were willing to work for profits.

Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 1866

Sensing a deepening rift between President Johnson’s view of Reconstruction and the mood of the nation, Congress held hearings and interviews with 144 witnesses.  Congress was shocked to learn about the tyrannical repression and violence toward blacks in the South.
In its findings, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction found that some states refused to repudiate the legality of secession, some states refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, some states elected un-reconstructed rebels to office (men who had held high ranking positions within the Confederate government), and that some of the states had created Black Codes, laws that restricted the rights of recently freed slaves.

Black Codes

Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in March and again in July 1866 over Johnson’s veto.  The bill was a response to the Black Codes and it stated that anyone who was born in the United States, excluding Indians, was a citizen and was entitled to full and equal benefit of all laws.  This was the first time in the history of the United States that Congress had overridden a presidential veto.

Northerners were concerned over the status of freedpeople and the effect Black Codes had on their rights. While freedpeople had the right to marry within their race and assume the responsibilities of householders, the local courts could take their children away if the parents were found “unfit” to raise them. Often judges issued orders to remove children and apprenticed them to their former owners until age twenty-one. This smacked of slavery to many. Some states forbade freedpeople from possessing firearms or alcohol, restricted their ability to buy land, forbade them freedom of assembly, and arrested them for “vagrancy,” or for not working for whites. Arrests could lead to imprisonment and to chain gangs, where convicts were leased out to planters as laborers. In fact, controlling black labor was at the heart of the black codes. Most codes demanded that freedpeople sign year-long labor contracts that allowed them to be paid only at the end of the harvest but with deductions taken out for minor infractions.

Violence

White southerners also engaged in race riots that led to death and mayhem in two southern cities.  On May 1, 1866, in Memphis, Tennessee, a race riot broke out when discharged black Union soldiers argued with city police.  According to a military investigation report, another city official, John C. Creighton, enticed a white crowd to “arm and kill every Negro and drive the last one from the city.” Then during the night the Negroes were hunted down by police, firemen and other white citizens, shot, assaulted, robbed, and in many instances their houses searched under the pretense of hunting for concealed arms, plundered, and then set on fire, during which no resistance so far as we can learn was offered by the Negroes.”

Cartoon from Harper’s Weekly alleging Klan and White League opposition to Reconstruction policies

In the riot forty-six blacks and two whites died, five women were raped, seventy-five people were injured, and over one hundred black homes, schools, and churches were burned. 

Another riot occurred in New Orleans just twelve weeks later on July 30.  This time politics was involved.  At a convention to disenfranchise ex-Confederates and give voting rights to freedmen, gangs of whites—some of them policemen—attacked blacks in the streets indiscriminately, killing thirty-four. General Philip H. Sheridan called it “an absolute massacre.”

Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction

“The feeling in many portions of the country toward emancipated slaves, especially among the uneducated and ignorant, is one of vindictive and malicious hatred. This deep-seated prejudice against color is assiduously cultivated by the public journals, and leads to acts of cruelty, oppression, and murder, which the local authorities are at no pains to prevent or punish. There is no general disposition to place the colored race, constituting at least two-fifths of the population, upon terms even of civil equality. While many instances may be found where large planters and men of the better class accept the situation, and honestly strive to bring about a better order of things, by employing the freedmen at fair wages and treating them kindly, the general feeling and disposition among all classes are yet totally averse to the toleration of any class of people friendly to the Union, be they white or black; and this aversion is not unfrequently manifested in an insulting and offensive manner.”

Fourteenth Amendment

Woman suffragists, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, objected to the wording of the Fourteenth Amendment because it introduced for the first time the word “male” into the United States Constitution.

In reaction to the findings of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, the recently imposed black codes, and the race riots, Congress enacted the Fourteenth Amendment and moved to overturn the state governments created under Johnson’s plan

Enacted June 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment included these provisions:

Radical Republicans, most associated with the Abolitionist movement prior to the War, represented a small but influential group of party members who were determined to totally change southern society, largely by granting immediate and full citizenship to the freedmen.  The radicals wanted to destroy the old southern aristocracy system and re-make the South along the lines of the capitalist North.

When were the Southern states readmitted to the Union?

Why were governments in the South readmitted to the Union?

Why were the congressional Republicans angry when Congress gathered for its session in December 1865?