Radical Reconstruction and Military Rule
Printed Page 467
Section Chronology
When Johnson continued to urge Southerners to reject the Fourteenth Amendment, every southern state except Tennessee voted it down. “The last one of the sinful ten,” thundered Representative James A. Garfield of Ohio, “has flung back into our teeth the magnanimous offer of a generous nation.” After the South rejected the moderates’ program, the radicals seized the initiative.
Each act of defiance by southern whites had boosted the standing of the radicals within the Republican Party. Radicals such as Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner and Pennsylvania representative Thaddeus Stevens united in demanding civil and political equality. Southern states were “like clay in the hands of the potter,” Stevens declared in January 1867, and he called on Congress to begin reconstruction all over again.
CHAPTER LOCATOR
Why did Congress object to Lincoln’s wartime plan for reconstruction?
How did the North respond to the passage of black codes in the southern states?
How radical was congressional reconstruction?
What brought the elements of the South’s Republican coalition together?
Why did reconstruction collapse?
Conclusion: Was reconstruction “a revolution but half accomplished”?
LearningCurve
Check what you know.
In March 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act and overturned the Johnson state governments and initiated military rule of the South.
Radicals proclaimed the provision for black suffrage “a prodigious triumph,” for it extended far beyond the limited suffrage provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. When combined with the disfranchisement of thousands of ex-rebels, it promised to cripple any neo-Confederate resurgence and guarantee Republican state governments in the South.
Military Reconstruction Act
Congressional act of March 1867 that initiated military rule of the South. Congressional reconstruction divided the ten unreconstructed Confederate states into five military districts, each under the direction of a Union general. It also established the procedure by which unreconstructed states could reenter the Union.
Despite its bold suffrage provision, the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867 disappointed those who also advocated the confiscation of southern plantations and their redistribution to ex-slaves. Thaddeus Stevens agreed with the freedman who said, “Give us our own land and we take care of ourselves, but without land, the old masters can hire us or starve us, as they please.” But most Republicans believed they had provided blacks with what they needed: equal legal rights and the ballot. If blacks were to get land, they would have to gain it themselves.
Military Reconstruction Act
> Military Reconstruction Act
- The ten unreconstructed Confederate states were divided into five military districts.
- Congress placed a Union general in charge of each district and instructed him to “suppress insurrection, disorder, and violence” and to begin political reform.
- After the military had completed voter registration, which would include black men, voters in each state would elect delegates to conventions that would draw up new state constitutions.
- Each constitution would guarantee black suffrage.
- When the voters of each state had approved the constitution and the state legislature had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, the state could submit its work to Congress.
- If Congress approved the constitution, the state’s senators and representatives could be seated, and political reunification would be accomplished.
Declaring that he would rather sever his right arm than sign such a formula for “anarchy and chaos,” Andrew Johnson vetoed the Military Reconstruction Act, but Congress overrode his veto. With the passage of the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, congressional reconstruction was virtually completed. Congress left whites owning most of the South’s land but, in a departure that justified the term “radical reconstruction,” had given black men the ballot.