HIGH SCHOOL CASE METHOD PROJECT

DRAFT
REV: SEPTEMBER 8, 2017

DEAN GRODZINS

Reconstruction (A): The Crisis of 1877

On the evening of February 26, 1877, at the Wormley House in Washington, DC, a hotel owned by
the richest black resident of the city, nine white politicians met to continue their negotiations. All day,
they had been seeking a way to end a bitterly contested presidential election.1 In November 1876,
American voters had favored the Democratic candidate, Governor Samuel Tilden of New York, over
the Republican, Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, by a popular vote margin of 51% to 48%.2 Both
parties, however, claimed to have won three Southern states: South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida.
If Hayes had carried them all, then he had won the election by a single vote majority in the Electoral
College, 185-184.3 At stake in the outcome, many believed, was not only who would be president, but
the fate of Republican Reconstruction policy, and therefore of black civil and political rights in the
South.

By 1877, Republicans had led the federal government for sixteen years, controlling for most of that
time the presidency and both houses of Congress. During these years, the Union had won a bloody
Civil War (1861-1865), defeating the attempt of 11 Southern states to form an independent Confederate
States of America, and slavery had been abolished (1865). The Republican-led government now faced
the challenge of reconstructing a country torn apart by war and transformed by emancipation.

In 1867, the Republican Congress enacted a reconstruction plan that placed the governments of most
former rebel states under military supervision. Republicans aimed to force white Southerners to
recognize that former slaves were now citizens with equal rights, including the right the vote. By 1870,
full civilian control had been restored in all former rebel states. (See Exhibit 1.) They all now recognized
black equality in their constitutions, and former slaves were voting across the South. Former slaves
almost all voted Republican, while most Southern whites supported the Democrats.

Republicans won control of all former rebel states, for various periods of time, between 1869 and
1877. Yet Southern Republicans faced constant, violent white opposition, and Republicans in
Washington grew increasingly reluctant to deploy force to stop it. In part as a result, Southern
Republicans lost state after state to the Democrats, who made their declared goal to “redeem” the South
from “negro rule.”

In November 1876, when the Tilden-Hayes election took place, Republicans still held three Southern
state governments—those with the disputed returns, Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. By early
1877, “Redeemers” had taken control of Florida, and South Carolina and Louisiana each had two
governments, one “Redeemer” and one Republican. The Republican governments in Louisiana and
South Carolina controlled little more than the state capitol buildings, which were guarded by U.S.
soldiers. The “Redeemer” governments, backed by white militia groups, controlled everything else.4
If Tilden became president, he was expected to order federal troops in Louisiana and South Carolina

Senior Researcher Dean Grodzins prepared this case. This case was developed from published sources, and solely as the basis for class discussion.
Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management.

Copyright © 2016 President and Fellows of Harvard College. This publication may not be digitized, photocopied, or otherwise reproduced, posted,
or transmitted, without permission.

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DRAFT Reconstruction (A): The Crisis of 1877

to their barracks, allowing the Redeemers to take over, but his election victory was now in dispute.
Some outraged Democrats predicted that if Tilden were not elected, there would be “war.”5

Congress appointed a special electoral commission of 15 members, with the power to decide
whether Tilden or Hayes had won South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. In mid February, the
commissioners made clear, in a series of 8-7 votes, that they intended to award all three states, and
therefore the election, to Hayes.a Before Hayes could officially be declared the winner, however, the
Constitution required that the Electoral Votes had to be counted before both houses of Congress.
Democrats, who controlled the House of Representatives, began a series of parliamentary maneuvers
there to stop this from happening (voting repeatedly, for example, to adjourn). They wanted to delay
the count long enough to prevent Hayes from being inaugurated on March 4th, as the Constitution
required. No one knew what would happen if no inauguration took place. Would there be civil unrest?

From the beginning of the crisis, Northern Republicans had been negotiating behind the scenes with
Southern Democrats. They tried to persuade the Southerners not to stand in the way of Hayes
becoming president. They promised, among other things, that Hayes would appoint a Southern
Democrat to his cabinet, give Southern Democrats federal jobs, and support the construction of a
railroad from Texas to the Pacific.6 The Democrats made clear, however, that what they wanted most
was “home rule.” Hayes would have to order the army to stop protecting the Republican governors
of South Carolina and Louisiana. This meant those governments would fall, and Republicans there,
especially black ones, might face violent reprisals. Now, at the Wormley Hotel, five Republicans from
Ohio, friends of Hayes, met with four influential South Carolina and Louisiana Democrats. On the
table seemed to be a deal: Southern Democrats would get the House to finish counting the electoral
votes in return for Republicans ending Reconstruction.7 Should the Republicans agree to it?

Plans for Reconstruction

In the spring of 1865, when the Confederate armies surrendered, Southerners were unrepresented
in Congress, and most of their elected state government leaders were under arrest or in hiding. In most
states, the only government was the occupying Union army.8 The federal government now had
extraordinary power over the South. Many Republicans wanted to use this power to force white
Southerners to accept that former slaves were now free workers and citizens, with equal rights. As the
Republican orator Wendell Phillips declared in 1866, Reconstruction meant the “North making over
the South in its likeness. … Reconstruction begins when the South yields up her idea of civilization,
and allows the North to permeate her channels and make her over.”9 Yet most Republicans would also
have agreed with Republican Senator Oliver Morton, who declared in 1867 that the political situation
of former rebel states was “abnormal,” and that the federal government “must hasten to make it normal
... as soon as it can be done consistently with … equal rights to all.”10 In other words, although Morton,
like Phillips, wanted to guarantee black civil equality, he also wanted the quick restoration of
democratic government in the South. Most Republicans, like Morton, assumed that black civil equality
and a democratic South were compatible. They expected that Southern whites, who made up almost
57% of the overall population in the former rebel South, would come around quickly to accepting black

a Democrats agreed to create the commission and abide by its rulings with the understanding that it would be made up of 7
Republicans, 7 Democrats, and 1 independent. To Democrats’ dismay, however, the commission unexpectedly ended up with a
membership of 8 Republicans and 7 Democrats. All the 8-7 votes were along party lines. For a detailed account of the creation
the electoral commission and its decisions up through February 26, see Michael Holt, By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential
Election of 1876 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, 2008), 204-235.

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Reconstruction (A): The Crisis of 1877 DRAFT

equality.11 Instead, most Southern whites persisted in rejecting black equality. Republican policy
makers struggled with how to respond to this rejection.

Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan

The struggle began during the war. In January 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued his
Emancipation Proclamation. It empowered the Union Army to free slaves in rebel-controlled areas and
to encourage slaves, including in Union-controlled areas, to leave their masters by becoming soldiers.
Nearly 150,000 Southern blacks eventually joined the Union army, and most were slaves who had freed
themselves by enlisting.12 Yet Lincoln did not permit the army to end slavery in Union-controlled parts
of the Confederacy. Lincoln preferred that Southern white voters there agree to abolish slavery
themselves.

In December 1863, Lincoln issued the first Reconstruction plan, which came to be known as the Ten
Percent Plan. In a proclamation, Lincoln declared that rebel states could establish new state
governments, which the Union would recognize as legitimate, on one condition: ten percent of voters
who had been qualified to vote in 1860—that is, white men—had to take an oath to support the
Constitution, the Union, and emancipation. Lincoln wanted their new governments to “recognize and
declare” the permanent freedom of the slaves in their state and to “provide for their education.”13
Under Lincoln’s plan, reconstructed governments were formed in Union-controlled areas of Louisiana,
Arkansas, and Virginia, and under slightly different terms, Tennessee.14 In 1864, he began to “suggest”
that these governments give some black men the vote: “I would myself prefer that … [the elective
franchise] were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.”15

The Ten Percent governments all declared emancipation and authorized public school systems
(which had not existed in the South), but none followed his suggestion to give black men the vote—
not even Louisiana, where a large, prosperous, well-established free black population lived in New
Orleans.16 Lincoln hoped that these governments would win growing popular support, but they never
did, with only small fractions of potential voters choosing to participate in elections. As Lincoln himself
conceded, speaking of Louisiana, the size of the electorate “on which the new Louisiana government
rests, would be more satisfactory to all, if it contained fifty, or thirty, or even twenty thousand, instead
of only about twelve thousand, as it does.”17

Lincoln hoped the Republican Congress would recognize the Ten Percent governments, but it
refused to seat any representatives they sent. By 1864, most Congressional Republicans wanted to
replace Lincoln’s Ten Percent reconstruction plan with the more demanding “Wade-Davis” plan. It
never became law, however, owing to Lincoln’s opposition. Wade-Davis would have allowed a state
to begin reconstruction only when a majority of its white male voters, not ten percent, took a loyalty
oath. Thereafter, the vote would be restricted to “ironclad loyalists”—those who could swear an oath
that they had never supported the rebellion. The new governments chosen by these voters would then
have to commit to black civil equality.18 A minority of Republicans, meanwhile, self-identified as
“Radicals,” wanted to go further than Wade-Davis, or Lincoln. They began calling for all “freedmen,”
or formerly enslaved men, to get the vote.19

Despite these Republican disagreements, they united in January 1865 to approve the Thirteenth
Amendment, abolishing slavery, and sent it to the states for ratification. In March 1865, shortly before
the end of the congressional session, Republicans united again to create a new federal agency, the
Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, popularly known as the “Freedmen’s Bureau.”
Republicans intended the Freedmen’s Bureau to smooth the transition of Southern society away from
slavery. The Bureau was run out of the War Department, and most of its original agents were soldiers.

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DRAFT Reconstruction (A): The Crisis of 1877

It never employed more than 900 agents at one time, but they spread across the South and did things
no federal official had done before. Among these were: providing assistance to people in poverty,
both black and white; establishing schools for former slaves; encouraging former masters to start
treating their former slaves as free laborers—meaning they could not be whipped and had to be paid
wages agreed to beforehand by contract. Agents also settled disputes among former slaves and
between former slaves and whites. In this respect, the Bureau operated as a kind of court system,
independent of civilian court systems in the South, with the agents’ rulings being enforced by the
occupying U.S. Army. Republicans always imagined the Bureau to be a temporary, transitional
institution. Congress originally chartered it “to continue during the present war of rebellion, and for
one year thereafter.”20

Presidential Reconstruction
In April 1865, just days after the principal Confederate army surrendered in Virginia, a confederate
sympathizer assassinated Abraham Lincoln. The presidency passed to Vice President Andrew
Johnson, a prominent Democrat from Tennessee. Over his long political career, he had championed
the interests of small white farmers (he called them “honest yeomen”) against rich slaveholders (he
called them a “pampered … corrupted aristocracy”). A staunch Unionist, he had rejected Tennessee
secession in 1861. In 1862, Lincoln had appointed him military governor of the Union-controlled areas
of Tennessee. He had never objected to slavery itself and had even owned five slaves, but as military
governor, he freed his slaves and led efforts to abolish slavery in Tennessee. When Lincoln ran for
reelection in 1864, Republicans had chosen him as Lincoln’s running mate to help him win Democratic
votes.21 Now president, Johnson quickly put in place a plan that historians call “Presidential
Reconstruction.”

Johnson’s goal was to restore, as soon as possible, civilian control of the South (although he used
his military authority over the South to dictate the terms of this restoration).22 First, he issued a blanket
pardon for most supporters of the confederacy, removing legal disabilities placed on them for having
for having participated in a rebellion, so long as they took an oath to support the Constitution and
emancipation. He required confederate leaders to apply to him personally for pardons, but he soon
was granting pardons to nearly all who asked—sometimes hundreds a day.23 He appointed temporary
civilian governors in the seven former rebel states that were still under military rule, and he asked these
governors to organize elections. Johnson also set three requirements for any former rebel state trying
to restore its status in the Union. The state governments had to reject secession, repudiate their war
debts, and ban slavery in their state constitutions. He also strongly urged them (although he did not
explicitly require them) to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. By the time the new session of Congress
began in December 1865, the eleven former rebel states had all met the required conditions and elected
representatives to Congress. All but Mississippi had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. Enough
states had ratified the amendment, in fact, that the Johnson administration declared it now part of the
Constitution.24

Johnson believed “’the work of restoration’ was now complete,” but the Republican Congress
disagreed.25 Although it welcomed the Southern state ratifications of the Thirteenth Amendment, it
held off seating any of the newly-elected Southern members.

Republicans were troubled that Southerners had not demonstrated a real change of heart about
slavery and rebellion. Several states had merely “repealed” their acts of secession without declaring
them “void,” or had declared only future acts of secession to be void. Mississippi had rejected the
Thirteenth Amendment, and other Southern states had made clear they were ratifying it reluctantly.
(South Carolina ratified it only with the understanding that the amendment gave Congress no

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Reconstruction (A): The Crisis of 1877 DRAFT

authority to legislate “upon the political status of former slaves, or their civil relations.”) Also, Southern
voters had elected a number of prominent Confederates to important state positions or to Congress.
Among them were ten Confederate generals, nine members of the Confederate Congress, and the Vice
President of the Confederacy himself, Alexander Stephens, who was chosen as a senator from
Georgia.26

Even worse, from the Republican perspective, the new governments had enacted a series of laws,
known as the “Black Codes,” that seemed to subvert the intent of the Thirteenth Amendment. The
Codes varied from state to state, but generally placed severe restrictions on the economic liberty of free
blacks. In Mississippi, for example, blacks had to sign yearly labor contracts or risk arrest for
“vagrancy,” which could be punished by forced labor. Similar laws existed in South Carolina, where
blacks were also limited to working as farmers or servants unless they paid an annual tax. The codes
all established much more severe punishments for blacks than whites for the same crimes and
authorized courts to take black “children” (meaning, anyone under 21) from their parents and
“apprentice” them to a master (meaning, work without pay). As a black Union veteran asked about
these laws, “If you call this Freedom, what do you call Slavery?”27 Many Congressional Republicans
felt the same way, although most did not want a break with Johnson.

Congress, led by moderate Republicans, tried to correct what they saw as the problems of
Presidential Reconstruction. In February 1866, they passed a bill extending the life of the Freedmen’s
Bureau and giving it the authority to prosecute civil rights violations. The trials would take place in
military courts. To their shock, Johnson vetoed the legislation, denouncing the Bureau as an
unconstitutional “system of military jurisdiction”; as an example of taxation without representation,
because the South was not yet represented in Congress; and as a waste of government money.
Freedmen, in his view, did not need federal help.28

In March 1866, Congress passed a Civil Rights Bill, which provided the first national definition of
U.S. citizenship: “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power.” By this
definition, freedmen were now citizens. The bill also extended to blacks “all the civil rights pertaining
to a white man” and gave federal courts, for the first time, jurisdiction over civil rights violations by
states. Johnson now infuriated Republicans by vetoing this bill as well. He denounced it for violating
states’ rights and operating “in favor of the colored and against the white race.” Congressional
Republicans overrode his veto, making the Civil Rights Act the first major piece of federal legislation
enacted by override. In July, Congress voted again to reauthorize and expand the powers of the
Freedmen’s Bureau. Johnson again exercised his veto. Again, Congress overrode it.29

Meanwhile, Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The first and most
important section wrote a version of the new definition of citizenship into the Constitution: “All
persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of
the United States and of the State in which they reside.” The amendment also forbade states from
violating freedmen’s civil rights: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person in its jurisdiction, the equal
protection of the laws.” The final section of the amendment gave Congress the authority “to enforce,
by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this [amendment].”30 Johnson could not veto a
constitutional amendment, but he urged states not to ratify it. None of the provisional Southern
governments did adopt it—except for Johnson’s home state of Tennessee. Congress rewarded
Tennessee by restoring its congressional representation.31 (See Exhibit 1.)

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DRAFT Reconstruction (A): The Crisis of 1877

Now locked in a bitter political struggle over the future of Reconstruction, Johnson and the
Republican Congress appealed for popular support in the congressional elections of 1866. As no former
rebel state, except Tennessee, was yet represented in Congress, the elections were contested mostly in
the North.

Johnson and his allies, now mainly Democrats, campaigned against the Fourteenth Amendment,
which they denounced as “the negro-equality constitutional amendment.” They had good reason to
think Northern white voters did not favor black equality. Few blacks lived in the North, but most
Northern states did not allow blacks to vote, and in 1865, Republican-sponsored referendums for black
suffrage had been defeated in Connecticut, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.32 Yet news of the Black Codes,
coupled with reports of rising violence against both blacks and white unionists in the South, alarmed
Northerners. Even worse, Johnson refused to see the bloodshed as evidence that his policies were not
working. Most spectacularly, in July 1866, a white mob attacked a Republican-sponsored constitutional
convention in New Orleans. The mob murdered at least 34 blacks, some of them apparently veterans,
and three white Republicans, among them the former Louisiana state treasurer. Johnson blamed
Radical Republicans for the riot, implausibly claiming that they had provoked whites to violence.33
Northerners began to fear that they had won the war but would lose the peace. They handed the
Republicans an overwhelming election victory. Republicans won a large enough majority in Congress
to override any future Johnson veto.34 They could now set the course of Reconstruction without the
need to compromise with any Democrats. The Radical wing of the Republican Party was now leading
the way.

Radical Reconstruction
Starting March 1867, Congress approved a series of Radical-inspired measures, all over Johnson’s
vetoes, “to provide for the more efficient government of the Rebel States.”35 These Reconstruction Acts
pronounced the governments of the ten states still without congressional representation “shall be
deemed provisional only” and reserved for Congress the right “at any time to abolish, modify, control,
or supersede” them.36 For now, Congress placed them under the supervision of the Union army. At
this time, over 20,000 federal troops were still stationed in the former rebel states. (See Exhibit 2.) As
Republican Congressman, former Union general, and future U.S. president James Garfield explained,
the “time has come when we must lay the heavy hand of military authority upon these rebel
communities, and hold them in its grasp till their madness is past.”37

The Reconstruction Acts grouped the ten states into five military districts, each to be commanded
by an army general. The general had the power to “suppress insurrection, disorder, and violence,” to
try civilians before military courts, and to remove any state official from office and replace him.38 The
general was also charged with supervising the creation of new state governments. First, he would
appoint voter registration boards, consisting of “loyal officers or persons.” They would register adult
male citizens over 21 “of whatever race, color, or previous condition,” who could also swear that they
had never broken an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution.39 One leading Republican estimated that
this requirement would disenfranchise 10 to 15 thousand prominent ex-Confederates, although no one
knew for sure.40

Once the voters were registered, the military would supervise state referendums on whether to call
constitutional conventions. Voters could reject a convention, but this meant they would remain under
military rule without congressional representation. If voters called a convention, all delegates had to
swear that they had never broken an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution. Any state constitution they
wrote would take effect only after voters had ratified it in a referendum, and it had been approved by

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Reconstruction (A): The Crisis of 1877 DRAFT

Congress. With a constitution in place, the state could elect a governor and legislature. The legislature
then had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. When enough states had joined it to make the
Fourteenth Amendment part the Constitution (which happened in 1868), the state would be eligible to
be represented in Congress.41 Once Congress decided to admit its representatives, the state would be
considered reconstructed.

This reconstruction plan did less than some “ultra” Radicals wanted, prominent among them
Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, a leading Republican congressman. Stevens wanted the South
treated (in the words of one historian) “as a subject province, until a new generation, trained to
appreciate republican values, could replace the old.” He supported the long-term disenfranchisement
of a million ex-Confederates, an open-ended military occupation of the South, and the expropriation
of 400 million acres belonging to rich Southern planters, some of which the federal government would
redistribute in forty-acre lots to former slaves.42 Even most Radicals, however, rejected his ideas.
Instead, their reconstruction plan rested on the conviction that giving former slaves the vote would be
enough, in the run, to protect black rights. As one Radical declared, black suffrage was “the most far-
sighted provision against social disorder, the surest guaranty for peace, prosperity, and public
justice.”43 At the same time, Radicals expected blacks to vote Republican and so help keep confederate-
sympathizing Democrats from power.

Radicals in Congress considered black voting so important that, in 1869, they pushed through the
Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It guaranteed that “the right of citizens of the United States
to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color,
or previous condition of servitude” and gave Congress authority to pass laws to enforce this guarantee.
Congress also required the four Southern states that were at that time still not represented in Congress
(Georgia, Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas) to ratify it before their representation was restored. With
the support of these states, the amendment became part of the Constitution in 1870.44

Radicals wanted to keep whites who were hostile to black rights from gaining power until black
suffrage was securely established. To achieve this goal, Radicals used two key measures, both seen as
temporary. One was to disenfranchise ex-confederates. Most Republicans recognized, however, that
disenfranchisement of whites would be too politically controversial to last long. Most ex-confederates
were Democrats, so Democrats could effectively attack disenfranchisement as a mere partisan scheme
to keep the Republican Party in power. Perhaps for this reason, the 1867 Reconstruction Acts were the
only federal reconstruction laws to require confederate disenfranchisement.45 At the state level,
Southern Republicans in many states enacted additional disenfranchisement measures, and doing so
did help them win some elections. Very quickly, however, Democrats turned the demand for restoring
white voting rights into an effective campaign issue. As a result, all state disenfranchisement laws were
soon repealed.46

The other key Radical measure was to place civilian governments in the South under U.S. Army
supervision. Many Republicans were troubled by the idea of subjecting fellow Americans to extra-
constitutional military rule, but most thought they had little choice. As one prominent Republican
senator wrote to a friend, establishing military rule was the “last thing” he wanted, but the people of
the rebel states “behave so badly there seems to be no other way of protecting loyal men.”47 Even so,
most Republicans could only accept the continued military occupation of the South if it was kept as
light as possible, and if it was not open-ended.48 Republicans in Congress, including many Radicals,
voted for rapid, mass demobilization of the army in 1865 and 1866. In May 1865, just after the fighting
stopped, the Union army had around 900,000 men under arms in the former rebel states.49 By 1867,
only about 20,000 soldiers remained stationed in the South to supervise the creation of the new
governments there.50 (See Exhibit 2.) Again, the Radical plan reverted each state back to full civilian

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DRAFT Reconstruction (A): The Crisis of 1877

control as soon as it fulfilled the conditions laid out in the Reconstruction Acts, and Congress
readmitted its congressional representatives. Republicans hoped many former rebel states would be
restored to the Union in time to take part in the 1868 presidential election.51

Until then, Republicans had to deal with the president they had, their enemy Andrew Johnson. He
could potentially cause problems for their reconstruction plan because, under the Constitution, he was
commander in chief of the army. They therefore tried to keep control of the military in the hands of
Republicans, such as the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, who had been appointed by Lincoln. In
part to keep Johnson from replacing Stanton, Congress enacted the Tenure of Office Act (1867). This
law forbade the president from dismissing any official who had been approved by the Senate, without
the agreement of the Senate. In early 1868, Johnson defiantly dismissed Stanton anyway. The
Republican House responded by impeaching him—the first presidential impeachment in U.S. history.
In May, however, the Senate decided, on a close vote (just short of the necessary two-thirds majority),
not to remove him from office.52

In the November elections, a Republican, Ulysses Grant, won the presidency. The Union Army
commander during the war, Grant had campaigned on the slogan, “Let Us Have Peace.”53 By this
point, Congress had “readmitted to the Union”b—and ended military rule over--seven rebel states that
had fulfilled all the conditions the Radical Reconstruction: North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia,
Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas. They joined Tennessee, which had been readmitted in
1866. (See Exhibit 1.)

In 1868, Grant carried all the newly-readmitted Southern states on the strength of black votes—
except for Louisiana and Georgia, where large-scale white violence depressed black turnout.54 Yet
military reconstruction was quickly drawing to an end. The last rebel states, Virginia, Mississippi and
Texas, would be readmitted in 1870. Congress would shut down the semi-military Freedmen’s Bureau
in 1872.55

The Republican South

The 1867 Reconstruction Acts had forced Southern states to write new constitutions. The Acts also
mandated that there be no color restriction on who could vote for or serve as delegates to the
constitutional conventions. In huge numbers, ex-slaves participated in these special elections, and 265
blacks were chosen as delegates—the first large group of black elected officials in American history.56
The new state constitutions that they helped to write eliminated race restrictions on voting. Black
voters went on to form the backbone of the Republican Party in the South. Over the coming years,
hundreds of Southern black Republicans were elected to office, mostly at the state and local levels, but
also to Congress.57 In 1867-1868, these black leaders were drawn disproportionately from the small
population that had been born free or emancipated before the Civil War. But as time passed, more rose
from the masses of impoverished former slaves who had been freed during the war.58

The Southern Republican Party was therefore very different from the Northern party, which was
overwhelmingly white. Yet Southern Republicans could not rely entirely on black votes. Except in
Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, no Southern state had a majority black electorate.59
Southern Republicans needed to win, and did win, some white support, and most of their leaders were
white. In only one Southern Republican state legislature, that of South Carolina, did black members

b Many Northerners resisted using the term “readmitted,” because they denied that the Southern states ever had the right to exit
the Union. For more on this controversy, see Exhibit 1.

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Reconstruction (A): The Crisis of 1877 DRAFT

constitute a majority. Of the 129 Southern Republicans who served in Congress during Reconstruction,
just 16 were black.60

Many prominent white Southern Republicans were Northerners who had settled in the South after
the war. Southern Democrats would accuse them of being “carpetbaggers”—mere fortune hunters,
who when they left the North, had allegedly been so poor that they could fit all they owned into a
carpetbag (a small suitcase). The label stuck, but the characterization was false. Most were middle
class, well-educated young Union veterans, ambitious to make money but also help “substitute the
civilization of freedom for that of slavery.”61 Although “in no [Southern] state did they constitute even
2 percent of the total population,” they made up a far larger share of Southern Republican leaders. Of
the 113 white Southern Republicans who served in Congress during Reconstruction, for example, 60
were carpetbaggers.62

Republicans for a time received support from a significant minority of native Southern whites. Most
Southern white Republican votes came from this group, as did a significant proportion of party
leaders—including 53 of those 113 white Southern Republicans in Congress. Southern Democrats
dismissed these whites as impoverished “scalawags” (rascals). Again, the label stuck, and again it was
unfair. Scalawags were a diverse group, including some who were rich and even a few prominent ex-
Confederates. Some scalawags had been large slaveholders and did not particularly like black equality,
but saw black voting as now “an unavoidable fact of life” to which they had to adapt. Other scalawags
were particularly interested in modernizing the agriculturally-based Southern economy and thought
the Republicans knew best how to do it. As one declared, “Yankees and Yankee notions are just what
we want in this country. We want their capital to build factories and workshops. We want their
intelligence, their energy and enterprise.” Most scalawags, however, were small farmers from the hilly
and mountainous regions of the South, such as eastern Tennessee and northern Alabama, where
slavery had never taken hold, and which had often been Unionist strongholds during the Civil War.63
(Over 90,000 Southern whites from the rebel states, mostly from these non-plantation areas, had served
in the Union army.)64

From 1868 to 1877, this interracial Southern Republican coalition won control, for months or years,
of every Southern state government. In power, Southern Republicans enacted a range of measures to
transform the region. Among their notable achievements, they established the first government-
funded public school systems in the South, enacted laws banning many forms of racial discrimination,
and promoted economic development, especially though railroad building.65

To support their initiatives, however, the Republican governments raised taxes and public debt to
unpopular levels.66 Factionalism also weakened Southern Republicans; their carpetbagger, scalawag,
and black leaders were frequently at odds over issues ranging from policy to patronage. As one
Southern Republican newspaper lamented, “Our party [has been] disorganized, disrupted, and
demoralized … rent and torn by internal feuds.”67 Southern Republicans also lost popular support
because they were not above corruption. The corruption often involved railroad promotion, as when
state officials accepted bribes or favors from a railroad company in return for giving it state backing to
build a particular line. (Corruption, however, was hardly unique to Southern Republicans. In this era,
members of both parties in both South and North were guilty. One of the worst cases of political
corruption in the 1870s actually took place not in the Republican South but in Democratic-controlled
New York City, where the political “machine” led by “Boss” William Tweed “plundered the city of
tens of millions of dollars.”)68

The most severe challenge Southern Republicans faced, however, was that most Southern whites
refused to recognize their governments as legitimate. Southern Republicans, white as well as black,

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DRAFT Reconstruction (A): The Crisis of 1877

found themselves and their families publicly snubbed and insulted. Customers boycotted their
businesses; local banks refused to give them loans; their children were beat up at school.69 They also
faced the threat of white vigilante violence. Such violence, especially against black Republicans,
became a constant feature of Southern life during Reconstruction, and grew terrifyingly intense around
election time.

The Ku Klux Klan

The most notorious white vigilante group (although by no means the only one) was the Ku Klux
Klan (KKK). Founded in 1866 in Tennessee by Confederate veterans, it quickly organized in other
Southern states. Between 1868 and 1871, the KKK carried out beatings, arson, lynchings, assassinations,
and mass killings, directed mostly against Republicans, especially black ones. Southern Republican
governments had difficulty responding. The violence overwhelmed their court systems, and the
people responsible often escaped punishment. As for responding with force, Southern Republican
leaders did not trust white militia and feared that reliance on black militia might start an all-out race
war. They also thought, with good reason, that their forces would be outgunned.70 In 1868, for
example, the Republican governor of Florida tried to arm the state militia by ordering 2,000 guns and
40,000 rounds of ammunition from New York. But the KKK stopped the train carrying the shipment
before it reached the state capital and removed the weaponry.71

Southern Republicans therefore turned to the federal government for help. The Republican
Congress, after holding hearings to expose Klan violence, passed a series of laws, notably the Ku Klux
Klan Act of 1871. The act gave federal courts, for the first time, jurisdiction over civil rights crimes by
individuals, including attempts to violate black voting rights. The act also allowed the president to use
military force to suppress any “organized and armed” group that threatened the government with
violence. The Grant administration used these powers aggressively in certain states. Thousands of
alleged KKK members were indicted, hundreds went to jail, and the army was sent in to restore order
in South Carolina.72 The power of the Klan was effectively broken. Many Southern Republicans were
now convinced, as one Mississippi carpetbagger declared in 1872, that only “steady, unswerving power
from without,” could preserve Reconstruction.73 Over the course of the 1870s, however, Republicans in
Washington proved increasingly reluctant to intervene in the South.

Retreat from Reconstruction

In election campaigns during the Reconstruction period, Republicans often accused rival Democrats
of being traitors who wanted to overturn the results of the Civil War and betray the sacrifices of Union
soldiers. Such rhetoric, called “waving the bloody shirt,” proved very effective, especially in winning
the votes of Union veterans. Realizing this, a growing number of Democrats in both North and South
declared themselves ready for a “New Departure.” They acquiesced to “the Constitution as it stands
now,” with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, assured Northerners that the
loyalty of the South was now secure, and called for the nation to move on from Reconstruction.74

Meanwhile, the influence of the architects of Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans, was in
decline. A growing number of Northern Republican leaders, who called themselves “Liberal
Republicans,” were sympathetic to the New Departure Democrats. Disgusted by the corruption that
plagued political life at this time, their priority was not Reconstruction but “reform.” Liberals viewed
“waving the bloody shirt” as a way that corrupt Republican “bosses” manipulated voters. In this view,
Republican politicians were fueling needless sectional hatred so that they could continue to steal from
the people. Liberals came to see President Grant as an enemy of reform and refused to support him
for reelection in 1872. Instead, they formed a coalition with Democrats to run their own candidate

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against him. Grant won the election, but Liberal Republicans were now recognized as the most
important group of swing voters, whose support both parties wanted to win.75

Then, in 1873, a financial panic produced an economic depression, which lasted for years. In 1874,
unemployment may have reached 25% in New York City, and in 1878, 10,479 companies, with assets
of over $250,000,000, went bankrupt. Protests for “Work or Bread” broke out in many cities, while in
January 1877, newspapers reported that more than 20,000 people came to collect free coal from a New
York charity. The desperate crowds included “[w]an faced, hollow-eyed women, with weak looking
infants in their arms; stout but crestfallen men, evidently mechanics out of employment and on the
verge of starvation; feeble old men, scarcely able to hobble along; weak looking girls and young men
well dressed in rags ….”76

In the minds of many voters, especially outside the South, economic and financial issues, not the
ongoing problems of Reconstruction, became a top concern. Moreover, many voters blamed
Republicans, as the party in power, for the “hard times.” As a result, in the 1874 Congressional
elections, Democrats won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since before the
Civil War.77 Republicans, after the election but before the new House members took office, rushed
through a last piece of Radical legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which banned racial
discrimination in many areas, including jury selection. Republicans realized that no more civil rights
laws would be enacted any time soon.78

“Redemption”
In this shifting national political climate, Democrats began winning control of states across the
South. They achieved these victories in part by consolidating the white vote. They won white voters
with promises to end Republican “corruption” and “extravagance” and with blunt appeals to racial
solidarity, insisting that the South must be “redeemed” from “Negro rule.” The “Redeemers” also,
however, resorted to vote fraud and anti-Republican political violence.

Some of the worst violence took place in Louisiana. In the state elections of 1872, both Democrats
and Republicans claimed victory after a violent campaign. By 1873, Republicans and Democrats had
organized separate governments, each with its own governor. The dispute between them for control
in one town, Colfax, produced a massacre. Black militia tried to retain possession of the county
courthouse, but were outnumbered and outgunned by an all-white sheriff’s posse. Perhaps 280 blacks
were killed. The posse burned many of them alive in the courthouse and shot scores of militiamen
who had surrendered.79 In 1874, armed “White Leagues” invaded the capital, New Orleans, in the
name of the Democratic governor. Grant was compelled to order in the army to keep the Republican
governor in power.80

Early the following year, Democrats tried to seize control of the Louisiana legislature, illegally
installing five assembly members. The Republican governor ordered a local U.S. Army commander to
remove the five members from their seats. A detachment of soldiers marched into the assembly
chamber itself and forced them to leave.81 When news of this action reached the North, it provoked an
intense political backlash. Even many Republicans were frightened by the idea of troops ejecting
legislators.82 The criticism grew so fierce that Grant worried about the political cost of ordering any
more military interventions.

Later in 1875, the carpetbagger Republican governor of Mississippi faced a surge of White League
terror. It shut down the Republican Party in many parts of his state. He asked Grant to send in the
army to restore order, but the president would not do it. Shortly afterwards, Democrats took control
of Mississippi, and the governor had to flee to the North to avoid arrest. When a Mississippi

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Republican leader later asked Grant why he had let this happen, Grant replied that if he had intervened,
Republicans would have lost a critical gubernatorial election in the major swing state of Ohio.83
Because he had not intervened, the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, had won a narrow
victory.84 In 1876, Hayes would become the Republican presidential nominee.

In early 1877, when the outcome of the 1876 election was still in doubt, a writer for an Ohio
newspaper compared the government of Louisiana to “a doll-baby leaning on props.” If the federal
government was to say, “’Hands off—look out for yourselves down there!’ … it would fall like a block
of cards.” In regard to Republican governments in the South, the writer saw only two options: “You
must either let them fall and go under out of sight, and cease to trouble us, or you must use the United
States army at every election. There is no half-way ground.”85

The 1876 Election

During the 1876 election, the Republican campaign machine continued to “wave the bloody shirt.”
The party platform, for example, accused the Democratic Party of “being the same in character and
spirit as when it sympathized with treason….”86 In accepting the party nomination, however, Hayes
sounded like a Liberal Republican. He identified as the “paramount” issue of the election not
Reconstruction, but political corruption. In regard to the South, he promised to “cherish … the interests
of the white and of the colored people both, and equally.”87 He actually did not sound too different
from the Democratic candidate, Tilden, who ran on a platform affirming New Direction moderation.
It proclaimed the Democrats’ “faith in the permanence of the Federal Union, our devotion to the
Constitution of the United States, with its amendments universally accepted as a final settlement of the
controversies that engendered civil war ….”88

In the remaining Republican states in the South, however, the campaign took on a different
character. In South Carolina, armed white militia calling themselves “Red Shirts” carried out a
campaign of terror in support of the Democratic candidate for governor.89 Nonetheless, enough black
Republicans voters turned out there, and in Florida and Louisiana, so that Hayes could claim an
Electoral College victory. When the Electoral Commission made clear it would award the disputed
electoral votes to Hayes, the bitter fight over whether he or Tilden had won the election seemed about
to be resolved. Yet the subsequent actions of the House of Representatives, aiming to block Hayes’s
inaugural, indicated continued Democratic resistance.

Republicans had to find a way to get Democrats to accept Hayes’s election. In the negotiations that
followed, Southern Democrats demanded “home rule”—that is, that the U.S. Army should stop
propping up Southern Republican governments. This would mean the end of Reconstruction. In late
February 1877, the negotiations led to the meeting at the Wormley House in Washington.

In that smoke-filled room were Ohio Republicans, acting on behalf of Hayes, and representatives of
Louisiana and South Carolina Democrats. Before the meeting, one of the Republicans had asked for
assurance that if the army stood down in Louisiana and let the “Redeemers” take over, blacks and other
Republicans would not be mistreated. A Louisiana negotiator had responded that he “thought” this
condition could be met.90 At the Wormley meeting itself, one of Hayes’s friends, Congressman and
future U.S. President James Garfield, expressed distaste for the negotiations. If Southern Democrats
wanted to end the delaying tactics in the House out of “high public duty,” he said, “the whole nation
would honor … [them for] resisting anarchy—and thus preventing Civil War; but neither they nor we
could afford to do anything that would be or appear to be a political bargain.”91 Nonetheless, a bargain
appeared to be possible. The Republicans now had to decide whether to accept it.

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Exhibit 1 ”Readmission”* of Former Rebel States to the Union

*The former rebel states are often said to have been “readmitted to the Union” between 1866 and 1870. Yet
many Northerners, especially Republicans, avoided this wording, because they denied that these states had left
the Union. The question of whether the former rebel states were in or out of the Union had important
consequences for Reconstruction. For example, in 1865, ten former rebel states ratified the Thirteenth
Amendment, abolishing slavery. Partly on the basis of these ratifications, the amendment was declared part of
the Constitution in December 1865. Yet none of these ten states had at that point been “readmitted to the Union.”
If they were not “in the Union,” how could they have participated in the ratification of the amendment? Most
Republicans preferred to say that the Southern states, although still in the Union, needed to be placed (in Abraham
Lincoln’s words) back into “proper practical relation with” it. This meant restoring their representation in
Congress and ability to participate in presidential elections, and ending federal military supervision over their
governments.

State Date of “Readmission”

Tennessee July 24, 1866
Arkansas June 22, 1868
North Carolina June 25, 1868
South Carolina June 25, 1868
Florida June 25, 1868
Louisiana June 25, 1868
Alabama July 14, 1868
Georgia July 15, 1868
Virginia January 26, 1870
Mississippi February 23, 1870
Texas March 30, 1870
Georgia July 15, 1870

Source: Mary Beth Norton et al., A People & a Nation: A History of the United States (8th ed.; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008),
1:448 (Map 16.1); Abraham Lincoln, “Speech on Reconstruction,” Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865 (Library of America,
1989), 699.

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Exhibit 2 U.S. Army Presence in the Former Rebel States, 1865-1866

Note: Texas is counted separately because the federal government stationed many troops there not
primarily to enforce federal Reconstruction policy, but to protect the border with Mexico.

Population September 1865 January 1866 December 1866

in 1860
State Troops Posts Troops Posts Troops Posts
Alabama 964,201 18,051 24 7,832 12 831 7
Arkansas 435,450 11,139 19 9,280 14 1,442 9
Florida 140,424 8,703 24 2,813 27 1,365 15
Georgia 1,057,286 15,779 75 2,764 14 1,136 8
Louisiana 708,002 23,747 33 9,772 14 4,341 8
Mississippi 791,305 13,796 33 9,119 10 747 6
North Carolina 992,622 8,788 16 2,209 13 1,132 10
South Carolina 703,708 9,642 37 7,408 41 1,624 15
Tennessee 1,109,801 16,077 13 7,345 7 1,698 6
Texas 604,215 43,424 -- 25,085 16 7,363 25
Virginia 1,219,630 20,760 50 3,293 39 3,275 13
Totals without
8,122,429 146,482 324 61,835 191 17,591 97
Texas
Totals with
8,726,644 189,906 -- 86,920 207 24,954 122
Texas

Source: Adapted from Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2015), 258, 259, 262, 263; Michael R. Haines, “State Populations (Series Aa2244-6550),” in Susan B.
Carter et al., Historical Statistics of the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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Endnotes

1 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988; updated edition: New York: Harper Perennial,
2014), 580-581. A classic account of the 1876-77 electoral dispute is C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of
1877 and the End of Reconstruction (1951; New York: Oxford, 1991); for useful critique of key aspects of Woodward’s account, see
Michael Les Benedict, “Southern Democrats in the Crisis of 1876-77: A Reconsideration of Reunion and Reaction,” in Preserving
the Constitution: Essays on Politics and the Constitution in the Reconstruction Era (New York: Fordham, 2006), 186-208.
2 “1876 Presidential Election,” Guide to U.S. Elections (6th ed.; Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2010), 768.

3 Michael F. Holt, By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, 2008), 258, Table 8.

4 Holt, By One Vote, 193; Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction (Chapel Hill:
University North Carolina, 2014), 383-384; Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2015), 241.
5 Foner, Reconstruction, 576.

6 Much of Woodward, Reunion and Reaction, details these negotiations.

7 For skeptical accounts of the significance of the Wormley conference—questioning whether the Southerners were actually in
a position to deliver the votes they promised, for example, and even whether Southern Democrats were the principal force
behind the house delaying actions—see Woodward, Reunion and Reaction, especially 191-198, and (from a different perspective)
Benedict, “Southern Democrats,” 205-206.
8 Summers, Ordeal, 42-43; Downs, After Appomattox, 29-30, 33.

9 Wendell Phillips, quoted in Summers, Ordeal, 58, 410n1.

10 Oliver Morton, quoted in Summers, Ordeal, 108-109.

11 In 1860, there were 8,726,644 whites and 3,632,726 blacks in the 11 states that would become the Confederacy (not counting
the part of Virginia that rejected secession and in 1863 joined the Union as the state of West Virginia). See Michael R. Haines,
“State Populations” (Table Group Aa2244-6550), in Susan Carter et. al., eds., Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest
Times to the Present: Millennial Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
12 On the Emancipation Proclamation, see James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-
1865 (New York: W.W. Norton), 340-392; on black Union soldiers from slave states, see Oakes, pp. 387-388.
13 Lincoln, “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction,” Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865 (Library of America, 1989), 555-
558.
14 Downs, After Appomattox, 65; Foner, Reconstruction, 43-50; Summers, Ordeal, 21-24. The difference in Tennessee concerned the
kind of oath Southerners had to take. Lincoln’s proposed oath required only future loyalty to the Union. In Tennessee, Andrew
Johnson, whom Lincoln appointed governor (and who later succeeded Lincoln as president), insisted on limiting voting to
those who could swear the “ironclad oath” (Foner, 60), that they had never supported the Confederacy.
15 Lincoln, “To Michael Hahn,” Speeches and Writings, 579; “Speech on Reconstruction, Washington, DC,” 699.

16 Summers, Ordeal, 23-24; Foner, Reconstruction, 47-50. The new Tennessee constitution did not explicitly limit the vote to
whites, although Governor Andrew Johnson suggested to the constitutional convention delegates that black voting could still
be stopped: “… [I]f you want a certain class disqualified as voters, say so; but do not put it in your constitution.” Quoted in
Summers, Ordeal, 22.
17 Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 699. Even this was an optimistic assessment. When the loyal government of Louisiana wrote a
new Constitution, only around 6,000 voters had cast ballots calling for the convention and fewer than 9,000 had voted to ratify
its work. See Summers, Ordeal, 25.
18 Foner, Reconstruction, 60-61; Summers, Ordeal, 24-25.

19 Foner, Reconstruction, 61-62.

20 “An Act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees” (13 Stat. 507, Ch.150); Foner, Reconstruction, 142-143,
148-151; Summers, Ordeal, 55-56.

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21 Foner, Reconstruction, 43-45, 176-177, 179; Summers, Ordeal, 21-22, 63.

22 According to Downs, After Appomattox, 70-83, Johnson encouraged civilian governments to assume power while continuing
to exercise military power over them. In effect, Downs argues, Johnson created a kind of “duplex” government in the South, in
which lines of authority between the civilian and military administrations were “confused and ill defined.”
23 Foner, Reconstruction, 183-184, 191; Summers, Ordeal, 64-67.

24 Foner, Reconstruction, 187-188, 193-197; Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the
Thirteenth Amendment (New York: Cambridge, 2001), 224-233. Vorenberg also discusses the federal decision, which had been
endorsed by Lincoln before his death, to count approval of Southern state governments towards the ratification of the
Thirteenth Amendment, even though they had not yet been “readmitted to the Union” (meaning, Congress had not yet
decided to seat their congressional delegations); see also Exhibit 1.
25 Quotation in Foner, Reconstruction, 240.

26 Summers, Ordeal, 69-72; Foner, Reconstruction, 196-197, 199. South Carolina quotation in Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 230.

27 Foner, Reconstruction, 199-204; Summers, Ordeal, 72-77; quotation in Foner, Reconstruction, 215.

28 Foner, Reconstruction, 243, 247; Summers, Ordeal, 88-89. The text of the vetoed bill, “An Act to Enlarge the Powers of the
Freedmen’s Bureau,” can be found at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-
bin/ampage?collId=llsb&fileName=039/llsb039.db&recNum=332; Johnson’s veto message can be found at
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=71977&st=Andrew+johnson&st1=veto.
29 “An Act to protect all Persons in the United States in their Civil Rights, and furnish the Means of their Vindication” (14 Stat.
27, Ch. 31); Foner, Reconstruction, 244, 250-251, 248n37; Summers, Ordeal, 88-90. The text of Johnson’s veto message can be
found at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=71978&st=Andrew+johnson&st1=veto. See also, “An Act to
continue in force and to amend ‘An Act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees’” (14 Stat. 173, Ch.200);
Johnson’s message explaining his veto of this act can be found at
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=71982&st=&st1=#axzz1IzFSVtXD.
30 See http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=014/llsl014.db&recNum=389. The Fourteenth
Amendment has three other sections. Section 4 forbids the United States from agreeing to pay any confederate debts. Section 3
forbids anyone from holding federal or state office who had broken an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution by supporting
“insurrection and rebellion;” a two-thirds vote of Congress could remove this “disability.” (By 1872, only few former
confederates were still operating under this disability when Congress passed a “general amnesty” law. See Foner,
Reconstruction, 504.) Section 2 declares that if a state “abridged” the voting rights of its adult male inhabitants, its
representation in Congress would be reduced accordingly. This section was intended to discourage Southern states from
denying former slaves the vote.
31 Foner, Reconstruction, 260-261, 268-269.

32 Summers, Ordeal, 98; Foner, Reconstruction, 223.

33 Foner, Reconstruction, 262-263; Summers, Ordeal, 96-97.

34 Foner, Reconstruction, 267.

35 “An act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States” (14 Stat. 428, Ch. 153). On the congressional
debates over the first Reconstruction Act, see Foner, Reconstruction, 273-277; Downs, After Appomattox, 165-174.
36 “An act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States,” Sec. 6.

37 Quoted in Downs, After Appomattox, 168.

38 “An Act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States,” Sec. 3-4; “An Act supplementary to an Act
entitled, ‘An Act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States” (15 Stat. 14, Ch.30), Sec. 2.
39 “An Act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States,” Sec. 5; “An Act supplementary to an Act entitled
‘An Act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States’ … and to facilitate Restoration” (15 Stat. 2, Ch. 6),
Sec. 4.
40 Foner, Reconstruction, 276.

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41 “An Act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States,” Sec. 5; “An Act supplementary to an Act entitled
‘An Act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States’ … and to facilitate Restoration.”
42 Downs, After Appomattox, 166; Foner, Reconstruction, 235; quotation, Summers, Ordeal, 17; Stevens and his allies characterized
as “ultra” in Foner, p. 315. Stevens proposed that confiscated land not distributed to freedmen be auctioned off, with the
proceeds used in part to pay the pensions of Union veterans and compensate Southern loyalists for wartime losses (Foner, 235).
43 Quoted in Downs, After Appomattox, 169.

44 http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=015/llsl015.db&recNum=379; Summers, Ordeal, 256. See

also https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-in/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=016/llsl016.db&recNum=1166 for the March 20, 1870
proclamation by Secretary of State Hamilton Fish certifying that the Fifteenth Amendment had become part of the
Constitution.
45 Some Radicals had wanted the Fourteenth Amendment to bar former Confederates from voting until 1870, but most
Republicans rejected this idea. See Foner, Reconstruction, 253-254; Summers, Ordeal, 91-92; Foner, Reconstruction, 446.
46 Foner, Reconstruction, 323-324, 412-414; Summers, Ordeal, 161-168, 328. Republicans in five former rebel states
disenfranchised few former Confederates, either because they thought they could win enough white support without
disenfranchisement (Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina), or they because they thought they could win without white
votes (South Carolina). By 1872, disenfranchisement seems to have ended in all former rebel states except Arkansas.
47 Quoted in Summers, Ordeal, 104.

48 Downs, After Appomattox, 166-174.

49 Downs, After Appomattox, 260.

50 The army had a total of around 50,000 troops in 1867, but most were stationed outside the South—principally in the West,
where they fought Indians. Downs, After Appomattox, 101-102, 260, 264.
51 Summers, Ordeal, 102.

52 Downs, After Appomattox, 199-202; Foner, Reconstruction, 333-336; Summers, Ordeal, 136-140.

53 Foner, Reconstruction, 338.

54 Foner, Reconstruction, 343.

55 Summers, Ordeal, 298; “An Act making Appropriations for sundry civil Expenses of the Government for the fiscal Year ….”
(17 Stat. 347, Ch. 417), 366.
56 Foner, Reconstruction, 318. The first black elected official in U.S. history is thought to be Alexander Lucius Twilight, who was
elected to the Vermont legislature in 1836. See http://www.biography.com/people/alexander-lucius-twilight-213035
57 Foner, Reconstruction, 351-357. 16 blacks served to Congress, 18 in high state office (governor, lieutenant governor, treasurer,
superintendent of education, and secretary of state), more than 600 as state legislators, and many in local offices (such as
mayor, sheriff, county commissioner, and justice of the peace).
58 Foner, Reconstruction, 318-319, 358-359.

59 Foner, Reconstruction, 294; Summers, Ordeal, 126.

60 Foner, Reconstruction, 354, 352, 349n6.

61 Foner, Reconstruction, 137, 294-297; quotation p. 296.

62 Foner, Reconstruction, 349n6; quotation pp. 296-297.

63 Foner, Reconstruction, 297-301; quotations pp. 298, 299.

64 Summers, Ordeal, 27.

65 Foner, Reconstruction, 365-383.

66 Foner, Reconstruction, 383-384, 415-416.

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67 Quoted in Foner, Reconstruction, 349.

68 Foner, Reconstruction, 384-388; quotation from Foner, p. 491.

69 Foner, Reconstruction, 349-350; Summers, Ordeal, 171.

70 Foner, Reconstruction, 425-444.

71 Summers, Ordeal, 149.

72 “An Act to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and for other
Purposes” (17 Stat. 13, Ch. 22), Sec. 4; Foner, Reconstruction, 454-459, Summers, Ordeal, 267-271.
73 Albert T. Morgan, quoted in Foner, Reconstruction, 459; on Morgan, see Foner, pp. 296, 559.

74 Foner, Reconstruction, 487-488n46, 412, 506; Summers, Ordeal, 301-302.

75 Holt, By One Vote, 5, 7, 11-12, 48; Summers, Ordeal, 304-306; Foner, Reconstruction, 488-499. On the 1872 election, see Foner,
Reconstruction, 499-511.
76 Foner, Reconstruction, 512-514; Summers, Ordeal, 338-340; quotation in Summers, p.340.

77 Foner, Reconstruction, 523-524.

78 “An act to protect all citizens in their civil and legal rights” (18 Stat., pt.3, 335, Ch.114); Foner, Reconstruction, 532-534, 553-
556; Summers, Ordeal, 368-370.
79 Foner, Reconstruction, 550, 437; Summers, Ordeal, 330-331.

80 Foner, Reconstruction, 551; Summers, Ordeal, 354.

81 Foner, Reconstruction, 554; Summers, Ordeal, 358-359.

82 Foner, Reconstruction, 554; Summers, Ordeal, 360-361.

83 Foner, Reconstruction, 558-563; Holt, By One Vote, 45-48.

84 Hayes won over the Democratic candidate by 5,500 votes out of 593,000 cast. See Holt, By One Vote, 64.

85 Quoted in Summers, Ordeal, 377; see also, Summers, p. 452n26.

86 Republican Party Platform of 1876: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29624

87 Rutherford B. Hayes, Letters and Messages of Rutherford B. Hayes, President of the United States, together with Letter of Acceptance
and Inaugural Address (Washington, DC, 1881), 5, 7.
88 Democratic Party Platform of 1876: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29581

89 Foner, Reconstruction, 570-572, 574-575; Summers, Ordeal, 366-367.

90 Woodward, Reunion and Reaction, 195-196.

91 Quoted in Woodward, Reunion and Reaction, 196-197.

18

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