Andrew Johnson Reconstruction Plan
Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction Plan aimed to reintegrate Southern states into the Union after the Civil War. It required former Confederate states to nullify secession, abolish slavery, and repudiate Confederate debts. Johnson's leniency towards former Confederates and lack of protection for freed slaves led to clashes with the Radical Republicans in Congress, ultimately resulting in the passage of the Reconstruction Acts.
7 Key excerpts on "Andrew Johnson Reconstruction Plan"
- Jeffery A. Jenkins, Justin Peck(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...By examining these in turn, we observe the political dynamics at work in the early Reconstruction years. Before doing so, we set the stage by describing what congressional Republicans were up against as President Johnson made the first move in initiating sectional reconciliation. Presidential Reconstruction Once Andrew Johnson ascended to the presidency, 1 he envisioned a plan for sectional reconciliation that was more in line with Lincoln’s than with that of congressional Republicans. 2 Johnson also took advantage of Congress’s adjournment—the Thirty-Ninth Congress (1865–67) would not convene until December 1865, and he had no intention of calling them into special session beforehand—to take control of Reconstruction and dictate its direction via proclamation. Johnson sought a swift sectional reconciliation whereby white-led states voluntarily arranged to rejoin the Union under certain conditions. To that end, he appointed a provisional civilian governor for each state to organize whites-only constitutional conventions. Although to receive amnesty white Southerners had to take a basic oath of allegiance requiring them to accept emancipation, Johnson specified exceptions to help prevent the antebellum planter elite from returning to power. 3 Through his efforts, Johnson believed he might initiate a political realignment by which extreme elements on both the left and the right would be marginalized and a new party of the center would emerge that would elect him president in 1868. Key to this plan was a moderate South, chastened in defeat, that would rejoin the Union and provide him with a base of electoral support for his broader “National Union Party.” 4 By the end of 1865 Johnson’s plan had fallen apart...
eBook - ePub- Jeffrey K. Tulis, Nicole Mellow(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...His very choice of Andrew Johnson as his vice president, a southern Democrat who stayed loyal to the Union, is further evidence of his willingness to accommodate the South in hopes of a speedy restoration. Yet just prior to his death Lincoln was seriously considering a reintegration plan that would be more demanding, requiring, for example, at least limited African American suffrage. The upshot is that Johnson assumed the presidency without inheriting a clear plan of action from his predecessor. 5 Radical Republicans in Congress and their supporters were initially optimistic that Johnson would impose an aggressive reconstruction plan on the South, largely owing to a misinterpretation of the intent behind some of his first comments after assuming the presidency (including, for example, his telling a group of Radical congressmen that “treason must be made infamous, and traitors must be impoverished”). Raised in poverty in the mountains of Tennessee, Johnson disliked the white planter elites who dominated southern politics before the war and who had led the rebellion. He had also recently been the target of an assassination attempt. The combination fueled his interest in punishing treason; it did not, as Radicals believed, extend to a principled commitment to Radical ideas. 6 Radical Republicans were quickly disabused of their expectation. Johnson’s first move was to institute a “restoration plan” for the South that was far more lenient than that desired by congressional Republicans. Reminiscent of Lincoln’s assertion of executive authority at the outset of the Civil War, Johnson enacted his plan while Congress was in recess. Because the war was over, Johnson could easily have chosen to reconvene Congress for the purpose of establishing a jointly negotiated postwar agenda. He chose, instead, to preempt it...
eBook - ePubThe American Civil War and Reconstruction
People, Politics, and Power
- Britannica Educational Publishing, Jeff Wallenfeldt(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Britannica Educational Publishing(Publisher)
...The plan required not 10 percent, but a majority of the white male citizens in each Southern state to participate in the reconstruction process, and insisted upon an oath of past, not just of future, loyalty. Finding the bill too rigorous and inflexible, Lincoln pocket vetoed it; the Radicals bitterly denounced him. During the 1864–65 session of Congress, they in turn defeated the president’s proposal to recognize the Louisiana government organized under his 10 percent plan. At the time of Lincoln’s assassination, therefore, the president and the Congress were at loggerheads over Reconstruction. R ECONSTRUCTION UNDER A NDREW J OHNSON At first it seemed that the new president, Andrew Johnson, might be able to work more cooperatively with Congress in the process of Reconstruction. A former representative and a former senator, Johnson understood congressmen. A loyal Unionist who had stood by his country even at the risk of his life when Tennessee seceded, he was certain not to compromise with secession. His experience as military governor of that state showed him to be politically shrewd and tough toward the slaveholders. “Johnson, we have faith in you,” Radical Benjamin F. Wade assured the new president on the day he took the oath of office. “By the gods, there will be no trouble running the government.” J OHNSON’S P OLICY Such Radical trust in Johnson proved misplaced. The new president was, first of all, himself a Southerner. He was a Democrat who looked for the restoration of his old party partly as a step toward his own reelection to the presidency in 1868. Most important of all, Johnson shared the white Southerners’ attitude toward African Americans, considering black people innately inferior and unready for equal civil or political rights...
eBook - ePubBuilding the American Republic, Volume 1
A Narrative History to 1877
- Harry L. Watson(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...“Treason must be made odious, and traitors must be punished and impoverished,” he swore repeatedly, highly gratifying Radical Republicans who longed to remake the South. But Johnson himself was not even a Republican, much a less a radical one, and he had no sympathy for Radical Republican notions of racial equality. At heart, Andrew Johnson remained devoted to the principles of President Andrew Jackson, his fellow Tennessean who had made states’ rights, limited government, and white man’s democracy cornerstones of the early Democratic Party. Since his best chances for election as president in his own right lay with the Democrats rather than Republicans, he soon realized that his own Reconstruction policy should emphasize forgiveness rather than punishment of the secessionists, a speedy restoration of the southern state governments, and reliance on states’ rights to decide the fate of the freed people. Johnson’s Policies Six weeks after taking office, Johnson launched a surprisingly lenient Reconstruction policy. He did not mention treason trials or confiscations. Instead, he pardoned all Confederates who renounced secession and accepted emancipation, except for major Confederate leaders and the owners of $20,000 in taxable property. A second proclamation named a provisional governor for North Carolina and required him to call a special convention to write a new state constitution. Unpardoned Confederates could neither serve in this convention nor vote for its delegates, but the state’s other suffrage laws remained in effect, so black men (and all women) could not vote. The other seceded states received similar instructions. Once a state had renounced secession, accepted emancipation, repudiated the Confederate debt, and written these changes into a new constitution, Johnson decided, it could elect its own governor, legislature, and members of Congress...
eBook - ePubMississippi
A History
- Westley F. Busbee(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Chapter 12 Reconstruction in Mississippi The whites esteem the blacks their property by natural right, and however much they may admit that the individual relations of masters and slaves have been destroyed by the war and the President’s emancipation proclamation, they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large, and whenever opportunity serves they treat the colored people just as their profit, caprice or passion may dictate. 1 Chapter Objectives Explain the “Presidential Reconstruction” program in Mississippi. Explain the “Congressional Reconstruction” program in Mississippi. Include a statement of the strengths and weaknesses of the state government during this period. Explain how the Reconstruction period ended in Mississippi. Presidential Reconstruction, 1865–1867 Historians refer to the first phase of post-Civil War Reconstruction as “presidential” because it was implemented by President Andrew Johnson. Some forty-four days after he assumed office, President Johnson issued a proclamation on May 29 providing guidelines for the readmittance into the Union of the former Confederate states. Following the reconstruction procedures that President Lincoln had initiated during the war, Johnson offered amnesty to persons who would take an oath of loyalty to the United States, but there were exceptions. Denied this generous offer were those who had held high civil or military offices in the Confederacy and those who had owned property worth $20,000 or more in 1860. These individuals could obtain amnesty only by petitioning the president directly. But as it became generally known during the course of the first year that Johnson intended to grant amnesty to every applicant, many of the antebellum and wartime leaders qualified to participate in the new state government. William L. Sharkey To oversee the program of reconstruction in Mississippi, Johnson appointed as provisional governor William L...
eBook - ePubWomen and the American Civil War
North-South Counterpoints
- Judith Giesberg, Randall Miller(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- The Kent State University Press(Publisher)
...Reconstruction had to address many pressing questions at once: What would be the status of former Confederate states in the Union, and what oversight could the federal government now claim over them? How would the law regard former Confederates and, perhaps more tellingly, the four million formerly enslaved people who secured freedom with Union victory and the Thirteenth Amendment? What social, economic, political, and legal systems would replace slavery? So complex were these questions and the various answers that emerged to them that historians struggle even to assign definitive dates to the Reconstruction period. Many begin it during the war itself rather than after Appomattox in April 1865, and some continue it past the standing down of the last federal troops in the South in April 1877 and through the slow, painful construction of a Jim Crow South in the 1880s and 1890s. 5 Whatever its bookends, the major legal milestones of Reconstruction attest to its peak in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Many white Southerners wished the postwar South to resemble the antebellum South as closely as emancipation would allow, and as a result the oppressive Black Codes enacted by Southern states in 1865 and 1866 significantly replicated earlier slave codes. In these years President Andrew Johnson, who assumed the helm of Reconstruction following Lincoln’s assassination, steered a surprisingly lenient course that allowed former Confederates to return to power across the South and bring with them laws and practices meant to protect whites’ economic and political supremacy. Such open disregard for African Americans’ most basic rights—and the overt violence whites employed to ensure their oppression—provoked a sweeping shift away from this so-called Presidential Reconstruction policy...
eBook - ePub- John David Smith(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- The Kent State University Press(Publisher)
...Directly examining those southern politicians who served in state governments formed under Johnson’s policy of swift reintegration back into the Union, Perman maintained that white southerners did not passively observe Presidential Reconstruction. No matter their prewar backgrounds (which often revealed less than firm support for secession), southern political leaders immediately after the war made it clear in word and deed that they were “not prepared to ignore their vital interests in pursuit of reunion at any cost.” 23 Most important among these “vital interests” was the continued subordination of the former slaves. If accepting defeat entailed accepting anything that resembled equality between the races, southern political elites insisted that resisting defeat was necessary. 24 Under Johnson’s policy of “self-Reconstruction,” moreover, southern political leaders believed that “preserving, and even extending, the autonomy which they possessed under the President’s policy” was possible. Perman maintained that given the intensity of white southerners’ feelings on the status of African Americans and the optimism of southern politicians that they would be able to control the extent of Reconstruction, moderate northern policies based on conciliation and compromise (either between the Republican Party and Johnson or the Johnson administration and the newly formed southern regimes) were “inapplicable and bound to end in disaster sooner rather than later.” Instead of being a malicious incompetent, as revisionists like McKitrick charged, Perman insisted that Andrew Johnson was “shackled” during Presidential Reconstruction because he could not renounce the actions of southern politicians (e.g., passing a series of Black Codes on the state level that restricted the freedoms of African Americans) without agreeing with the position of the Republicans...
