1
• 10% of voters must swear
loyalty to Union
• Must abolish slavery

• Majority of white men must
swear loyalty
• Must ratify 13 th Amendment
• Former Confederate officials
may vote and hold office
2

Black Codes: laws that severely
limited the rights of
freedmen
Blacks were forbidden to:
• Vote
• Own guns
• Serve on a jury
3

4
• Republicans felt Johnson’s
plan was too lenient
• Allowed southern lawmakers
to pass black codes
• Congress commissioned report
said south was “trying to preserve
slavery as long as possible”
• Johnson ignored the report
• Congress vowed to take control
over Reconstruction

6
• Congress passed the
Civil Rights Act of 1866
• Gave citizenship to African
Americans
• President Johnson vetoed
the bill
• Congress overrode the veto

7
• Congress worried Civil Rights
Act might be ruled
unconstitutional based on
Dred Scott decision (1857)
• Defined citizens as “all persons
born or naturalized in the U.S.”
• Guarenteed citizens “ equal
protection of laws”
• States were forbidden to:
“deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property without
due process of law”

8
• Johnson encouraged former
Confederate states to reject the
Fourteenth Amendment
• Decided to make it an issue in
the 1866 Congressional elections
Election of 1866
• Across the North, Johnson urged voters
to reject the Radicals
• Violence in South convinced northern
voters to vote for Radicals
• Republicans won majorities in both
houses

9
Radical Republicans
• Threw out state governments that
refused to ratify 14 th Amendment
• Divided South into five military
districts to enforce Reconstruction
• Former Confederate states had to write
new state constitutions and ratify the
14 th Amendment
• Elections to set up new state
government, confederate officials
couldn’t vote

Plan
Ten Percent Plan Wade-Davis Bill Johnson Plan
Proposed by President
Lincoln (1863)
Republicans in
Congress (1864)
President
Johnson (1865)
Reconstruction
Act
Radical
Republicans
Conditions for former
Confederate
States to
Rejoin
Union
• 10% of voters must swear loyalty to
Union
• Must abolish slavery
• Majority of white men must swear loyalty
• Former
Confederate volunteers cannot vote or hold office
• Majority of white men must swear loyalty
• Must ratify
13 th
Amendment
• Former
Confederate officials may vote and hold office
• Must disband state governments
• Must write new constitutions
• Must ratify 14 th
Amendment
• African
American men must be allowed to vote
5

10
• Congress continued to pass
Reconstruction Acts over Johnson’s
vetoes
• Had duty to execute the laws, but did
whatever he could to limit their effect
• Fired several military commanders
who supported Reconstruction
• Congress decides to remove him from
office

11
• Impeach: to bring formal charges
against
• Constitution: House can impeach
president for “treason, bribery, or
other high crimes and misdemeanors”
• Clear that Johnson wasn’t guilty of
“high crimes and misdemeanors”
• One vote shy of the two-thirds
majority needed for conviction

12
• 1868 Republicans nominated
Ulysses S. Grant
• Union’s greatest war hero
• By election day most southern states
had rejoined the Union
• As demanded by Congress, the
southern states allowed blacks to vote
• 500,000 blacks voted – nearly all for
Grant

13
• Proposed by Congress in 1869 and
ratified in 1870
• Forbade any state to deny any citizen
the right to vote because of
“race, color, or previous condition
of servitude”
• Now all African American men over
the age of 21 had the right to vote

• Supported the new Republican Governments
• Many were businessmen who had opposed succession and the war
• Many whites in the South viewed them as traitors (scalawags)
14

• Came to the South during Reconstruction
• Accused by southerners as hoping to get rich quick from South’s misery
• Came to the south so quickly, they were called carpetbaggers
• Some did come to profit as the South was rebuilt
• Others were reformers, teachers, ministers
15

III
• Major new group in southern politics
• Before the war they had no voice
• Not only voted in large numbers, also ran for and elected to public office
• Sheriffs, mayors, legislators in the new state and local governments
• 16 African Americans elected to Congress between 1869-1870
• 2 United States Senators, both from Mississippi
16 Hiram Revels

Conservatives: white southerners who resented the changes imposed by
Congress and enforced by the military
• Most white southerners were Democrats
• “declared war” on anyone who cooperated with Republicans
• Some formed secret societies (Ku Klux Klan) to re-gain power
• Goal to keep Republicans out of office
• Threats, violence – murdered hundreds of African Americans and
their white allies
17

• As Klan gained power, blacks turned to Congress for help
• 1870, Congress made it a crime to use force to keep people from voting
• The threat of violence remained
• African Americans were frightened away from the ballot box
18

• Some Radical Republicans proposed “40 acres and a mule”
• Some proposed breaking up plantations and giving land to freedmen
• Sharecropping: freedmen rented and farmed a plot of land. Planters provided
seed, fertilizer, and tools (on credit) in return for a share of the
crop at harvest time.
• If harvest didn’t cover what was owed, they fell deeper in debt
19

• By the 1870’s Radical Republicans were losing power
• Many northerners grew weary of trying to reform the South
Radicals in Decline
• Corruption in Grant’s presidency
• Northerners lost faith in Republicans and their policies
• Amnesty Act of 1872 restored the right to vote to white southerners
who had been confederates
• South voted solidly Democratic
20

Disenfranchise: to deprive of the right to vote
• Poll taxes: required voters to pay a fee each time they voted.
• Literacy tests: required voters to read and explain a section of the
constitution.
• Grandfather clause: if grandfather had been eligible to vote on January 1, 1867,
the voter didn’t have to take a literacy test.
• White Primaries: primary elections where non- white voters were prohibited
from participating.
21

22
Segregation: legal separation of the races, known as Jim Crow Laws
• Became the law of the South after 1877
• Laws separated blacks and whites in schools, restaurants, theaters, trains,
streetcars, playgrounds, hospitals, and even cemeteries
“ a system of oppression so rank that nothing
could make it seem small except the fact that
African Americans had already been ground
under it for a century and a half.”
- George Washington Cable, “The Freedmen’s Case in Equity”