1.1 Presidential vs. Radical Reconstruction and the Amendments

Why the first Reconstruction fight is a CLEP hinge

CLEP History of the United States II begins in 1865 because Appomattox ended Confederate armies without deciding what Union, citizenship, or Black freedom would mean in law. Reconstruction is that settlement struggle. Items in this chapter punish two mix-ups above all: confusing presidential Reconstruction (Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, rapid restoration, white-controlled Southern governments) with congressional or Radical Reconstruction (five military districts, Black male suffrage as a condition of readmission), and assigning the wrong job to the wrong Reconstruction amendment.

The war destroyed the Confederate state. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified December 6, 1865, destroyed chattel slavery as a property system, with the notorious exception of forced labor "as a punishment for crime." Neither military victory nor that amendment automatically made formerly enslaved people citizens, voters, jurors, or landowners. Those outcomes required statutes, additional amendments, a federal agency, and—when white Southern legislatures rebuilt racial control—the United States Army as a temporary constitutional police. When a stem asks who restored the Southern states, or which amendment guarantees equal protection, the question is really asking where power sat: the White House, Congress, the army, or later the Supreme Court.

Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan versus Wade-Davis

Lincoln treated Reconstruction as a wartime instrument to shorten the conflict and pull white Southern Unionists back into loyal governments. In the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction (December 8, 1863), he offered pardon to most Confederates who took a loyalty oath. When a number equal to 10 percent of a state's 1860 voters took that oath, they could organize a Unionist government and seek seating in Washington. High Confederate civil officials and some officers were excluded. Lincoln wanted restored states to abandon slavery, but he did not make Black suffrage a nationwide condition. He privately favored a limited start—Black Union veterans and literate Black men—rather than immediate universal Black male voting.

Congressional Republicans who would soon be called Radicals read the 10 percent threshold as a gift to planters. The Wade-Davis Bill (1864), sponsored by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, required a majority of white male citizens to take an ironclad oath that they had never voluntarily aided the Confederacy. Only then could a state hold a constitutional convention. Lincoln pocket-vetoed the bill after Congress adjourned. Wade and Davis answered with the Wade-Davis Manifesto, charging the president with executive usurpation. Lock the contrast: Lincoln's bar is 10 percent and an oath about future loyalty; Wade-Davis is 50 percent and an oath about wartime conduct. That pairing is a standard trap stem.

Lincoln never administered a peace. Shot on April 14, 1865, he died the next morning. Vice President Andrew Johnson—a Tennessee Unionist Democrat, former slaveholder, and politician of poor whites—inherited the problem with almost no party base in the Republican Congress that would have to seat Southern members.

Johnson's restoration and the Black Codes

Johnson's May 1865 proclamations looked like Lincoln's plan with a sharper class edge. Most white Southerners regained civil and political rights by taking an oath. Fourteen excepted classes, including Confederate officials and owners of taxable property worth $20,000 or more, needed a personal presidential pardon. Johnson handed those pardons out freely. He appointed provisional governors and required states to repeal secession ordinances, ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, and repudiate Confederate war debts. He did not require Black suffrage, new civil-rights guarantees, or land reform.

Southern conventions complied on paper, then passed Black Codes in 1865–1866. Mississippi and South Carolina led. The codes admitted that people could no longer be bought and sold as chattel, then rebuilt racial labor control through vagrancy statutes, year-long contract requirements, apprenticeship of Black children to white employers, limits on testimony against whites, and, in some jurisdictions, occupational, firearms, or property restrictions. To Radicals, the codes proved that presidential Reconstruction would recreate slavery under another name.

Northern opinion hardened after reports of the codes, the Memphis and New Orleans massacres of 1866, and Johnson's abusive "swing around the circle" midterm campaign. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866—birthright citizenship for people born in the United States (with the era's exclusion of untaxed Native people) and equal civil rights to contract, sue, and hold property—then overrode Johnson's veto. Treat that statute as the statutory twin of the Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship sentence. Do not confuse it with the later Civil Rights Act of 1875, which tried to open public accommodations and was struck down in 1883.

Radical Republicans and the Reconstruction Acts of 1867

Radical Republicans, led in the House by Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and in the Senate by Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, wanted more than a restored Union. Stevens pressed confiscation and land for freedpeople; Sumner emphasized equal civil and political rights and a biracial Republican South. Not every Republican was a Radical. Moderates wanted to lock in the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment without Stevens's land program. After the 1866 midterms produced a veto-proof Republican majority, Congress took reconstruction away from Johnson anyway.

The First Reconstruction Act (March 2, 1867), followed by three supplementary acts, divided ten former Confederate states into five military districts. Tennessee had already been readmitted after ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment, so it escaped district government. District commanders could use troops to protect life and property and to supervise new voter registration that included Black men and excluded many former Confederates under the logic of the pending Fourteenth Amendment's Section 3. To regain representation, a state had to write a new constitution with Black male suffrage, have the registered electorate ratify it, and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.

This is congressional Reconstruction: the army as a temporary constitutional enforcer, Black voting as the price of readmission, and Johnson reduced to a hostile administrator who still nominated officials and issued pardons.

The Reconstruction amendments: do not mix their jobs

CLEP stems routinely shuffle slavery, citizenship, and voting across the wrong amendment. Learn them as a sequence of unfinished revolutions.

Thirteenth Amendment (proposed January 1865; ratified December 6, 1865). Section 1 abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude, "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." Section 2 gives Congress enforcement power. That crime exception later helped underwrite convict leasing. The amendment ends legal property in persons; it does not define citizenship or protect the vote.

Fourteenth Amendment (passed by Congress June 1866; ratified July 9, 1868). Section 1 overturns the citizenship holding of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). It declares that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens of the United States and of the state where they reside. No state may abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens; deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process; or deny any person equal protection of the laws. Section 2 threatened reduced House representation if adult male suffrage was denied except for crime or rebellion—pressure for Black voting without yet writing a direct voting right. Section 3 barred many ex-Confederates from office until Congress removed the disability. Section 4 voided Confederate debts. Section 5 is the enforcement clause later gutted by the Court. If a question says citizenship, due process, or equal protection, the answer is the Fourteenth, not the Fifteenth.

Fifteenth Amendment (passed 1869; ratified February 3, 1870). The right of citizens 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." It does not mention sex, literacy, property, poll taxes, or "understanding" tests. Woman suffrage activists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, split over supporting an amendment that omitted sex after the Fourteenth Amendment's Section 2 had written "male" into the Constitution. Southern states later used the Fifteenth's narrow wording to cut Black turnout without using the word race.

Freedmen's Bureau and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson

Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—the Freedmen's Bureau—on March 3, 1865, inside the War Department. Oliver O. Howard directed it. Agents issued rations and medical care, supervised labor contracts, sat in as informal courts, and, with Northern missionary societies, built schools that became the foundation of Black literacy in the South. Johnson vetoed a 1866 extension; Congress overrode him. The Bureau never became a lasting welfare state. It expired in 1872, and its land role collapsed earlier when Johnson restored plantations to pardoned owners.

Fear that Johnson would use the army to sabotage the Reconstruction Acts produced the Command of the Army Act and the Tenure of Office Act (both 1867). The latter forbade the president from removing certain Senate-confirmed officials without Senate consent. Johnson tested it by removing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, a Lincoln holdover allied with Radicals and the statutory channel for military Reconstruction. The House impeached Johnson on February 24, 1868. The Senate trial ended on May 16, 1868: 35 guilty, 19 not guilty on the decisive article—one vote short of the two-thirds required for removal. Johnson remained president, politically isolated, through March 1869. Ulysses S. Grant then took office as a Republican committed, at least initially, to enforcing the Reconstruction laws.

Exam traps in this section are mechanical if you slow down. Presidential Reconstruction is Lincoln/Johnson restoration without Black suffrage as a national condition. Congressional Reconstruction is the 1867 military acts plus Black male voting. The Thirteenth frees; the Fourteenth nationalizes citizenship and equal protection; the Fifteenth is a racial voting ban with huge loopholes. Johnson was impeached and acquitted, not removed. Stevens and Sumner were congressional Radicals, not Bureau commissioners and not the authors of Lincoln's 10 percent math.