Reconstruction (The Great Emancipator)

This article covers the timeline of The Great Emancipator from 1865-1869, covering the end of the American Civil War in April and May 1865 until the end of the Lincoln administration in 1869.

1865: Reconstruction Begins
In May 1865, with the official end of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln began to refocus his energies on the the restructuring of government and civil society in the Southern states, which soon became known as Reconstruction. Lincoln had placed the remaining Southern states that were being occupied under federal military rule for the next nine months, hoping that this time period would allow himself and his fellow Republicans in Congress the chance to work out a lasting solution. On May 15, President Lincoln, his Cabinet, and Republican congressional leadership met in the White House to discuss a series of plans and goals for Reconstruction. The immediate issues that were drawn up: suffrage, land ownership, readmission of the Southern states, did not have obvious answers. Lincoln and his Cabinet, including Vice President Andrew Johnson, had drawn up a moderate program modeled on the state of Louisiana: 10% of the state's voting population had to swear an oath of allegiance to the United States in order to allow for re-admittance to the Union, suffrage was to then be allowed, and possibly extended to the South's Black population, but only for men with sufficient education or veteran status. Lincoln had hoped to leave the difficult issue of land ownership to a later series of meetings. Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the Radical Republicans in Congress, would not allow it to.

Stevens and the Radicals proposed more stringent requirements for re-admittance: 50% must swear allegiance, modeled after the failed Wade-Davis Bill from 1864, and a plan for universal Black suffrage to match that of Southern Whites. Stevens entered this meeting with his own goals, including the destruction of what he and his friends called the Slave Power that had controlled the South before the war. Additionally, Lincoln and Stevens came at the issue from ideologically different understandings of the need for "re-admission" as Lincoln considered the South the location of an insurgency that had not legally left the Union, while Stevens believed that each state's secession had made them essentially foreign bodies. Vice President Johnson personally admonished Stevens for his proposals, setting the stage for later conflict. President Lincoln was focused on brokering a compromise and establishing the necessary antecedents to reformed Southern government, and he stood firm on his initial proposals. At that point, Stevens and his fellow Radical Republicans threatened to walk out of this and further meetings unless the President showed a willingness to compromise. This became the first of many meetings of Republican leadership in the summer of 1865 until a final plan was crafted in September.

The Reconstruction Compromise, as it was crafted, agreed to a 25% allegiance standard for Southern re-admission to the Union, with suffrage to be given to Southern Blacks that met an educational standard or held veteran status. In return for this, Stevens exacted from Lincoln a promise to support the passage of amendments to the Constitution granting Americans the right to vote without regard to race or past servitude and officially repealing the Three-Fifths Compromise. Passing such amendments under Lincoln would ensure that such amendments would precede the 1870 census, and without the Three-Fifths Compromise the South would see a major increase in representatives, while Republican leadership had hoped to court the votes of Southern Blacks to ensure their dominance in Congress. This was all preceded by the idea that reconstructed states would already be readmitted to the Union prior to 1870, which soon became the deadline for restructuring Southern civil society. Additionally, Stevens ensured from Lincoln the passage of a congressional act ensuring Blacks equal protection before the law. Meeting in the middle, the final compromise required that the form of government set out by readmitted Southern states meet a standard of "sufficient republican government" and the establishment of what became popularly known as the Freedmen's Bureau in order to oversee matters of land and education on a state-by-state basis.