The Civil War and Reconstruction are commonly thought of as occurring in sequence—first came the war and then Reconstruction. Actually, the war and the struggle over Reconstruction took place simultaneously until 1865. After the Confederate surrender in 1865, the contest over the future of the South continued for at least another twelve years. Some would argue the struggle continued much longer—perhaps another hundred years. The chronology below divides this history into distinct phases that marked significant events in the process of Reconstruction. (See Chapter 1 “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”: Constructing Reconstruction History.)
The process of Reconstruction during Lincoln's presidency was fluid, reflecting the president's belief that his primary duty was to save the Union. He based his Reconstruction policies on his expansive concept of the war powers of the presidency.
| 1861 | August: The First Confiscation Act authorized Federal seizure of any slaves used in support of the rebellion. |
| 1862 | February: Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts outlined his state suicide theory.
April: With the Southern Democrats gone, a Republican-dominated Congress freed the slaves living in the District of Columbia. June: Congress banned slavery in the territories. Lincoln appointed military governors in Louisiana, Tennessee, and North Carolina. September: Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, hoping that Southern Unionists would take advantage of the opportunity to effect a return to the Union. |
| 1863 | January: Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
April: The Appalachian region of western Virginia “seceded” from the rebel state Virginia and joined the Union as a free state. The new state constitution provided for the gradual emancipation of slaves. December: Lincoln, hoping to entice rebels back into the Union, issued the Amnesty and Reconstruction proclamation. He also moved to establish Unionist-based state governments in occupied areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, Virginia, and North Carolina. |
| 1864 | July: Congress passed the Wade-Davis Bill as a protest against Lincoln's plan of Reconstruction. They argued that he was moving too fast. Lincoln responded with a “pocket veto.”
August: Congress reacted to Lincoln's veto with the Wade-Davis Manifesto attacking his Reconstruction policies. November: Lincoln won a second term in office along with Andrew Johnson, a Southern Unionist and pro-war Democrat, as his new vice president. Sherman began his march through Georgia. (Gone with the Wind and Cold Mountain, both novels adapted as motion pictures, provide vivid images of the Southern home front during this period as experienced by white women. See Chapter 3 “Let's Make a Start”: Women and Reconstruction.) |
| 1865 | March: Freedmen's Bureau was established to assist with the transition of the ex-slaves from bondage to freedom. Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address seemed to indicate to many both at the time and afterwards that he favored a quick restoration of the Southern states with limited political reform and humane treatment of the rebels: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Andrew Johnson appeared drunk at the inauguration ceremonies. |
Johnson became president upon Lincoln's assassination. The new president was strongly opposed to secession, but, unlike Lincoln, he proved no friend of the freedmen. “Damn the Negroes, I am fighting those traitorous aristocrats, their masters,” he exclaimed. Southerners were at first unsure of what impact Lincoln's death would have on the defeated South. For their part, the Republicans initially saw Johnson as an ally. (See Chapter 2, Lincoln “Unmurdered”: Reconstruction Alternatives and Counterfactuals.)
| 1865 | April: Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia. In General Order #9, Lee bid farewell to the men of the Army of Northern Virginia. The address contained essential elements of what would become the Lost Cause ideology—references to Southern fortitude, duty and “County,” and submission only to impossible odds.
May: Johnson laid out his own plan of Reconstruction—a process, he contended, that embodied Lincoln's goal of a quick restoration of the Union. November: Mississippi passed a “black code” designed to control the activities, labor, and mobility of ex-slaves, in effect restoring aspects of the old slave codes. December: Johnson announced that the former rebel states were now reconstructed and restored to the Union. But Congress refused to recognize the Johnson state governments. Congress established a Joint Committee on Reconstruction to inquire into conditions in the South. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. (For a discussion of black self-emancipation and the issue of race and memory see Chapter 4 “Sunshine Headin’ My Way”: Memories of Reconstruction in Black and White.) |
| 1866 | February: Johnson vetoed Freedmen's Bureau Bill.
April: Congress enacted first Civil Rights Act over Johnson's veto. Virginia journalist Edward A. Pollard published The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. May: Ex-rebel soldiers in Tennessee established the Ku Klux Klan. Memphis was the scene of a widely reported race riot. The anti-Republican, anti-Reconstruction insurgency soon spread across the South in a variety of informal or paramilitary organizations. (See Chapter 6 “I Am Vengeful and I Shall Not Sleep”: The Civil War and the Legacy of Violence during Reconstruction.) June: Supreme Court weakened black civil rights in Slaughter-House Cases ruling. July: Ex-rebels in New Orleans rioted against Southern Unionists (scalawags) and their black allies. August: Johnson began his “swing around the circle”—a series of speeches attacking the Republicans over Reconstruction policy. November: Republicans won significant victories in the Congressional elections. |
In the face of Johnson's continuing opposition, the Radical Republicans and their allies moved to initiate a Congressional program of Reconstruction in March 1867 and in July 1868 that would ensure passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, black civil rights and loyal (read Republican) governments in the states of the former Confederacy. Central to the Congressional plan was the rejection of the Johnson-approved state government and the division of the former Confederacy (excepting Tennessee) into five military districts.
In time, the determination of the North to persist with Reconstruction softened. The Northern retreat reflected the pressures of continued resistance in the South, Democratic opposition at the polls, and, ultimately, the North's shallow commitment to the protection of black civil rights.
| 1877 | February: A meeting at the black-owned Wormley's Hotel in Washington, DC settled the disputed election of 1876. In “The Compromise of 1877,” the Republicans got the presidency and the “Redeemers” got the South. Although about 30,000 Federal troops remained in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, the compromisers understood that the soldiers would remain but not intervene to support the so-called carpetbag state governments in the push and shove of Southern politics. The Republicans abandoned support of the last “carpetbag” holdouts in Louisiana and Florida. The South was “redeemed.” Reconstruction in what may be considered its formal phase was over. And Congress removed the last legal restrictions on ex-rebels. The “informal secession” was over. |
| 1883 | The Supreme Court ruled that the equal-accommodations sections of the Civil Rights Acts of 1875 were unconstitutional. Speaking of the Redeemer victory in the battle for Reconstruction, Lucius Q.C. Lamar (who had authored the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession and who later served on the U.S. Supreme Court, 1888–1893) wrote that the white South had defeated its Reconstruction enemies: “We have no enemy in our front.” |
| 1890–1908 | Disfranchisement: The governments of the South, controlled by the Redeemer Democrats, moved to eliminate the Republican black vote through the poll tax, the grandfather clauses, felon disfranchisement, literacy tests, and other means. In Louisiana the number of black voters fell from 130,334 to 1,342. African Americans in the South would not return to the polls in significant numbers until after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. |
| 1896 | Segregation (the “Jim Crow” system): In Plessey v. Ferguson (1896), the U.S. Supreme ruled that “separate but equal” racial segregation in public accommodations was legal under the Fourteenth Amendment. State by state, “Redemption” reversed the brief period of integration enacted by the Reconstruction state governments. Eventually, formal segregation touched a wide range of situations: schools, trains, buses, movie theaters, swimming pools, water fountains, grave yards, and more. |
| 1913–1963 | Reconciliation: Confederate and Union veterans, now in their seventies and eighties, returned to the Gettysburg battlefield in July 1913. “The Grand Reunion” occurred in a spirit of comradeship and shared experience for the fiftieth anniversary of the engagement. There, President Woodrow Wilson spoke of North-South reconciliation: “We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten—except that we shall not forget the splendid valor.”
The centennial anniversary of the battle in 1963 reaf-firmed the image of the Civil War as a brothers’ war over the nature of the Union. The ceremony ignored slavery as the essential cause of the Civil War. Further, Reconstruction became the “tragic era” in popular memory in the North as well as the South. Southerners had won the memory war (see Chapter 7 “A Gallant Soldier and a Christian Gentleman”: The Reconciliation of North and South” and Chapter 8 “Princess of the Moon: The Lost Cause, Reconstruction, and Southern Memory.”) |