What divided President Johnson and the Republican Congress at the height of Reconstruction?

0:04[MUSIC] When Congress met the 39th Congress for the first time in December 1865, President Andrew Johnson who succeeded to the presidency after Lincoln was assassinated, Johnson was the Vice President at that point. Johnson had more or less dealt with reconstruction to his own satisfaction. Anyway, he had set up new governments in the South controlled completely by White Southerners. Black people had no voice, no right to vote, no civil rights in the Southern states at that moment.

0:35He said, well, reconstruction is over, the country is reunited, black people are free but the Republican majority in Congress said, no, we need more action here. We need more to be done to protect the basic rights of the former slaves. Moreover, the all white governments had, as you said, enacted these laws called the Black Codes, which were laws specifically directed at Black people and limited very severely their rights as free people. The most controversial portions required each adult, black male to sign a labor contract, a yearly labor contract at the beginning of the year to work for a white employer. In other words, it was illegal to go to try to work for yourself if you wanted to do that. You had to sign up to work for a white employer. This was an attempt to use the law to get a system similar to slavery,

1:31going again, the plantation labor in the South with very few rights for the laborers. Congress felt that the South was trying to reinstate slavery without the name. Several very important laws were enacted in the spring of 1866. The first one, the Freedman's Bureau bill which extended the life of the Freedman's Bureau. The Freedman's Bureau was a government agency meant to oversee the transition from slavery to freedom and Congress established this toward the end of the Civil War in early 1865.

2:07Then, in the spring of 1866, Congress voted to extend the life of the Freedman's Bureau for another five years but Johnson vetoed that. He said, we've done enough. Black people are free, they have no right to complain. The government can't get involved in these things and he vetoed it, and the Freedman's Bureau bill failed to pass over his veto at first. Then a couple of months later, it was enacted over Johnson's veto, and the Freedman's Bureau lasted down to about 1870. Much more important was the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which is really one of the most important laws in American history, and it's still on the books in one form or another. Basically, that started by saying, any person born in the United States is a citizen of the United States. Now, you might say, well, that's obvious.

3:00Everyone should knows that, but they didn't know it back then. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 had declared that no Black person can be a citizen of the United States. Citizenship was for whites only and Republicans were very outraged by the Dred Scott decision. Abraham Lincoln, who certainly believed in the rule of law, basically said, this decision is so wrong that we don't have to obey it. We can just ignore it. It's a complete travesty of what the Constitution was meant to say.

3:30Now, the problem is the Constitution doesn't actually say who is a citizen of the United States, although it mentions them until the 14th Amendment, which comes up soon. But anyway, it declares that anyone born in the U.S., including African Americans are citizens, and it lays out basic civil rights, which they are to enjoy the same as white people.

3:51These are basically the rights that you need to compete in the labor market, the right to own property, the right to sue and be sued in court, the right to go and testify in court. You can't be a free person trying to move ahead in the society without those basic civil rights. That bill was passed by one vote over Johnson's veto and became law as a result. But the fight over those laws really led to a split between President Andrew Johnson and the Republican majority in Congress. Pretty soon afterwards, it led to the abrogation of the Southern governments, all white governments that Johnson had established and the beginning of what they called radical reconstruction where African Americans for the first time were given the right to vote in large numbers and new governments came into power in the South. But as I say, those two laws are a very good example of the shift in public policy that was taking place as a result of reconstruction.