The 14th Amendment Receives the Required Number of States for Ratification: July 9, 1868
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This text comes from our book, The American Venture.
With Reconstruction placed firmly in its own hands, Congress disbanded all the southern state governments that had been established under Johnson. Instead, Congress divided the South into five military districts, each under a military general. The five generals answered to one supreme general, Ulysses S. Grant. The Reconstruction Act gave the military the authority to remove “disloyal” members from the southern state governments, for Congress had decreed that ex- Confederates could not serve in public office—even those who had been granted amnesty by Johnson. Southern states had to call conventions to draw up new state constitutions that would guarantee full civil rights and the suffrage to blacks. Blacks, too, would have a say in choosing delegates to these state constitutional conventions. Congress further ruled that no southern state could be readmitted to the union unless it ratified the 14th Amendment.
The fact that only “loyal” whites and blacks could now vote in the South (and that many whites refused to register to vote in protest of Reconstruction) meant that, in the South, more blacks than whites voted in the elections of 1867. The result was that southern governments became predominately Republican and that many blacks were elected to public office.
Many of the newly elected black officials proved to be competent leaders. For instance, South Carolina’s constitutional convention was dominated by such educated and articulate black men as Robert Brown Elliott (who had a liberal education and could speak several languages), Francis Cardozo (the principal of the Avery Institute, a private college for blacks), William Whipper (a lawyer from Pennsylvania), and Martin Delany. In Congress, James Rapier ably represented Alabama, while the eloquent James Lynch became Mississippi’s secretary of state. Other elected black leaders, however, were not as capable in the art of politics and easily fell under the sway of “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags,” who used them as pawns for their political and economic power.
Deprived of political power, some whites in the South turned to violence. They formed secret societies such as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize blacks so that they would not vote. The Klan, however, did not start out as a group to terrorize freedmen but as a sort of mock secret society formed by bored, former Confederate officers in Pulaski, Tennessee in December 1865. When the Klan’s members took to riding at night clad in white sheets—and discovered how this frightened black people—they decided they could use their club to keep freedmen “in their place.” The Klan, they saw, could be used to keep freedmen from voting and, they hoped, break the power that the Freedmen’s Bureau, the scalawags, and carpetbaggers held over the South.
In April 1867, Klan leaders established a unified organization for the establishment of an “Invisible Empire” to resist Reconstruction. They formed an elaborate chain of command under the command of a “Grand Wizard,” the Confederate cavalry general, Nathan Bedford Forrest. For several years, the Klan and its imitators not only frightened blacks but beat and murdered anyone (including white unionists, carpetbaggers, and scalawags) who would not submit to their demands. Bands of blacks and unionist whites clashed in bloody struggles with the Klansmen.
The southern governments were hard put to suppress the Klan. In some counties, the Klan was the de facto government, for many whites (even if they deplored violence) saw the Klan as their protectors against what they deemed northern oppression. Even though Forrest disbanded the Klan in 1869, local chapters continued their career of violence. In 1871, Congress tried to counteract the violence by taking the power to punish murder, assault, and robbery from the states; but by that time, Klan groups were on the decline. The original Ku Klux Klan effectively died out in the mid-1870s.
The Radicals Take on the President
The Radical Republicans in Congress had been successful in taking Reconstruction from President Johnson—but even then, they were not content. Radical Republican leaders like Thaddeus Stevens wanted to take down the president himself. The way to do this was impeachment; the problem was, the Radicals had no grounds on which to impeach Johnson. He had not committed any of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that the Constitution demanded for the removal of a president from office.
Still, the Radicals could chip away at the president’s power. In March 1867, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act. As we have seen, the Constitution requires the president to seek the “advice and consent” of the Senate to appoint a member of his cabinet. The Tenure of Office Act, however, required the Senate’s advice and consent when the president wanted to remove a cabinet member from office. President Johnson saw this congressional act as a violation of his constitutional rights and refused to abide by it. Johnson’s secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, however, was an ally of the Radicals and opposed to the president’s policies. To get rid of this thorn in his side, in August, Johnson removed Stanton as his secretary of war, replacing him with Ulysses S. Grant—without asking the Senate’s leave.
Stevens and his Radical allies now had the “high crime and misdemeanor” they needed to go after Johnson. In February 1868, the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Johnson for Stanton’s removal. In accordance with the Constitution, the Senate, under the presidency of Chief Justice Salmon Chase, then gathered to try Johnson. Since the Republicans dominated the Senate as well as the House, it looked like his conviction was a sure thing. Surprisingly, however, seven Republicans voted against conviction, bringing the final vote to 35 senators for and 19 against conviction—just one vote less than the two-thirds majority the Radicals needed for conviction. Yet, though the Senate failed to convict Johnson, the impeachment was effective, for it made the president so unpopular that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats would choose him for their nominee in the election of 1868. With only ten months left in office, the president was powerless. Southern whites thus fell completely under the sway of those whom they deemed their enemies—the Radical Republicans.
By the end of 1868, the Radical Republicans seemed to have achieved many of their goals. That year, eight southern states (North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee) had voted to ratify the 14th Amendment and were readmitted into the union. (Congress had made ratification of the amendment a prerequisite for the readmission of any southern state.) On July 9, 1868, the amendment had received the required number of states for ratification and became a part of the Constitution. In November of the same year, Ulysses Grant, a supporter of the Radical Republicans, was elected president. This assured a continuation of Radical policies for at least four more years.
