How should the seceded states return, and what would freedom mean for four million people who had been freed? Lincoln began answering in 1863. In December he offered the Ten Percent Plan: a state could form a new government once 10 percent of its 1860 voters swore loyalty to the Union and accepted emancipation. Many in Congress thought this far too lenient.
Key idea
On April 14, 1865, five days after Appomattox, John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington; he died the next morning. President Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat who had stayed loyal to the Union, offered pardons to most former Confederates and let Southern states rejoin quickly. Many of the new state governments passed Black Codes limiting freedpeople's rights.
Why it works
Johnson had long attacked the planter elite, but he believed the states should decide who could vote, and he did not support rights for freedpeople. Under his plan, Southern voters elected many former Confederate officers and officials to Congress. The Black Codes, first in Mississippi and South Carolina in 1865, required freedpeople to sign yearly labor contracts, punished "vagrancy" with forced labor, and limited where they could live, work and own land. To many Northerners it looked as if the South was rebuilding slavery under another name.
Worked example: What a Black Code did
Under the 1865 codes of Mississippi and South Carolina, a freedperson without a labor contract or "visible means of support" could be arrested as a vagrant and fined, and the person's labor could be auctioned off for up to a year to pay the fine. What did that mean in practice?
- A freedperson who refused a planter's terms could be arrested.
- If the person could not pay the fine, the person's labor was sold to the highest bidder, often a planter.
- So workers lost the power to bargain or quit, the heart of what freedom meant to them.
- The Freedmen's Bureau and Congress soon moved against such laws.
Answer: It forced freedpeople back to plantation labor on employers' terms.
Common mistake
Many think Reconstruction began with harsh rule over the South. The first phase, under Johnson in 1865 and 1866, was lenient to former Confederates: quick readmission, broad pardons, and no protection for freedpeople. Congress took control only in 1867, after Johnson's plan produced the Black Codes and violence against freedpeople. Check the order: lenient first, stricter second.