Presidential and Congressional Reconstruction

Lincoln wanted reunion fast and painless. His Ten Percent Plan let a southern state reenter the Union once 10 percent of its 1860 voters swore loyalty to the Union, with no requirement to protect Black civil rights. Congress thought this let the South off too easy and passed the Wade-Davis Bill demanding a majority loyalty oath instead; Lincoln killed it with a pocket veto. After Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, Johnson took over and went further than Lincoln ever had: he pardoned most Confederates, let southern states pass restrictive Black Codes, and allowed former Confederate leaders back into government. Congress, now dominated by Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, saw this as Reconstruction being handed back to the men who had started the war.

Congress fought back. It passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment over Johnson's veto, then in 1867 passed the Reconstruction Acts, throwing out Johnson's state governments and carving the former Confederacy into five military districts, each run by a Union general, each state required to write a new constitution guaranteeing Black male suffrage before readmission. To box Johnson in, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, barring him from removing certain officials without Senate consent. When Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton anyway, the House impeached him in 1868; the Senate acquitted him by exactly one vote.

That one vote matters: it shows Congress had real power over Reconstruction but not total control, and it explains why Reconstruction policy kept shifting rather than following one fixed plan across 1865 to 1877.