CHAPTER XI.
RECONSTRUCTION
Though arms were grounded, there remained the new task, longer and more perplexing, if not more difficult, than the first, of restoring the South to its normal position in the Union. It was, from the nature of the case, a delicate one. The proud and sensitive South smarted under defeat and was not yet cured of the illusions which had led her to secede. Salve and not salt needed to be rubbed in to her wounds. The North stood ready to forgive the past, but insisted, in the name of its desolate homes and slaughtered President, that the South must be restored on such conditions that the past could never be repeated. The difficulty was heightened by the lack of either constitutional provision or historical precedent. Not strange, therefore, that the actors in this new drama of reconstruction played their parts awkwardly and with many mistakes.
Facsimile of a portion of President Lincoln’s draft of the Preliminary Proclamation of Emancipation, September. 1862
From the original in the Library of the State of New York, Albany.
A most interesting constitutional problem had to be faced at the outset: What effect had secession had upon the States guilty of it; was it or was it not an act of state suicide? This question was warmly debated in Congress and out. Although ridiculed in some quarters as a mere metaphysical quibble, it lay at the bottom of men’s political thinking on reconstruction, and their views of the proper answer to it powerfully influenced their action.
All loyal Democrats and most Republicans answered it in the negative. Secession, they said, being an invalid act, had no effect whatever; the rebellious tracts were still States of the Union in spite of themselves. But the two parties reasoned their way to this conclusion by different roads. The Democrats deduced the view from the State’s intrinsic sovereignty, the Republicans from the national Constitution as ordaining “an indestructible Union of indestructible States.” This class of thinkers, in whichever party they were found, naturally preferred the term “restoration” to “reconstruction.”
The theory of state suicide was held by many, but with a difference. Sumner and a few others deemed that secession had destroyed statehood alone; that over individuals the Constitution still extended its authority and its protection, as in Territories. Thaddeus Stevens and his followers viewed secession as having left the State not only defunct but a washed slate governmentally, like soil won by conquest. Both these parties conceived the work before Congress to be out-and-out “reconstruction,” involving the right to change old state lines and institutions at will. Not even this position was more ultra than the course which reconstruction actually took.
Closely related to this main problem were several other questions nearly or quite as vexing. Were any conditions to be imposed upon the peoples seeking re-admission to the Union as States? If so, what, aside from the loyalty of voters and officeholders, were these conditions? Was the President to initiate and oversee the process of redintegration, prescribing the conditions of re-admission, and determining when they were fulfilled, or was all this the business of Congress? And, lastly, did the right thus to oversee and impose conditions depend upon a certain war power of Congress or of President, or upon the clause of the Constitution which guarantees to every State a republican form of government? Nearly the same question as this, in another form, would be, Was this right explicitly constitutional or only impliedly so?
The answer practically returned to these difficult inquiries was that Congress, as a quasi war right, must exact of the States lately in secession all the conditions necessary, in its view, to their permanent loyalty and the peace of the Union.
The history of reconstruction divides into three periods: Reconstruction during the war, President Johnson’s work, and Congressional reconstruction.