A Third Reconstruction, or a Second Civil War?

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The New Republic
@newrepublic
The GOP’s master plan for undoing American democracy involves curtailing or eliminating the easiest and most accessible voting methods. But the use of intimidation or outright violence is not outside the boundaries of possibility, or probability.

A Third Reconstruction, or a Second Civil War?
American democracy may perish from the earth.
newrepublic.com
1:21 AM · Jun 21, 2021

https://newrepublic.com/article/162637/third-reconstruction-second-civil-war

When Vice President Andrew Johnson assumed the office of president upon the death of Abraham Lincoln in mid-April 1865, he initially incurred favor with Republican legislators in Congress, including those identified as “Radical Republicans,” by appointing the “Christian soldier” and Union Maj. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard to head up the newly created Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (later just the Freedmen’s Bureau). Howard, to the satisfaction of Republicans of all stripes, immediately commenced distributing to the freedmen tracts of abandoned and confiscated Confederate lands.

Johnson received a less friendly response from members of Congress at the end of the following month when he issued a proclamation granting amnesty and pardon “to all persons who have, directly or indirectly, participated in the existing rebellion” (with some exceptions). Johnson then issued another proclamation subversive of the goals of Reconstruction, this one authorizing the appointment (by himself) of a civilian provisional governor for North Carolina, a policy that he then extended to other Southern states. Legislators, already unhappy with the first proclamation because of what they saw as its excessive leniency, objected to this second one on the grounds that Johnson had exceeded his constitutional authority. The job of reconstituting the Southern states’ civilian governments, they maintained, belonged to Congress alone.

Johnson’s plan, which the historian Allen C. Guelzo dubbed “self-reconstruction,” left it entirely to the states to write new constitutions and implement them as they saw fit. And soon enough, the Southern states began promulgating the infamous “Black codes,” deliberately designed to deny their newly freed slaves either the franchise or any path toward economic independence. The ultimate result of Johnson’s scheme would have been to create Southern state legislatures and state congressional delegations composed entirely of Southern Democrats, with nary a single representative from the Republican Party, white or Black.

Congress had been in recess while all this was transpiring, and when it convened in December 1865, it went right to work to counter Johnson’s edicts. It extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau, created a Joint Committee on Reconstruction, and passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1866. Johnson vetoed the measure extending the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Civil Rights Bill. Congress overrode both vetoes. Meanwhile, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction issued a report arguing that Congress could not “be expected to recognize as valid the election of representatives from disorganized communities.”

*snip*



Yes, this is from the 17th, but I missed it.