PBS' "Reconstruction: The Second Civil War" 1st Episode (Pt. 2 of 2)

(Cont. from Part 1) Johnson was the only Senator from the Confederate states who refused to resign his seat in the US Senate in 1861. Lincoln brought the staunch Union Democrat into the Vice Presidency with his re-election in 1864.

Johnson saw himself as the champion of the poor whites against the planter class. He was deeply suspicious of the planters, who he blamed (with very good reason!) for bringing on the Civil War. But for Johnson, as for most Southern Jacksonians, democracy meant democracy for whites. He is quoted in the program as saying, "White men alone must manage the South." (And, yes, he did mean men.) And because he considered that goal so important, he quickly overcame his initial impulse to restrict the power of the Southern planters, granting them pardons by the thousands that allowed them to reclaim their property and officially participate in politics.

The first episode describes how vigilante violence and official discrimination quickly mounted in the South, one of the most dramatic episodes being the riot in New Orleans of July 1866, when a white mob attacked a Republican convention, murdering 34 blacks and 3 whites. The intransigence of white Southerners, and the obvious failures of Johnson's Reconstruction program, led many white voters in the North who were reluctant to see black Americans granted full political rights to support a more vigorous approach. The 1866 Civil Rights Act was passed over Johnson's veto.

The election of 1866 brought a very strong Republican majority to both houses of Congress. The first episode takes us through the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution (officially abolishing slavery) and the 14th Amendment (extending the Bill of Rights protections explicitly to states). The program does a surprisingly good job in briefly sketching the divisions in the Republican Party over Reconstruction. The initiation of Congressional Reconstruction put the former Confederacy back under military rule, not allowing states to be readmitted until the vote was guaranteed to black men.