Congressional Reconstruction Quotes

By 1870, a large majority of blacks lived in two-parent family households, a fact that can be gleaned from the manuscript census returns but also “quite incidentally” from the Congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings, which recorded countless instances of victims assaulted in their homes, “the husband and wife in bed, and … their little children beside them.

While floor statements from today's [congressional] representatives are typically delivered to empty galleries and published into unread oblivion, legislative debates in the Reconstruction era were widely disseminated and closely observed.

capture the Republican nomination instead of Grant. With Johnson acquitted, everyone knew, Grant would get the party nod. Significantly, the seven Republicans who voted for acquittal all campaigned for Grant after he secured the nomination. They also extracted a critical pledge from Johnson that he would cease interfering with congressional action on Reconstruction.

But where Lincoln’s absent hand was felt most keenly was in race relations. Black codes were passed in state after state across the South—as restrictive as the antebellum laws governing free blacks (Richmond’s old laws had even regulated the carrying of canes). These codes propounded segregation, banned intermarriage, provided for special punishments for blacks, and, in one state, Mississippi, also prevented the ownership of land. Not even a congressional civil rights bill, passed over Johnson’s veto, could undo them. For their part, the Northern states were little better. During Reconstruction, employing a deadly brew of poll taxes, literacy requirements, and property qualifications, they abridged the right to vote more extensively than did their Southern counterparts.

Black suffrage, of course, was the most radical element of Congressional Reconstruction, but this too derived from a variety of motives and calculations. For Radicals, it represented the culmination of a lifetime of reform. For others, it seemed less the fulfillment of an idealistic creed than an alternative to prolonged federal intervention in the Southh, a means of enabling blacks to defend themselves against abuse, while relieving the nation of that responsibility. Many Republicans placed utopian burdens upon the right to votet. "The vote," Radical Senator Richard Yates exclaimed, "will finish the negro question; it will settle everything connected with this question...We need no vast expenditures, we need no standing army....Sir, the ballot is the freedman's Moses." When such expectations proved unrealistic, disillusionment was certain to follow.

Although the theories of conquered provinces, state suicide, and the like did not disappear, the “republican form of government” clause became by 1863 [Page 703] the basis for both presidential and congressional approaches to reconstruction.

landscape that was as partisan as the halls of government, Democrats and conservative Republicans refused to believe correspondents from opposing newspapers about lawlessness. Doubters also rejected the testimony from witnesses delivered before congressional committees under

In a media landscape that was as partisan as the halls of government, Democrats and conservative Republicans refused to believe correspondents from opposing newspapers about lawlessness. Doubters also rejected the testimony from witnesses delivered before congressional committees under oath and denied the existence of the Ku Klux Klan.2