Public interest now for a time turned to the South, where the Fourteenth Amendment was before the state legislatures.The radicals, taunted with having no plan of reconstruction beyond a desire to keep the Southern States out of the Union, professed to see in the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment a good opportunity to readmit the States on a safe basis.The elections of 1866had pointed to the ratification of the proposed amendment as an essential preliminary to readmission.But would additional demands be made upon the South? Sumner, Stevens, and Fessenden were sure that Negro suffrage also must come, but Wade, Chase, Garfield, and others believed that nothing beyond the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment would be asked.
In the Southern legislatures there was little disposition to ratify the amendment.The rapid development of the radical policies during 1866 had convinced most Southerners that nothing short of a general humiliation and complete revolution in the South would satisfy the dominant party, and there were few who wished to be "parties to our own dishonor." The President advised the States not to accept the amendment, but several Southern leaders favored it, fearing that worse would come if they should reject it.Only in the legislatures of Alabama and Florida was there any serious disposition to accept the amendment; and in the end all the unreconstructed States voted adversely during the fall and winter of 1866-67.This unanimity of action was due in part to the belief that, even if the amendment were ratified, the Southern states would still be excluded, and in part to the general dislike of the proscriptive section which would disfranchise all Confederates of prominence and result in the breaking up of the state governments.The example of unhappy Tennessee, which had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and had been readmitted, was not one to encourage conservative people in the other Southern states.
The rejection of the amendment put the question of reconstruction squarely before Congress.There was no longer a possibility of accomplishing the reconstruction of the Southern states by means of constitutional amendments.
Some of the Border and Northern states were already showing signs of uneasiness at the continued exclusion of the South.But if the Constitutional Amendment had failed, other means of reconstruction were at hand, for the radicals now controlled the Thirty-ninth Congress, from which the Southern representatives were excluded, and would also control the Fortieth Congress.
Under the lead of Stevens and Sumner, the radicals now perfected their plans.
On January 8,1867, their first measure, conferring the franchise upon Negroes in the District of Columbia, was passed over the presidential veto, though the proposal had been voted down a few weeks earlier by a vote of 6525 to 35 in Washington and 812 to 1 in Georgetown.In the next place, by an act of January 31, 1867, the franchise was extended to Negroes in the territories, and on March 2, 1867, three important measures were enacted: the Tenure of Office Act and a rider to the Army Appropriation Act--both designed to limit the power of the President--and the first Reconstruction Act.By the Tenure of Office Act, the President was prohibited from removing officeholders except with the consent of the Senate; and by the Army Act he was forbidden to issue orders except through General Grant or to relieve him of command or to assign him to command away from Washington unless at the General's own request or with the previous approval of the Senate.The first measure was meant to check the removal of radical officeholders by Johnson, and the other, which was secretly drawn up for Boutwell by Stanton, was designed to prevent the President from exercising his constitutional command of the army.
