Reconstruction Acts of 1867: Military Districts, Black Codes and McCardle

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Abraham Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan let a Southern state form a government once 10 percent of its 1860 voters swore loyalty, and he vetoed the harsher Wade-Davis Bill. After his assassination, Andrew Johnson asked only that states repudiate secession, abolish slavery and cancel Confederate debts, and he pardoned many Confederate leaders while Congress was out of session. The new governments passed Black Codes, with vagrancy laws that auctioned the labor of Black men lacking written contracts and apprenticeship laws that took children from their parents. In December 1865 House clerk Edward McPherson left Southern members off the roll call.

Johnson's Swing Around the Circle tour backfired, and the 1866 midterms gave Republicans veto-proof majorities. On March 2, 1867 the First Reconstruction Act split ten states into five military districts and required new constitutions with Black male suffrage, sparing Tennessee, which had ratified the 14th Amendment. Supplementary acts set up voter registration, let commanders under Ulysses S. Grant remove civil officials and freed them from Attorney General Henry Stanbery's narrow opinions. When Mississippi editor William McCardle's habeas case reached the Supreme Court, Congress stripped the Court's jurisdiction over Johnson's veto, and the Court accepted it.

• Johnson compared himself to a persecuted Jesus Christ during his speaking tour.
• Stanbery argued former Confederates needed only to promise future loyalty.
• Supporters cited the Constitution's guarantee clause and the principle of vae victis, woe to the conquered.
• After a Mississippi boycott, Congress required only a majority of votes cast to ratify new constitutions.
• Legal scholar David P. Currie argued in 2008 that the first Reconstruction Act was unconstitutional.