The Joint Committee on Reconstruction, appointed when Congress refused to accept the work of President Johnson, proceeded during several months to take testimony and to consider measures.The testimony, which was taken chiefly to support opinions already formed, appeared to prove that the Negroes and the Unionists were so badly treated that the Freedmen's Bureau and the army must be kept in the South to protect them; that free Negro labor was a success but that the whites were hostile to it; that the whites were disloyal and would, if given control of the Southern governments and admitted to Congress, constitute a danger to the nation and especially to the party in power.
To convince the voters of the North of the necessity of dealing drastically with the South a campaign of misrepresentation was begun in the summer of 1865, which became more and more systematic and unscrupulous as the political struggle at Washington grew fiercer.Newspapers regularly ran columns headed "Southern Outrages," and every conceivable mistreatment of blacks by whites was represented as taking place on a large scale.As General Richard Taylor said, it would seem that about 1866 every white man, woman, and child in the South began killing and maltreating Negroes.In truth, there was less and less ground for objection to the treatment of the blacks as time went on and as the several agencies of government secured firmer control over the lawless elements.But fortunately for the radicals their contention seemed to be established by riots on a large scale in Memphis and New Orleans where Negroes were killed and injured in much greater number than whites.
The rapid development of the radical plans of Congress checked the tendency toward political division in the South.Only a small party of rabid Unionists would now affiliate with the radicals, while all the others reluctantly held together, endorsed Johnson's policy, and attempted to affiliate with the disintegrating National Union party.But the defeat of the President's policies in the elections of 1866, the increasing radicalism of Congress as shown by the Civil Rights Act, the expansion of the Freedmen's Bureau, the report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, and the proposal of the Fourteenth Amendment led farsighted Southerners to see that the President was likely to lose in his fight with Congress.
Now began, in the latter half of 1866, with some cooperation in the North and probably with the approval of the President, a movement in the South to forestall the radicals by means of a settlement which, although less severe than the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, might yet be acceptable to Congress.
One feature of the settlement was to be some form of Negro suffrage, either by local action or by constitutional amendment.Those behind this scheme were mainly of the former governing class.Negro suffrage, they thought, would take the wind out of the radical sails, the Southern whites would soon be able to control the blacks, representation in Congress would be increased, and the Black Belt would perhaps regain its former political hegemony.It is hardly necessary to say that the majority of the whites were solidly opposed to such a measure.But it was hoped to carry it under pressure through the legislature or to bring it about indirectly through rulings of the Freedmen's Bureau.
Coincident with this scheme of partial Negro suffrage an attempt was made by the conservative leaders in Washington, working with the Southerners, to propose a revised Fourteenth Amendment which would give the vote to competent Negroes and not disfranchise the whites.A conference of Southern governors met in Washington early in 1867 and drafted such an amendment.But, it was too late.
