Tennessee is back in the Union; no other rebel state gets the deal
A year after Appomattox, the eleven former Confederate states remained outside Congress, their status unsettled as President Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans disagreed over the terms of reunion. Tennessee broke first: its legislature ratified the Fourteenth Amendment on July 18, 1866, and Congress voted the state back into the Union on July 24. Because it had ratified before readmission, Tennessee avoided the military governorship other Southern states would soon face. The other ten states would not follow Tennessee's path for several more years, with readmissions stretching from 1868 to 1871 under Congress's own terms.
Tennessee's early ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment made it the exception to Congressional Reconstruction rather than its first success. Every other former Confederate state was instead placed under military districts and forced to ratify the amendment as a condition of return, a split that hardened the Radical Republicans' resolve to legislate Reconstruction over Johnson's vetoes.
QWhy did Tennessee avoid the military governors imposed on other Southern states?
Timing. Tennessee ratified the Fourteenth Amendment on July 18, 1866, before Congress had finalized the harsher terms it would soon impose on the rest of the former Confederacy. Because the state had already met the federal government's core condition, Congress readmitted it on July 24 without placing it under the military district system the Reconstruction Acts would soon establish elsewhere. Every other former Confederate state ratified the amendment only after federal troops and appointed governors were already running its government. Tennessee's legislature acted six days ahead of the harsher terms and avoided the occupation the rest of the South faced.
QWhat organization formed in Tennessee just months after its readmission was set in motion?
The Ku Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in December 1866, months after the state's Fourteenth Amendment ratification and congressional readmission. Tennessee, the same state moving fastest toward readmission, was also where the Klan took root. The Klan grew into the era's most visible symbol of white resistance to the constitutional changes Tennessee's own legislature had just accepted. The legislature ratified the amendment the same year the Klan was founded in Pulaski.
QHow close did Andrew Johnson come to being removed from office over his Reconstruction fights?
Johnson was impeached by the House in 1868 for violating the Tenure of Office Act, a law Radical Republicans passed specifically to box in his authority over Reconstruction appointments. The Senate acquitted him by a single vote, the narrowest possible margin for a president to keep his office. The same congressional majority that pushed through the Reconstruction Acts over his repeated vetoes came within one senator of removing him entirely. Johnson served out the balance of his term but never regained control over Reconstruction policy.
