NARRATOR
In December 1865, the Thirty-Ninth Congress, the first since the end of the Civil War, convened in Washington. More than sixty former Confederates prepared to take their seats, including four generals, four colonels and six Confederate cabinet officers, even Alexander H. Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy, expecting as one observer put it, "to govern the country he had been trying to destroy."

BLIGHT
If the South was going to "rise again" so to speak, control its own political life, control the freed people, indeed if the ex-Confederates themselves were going to be allowed back into leadership at the national level, then to so many white Northerners it seemed like the war would have been fought in vain.

NARRATOR
On the opening day, the Clerk of the House refused to announce the names of the Southern delegates in his roll call. The former Confederates were denied their elected seats and sent packing. The fight for control of Reconstruction had begun.

BLIGHT
In many ways, Congress was a poisoned atmosphere in the debates over the Reconstruction policy. There were raw war memories being played out. There were visceral hatreds being played out on the floor of Congress between Republicans and Democrats. These debates are between men who have experienced this war, who have fought this war. They are fighting, literally, about the meaning of that conflict they have just fought.

NARRATOR
Northern Democrats sided with Johnson, and railed against Republicans across the aisle. Washington must get out of the way, they insisted, and let Southerners run their own affairs.

AYERS
The Democrats had always identified themselves as the party of the white man. They very explicitly said, "We are here to protect the rights of white men North and South, and how do we do that? We hold the Union together." For that reason the Democrats saw themselves as trying to put the North and South together as quickly as possible during the Civil War and as soon as it's over, trying to knit North and South together at the expense of black men.

BLIGHT
At one point in the debates Thaddeus Stevens stood up, and answering his Democratic colleagues says, "Do not, I pray, admit those who have slaughtered half a million of our countrymen, until their clothes are dried and until they are re-clad. I do not wish to it side by side with men whose garments smell of the blood of my kindred." It was Stevens's way of saying, "We're going to keep the South out of the Union, as long as we can, and we're not going to allow anybody back in here who was responsible for making the war."

NARRATOR
A Congressional committee on Reconstruction concluded that Southern governments were unable to keep law and order, or stem violence against African Americans. Allowing Southern states unchecked power so soon after the war, the committee said, was "madness and lunacy." Moderate Republicans had hoped to persuade Johnson to provide minimal protections for blacks in the South. Now even they were growing impatient with the president's policies. In March 1866, both houses of Congress passed a landmark Civil Rights Bill that protected the rights of American citizens without regard to race. Republicans warned Johnson not to veto the bill if he hoped for any continued cooperation with Congress. Two weeks later, Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Bill.

WALKER:
Johnson is opposed to the granting of those kinds of protections to black people. This had not been done for the white immigrants who had come to America -- why then are you doing it for these black people?

NARRATOR
Moderate Republicans were outraged.

FONER
Johnson was stubborn, self-righteous, rigid in thinking. He was really the worst person possible to become president accidentally, at a time when flexibility, vision and creative leadership were really what was required.

BLIGHT
Moderate Republicans were forced into the Radical camp because they had to oppose Andrew Johnson. Johnson's plan of Reconstruction was so lenient, in utter contempt of black liberty that it was simply unacceptable.

NARRATOR
A united Republican party overrode Johnson's veto. America had its first Civil Rights Act. But many in Congress argued that the act was not enough -- that safeguarding civil rights required changes to the Constitution itself. Republican leaders proposed a new amendment.

FONER
The Fourteenth Amendment becomes the crux of the political battle in 1866, and basically what they put into the Constitution is a new definition of American nationality and citizenship, making African Americans, for the first time, full citizens of the United States. This is the origin of the concept of civil rights in American society, rights which obtain to you as a citizen, which cannot be rescinded because of your race.

BLIGHT
This is a titanic debate about just what the authority of the federal government is going to be. There were plenty of Americans who argued the federal government had no right to declare black people citizens.

FONER
The Democrats are constantly putting forward racist arguments: You are eradicating a line between black and white which has existed forever. To Republicans, what's at stake here, really, is the definition of freedom. If a person can be discriminated against in every walk of life because of their race, has slavery really been abolished?

NARRATOR
Congress overwhelmingly passed the Fourteenth Amendment, but it had to be ratified by three-fourths of the states. The President denounced the amendment, and accused the Republicans of treason.

WALKER
Johnson is opposed to an expansion of federal power. For him, constitutional authority resides at the state level, not at the national level. And Johnson believes that the Republicans are engaged in an enormous usurpation of state authority.

NARRATOR
The lines were drawn.