American Experiment (159 page)

He got off to a quick start in the late spring of 1865, leaving congressional leaders on the sidelines. In a series of proclamations and executive actions he struck at the old Southern leadership by granting amnesty to Confederates who took the oath of allegiance, except for large property holders and other influentials. Members of such excepted categories could, however, apply for special pardons. The President empowered provisional governors to call conventions made up of delegates elected by eligible voters; the conventions would then arrange elections for state offices and for Congress. Conspicuously absent from this plan was any provision for black suffrage.

Congressional Republicans were by no means idle during these spring days of 1865. With Congress out of session, they could not shape grand strategy, but at first they felt little need to because of their continuing confidence in Johnson. Sumner himself was so untypically trusting that he wrote to a friend that on
“the question of colored suffrage the President is with us.”
Indeed, one of the Radicals’ main reservations about Johnson at this time was that he was
too
vengeful toward the old Southern leaders. Many Radicals felt that the issue was far less the punishment of Confederate “traitors” than the combining of civil, political, social, and economic reforms as necessary for the freed people truly to achieve freedom. The more
Johnson remained silent on these crucial matters, the more uneasy many party leaders became. And the more he seemed to be following a policy of vengeance against the old Confederate leadership, the more he appeared to be astride two horses that were beginning to buck in opposite directions.

Which horse would Johnson stick with? As it turned out, he was left with little choice, for his increasing involvement with Southern leaders and Northern conservatives entangled him in a “pro-Southern,” pro-states’ rights constellation of forces, while it was temperamentally impossible for him—and, he doubtless felt, politically unrewarding—to work with the Radical leaders whom, in his hierarchy of hatreds, he loathed even more than most Copperheads. As he moderated his policies in the South, as he recognized Southern state governments that met his requirements, as he received endless delegations pouring out their grievances and playing on his vanity, as he issued thousands of special pardons to onetime Confederate leaders, he slowly became tied to the Southern structure of leadership and power that he had hated. He became, in Kenneth Stampp’s words, virtually the prisoner of the men he had set out to destroy. Thus he lost his chance to mobilize a new leadership among Southern yeomanry and Unionists.

And Southern leadership was ready to assert itself. As provisional state governments were established under Johnson’s plan, their legislatures, elected by whites only, began to pass “Black Codes” that gave freed people some basic legal rights, such as to marry and make contracts, but that also included vagrancy and apprenticeship provisions designed to keep blacks virtually in a condition of peonage. If Johnson felt politically embarrassed by the Southern leadership, he hardly showed it. He urged the legislatures to liberalize their racial policy, but he barely demurred when they defied him. Nothing was done for the Negro’s basic needs and education. Carl Schurz, whom the President himself sent on a fact-finding tour of the South, reported that hundreds of times he was told that “learning will spoil the nigger for work” and that the elevation of the blacks would be the “degradation” of the whites. Johnson ignored his reports.

Sumner visited Johnson just before Congress convened. For two and a half hours the men sparred warily. Complaining that the “freemen” of Georgia and Alabama were mistreated by the “rebels,” Sumner accused the President of throwing away the victories of the Union army. Johnson bridled.

“Mr. Sumner, do murders ever occur in Massachusetts?”

“Unhappily yes, Mr. President.”

“Do people ever knock each other down in Boston?”

“Unhappily yes, Mr. President, sometimes.”

“Would you consent that Massachusetts should be excluded from the Union on this account?”

“No, Mr. President, surely not.” The breach between the two men was unbridgeable—especially after the senator, on leaving, picked up his silken tophat from where he had laid it on the floor and discovered that Johnson, in his excitement, had used it for a spittoon.

By the time Congress convened in early December 1865, the South was busy reconstructing its old political, social, and economic system and the President was actively abetting it under the banner of states’ rights. Moderate as well as radical Republicans were furious—but no longer frustrated, for now they could take the initiative away from the White House. The legislators did so through the classic weapons of parliamentary battle: controlling entrance into their own ranks, holding up the executive’s program, and using congressional investigations as a form of attack. At the opening of the session, the Clerk of the House simply omitted from the roll call the names of men elected from formerly seceding states. Now it was the Southerners who were furious—and helpless.

The Republicans, solidly in control of both chambers, proceeded to set up a fifteen-member Joint Committee on Reconstruction to plan and assert the role of Congress in Southern policy. The President could do nothing to stop this. Under the stinging parliamentary whip of Stevens and the moral lash of Sumner, the Radical Republicans along with many moderates began to act with unprecedented unity on procedure. On policy Republicans as a whole were still fundamentally divided, as later events would demonstrate; probably the only major issue on which
all
of them agreed was the end of slavery, and it was symbolic that the Thirteenth Amendment, passed earlier by two-thirds majorities in House and Senate, and then ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures, was proclaimed in effect two weeks after Congress convened. At last, black emancipation was part of the United States Constitution.

Emancipation—but not freedom. And on this distinction turned some portentous differences among Republicans. Some felt that simply eradicating slavery was enough, while the vast majority recognized that the federal government must guarantee the freed people’s legal and civil rights. A lesser number of Republicans would protect the blacks’ political rights, especially their right to vote. Some Republicans—mostly Radicals—were eager to provide land, sustenance, and education on the premise that in the long run the blacks’ civil and political liberties had to be buttressed by
social and economic freedom; to some Republicans this notion was radical and dangerous. These differences over the substance of policy were multiplied by differences over the execution of it—whether the federal or state governments should direct Reconstruction, whether Congress or the President should control federal policy, how much power should be granted the Freedmen’s Bureau or other bureaucracies, how much authority should be left in the hands of federal and state judges.

With all these permutations and combinations, it was a tribute both to the resolve of the Republicans and to the strength of their caucuses that the party remained united in the early months of 1866. Moving quickly to protect the freed people’s civil rights through the use of military courts, Congress voted to extend the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and enlarge its powers. Though moderate Republicans favored the bill and radicals felt it was far too limited, the President vetoed it. Earlier, Congress passed a Civil Rights Act granting citizenship to the newly freed—thus overturning
Dred Scott
—and granting equal civil rights to all persons born in the United States, with the notable exception of Indians. Johnson vetoed this bill as an invasion of states’ rights. Congress passed both bills over his vetoes.

Thus were the great constitutional catapults of Congress and President wheeled into position; the test now, as debate among press, politicians, and public rose to white heat, was one of leadership. Politicians were already maneuvering for advantage in the congressional elections of 1866, which they viewed as both an immediate sounding of public opinion and as a prelude to 1868 and beyond. Bypassing the President, the Joint Committee drew up a proposed Fourteenth Amendment in order to secure blacks’ civil rights and to thwart any effort by the Supreme Court to invalidate the Civil Rights Act. This proposal was a supreme test of the Republicans’ solidarity—especially over the issue of states’ rights, for the proposed amendment barred the states from passing laws “which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” or from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” or of the “equal protection of the laws.” Republican ranks held firm, but at a price—the amendment did not firmly grant the black man the right to vote.

Excluded from the Joint Committee at the start for his “extremism,” Sumner infuriated congressional Republicans by opposing the amendment on highly political grounds—he had to deal with moderate Republicans back home—but he redeemed himself with a fervent five-hour address, “The Equal Rights of All,” which concluded: “Show me a creature, with erect countenance looking to heaven, made in the image of God, and I show you a MAN, who, of whatever country or race, whether darkened
by equatorial sun or blanched by northern cold, is with you a child of the Heavenly Father, and equal with you in all the rights of Human Nature.... It is not enough that you have given Liberty. By the same title that we claim Liberty do we claim Equality also…. One is the complement of the other....”

The state of liberty and equality in the South three years after the Emancipation Proclamation was not good. At the end of April 1866, following three months of almost daily hearings, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction reported its findings. Well over a hundred witnesses, including Freedmen’s Bureau agents, Southern unionists, and a few black men, had testified that floggings and killings of freed people continued, with many of the crimes not prosecuted or even disclosed. The celebrated Clara Barton, reporting with a nurse’s precision, testified that a young woman, black and pregnant, had come to her for help; she had been whipped for not “spinning properly”—whipped with a “lash half as large as my little finger,” whipped to the bone, the flesh completely cut out along most of the gashes. Southerners charged the committee with bias, but Northerners were horrified, and they were further aroused by news of race riots in Memphis and New Orleans; in each case more than a hundred blacks were killed or injured by white police and civilians who had gone on a rampage of shooting, stabbing, burning, and lynching.

Johnson watched in dismay as the country polarized, for the mounting division threatened his “middle way.” But instead of dampening the fires, he poked them up with intemperate statements. Responding to a group of serenaders on the White House grounds, he branded the Joint Committee as an “irresponsible central directory”; he had fought traitors in the South, he thundered, and was prepared to fight them in the North. Goaded into naming names, he listed Stevens, Sumner, and Phillips. He could not veto the Fourteenth Amendment, but he could and did urge Southern states not to ratify it. As moderates as well as radicals broke away from him, he tried all the harder to rally the forces of the center. He not only replaced moderates in his Administration with more conservative types—including the supplanting of postmasters by the hundreds—but he summoned a National Union Convention to meet in Philadelphia to launch his new party. The convention made a fine show of unity, symbolized by Massachusetts and South Carolina delegates marching into the hall in pairs, but potential Democratic supporters held back, largely because they wanted to protect the standing of their state and local parties in the North. The still potent New York Democracy, in particular, preferred to concentrate on electing its own to state offices rather than backing an apostate Republican President.

Johnson fought on. In August he set out on a daring venture—a “swing around the circle”—to arouse support. Warned by a supporter, Senator James R. Doolittle, that he would be “followed by the reporters of a hundred presses who do nothing but misrepresent you”—who indeed might report one of his “outbursts”—the President was undeterred. He assembled a glittering presidential party headed by Secretary Seward, General Grant, and Admiral Farragut. The party took the old “presidential route” to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, journeyed by yacht up the Hudson, then turned west for stump speeches along the Erie Canal. In the Eastern cities Johnson attracted huge, fervent crowds, who emboldened him to new attacks on the rump Congress, disunionists and “traitors,” the “subsidized and mercenary press.” But in the Midwest, as Johnson gave his one set speech over and over again, the press grew bored and hostile and crowds turned ugly, Grant deserted the presidential party, the President fell into shouting matches with hecklers, riots broke out, platforms collapsed, Seward came down with cholera and almost died. The “swing” was judged a disaster; the President had fired up issues without defining them, asked support for pro-Administration candidates without naming them, sought some kind of middle way without explaining it.

Most “off-year” elections, lacking the focus of a presidential contest, produce sketchy results; 1866 turned out to be a dramatic exception. Republicans carried every gubernatorial contest and every state legislature in the North. They would command huge majorities in the Fortieth Congress—42 to 11 in the Senate, 143 to 49 in the House. To the jubilant radicals, the results were as meaningful as they were decisive. The campaign had been vituperative on both sides, but it had sharply defined the lines of conflict. After years of isolation and frustration the radicals not only had a mandate; with their two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress they now had
power.

For a brief fleeting moment in history—from late 1866 to almost the end of the decade—radical senators and congressmen led the Republican party in an audacious venture in both the organization and the goals of political power. To a degree that would have astonished the constitution-makers of earlier years, they converted the eighty-year-old system of checks and balances into a highly centralized, majoritarian system that elevated the legislative branch, subordinated the executive and judicial branches, and suspended federalism and “states’ rights” in the South. They turned the Constitution on its head. The aims of these leaders were indeed
revolutionary—to reverse age-old human and class relationships in the South and to raise millions of people to a much higher level of economic, political, social, and educational self-fulfillment. That such potent means could not in the end produce such humane and democratic ends was the ultimate tragedy of this revolutionary experiment.