Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  This was deliberately seeing ghosts for bedsheets. The Radicals were driven by neither a demonic thirst for centralized government nor an idealized passion for racial egalitarianism. “This doctrine does not mean that a negro shall sit on the same seat or eat at the same table with a white man,” Thaddeus Stevens replied in 1867. “That is a matter of taste which every man must decide for himself. The law has nothing to do with it.” But insofar as the black man born in the United States and the white man born in the United States were considered politically, their identity was based not on being black or white but on being citizens. “We will have no permanent settlement of the negro question,” warned the New York editor Theodore Tilton, “till our haughtier white blood, looking the negro in the face, shall forget that he is black, and remember only that he is a citizen.”62

  The stage was now set for a direct confrontation between the president and the Radical wing of what was supposed to be his own party. The Radicals began by setting out once again their version of Reconstruction’s primary question: that secession was tantamount to state suicide, that the former Southern states were now in the position of territories, and that the Constitution clearly placed territories under the oversight of Congress. “Congress alone is authorized to deal with the subject of reconstruction,” wrote one Radical congressman to Charles Sumner, and that grant of authority included an unprecedented level of intervention in local Southern affairs, just as it would in any Federal territory. That included the requirement of black voting rights and land reform: “Our safety and the peace of the country require us to disenfranchise the rebels and to enfranchise the colored citizens in the revolted states and thereby confide the political power therein to … safe hands.” This led the Radicals to push not only for the civil rights bill but also for renewal of the Freedmen’s Bureau (since the Bureau would be given much of the responsibility as a federal watchdog for violations of the civil rights bill) and confirmation of Sherman’s forty-acre order.63

  Johnson interpreted these actions as an assault on his presidential authority as well as on his old Democratic deference to state and local power—which is precisely what they were. But unlike Lincoln, who had defused attacks like these by moving softly around them, Johnson hurled the full force of his anger at the Radicals. On February 7 Johnson received a delegation of African American leaders, headed by Frederick Douglass, and proceeded to harangue them on the impossibility of granting political equality to blacks. When Douglass tried to object, Johnson cut him short: “I do not like to be arraigned by some who can get up handsomely-rounded periods and deal in rhetoric, and talk about abstract ideas of liberty, who never periled life, liberty, or property.” Douglass took his objections out the door with him and published them in a Washington newspaper. “I know that d——d Douglass,” screeched Johnson when he read Douglass’s comments; “he’s just like any nigger, & he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”64

  Having turned from playing Moses to playing Pharaoh, Johnson struck back at Congress. On February 19 he vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau renewal bill, arguing that Congress had no right to fasten federal oversight agencies on states it was determined to bar from their due representation in Washington—and he let people draw their own conclusions from his contention that the Southern states were still states. Three days later, in a Washington’s Birthday speech at the White House, Johnson linked himself to Andrew Jackson, fighting off a new set of enemies of the Union. “Who has suffered more than I have?” Johnson whined. When a voice in the crowd asked him to name names, Johnson singled out Stevens, Sumner, and Wendell Phillips, as though they were public enemies. And then, as if to crown these gaffes, Johnson vetoed the civil rights bill on March 27, effectively burning whatever bridges he still had to the Republican Party that had nominated him only a year and a half before. Even moderate Republicans were aghast at Johnson’s recklessness, especially since the civil rights bill had been written and rewritten by Lyman Trumbull of Illinois specifically to appease Johnson.65

  Rather than managing Congress in Lincoln’s style, Johnson had only succeeded in colliding with it and making himself look the worse for the wear. On April 9, Congress successfully overrode Johnson’s veto of the civil rights bill (although the Senate managed the override only by a single vote); a second version of the Freed-men’s Bureau bill was passed, and when Johnson vetoed it again, Congress overrode that veto as well. Finally, on April 30, determined to put black civil rights beyond the reach of Johnson’s interference and Johnson’s vetoes, William Pitt Fessenden in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in the House introduced a proposal for a new constitutional amendment, bluntly establishing a jus soli baseline for defining United States citizenship, and subordinating state citizenship to it.

  All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

  This effectively removed the definition of both citizenship and voter eligibility from state jurisdiction and handed it to the federal government. But this was not all: the amendment went on to expel from Congress any member of the House or Senate, or any civil or military officer of the United States, who had been “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” and imposed repudiation of the Confederate debt on the former Confederate states, so that anyone still holding Confederate securities and expecting to get them redeemed was left to use them as wallpaper. Predictably, Johnson gagged on the amendment. But since amendments to the Constitution do not require a presidential signature, both houses of Congress passed this Fourteenth Amendment by the required two-thirds majority in June 13, 1866, and forwarded it to the state legislatures for ratification without even bothering to send Johnson the customary notification resolution.66

  Johnson attempted to fight back with what powers he still had in hand, but by the summer of 1866 even the small standing he had as president was dwindling. The popular songwriter Henry Clay Work set his contempt for Johnson to music:

  Who shall rule this American nation? Say, boys, say!

  Who shall sit in the loftiest station? Say, boys, say!

  Shall the men who trampled on the banner?

  They who now their country would betray?

  They who murder the innocent freed men? Say, boys, say!

  chorus: No never! no, never! The loyal millions say;

  And ‘tis they who rule this American nation, They, boys, they!

  Who shall rank as the family royal? Say, boys, say!

  If not those who are honest and loyal? Say, boys, say!

  Then shall one elected as our servant

  In his pride, assume a regal way?

  Must we bend to the human dictator? Say, boys, say!

  Shall we tarnish our national glory? Say, boys, say!

  Blot one line from the wonderful story? Say, boys, say!

  Did we vainly shed our blood in battle?

  Did our troops resultless win the day?

  Was our time and our treasure all squander’d? Say, boys, say!67

  With congressional elections looming in the fall of 1866, Johnson embarked on a desperate bid to rally popular support for his collapsing Reconstruction plan, making a whirlwind speaking tour of the North, a “swing round the circle,” and dragging a reluctant General Grant with him to provide moral support. A National Union Convention, designed to unite moderate Republicans and Northern Democrats behind Johnson, met in Philadelphia in August, but it was upstaged by a Radical-sponsored Southern Loyalists’ Convention, which paraded through the streets of Philadelphia in September to hear Frederick Douglass and Quaker activist Anna Dickinson offer impassioned appeals for black equal
ity. Johnson, for his part, could not seem to open his mouth without offending people, and his rough country mannerisms (in contrast to Lincoln’s, which had been smoothed by a lifetime of trying to elude his backwoods origins) dampened support across the North rather than rousing it. “I care not for dignity,” Johnson boasted, and promptly provided all the proof necessary. When a heckler in Cleveland on September 3 shouted that Johnson couldn’t look a man in the face, Johnson lost all self-control and began shouting,

  I wish I could see you; I will bet now, if there could be a light reflected on your face, that cowardice and treachery could be seen in it. Show yourself. Come out here where we can see you. If ever you shoot a man, you will stand in the dark and pull your trigger … Those men—such a one as insulted me here tonight—you may say, has ceased to be a man, and in ceasing to be a man shrunk into the denomination of a reptile, and having so shrunken, as an honest man, I tread on him.68

  In the November elections, the Republicans crushed Johnson’s moderate and Democratic friends, and, taking no hint from his “swing round the circle,” voters gave the Radicals a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress—43 to 9 in the Senate, 173 to 53 in the House. Johnson had now lost control not only of his public image but also of his administration. Even Tennessee, to Johnson’s embarrassment, gave up on Johnson and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment as part of a deal that would guarantee the readmission of Tennessee’s representatives and senators to Congress on Congress’s terms. “We have fought the battle and won it,” crowed Parson Brownlow, who was now Tennessee’s Republican governor and the deadly political enemy of Andrew Johnson. “Give my respects to the dead dog in the White House.”69

  THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES ABANDONS YOU

  The results of the congressional in 1866 were an open invitation to the Radicals, with Thaddeus Stevens the dominant Radical of the House and Ben Wade the new president pro tem of the Senate, to take up the reins of Reconstruction from Johnson’s faltering hands and substitute a congressional Reconstruction plan. They moved first on January 22, 1867, by passing a bill that called the newly elected 40th Congress to order on March 4, 1867, immediately after the close of the 39th Congress, rather than the following December, so as to give Johnson no opportunities for mischief during a congressional recess. With that foundation securely under foot, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction turned to the scaffolding of congressional Reconstruction, and on March 2, 1867, Congress enacted the first of three major Reconstruction Acts. Declaring that “no legal State governments or adequate protection for life or property now exists in the rebel states,” the First Reconstruction Act consolidated most of the old Confederacy into five “military districts”: Virginia would constitute the first, the Carolinas the second, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida the third, Mississippi and Arkansas the fourth, and Texas and Louisiana the fifth. Each district would be supervised by an army general appointed by the president, and other army officers and Freedmen’s Bureau agents would act as adjuncts to the civilian administrations in properly registering voters.70

  Despite such martial appearances, the “military districts” really did employ most of the civilian procedures associated with organizing territories. Civil governments would exist, but the army would have overall supervision of the civil process and fine-tune the operation of civil government until the state regimes began to look like what Congress wanted. When “the people of any one of said rebel States”—which included all adult males of “whatever race, color, or previous condition,” but not former Confederate civil officials or military officers—were willing to write a new state constitution embracing the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, Congress would recognize a Southern state and admit its civil representatives as members of Congress rather than mere “delegates.”

  President Johnson, of course, vetoed the First Reconstruction Act. The Radicals anticipated this, and Congress overrode the veto without hesitation. In fact, they anticipated more than just a veto. On the same day that Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act, a rider was attached to a military appropriations bill to limit Johnson’s ability to make military appointments and issue orders to military commanders, and to force the president to pass all of his orders through the general in chief (which in this case was Grant). This would ensure, as much as possible, that the new district commanders would see themselves as answerable more to Grant and Congress than to the president. And to make sure that Johnson would not try to circumvent the operation of the Reconstruction Act through his use of civilian patronage appointments, Congress added the Tenure of Office Act in March 1867. The new statute prevented the president from unilaterally removing civilian government job holders until the Senate approved a successor for that office, a step designed to further clip Johnson’s presidential wings. (If the Senate was in recess, the president would be allowed only to “suspend” an officeholder until the Senate reconvened.) Johnson vetoed the act; Congress overrode the veto.71

  The third stone in the new edifice of Reconstruction was the Second Reconstruction Act, passed on March 23, 1867, which established the procedures for registering eligible white and black voters—and excluding any Southern participants “in any rebellion or civil war against the United States.” Johnson vetoed this one, too; Congress just as easily overrode the veto. “We must establish the doctrine of National Jurisdiction over all the States in State matters of the Franchise,” warned Thaddeus Stevens, “or we shall finally be ruined.”72

  Andrew Johnson’s presidency was by this point so impotent that simply getting rid of him seemed worth considering, especially since Ben Wade, as the president pro tem of the Senate, would be his constitutional successor. Discussions among the Radicals about impeaching Johnson and removing him from the presidency had flickered as early as his veto of the civil rights bill in 1866 (Hannibal Hamlin, whom Johnson had supplanted as vice president in 1864, took up the impeach-Johnson cry that fall, asking, “Did we fight down the rebellion to give the South more power?”). But not until January 1867, when it was clear that the incoming Congress would give them almost unstoppable momentum, did the Republican caucus in the House begin seriously considering such a move.73

  Once considered, however, action quickly followed: on January 7 (the same day as the Senate overrode Johnson’s veto of a bill to extend voting rights to blacks in the District of Columbia), James Ashley, the Radical Ohio representative who had been the floor manager for the Thirteenth Amendment, moved for Johnson’s impeachment on the grounds that he had “corruptly used” the presidential pardoning, veto, and appointment powers. That effort died in the House Judiciary Committee, which found no specific evidence it could use as the basis for impeachment proceedings beyond Johnson’s political truculence. When the 40th Congress began work in March, Ashley tried again, hoping that a new Judiciary Committee would be more favorable to impeaching a conspirator who “came into the presidency by the door of assassination” and who might even have been complicit “in the assassination plot.” But the new committee had no more desire to challenge the president than its predecessor had, and in June the impeachment proposal was dropped again, by a 5–4 vote.74

  Emboldened by these failures, Johnson struggled to regain the initiative—and undercut the Reconstruction Acts—by denying military commanders in the five districts the power to invalidate fraudulent registration and voting procedures. This, in effect, liberated Southern civil authorities to create fanciful voting requirements that would invariably disqualify black voters. This was so transparent a maneuver that even some of the military district commandants balked, and when Philip Sheridan, the commander for Texas and Louisiana, ignored an opinion criticizing military intervention in voter registration from Johnson’s compliant attorney general, Henry Stanbery, Johnson dismissed Sheridan on July 31, 1867. This cost Johnson the patience of Ulysses S. Grant, who had regarded Sheridan as a protégé, and who in his role as general in chief advised military commanders that Stanbery’s opinion had neither “language or
manner entitling it to the force of an order.” Sheridan’s dismissal set off a new flurry of impeachment demands, this time from Thaddeus Stevens and the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. But once again, no one in Congress could produce any hard evidence that Johnson had broken a law.75

  On the other hand, the dismissal of Sheridan was not nearly enough of a victory to sustain the longer reach of Johnson’s counterattack. In July 1867, the Radicals passed a Third Reconstruction Act that transferred all powers of “suspension, removal, appointment, and detail” of the Southern military district commanders into the hands of “the General of the army of the United States.” This was a military counterpart to the Tenure of Office Act, and it made clear that the district military commanders (such as Sheridan) would have all the power they needed to oversee voter registration and “ascertain, upon such facts or information as they can obtain, whether such person is entitled to be registered under said act,” without presidential meddling.76

  If Grant was now to inherit most of the military powers that Johnson thought properly belonged to himself, Johnson was determined to control Grant, and to that end he proposed evicting the current secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, and installing Grant in his place. Grant’s reaction was evasive, and with good reason, since Stanton was a friend of the Radicals and such a move would bring Johnson into collision with the Tenure of Office Act. But Johnson had decided that by now he had nothing to lose; besides, the Tenure of Office Act did permit him the power to make, and unmake, appointments during a congressional recess. On August 5, just days after Congress adjourned for its 1867 summer recess, Johnson tartly informed Stanton that “public considerations of a high character constrain me to say that your resignation as Secretary of War will be accepted.” Stanton (who had been secretly warned by Grant of Johnson’s plans) just as tartly refused: “Public considerations of a high character, which alone have induced me to continue at the head of this Department, constrain me not to resign the office of Secretary of War before the next meeting of Congress.” This Johnson classified as “not merely a disinclination of compliance with the request for his resignation; it was a defiance, and something more.”77