After Lincoln
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Fort Fisher was a critical gateway between the Cape Fear River in North Carolina and the Atlantic Ocean, and Butler proposed a daring idea for breaching its ramparts: A Union ship crammed with gunpowder would sail directly at the fort, then ground troops would follow up with an assault. Grant went along with the scheme and allocated sixty-five hundred men.
• • •
Bad weather, poor communication, and failed technology combined to produce an epic failure. Butler arrived on the scene to find that Admiral David Porter had already launched his ship, but its muted explosion had done little damage to the fort.
Acting on his own, Butler withdrew his landing forces. During the planning stages, he had already alienated Porter. Now the admiral was quick to report to Washington that Butler could have proceeded with the attack and easily overwhelmed the fort’s defenders.
“If this temporary failure succeeds in sending General Butler into private life,” Porter wrote, “it is not to be regretted.”
Grant took that cue and relieved Butler of command. Some two weeks later, Butler’s replacement, General Adelbert Ames, took Fort Fisher. Ben Butler returned to private life.
Much later, Grant would make a halfhearted attempt at being fair: “General Butler certainly gave his very earnest support to the war,” Grant wrote in his memoirs, “and he gave his own best efforts personally to the suppression of the rebellion.”
Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles offered a different judgment, one that was never widely shared: “Butler’s greater intellect overshadowed Grant, and annoyed and embarrassed the General-in-Chief.”
• • •
In New Orleans, Nathaniel Banks was pursuing a policy different from Butler’s in dealing with the city’s black residents. General Banks, who saw himself as a presidential possibility for 1868, worried that giving the vote to freed black men would undercut his popularity with white voters.
After President Lincoln had met privately with two wealthy black businessmen from Louisiana who argued for black voting rights, Lincoln raised the possibility with the state’s civilian governor. But he also made clear that it was “only a suggestion, not to the public but to you alone.”
• • •
Pinckney Pinchback was dissatisfied with the tenor of the postwar planning. He calculated that since the Emancipation Proclamation, black regiments totaling 180,000 men had been fighting for the Union, and he went north early in 1865 to appeal directly to Lincoln for permission to raise more of the all-black regiments in Ohio and Indiana and speed the war to its end.
Before he could apply for an interview at the White House, Pinchback learned that Lincoln had been shot.
He traveled on to Cincinnati to see his wife and mother. Pinchback was now twenty-seven, as tall as his father had been, with a fashionable beard but untamable hair. He intended to wait in the North to see what direction Vice President Andrew Johnson would take once he was installed as Lincoln’s successor.
By autumn, however, Pinchback’s impatience overcame him, and he and Nina headed south to assess his future.
• • •
In Washington, debate was under way on the problems certain to arise once the last shot was fired. Charles Sumner worried that time was running out for the major changes in society that only wartime could advance. He was gratified when Lincoln appointed his ally Salmon Chase as U.S. Chief Justice, and he looked to the Court to overturn the Dred Scott decision. Sumner attacked that decision—a ruling that Negroes were not citizens—as “more thoroughly abominable than anything of the kind in the history of the court.”
On February 1, 1865, with the Thirteenth Amendment pending before Congress, Sumner introduced a motion to permit John Sweat Rock to become the first black attorney to address the Supreme Court. That milestone would be a vindication for the forty-year-old Rock, born in New Jersey to parents who fostered his talents and encouraged his ambition. Denied entrance to medical schools because of his race, Rock had turned to law and had been admitted to the Massachusetts bar.
Sumner fretted over the fate of Southern slaves who lacked Rock’s early advantages. Without federal protection, Sumner saw them being kept in peonage by their former owners, who would establish “slavery under an alias.”
Secretary of War Stanton had formed the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission to recommend means to help the former slaves support themselves. But Sumner found the commission sluggish in producing its report, and other Radical Republicans objected to leaving the effort under the control of the War Department. They pointed out that the Treasury already managed the land that should be parceled out when the war ended.
Division over the issue ran deep. Did the majority of the Congress believe that Washington should guarantee Negroes land, jobs, and education? Or, along with many Northerners, were they convinced that the result would be a dangerous incursion of federal power into private life?
Republican senator James Grimes of Wisconsin framed the fate of the former slaves starkly: “Are they free men or are they not? If they are free, then why not let them stand as free men?”
After legislative jockeying and concessions by the Sumner camp, a bill created a Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Land within the War Department.
On March 3, 1865, President Lincoln signed legislation that stipulated that the life of the bureau was limited to last “during the present War of Rebellion and one year thereafter.” The bureau’s commissioner could provide applicants with no more than forty acres of land, for which the tenants would pay low rent for three years. After that, they could buy the property at its appraised market value.
Up to the final vote, Senator Sumner’s opponents were protesting that the bureau would favor black farmers over white. Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas sounded their rallying cry: “I do not believe it is necessary to secure the property of one race that another shall be destroyed.”
To head a new bureau already beset by controversy, Lincoln intended to name a Northern graduate of West Point, Major General Oliver Otis Howard.
Andrew Johnson
CHAPTER 5
ANDREW JOHNSON (1865)
WHEN ANDREW JOHNSON TOOK THE presidential oath of office on the morning of April 15, 1865, the occasion was clouded by more than the murder of the man he was replacing. Six weeks earlier, Johnson had disgraced himself at Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural ceremony in ways he was still trying to live down.
For entirely political motives, Lincoln’s advisers had settled on Johnson, the fifty-six-year-old senator from East Tennessee, as their vice presidential candidate. With Hannibal Hamlin of Maine on the ticket in 1860, Lincoln had not won a majority of the vote—39.8 percent. Stephen Douglas and his Democrats had taken slightly less than 30 percent, and the remainder split between John Breckenridge’s Southern Democrats and John Bell’s Constitutional Union Party.
For re-election, Lincoln needed a stronger running mate. Right up to Election Day, he had been apprehensive about the outcome, and he told a friend, “I wish I were certain.”
Although the votes would not be counted from either Louisiana or Johnson’s Tennessee, the new vice presidential nominee brought in support from Democrats in other states, and the ticket won by four hundred thousand votes. That was 55 percent of the total vote, to 45 percent for General McClellan, running as a peace candidate.
Andrew Johnson had first won acclaim in the North as the sole Southern Democrat in the Senate to commit himself to the Union. While voters in his state were deciding whether to secede, Johnson stumped the countryside trying to separate the issue of slavery from the question of loyalty to the country:
“Damn the Negroes,” Johnson said. “I am fighting those traitorous aristocrats, their masters.”
When Northern troops took control of Tennessee, Lincoln appointed Johnson as the state’s military governor. He moved forcefully against the secessionists who cited the U.S. Constitution to justify their right to withdraw from the Union. “Whenever you hear a man prating about th
e Constitution,” Johnson said, “spot him for a traitor.”
He freed his own slaves and argued for giving black men the vote. “A loyal Negro,” Johnson said, “is worth more than a disloyal white man.”
Andrew Johnson’s contribution was not the only factor in Lincoln’s re-election. For the first time, most army troops had been allowed to vote by absentee ballot, and news from the battlefield had continued to be heartening.
• • •
On the morning of Lincoln’s second inaugural, on March 4, 1865, Johnson was in no condition to attend. His friends later claimed that he had been recovering from typhoid fever or malaria. They pointed out that Johnson had asked to stay on in Tennessee and delay his own swearing-in until April but that Lincoln had insisted he come to Washington.
In any event, on the night before the inaugural Johnson had indulged himself at a reception given by his friend John Forney, the secretary of the Senate. On the cold and rainy morning of the most important day of his life, he showed up at the Capitol looking ashen and weak.
The ceremony had been moved inside to the overheated and muggy Senate chamber. In the vice president’s office, Johnson prevailed on his outgoing predecessor to fetch him a whiskey. “I’m not well,” Johnson complained, “and need a stimulant.”
Hannibal Hamlin did not drink, but to oblige Johnson, he sent out for a bottle of whiskey, then watched with dismay as Johnson quickly filled and downed three tumblers.
The Senate was crowded and noisy when Johnson entered arm in arm with Hamlin and took a seat while Hamlin made his brief remarks. In the visitors gallery, women observed that as Johnson began to speak without notes he was flushed and unsteady.
For seventeen agonizing minutes, a lifetime of bitterness spewed out across the chamber, even though not many in his appalled audience could appreciate the background for Johnson’s tirade.
• • •
As a boy named for Andrew Jackson, he had been three when his father, a tavern waiter, died in Raleigh, North Carolina. The boy was told that he had been trying to rescue two drunken patrons from a nearby swollen river. Andrew’s mother struggled for the next ten years. When she could no longer support him and his brother William, she apprenticed them to a tailor.
After a scrape with the law, the two young men ran away. Eventually, they rejoined their mother and her new husband and made their way to Greenville, Tennessee.
With no formal education, Andrew opened a tailor shop. At nineteen, he married an orphan, Eliza McCardle, who encouraged his efforts to read and write. A hard worker, Andrew amassed modest holdings, including a few slaves. Short, always well-dressed, but often glowering, Johnson entered politics as an alderman in 1829 and as the mayor of Greenville five years later.
Elected to the Tennessee legislature, Johnson introduced a bill to give indigent men 160 acres of public land if they would live on it. He promoted that measure when he reached the U.S. Congress in 1843 and finally saw it become law during the Civil War’s second year.
As a populist, Johnson opposed Congress accepting the bequest of James Smithson to create a museum because, he said, taxpayers would soon have to support the institution. In a highly charged era, Johnson’s opposition to secession was marked by its fiery language. He denounced Jefferson Davis as one of the South’s “illegitimate, swaggering, bastard, scrub aristocrats.”
Johnson’s ingrained sense of victimhood never left him. “Some day,” he vowed, “I will show the stuck-up aristocrats who is running the country.” Like Andrew Jackson before him, he found the wealthy and educated “not half as good as the man who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow.”
• • •
His resentments were on full display as Johnson singled out Lincoln’s cabinet appointees to upbraid them by name and remind them that they owed “what you are or ever will be to the people.” Gideon Welles was nearly spared when Johnson could not remember his name, but he leaned over to ask John Forney, “Who is the Secretary of the Navy?”
Finished with his domestic insults, he railed against the diplomats in the chamber for “all your fine feathers and geegaws.”
Johnson was determined to set himself apart from the wealthy and well-born: “Today, one who claims no high descent, one who comes from the ranks of the people, stands, by the choice of a free constituency, in the second place of this Government.” Gleefully, he observed that “there may be those to whom things are not pleasing.”
Lincoln had entered the hall and taken his place at the center of the notables. He listened impassively, head bowed and sometimes closing his eyes. His response was impossible to read. Charles Sumner first sat with an ironic smile until he covered his face with his hands and rested his head on his desk.
Gideon Welles murmured to Secretary of War Stanton, “The man is either drunk or crazy.” Not visibly disturbed, Henry Seward seemed prepared to hear Johnson out, but Hannibal Hamlin leaned forward to pull on Johnson’s coattails, and the oath of office was finally administered.
At its conclusion, Johnson brought the Bible to his lips. To general mystification, he announced, “I kiss this book in the face of my nation of the United States.”
Other years, the vice president would then swear in the new senators, but since Johnson could not perform that task, the duty was turned over to a clerk.
• • •
It fell to Lincoln to redeem the day. The skies had cleared, and the audience moved outdoors for his oration. As the president mounted the platform to deliver what he would consider his best speech, the sun appeared and gave hope to those looking for a better omen.
Where Johnson had been intent on settling scores, Lincoln sought to heal the nation’s wounds. The solemnity of the occasion brought forth a scriptural tone from a man who resisted religious cant. With a lofty impartiality, he surveyed both sides in a conflict nearing its end.
“Both read the same Bible,” Lincoln said, “and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.” That was not to say that the president was neutral about slavery. “It may seem strange that any men should ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” But “let us judge not that we be not judged.”
Lincoln said that he prayed fervently for the war to end, and yet in the righteous judgment of the Lord 250 years of slavery might require that the wealth accrued from slavery be lost and that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
But from this day forward, Lincoln concluded, “With malice toward none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and lasting peace, among ourselves and with all nations.”
That evening, five thousand people swarmed the White House, and the president shook every hand. Mary Lincoln, not always the most obliging political wife, promised “to remain till morning, rather than have the door closed on a single visitor.”
• • •
Two days after Johnson’s performance at his swearing-in, he appeared briefly at the Capitol again and then left town for the remainder of a special congressional session that ended on March 11. But if he was gone, the vice president was hardly forgotten. Around Washington, people were quoting a verse that concluded:
“O, was it not a glorious sight
To see the crowd of black and white
As well as Andy Johnson tight
At the Inauguration.”
Charles Sumner lamented the “frightful” behavior of the vice president and would have pushed for his impeachment except that the House adjourned and could not hear the charges.
Johnson’s letter to the Senate’s recorder made it clear that he himself did not remember just what he had said in his speech except that it was provoking “some criticism.” He asked for
“an accurate copy of your report of what I said on that occasion.” In time, his seventeen minutes were edited down for publication to a decorous six.
At the White House, Lincoln was calming fears about Johnson as best he could. To the comptroller of the currency, the president said, “I have known Andy Johnson for many years. He made a bad slip the other day, but you need not be scared. Andy ain’t a drunkard.”
Circumstance delayed the two men from meeting until the afternoon of April 14, when Johnson called on the president. His memory of Lincoln’s inaugural remarks seemed as sketchy as his memory of his own, since he urged an unforgiving reception for the Southerners who had betrayed the Union. Genial but noncommittal, Lincoln shook his hand warmly and called him “Andy.”
• • •
Henry Seward had survived Lewis Powell’s murderous attack, although the family was troubled by the slow recovery of his son Fred.
By May 9, 1865, the secretary of state was able to move downstairs to his parlor and receive Andrew Johnson and Seward’s fellow cabinet officers when they came to call.
Frances Seward had stayed in Washington to nurse her husband back to health, but by the end of the month she had fallen ill with a fever, and she became the patient. When she died on June 21, Thurlow Weed blamed the distress she had suffered over Seward’s ordeal.
As Seward grew stronger and could return to his duties at the State Department, he was finding, like Charles Sumner, that being attacked had won him a new popularity nationally. In Washington, however, the earlier protests against his policies were reignited, and some Radical Republicans were urging President Johnson to replace Seward with General Benjamin Butler, whom they saw as a martyr to the political intrigue in New Orleans.
While Johnson was resisting their pressure, Seward was warning France against trying to exploit the Civil War by installing its own ruler in Mexico. Bowing to Seward’s pressure, Napoleon III withdrew his French troops, and Seward found Great Britain ready to repair the strains with Washington that had arisen from its dealing with the Confederacy.