From June to August 1865, the president awarded more than five thousand pardons in three states alone—Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama. Johnson regarded each application for pardon as the same as a rebel’s confession. He said privately that he did not expect to deny many of them.
Typical of the Southern pleading was a letter from Charles McLean, who owned a plantation near Memphis. McLean pronounced his white neighbors “well satisfied” with Johnson’s record so far, although he thought the current problems could have been eased with “gradual emancipation.”
Instead, McLean wrote, his “family Negroes,” who had been worth one hundred thousand dollars in 1860, were now a liability—composed as they were of underage children and workers who refused to take responsibility for their aging fellow blacks.
McLean warned the president that in Tennessee “the regulations of the ‘Freedman’s Bureau’ are a perfect failure. The Northern People do not understand managing ‘Sambo.’ ”
McLean assured Johnson that he felt “a deep solicitude” for his slaves. But he was seventy years old and was “at a loss to do them justice, for they have little self-reliance and no management, unless directed by some person of experience, and having a correct knowledge of their character.”
• • •
Months before Johnson’s State of the Union address, Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens had become alarmed by the president’s emerging policies. Stevens regarded the Southern states as conquered property to be confiscated. If Johnson treated them instead as legitimate entities that could be quickly resuscitated, Southern Democrats might combine with fellow party members in the North. Johnson might then build a new coalition of unified Democrats and the more conservative congressional Republicans. That strategy would relegate Radicals like Stevens and Charles Sumner to the margins.
In a meeting with Johnson early in May, Stevens recommended that the president take no action until Congress could meet—if necessary, during a special session. The election of 1864 had given the Republicans a majority of 42 seats in the Senate to 10 for the Democrats and 149 Republicans to 42 Democrats in the House.
But Stevens knew that his Radicals did not control their own Republican Party and, in fact, represented only a third of the Congress. And the fact that Johnson had been elected on the Republican ticket seemed to be counting with him for less and less.
Johnson heard Stevens out, but he appeared to regard his request as a challenge and ignored it.
With Congress still in recess, the president not only reinstated the leadership in Virginia, he went on to restore the governments of other rebel states on his own authority. Stevens could only look on aghast.
“I write,” he confided to a friend, “merely to vent my mortification.”
In early July, Stevens tried again to dissuade the president from acting, this time by letter. “I am sure you will pardon me for speaking to you with a candor to which men in high places are seldom accustomed,” Stevens began.
He wrote that among all of the prominent men of the North with whom Stevens had spoken, “I do not find one who approves of your policy.” They thought Johnson’s “restoration” would destroy the Republican Party “(which is of little consequence)” but would also “greatly injure the country.”
Stevens asked Johnson to let the military commanders continue to govern the rebel states until Congress could take action. He also called on the president to end his “profuse pardons,” which will “greatly embarrass Congress if they should wish to make the enemy pay the expense of the war or a part of it.”
Again, Johnson ignored the Radicals’ pleas, but Southerners took them seriously. At the war’s end, prominent Confederates could hope for little more than to be spared hanging as traitors and having their property confiscated. Acknowledging defeat, they neither waged guerrilla war nor challenged the law that had freed their slaves.
But with Andrew Johnson standing up to the Radicals and showing unexpected sympathy for the rebels, Southerners went on the offensive. Johnson had to beg the governor of South Carolina to cajole his legislature into ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, and Mississippi held firm against it.
As a delegate to the Thirty-ninth Congress, Georgia elected the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stephens, who had been released from prison in Boston Harbor after Johnson pardoned him. Once seated, Stephens would be joined in Congress by four Confederate generals, five colonels, six rebel cabinet officers, and fifty-eight former representatives.
• • •
By December 2, 1865, when Charles Sumner went to the White House to confront Johnson in person, he already knew that his earlier impression of him had been an illusion.
For two and a half hours, the president sidestepped the chasm emerging between them. At last, Sumner accused Johnson of throwing away the Union victory.
How? Johnson asked.
Sumner said that “the poor freedmen in Georgia and Alabama were frequently insulted by rebels.”
Johnson was no longer concerned with Sumner’s good opinion. Unlike Lincoln, he was not amused by Sumner’s superior manner. Pointedly, he asked, “Mr. Sumner, do murders ever occur in Massachusetts?”
Sumner replied, “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.”
Sumner had always written out his orations and practiced them in front of a mirror. Now he was reminded that he had never mastered the cut-and-thrust of debate.
Yet Sumner’s discomfort was not over. Preparing to leave, he reached down for his silk top hat resting on the floor and found that the president—perhaps inadvertently—had been using it as a spittoon.
• • •
A man less optimistic—or self-involved—than Sumner might have detected much earlier signals that he and Andrew Johnson were not alike, after all.
He would have understood that Johnson was trying to mollify several warring factions: Sumner and his Radicals; Seward and Thurlow Weed, who wanted to unify the moderates of both parties in a new coalition; and the Democrats who hoped to reclaim Johnson as their own.
Such a balancing act did not come gracefully to a man as tactless as Johnson. At one point, he told Southern allies that he might “disarm the adversary”—whom Johnson identified as “the radicals who are wild upon negro franchise”—by extending the vote to a small number of educated black men.
To Sumner’s chagrin, he had discovered that Johnson’s spontaneous ranting at Lincoln’s second inaugural was a more accurate guide to his thinking than any sober remarks at the White House. In his frenzy that day, Johnson had exposed how bitterly he despised the South’s plantation owners—not for owning slaves, but for maintaining a stranglehold over the economy that had kept him poor so long.
• • •
As December approached and Johnson prepared to send to Congress his first State of the Union message, Thaddeus Stevens and the other Radical Republicans were poised to examine his policies far more critically than Charles Sumner had been inclined to do. Lately, Stevens had asked Sumner to recommend a history—in English—that described how Russia’s twenty-three million serfs had been emancipated in 1861.
But his temperament did not equip Stevens for passive research. He devised his own plan for dealing with the rebellious states. Revealing it on September 6, 1865, Stevens became infamous throughout the South as America’s Robespierre.
• • •
From birth, Thaddeus Stevens had been stigmatized. When he was born on April 4, 1792, with a disfigured foot, superstitious townspeople in his family’s remote Vermont village took it as confirming the judgment of God; two years earlier, his brother, Joshua, had been born with two clubfeet.
Their father, a failed farmer and part-time shoemaker, turned fir
st to whiskey, then vanished entirely, leaving his wife with two handicapped sons and two younger children born without their affliction.
Thaddeus had been named for Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the Polish hero of the American Revolution, and he was barely past adolescence when word came that his father had been killed during America’s second war with England in 1812.
Throughout his life, Stevens praised his mother, Sonia, for her determination to make his education compensate for the misshapen foot he dragged behind him. She enrolled her sons in an academy in the town of Peacham and worked as a maid and nurse to keep them there.
Schoolmates taunted both brothers; Joshua responded by taking up their father’s trade and moving west as a shoemaker. The more truculent Thaddeus propelled himself to Dartmouth College, where he did well but was passed over for membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He tried to dismiss the affront as blithely as he ignored jeering about his foot.
After a year of teaching and reading law in York, Pennsylvania, Stevens crossed into Maryland, where there was no residency requirement. Treating his examiners to rounds of liquor, he passed the bar and returned to set up practice in Gettysburg.
His first client, a defendant in a sensational murder case, was hanged, a defeat that left Stevens a lifelong opponent of capital punishment. Despite the setback, his quick mind and daring courtroom strategies quickly made Stevens prominent throughout the area.
He became expert at calibrating how far he could indulge his wit. To a judge who warned him against “manifest contempt of court,” Stevens felt safe in answering, “Manifest contempt, Your Honor? Sir, I am doing my best to conceal it.”
Except for his foot, Stevens had become a conventionally handsome young man, almost six feet tall and admired for his luxuriant brown hair. He scorned marriage, however, and his friends speculated that he might believe that his deformity would repulse a bride. Then, before he was forty, illness left him entirely bald. He bought a wig, which, as he well knew, fooled no one.
With slavery outlawed in Vermont since 1777, Stevens had grown up knowing few black people, but Gettysburg was only eight miles from a flourishing slave trade across the Mason-Dixon Line. Stevens was approached by a slave owner who had slipped into Pennsylvania to kidnap his former slave, Charity Butler, and her two children. He wanted Stevens to establish his ownership, and Stevens took the case.
That decision said little about his politics. At the same time, Stevens was representing three slaves who were suing for their freedom.
When the judge ruled against Charity Butler, her husband, Henry, appealed the decision to the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court. Stevens prevailed again there, but afterward he never took the side of a slave owner. And within two years, Stevens was offering a public Fourth of July toast that was politically risky, even in Pennsylvania:
“The next president,” Stevens said, raising his glass. “May he be a freeman, who never riveted fetters on a human slave.”
• • •
Violent events seemed to provoke in Stevens equally extreme responses. One night, his guests at dinner included a local bank cashier who drank too much to get home by himself. Other guests helped him to his door and left him there, trusting he would get inside.
The next day, the man’s body was found frozen on his doorstep. Neighbors in Gettysburg heard that Stevens took a hatchet to every bottle in his wine cellar and vowed never to drink again. He also briefly joined the temperance crusade until he decided that legislation could not prevent drunkenness.
In time, his remorse eased sufficiently for Stevens to buy both a tavern and a brewery and to argue for low liquor taxes.
• • •
Stevens passed his middle years aloof from even those closest to him. He won more than a thousand cases, earned a comfortable living, and was elected director of the Bank of Gettysburg. All the while, he kept a note to himself: “He is a happy man who has one true friend, but he is more truly happy who never had need of a friend.”
Stevens endorsed that sentiment even after his renown won him election to Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives at the age of forty-one. His reputation included stories of a sharp tongue, which were relished by everyone but their targets.
One favorite had Stevens confronting a political opponent on a narrow footpath. The man refused to give way, muttering, “I never stand aside for a skunk.” Stevens bowed and moved off the path. “I always do,” he said.
Stevens visited his mother in Peacham every year but otherwise kept in touch with his family mostly with gifts of money and hectoring letters to his nephews, warning them against rum and indolence.
Thaddeus, Jr., reacted by flunking out of the University of Vermont and being expelled four times from Dartmouth. Another nephew, Alanson Stevens, saw his uncle’s unforgiving side when he fathered a child with a fourteen-year-old girl named Mary Primm.
The infant died at nine weeks, and by the time the couple had another child, they claimed to be married. As a public man, Stevens had cultivated a reputation for protecting the poor and friendless. Yet when Alanson was killed during the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863, Stevens disavowed both mother and child and prevented Mary Primm from collecting the twenty-four hundred dollars that her husband had bequeathed to her.
• • •
Another widow brought out Stevens’s softer side. Lydia Smith, born in Gettysburg to a black servant and a white father, had married a free black man, a barber, and they had two sons. When he died in 1848, she went to work as the latest in Stevens’s succession of housekeepers.
She was attractive, light-skinned, and thirty-five. Stevens was fifty-six. Whatever their relationship became—and rumors persisted past the grave—Stevens treated her in public with unfailing courtesy. He demanded that every visitor, including his family, address her as “Mrs. Smith,” never as “Lydia.”
As a prominent bachelor, Stevens had learned to ignore town gossip. One scandal had arisen when a young black servant was found facedown in a shallow well, with an eye badly bruised and unmistakably pregnant. Even though the dead woman, known simply as Dinah, had a lover, unsigned letters tried to shift the blame to Stevens.
As president of the local borough council, Stevens did not respond to the accusations, but when the anonymous campaign resumed in the press after another murder three years later, Stevens sued for criminal libel. He won the suit, and the editor was sentenced to three months in the county jail before being pardoned by Pennsylvania’s governor.
Since Stevens was also awarded eighteen hundred dollars in damages, the editor had to sell his house to satisfy the judgment. Steven bought the property and, in a show of humanity or scorn, signed it back to its owner.
Such experiences had inured Stevens to the speculation over Lydia Smith until late in life, when another hostile editor seized on their relationship to deplore the hypocrisy of the “ultra-gadfly, super-sanctified saint of the African ascendancy.” Even then, Stevens did not respond directly. But he mused with a friend about his predecessors in politics.
He was not so lewd as Henry Clay, Stevens said, and “less vicious” in his personal habits than Daniel Webster. His hostility to Webster dated from 1850, when Stevens had listened in the Senate gallery while Webster spoke in favor of the Fugitive Slave Law and described abolitionists as fanatics “leading silly women and sillier men.” Hearing those words, Stevens said, “I could have cut his damned heart out.”
Stevens rejected any comparison with Martin Van Buren’s vice president, Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, who had proudly fathered two daughters with his mulatto housekeeper. What galled Stevens was that he himself “with three times” Richard Johnson’s ability and “a thousand times his honesty” had been denied his place on a national ticket.
• • •
On his limited stage, however, Stevens played a prominent role. He had first joined the Anti-Mason Party as a member of Pennsylvania’s legislature. He enlisted in that cause partly because of the murder of a renegade Mason but also bec
ause of his distrust of every form of organized religion. To a young seminary student, Stevens once offered avuncular advice: “Preach the Gospel,” he said, “but don’t attempt to prove it.”
When the Anti-Mason Party dissolved, Stevens turned to the Whigs. In 1844, he campaigned for Henry Clay, who lost Pennsylvania and the presidency.
Four years later, Stevens stood for Congress. As a candidate, he received a letter from Representative Abraham Lincoln soliciting Stevens’s “experienced and sagacious” opinion about the likely outcome of their coming elections. Stevens’s reply was cautiously pessimistic, but he won his seat easily, and Lincoln lost his.
In the House, Stevens became a fiery orator against slavery, basing his argument less on morality than on the crippling effect of slavery on economic growth. He contrasted New York and Pennsylvania with Virginia and claimed that since Virginia lacked a middle class, it had become no more than an incubator for “selecting and growing the most lusty sires and most fruitful wenches” to supply slave masters throughout the South.
On the House floor, Stevens backed the admission to the Union of California as a free state and rejected all compromise. He swore that he would never vote to admit another slave state; he presented petitions to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law; and he spoke eloquently about the need for public education.
His boldness put Stevens out of step with his fellow Whigs, and he was not nominated for re-election. Casting about, Stevens fastened on the Know Nothing splinter party as his instrument for returning to politics. He chose to ignore any inconsistency in supporting a secret society after his years of attacking the Masons.
By 1856, Stevens was a delegate to a convention made up of Whigs, Know Nothings, and the fledgling Republicans. He offered only tepid support to the presidential nominee, John C. Frémont, but he tore gleefully into Frémont’s opponent, the Democrat James Buchanan. “A bloated mass of political putridity,” Stevens called him.
Buchanan won the presidency but with a divided party that left him and his Democrats vulnerable. When Stevens was nominated for Congress as a Republican, his success was denounced by the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Intelligencer as “Niggerism triumphant.”
After Lincoln Page 13