After Lincoln

by A. J. Langguth

  As the gunfire intensified, Horton pleaded, “Make any arrests you please. We are not prepared to defend ourselves.”

  A survivor reported that a man with the police answered, “God damn you! Not one of you will escape from here alive!”

  Horton was shot and killed. Around the hall, the 150 delegates, most of them black, grabbed up chairs and tables to barricade themselves as they forced the police outside. Each time, the police broke through again with their pistols firing. The few black men who escaped from the hall were chased as they ran and gunned down in the street.

  By the time Union troops reached the scene, 48 men were dead, all but one of them Negroes. Another 116 were wounded. Ten of those were police officers.

  A white spectator told later of a young white man holding aloft a bludgeon covered with blood and black hair and boasting, “I have just killed a nigger with that.”

  He scoffed when the other man warned him that he might be punished: “Oh, hell! Haven’t you seen the papers? Johnson is with us!”

  So it could seem. The president received a copy of the wire sent by General Philip Sheridan to his commander, General Grant. Sheridan wrote that while he was out of the city, Mayor Monroe “suppressed the convention by use of their police force, and in doing so attacked the members of the convention and a party of two hundred negroes, and with firearms, clubs, and knives, in a manner so unnecessary and atrocious as to compel me to say that it was murder.”

  When the White House leaked Sheridan’s cable to the New York Times, that paragraph was omitted.

  Johnson had received other reports from Mayor Monroe and Louisiana’s lieutenant governor, who assured him that forty-two policemen had been killed and only twenty-seven Negroes. They identified the convention delegates as rioters who had been inflamed by white radicals to rise up against state and local authorities.

  After Johnson read their telegrams at a cabinet meeting, Gideon Welles was convinced. “There is little doubt,” he wrote in his diary, “that the New Orleans riots had their origins with the Radical members of Congress in Washington.” To Welles, it was the first in a series of riots that the Radicals were planning throughout the South.

  The president seemed to agree. He charged that the convention in New Orleans had been “illegal” and that its “revolutionary proceedings” had set off the riots.

  But the massacre had horrified the country, and for once Andrew Johnson was criticized for not being passionate enough. Many citizens believed with the Nation magazine that “perhaps the most alarming incident in this sad affair” was Johnson’s response, “the coolness with which he refrained from expressing one word of honest indignation at the slaughter, in an American city, of unarmed men by a mob of their political opponents for political reasons.”

  In New Orleans, the only men arrested for the bloodshed were a few survivors of the aborted convention.

  • • •

  Throughout the spring of 1866, Charles Sumner had suffered from an illness so severe that his alarmed friends wrote for reassurance that he would survive. When his mother died in June, they wrote again. And yet Sumner’s response was curiously buoyant.

  “My experience,” he wrote, trying to buck up a constituent, “admonishes me not to despair.”

  Andrew Johnson’s political missteps may have contributed to Sumner’s good cheer, but the reason for his high spirits was more personal. He gave a hint in a letter to Henry Longfellow. Sumner wrote that he had “come to an epoch in my life. My mother is dead. I have a moderate competency. What next?”

  Sumner added mysteriously that when they met again, “I may have something to tell you.”

  His hesitancy suggested that his news was as startling to Sumner himself as it would be to his friends. Fifty-five years old, stiff-necked, and proud of his reputation for never compromising, Charles Sumner was considering marriage.

  Even more astonishing, Sumner was courting one of the most eligible women in Washington. Beautiful Alice Mason was the granddaughter of a conservative Massachusetts senator who had developed the residential enclave on Beacon Hill where Alice was raised. In 1857, at the age of nineteen, she had married William Sturgis Hooper, whose father, Samuel, was both her Massachusetts congressman and a fervent supporter of emancipation.

  At that time, her acquaintance with Sumner had been slight, but she was demonstrating the same fierce commitment to a cause. Encountering a Boston man who favored compromising with the South, Alice cut him dead when he extended his hand. “I don’t know you, sir,” she said.

  At the outbreak of war, William Hooper was sent to Louisiana as a military aide to General Nathaniel Banks. He took sick there and died in September 1863. Alice Hooper was left a widow with a young daughter, Isabella, she called Bell.

  Grief-stricken, Alice began to visit Washington regularly to work as a volunteer nurse among the Union wounded. As her mourning deepened into depression, her in-laws prevailed on her to join them in Washington for the capital’s 1866 social season.

  By the time her period of mourning ended, Alice Hooper had become sufficiently fascinating to local males that William Fessenden stopped dropping by for games of bezique. Alice was simply looking “prettier than ever,” he explained, and he was a married man.

  But Indiana congressman Schuyler Colfax, the Speaker of the House, was a bachelor and continued to call regularly. Colfax seemed to be a logical match for Alice. Forty-two and considered handsome, he had lost his wife in the same year that Alice was widowed.

  And for a woman passionate about abolition, his politics could not be faulted. The day that the Thirteenth Amendment had come up for a vote expected to be close, Speaker Colfax had broken with precedent to ask that he be recorded as “aye.” The amendment passed, and a visitor to the Capitol recalled that the “cheering in the hall and densely packed galleries exceeded anything I ever saw before and beggared description.”

  Another rival to Colfax had appeared, however. Senator Fessenden watched with disbelief at the gallantry Charles Sumner displayed whenever Alice and her companions visited the Congress—“a most unusual thing for him.”

  In the past, any flirtation would have ended when Sumner reviewed his finances. Since he rejected all political donations and gifts, he was living on his annual salary of three thousand dollars, plus travel expenses. Although he indulged himself with fine rented rooms in Washington and bespoke suits from London tailors, Sumner lived frugally and had amassed a small savings account.

  But five thousand dollars would not support an elegant young bride. Then, thanks to his mother’s bequest, Sumner’s circumstances changed. He inherited sixty-five thousand dollars to be split with his sister and a three-story house on Hancock Street valued at $10,500.

  During Sumner’s illness, Alice Hooper had called often at his Washington rooms, bringing the comforts of her experience as a nurse. Now Sumner could entertain the idea of marriage, and Alice Hooper was ready for a proposal.

  Washington gossips were appalled at the prospect of a beautiful woman of twenty-eight throwing herself away on a man nearly twice as old. No matter that he was still a fine-looking man—for his age. He was notoriously difficult as a colleague and impossible to imagine as a husband.

  Julia Ward, a red-haired young writer, had once accompanied Sumner and Henry Longfellow on an excursion during which she met Samuel Howe. After they married and she had come to deplore Howe’s pompous rigidity, she told him, “Sumner ought to have been a woman, and you ought to have married her.”

  With Alice Hooper, money could not explain the attraction. Her father was wealthy, her father-in-law was richer still, and her husband had left her and their daughter more than Sumner’s mother had bequeathed to him.

  Distasteful as it might be around the capital, Alice seemed as attracted to Sumner’s strict principles as Julia Howe was impatient with them. He was flattered by her attentions, and they had convinced themselves that their mutual high regard would lead to contentment. Sumner did, however, warn his f
iancée that “unless we are both satisfied that this union is to be a happy one, we had better separate now.”

  In September, Sumner wrote to tell an old friend that he was engaged to a “beautiful lady of 28.” He added, “I write this gaily, & yet I cannot withhold from an early friend the solicitude which I feel at this great change in my life. I am an idealist & I now hope to live my idea. But I cannot forget that I am on the earth where there is so much of disappointment & sorrow. But I have said enough.”

  Alice Hooper ignored Sumner’s jitters and the dismay of her relatives and went ahead planning for her wedding. The ceremony was to be performed by the Episcopal bishop of Boston in the house of Alice’s late brother-in-law, who had been one of Sumner’s most unsparing political enemies.

  By October 17, 1866, Sumner had thrown off his doubts. “Today at 3 o’clock, and at the age of 55,” he wrote to John Greenleaf Whittier, “I begin to live.”

  An hour and a half later, Sumner, his bride, her daughter, Bell, and her dog Ty left Boston for Newport and a three-week honeymoon.

  • • •

  When President Johnson planned a trip out of Washington for late August 1866, his stated destination was Chicago and the dedication of a memorial to Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln’s debating partner. Douglas had rallied support for the Union when the Civil War began but died soon afterward. The dwindling Northern faction of the nation’s Democrats intended to honor his memory.

  Even though Johnson would not be on the ballot, his intemperate remarks were turning the coming congressional elections into a referendum on his presidency. Friends, worried that his emotions had been rubbed raw, urged him not to give speeches along his route. Johnson overruled them and launched a two-and-a-half-week tour from Washington to Chicago and back again that became known as the “Swing Around the Circle.”

  In Philadelphia, the campaign season had produced competing political conventions. Radical Republicans denounced a session expected by the president to build support for his new Union Party as the “Jefferson Davis and Andrew Johnson convention.”

  As the party’s patron, the president was making creative use of the spoils system Andrew Jackson had introduced to Washington. Throughout the spring of 1866, Johnson had warned the nation’s tax collectors, postmasters, and other federal employees that they would be fired if they did not join his Union Party.

  Republicans who refused were replaced by Democrats from the party they had defeated in the last election. Fifty-two postmasters and more than sixteen hundred other officials lost their jobs.

  William Fessenden, surveying the result in his home state of Maine, complained, using the slang term for those Democrats who had wanted to go on negotiating with Southerners rather than go to war against them. Fessenden said that Johnson had handed Maine over to “Copperheads and flunkies.”

  • • •

  At their competing convention, the Republicans nominated Thaddeus Stevens for re-election to the House, even though he had not shown up for the event. No one could doubt Stevens’s dedication to voting rights for blacks. But he was also realistic enough to deplore the sight of Frederick Douglass, the celebrated former slave, arm in arm at the convention with Theodore Tilton, a white editor.

  “It does not become radicals like us to particularly object,” Stevens acknowledged to an ally. “But it was certainly unfortunate at this time. The old prejudice, now revived, will lose us some votes. Why it was done I cannot see except as foolish bravado.”

  • • •

  As he headed for Chicago, Andrew Johnson confirmed Stevens’s misgivings by playing to the underlying apprehensions of Southern white males. The president announced that he did not want the South to rejoin the Union as “a degraded and debased people.” Rather, “I want them to come back with all their manhood.”

  Johnson would be traveling with cabinet officers, including Gideon Welles and Henry Seward, who shared his policy on reconstruction. Seward, in fact, had become actively hostile to the campaign of the Radical Republicans for Negro rights. Privately, he said that he expected to see the former slaves voting eventually but that “the North must get over this notion of interference with the affairs of the South.”

  As for the blacks themselves, Seward did not pretend to have sympathy. “I have no more concern for them than I have for the Hottentots,” he said. “They are God’s poor; they always have been and always will be so everywhere. They are not of our race. They will find their place. They must take their level.”

  Seward understood the political price he was paying for standing by the president. Thaddeus Stevens, for one, scorned him as the “malign force” who was responsible for Johnson’s defection from the Republicans who had elected him. These days, Seward saw himself as a man “who has faith in everybody and enjoys the confidences of nobody.”

  • • •

  The president was also taking along Wisconsin senator James Doolittle, and he intended to enhance his stature by appearing with the nation’s victorious military commanders. A reluctant General Grant had agreed to make the trip, along with several other officers. One, George Armstrong Custer, was a twenty-seven-year-old captain who had graduated last in his West Point class but redeemed himself at the battles of Bull Run in 1861 and Appomattox four years later.

  Also on the train would be sixty-five-year-old Admiral David Farragut, who had secured his place in naval history at the Battle of Mobile Bay in 1864. When Southern forces hemmed him in during the battle, Farragut’s supposed response was widely quoted: “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!”

  With those popular figures at his side, the president would now make publicly the charges that Welles had confided only to his diary. In St. Louis, Johnson assured the crowd that “every drop of blood that was shed” in New Orleans was the responsibility of “the Radical Congress.”

  At first, the president’s off-the-cuff remarks about the Civil War and its aftermath were met with cries of “Hang Jeff Davis!” But as he once again compared himself to Jesus and named his trio of Judases—Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Wendell Phillips—the crowd began to chant, “Hang Thad Stevens!”

  The president seemed to be mulling it over before he asked, Why not? and then pledged that, since the South had been whipped, he was now “prepared to fight traitors at the North.”

  As each repetition of the president’s stump speech reached the Northern press, Johnson outraged more readers with his hysteria and sacrilege. A loyal friend, Henry J. Raymond, both a New York congressman and the editor of the New York Times, wrote that he greatly regretted Johnson’s behavior: “The President of the United States cannot enter upon an exchange of epithets with the brawling of a mob.”

  As the tour moved north, the brawling continued, but the crowd’s response had soured. Aboard the train, Senator Doolittle fretted that the president’s outbursts were costing his political allies two hundred thousand votes.

  A reporter from the New York Herald recorded the scene in Indianapolis when Johnson tried to speak above the din of protesters.

  Appealing for “your attention for five minutes,” the president was shouted down: “No, no! We want nothing to do with traitors!”

  Johnson tried again. “I would like to say to this crowd here tonight . . .” Men yelled, “Shut up! We don’t want to hear from you!”

  Supporters who continued to chant, “Johnson!” were drowned out by louder calls for “Grant! Grant!”

  After a few more minutes, the president gave up and retreated from the train’s platform.

  • • •

  General Grant’s own warm reception from the crowds did not temper his irritation with the president’s performance. One journalist got Grant’s sentiments almost right when he quoted him as telling friends, “I am disgusted at hearing a man make speeches on his way to his own funeral.”

  What Grant had said privately to General John Rawlins was that he “did not choose to accompany a man who was deliberating digging his own grave.” />
  Grant had other reasons to regret the tour. In Seward’s home town of Auburn, Grant’s carriage ran over a boy whose leg had to be amputated. In Niles, Ohio, he was thrown to the ground when the speakers’ platform collapsed.

  And Grant was drinking again. Accompanying the tour was Sylvanus Cadwallader, who had reported from Grant’s headquarters during the war and had come to revere the general as being “pure in speech and heart.” But Cadwallader also joined regularly with General Rawlins in efforts to protect Grant from himself.

  When subordinates refused to intervene, Cadwallader was not afraid to take a stern line with the general, once locking him in a stateroom of a riverboat when he was drunk and throwing his whiskey bottles overboard.

  His esteem for Grant prevented the reporter from filing stories about his binges. Rawlins told him of Grant’s repeated promises to stop drinking, and Cadwallader observed that Grant often went without a drink for months at a time.

  Rawlins made it clear to junior officers that any attempt to lure Grant into drinking would end their career, and when Grant’s Negro servant named Bill yielded to Grant’s entreaties and supplied him with liquor, Rawlins threatened to burn him alive if he did it again.

  Only Julia Grant required no warnings or threats. Whenever she turned up in camp, Cadwallader marveled at her “quiet, firm control” as long as she was at Grant’s side.

  At the war’s end, grateful citizens of Philadelphia presented Grant with an expensive town house furnished down to a wine cellar stocked with the finest vintages. Mrs. Grant had consulted Rawlins about her options but found him reluctant to get involved now that a lapse by Grant would not lead to battlefield casualties.

  At last, Rawlins advised her to engage a reputable broker, sell the entire stock, and put the money in her own pocket. Cadwallader heard that she had done as Rawlins suggested and that her husband never knew about the sale.