After Lincoln

by A. J. Langguth

  One bizarre tactic to win Ross’s vote was the threat to evict his nineteen-year-old protégée from her basement studio in the Capitol. A precocious sculptor, Lavinia Ream had been contracted for a full-length statue of Lincoln, and because Ross was living in a room at her parents’ house, the anti-Johnson forces tried to frighten Vinnie Ream into appealing to Ross to vote for conviction. But the young woman was the sister of Perry Fuller’s wife, and Fuller had sworn allegiance to Johnson before the trial began.

  As another point of attack, Ben Butler forwarded to Ross a letter accusing him of “being infatuated to the point of foolishness with Miss Vinnie Ream.”

  The pressure got only worse on the night before the Senate vote. General Daniel Sickles, removed by Johnson and looking for revenge, waited until 4 a.m. at the Reams’ house for a chance to argue for conviction. But Ross was out, pacing the streets of Washington as he weighed his decision.

  For breakfast on the morning of the vote, Ross chose to go to the nearby house of Perry Fuller. Then, just before leaving for the Capitol, Ross dictated a response to a telegram from Kansas sent by D. R. Anthony, a brother of Susan B. Anthony. An editor in Leavenworth, he claimed to represent a thousand voters who were demanding conviction.

  Ross replied, “I do not recognize your right to demand that I vote either for or against conviction. I have taken an oath to do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, and trust that I shall have the courage to vote according to the dictates of my judgment and for the highest good of the country.”

  On the threshold of the Senate chamber, Ross was warned that if he voted for acquittal, he would be investigated on a charge of bribery. He moved inside and waited at his desk while Chase called the roll alphabetically. When his name was reached, Ross gave his verdict so faintly that senators across the hall called for him to repeat it. The second time, firmly and audibly, Ross said, “Not guilty.”

  • • •

  A telegram from D. R. Anthony was waiting when Ross returned to his room in the Reams’ house. “Your motives were Indian contracts and greenbacks,” the wire read. “Kansas repudiates you as she does all perjurers and skunks.”

  • • •

  Men and women who had not received a ticket of admission to the galleries were waiting outside the Capitol, impatient for news. When they spotted Thaddeus Stevens being helped to his carriage, they called, “What was the verdict?”

  In a recent interview with a Scottish journalist, Stevens had already revealed the fury that he had restrained during the trial. If Congress did not remove Johnson, Stevens had said, “we are damned to all eternity.”

  Now bitterness and frustration gave Stevens the strength to shout, “The country is going to the devil!”

  • • •

  President Johnson had sent an aide to Willard’s Hotel near the Capitol to wire the verdict to him even before jubilant friends and appointees descended on the White House. Former Tennessee representative Thomas Nelson, a member of Johnson’s defense team, rushed to Johnson’s side, exclaiming, “Well, thank God, Mr. President, you are free again.”

  To a New York Times reporter, Johnson predicted correctly that the votes on the lesser charges would not change before the next balloting. “Men’s consciences are not to be made harder or softer,” the president said philosophically. The Senate would not “know any more about the law and the evidence on the 26th instant than they do today.”

  Before the Senate took up the trial again, the Republican National Convention met in Chicago and nominated Ulysses Grant on a moderate platform that did not call for universal voting rights. The disappointing acquittal had killed the prospect of Ben Wade as vice president. The convention turned instead to House Speaker Schuyler Colfax.

  On May 26, the second and third articles of impeachment—limited charges about Stanton’s dismissal—met the same result as the vote ten days earlier. With the Radicals routed, the Senate adjourned, acknowledging that the remaining articles would not be resurrected.

  As Salmon Chase left the Capitol, he was aware that his rulings had permanently alienated his fellow Republicans. But Chase was also hearing from Democrats who saw him as their party’s nominee in a few weeks. The idea had its attractions. General Grant was clearly the Republican choice, and Andrew Johnson appeared to have no support in either of the two existing parties and little prospect of starting a third one. There were dim stirrings for Johnson in the grateful South, but in the North, the New York Sun was describing Johnson as “insane and an opium addict.”

  Publicly, Chase claimed that “the subject of the presidency has become distasteful to me.” His three years of serving with conservative justices on the Supreme Court seemed to have tempered his philosophy. At the Treasury, Chase had shown that he could bend his principles to meet a crisis. But to pursue the Democratic nomination would mean yielding on a lifelong commitment to equal voting rights. At home, his daughter saw no conflict. For Kate, to have Chase in the White House outweighed any scruples about universal suffrage.

  As Charles Sumner surveyed the Radical wreckage around him, he knew where the blame lay: “Bribery and personal vindictiveness toward Mr. Wade have been the decisive influences.”

  Bribery, however, was harder to prove than Wade’s unpopularity. It was widely suspected that James Legate, a postal official from Kansas, spent his days raising money to pay off those who voted for acquittal. Pliant senators were offered fifty thousand dollars—twenty-five thousand dollars down, the rest when the verdict was announced. On the advice of Perry Fuller, Legate disguised his slush fund as money for underwriting a possible presidential campaign by Salmon Chase.

  Early on, the Johnson team had hoped to provide cover for Edmund Ross in strongly Republican Kansas by enlisting a fellow senator, Samuel Pomeroy. But Pomeroy was among the most Radical senators and no inducement would change his vote.

  For the six weeks after the vote on May 16, Ben Butler’s investigative committee took testimony about possible corruption. Committee members often did not show up, and Butler acted alone in questioning the witnesses, who included Thurlow Weed, Perry Fuller, and Sam Ward. Unrepentant, Weed admitted to conversations about bribery but denied he had followed up on them.

  By the time Butler issued his report, he had to admit that he could provide no proof of corruption. Charles Woolley was arrested, however, for contempt after he refused to testify. He was locked up with his family in the Foreign Affairs committee room and then in Vinnie Ream’s basement studio.

  With no conclusive evidence produced against him, Woolley was released. Butler did no better with Perry Fuller or Sam Ward. And although he developed promising leads against several senators, they had all ended up voting Johnson guilty.

  When an enterprising reporter for the Cincinnati Gazette took up the trail, he found more evidence than Butler had, but Henry Seward and others had taken care to insulate Johnson from any illegality on his behalf, and public interest evaporated.

  All the same, John Henderson could announce at his wedding that President Johnson was naming his new father-in-law the commissioner of patents. Presidential appointments also went to other men being promoted by Van Winkle of West Virginia and Fowler of Tennessee.

  Along with routine patronage, Grimes of Iowa got a less tangible reward. Before the vote, the president had promised him that if he were acquitted, he would name General John Schofield to replace Stanton. A thirty-seven-year-old West Point graduate, Schofield was enforcing Reconstruction laws too diligently in the South to please Johnson, but the president kept his word.

  Edmund Ross wrote to Johnson urging that he gratify Perry Fuller’s long-held desire to enrich himself as commissioner of internal revenue. Within three days of receiving Ross’s letter, Johnson had nominated Fuller, but public outcry over so blatant a payoff forced him to withdraw Fuller’s name, wait two months, and appoint him as tax collector at the Port of New Orleans.

  Because the Senate was in recess, Fuller could assume the office
, travel to New Orleans, and replace sixty-five Republican employees with 150 men beholden to him. Fuller also looked after the father of Vinnie Ream, making him superintendent of a porous warehouse system that leaked tax money. By the time Fuller was arrested seven months later, he was accused of bilking the government out of $3 million.

  Senator Ross put up the bond to release Fuller, who fled from New Orleans. The case against him was dropped.

  During Johnson’s last months in office, Ross presented him with a number of other demands for patronage. In case the president might forget his obligation, Ross did not hesitate to remind him. Pressing for one applicant, Ross wrote that the appointment was “vital” especially because of “my activities on the impeachment.”

  Nathan Bedford Forrest

  CHAPTER 12

  NATHAN BEDFORD FORREST (1868)

  FORMER REBELS THROUGHOUT THE SOUTH celebrated Andrew Johnson’s acquittal by pouring into the streets to set off fireworks and jubilant gunfire. Johnson’s Southern friends wrote to him of a new day dawning. They expected that the president would now be free to proclaim a general amnesty, one that would—in the words of a letter from Memphis—“relieve us of the miserable Negro rule under which we groan in despair of any improvement in affairs.”

  White Southerners who had supported the Union throughout the war were apprehensive. One such man, condemned by his neighbors as a scalawag, reported to an equally downhearted friend that “the eyes of the rebels sparkle like those of fiery serpents.”

  Half a dozen young Confederate officers would have disputed his description. Ever since their army had been disbanded, those well-born sons of Pulaski, Tennessee, had been gathering at a friend’s law office to complain about the boredom of small-town life and to look for something that would replace the excitement of war.

  Their town had been named for Casimir Pulaski, a European count who had come to fight in the American Revolution. The count had never visited Tennessee before he was killed in battle at the age of thirty-one, but residents of this settlement in Giles County near the Alabama border had wanted to honor his sacrifice. Its population of two thousand was almost equally white and black.

  Beginning early in 1866, the restless young men, all under the age of thirty, had been making a mild splash by showing up in costume at local fairs and public events. They wore white masks, long robes, and conical hats made of white cloth molded over cardboard. To communicate in a private code, they blew on a child’s whistle that each of them carried. Their first pranks were limited to hazing other eager recruits by blindfolding them and clapping on skullcaps with donkey’s ears pinned to them.

  As an oath, candidates were required only to recite Robert Burns’s lines from “To a Louse”: “O wad some power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us.”

  In choosing Greek letters for their name, the members upheld an American tradition that dated from the formation of the academic honors society, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1776. They settled on kuklos—or circle, anglicized to Ku Klux. When they added “Klan,” it was for its sound—“like bones rattling together.” One of the six founders pointed out that klan was especially apt because “we are all of Scotch-Irish descent.”

  As membership grew, the group moved its headquarters outside town to a house half destroyed by a cyclone. The Pulaski Klan was only one of the postwar clandestine clubs springing up throughout the South—the Constitutional Guards, the White Brotherhood, the Society of Pale Faces. To sound more impressive, Klan members invented fanciful names for their leaders. Their president became the Grand Cyclops, his vice president the Grand Magi. They called their meeting place the Den.

  By early 1867, a night’s amusement for the Klan meant riding in white hoods through Negro neighborhoods, claiming to be the risen spirits of slain Confederate soldiers. A Klan member might carry a skeleton’s arm up his sleeve, offer to shake hands with a black man, and ride away laughing as the horrified Negro was left holding the bones.

  With early reports out of Tennessee about the abuse and murder of Negroes not yet linked to the Klan, the pastime could seem foolish or degrading but not ominous. Southern newspapers enjoyed printing the stories, and even some Northern editors saw only humor in the attempt to terrify superstitious darkies.

  But to others familiar with Tennessee’s recent history, the night-riding could already have a sinister aspect. During Andrew Johnson’s term as governor, he had managed to protect those farmers in eastern Tennessee who remained loyal to the Union. But after Johnson went off to Washington, he was followed by Governor William Brownlow, a Methodist preacher from Knoxville who had once been imprisoned by the Confederacy for his Northern sympathies.

  Facing re-election in 1867, Brownlow needed votes to offset the Confederate majorities in central and west Tennessee. He and his allies—with no enthusiasm except for staying in office—pushed through a state law giving Negroes the right to vote.

  Captain George Judd, the Freedmen’s Bureau agent in Pulaski, understood the odds against peaceful elections. He wrote that white people “do all they can to degrade the Negroes and keep them down to what they see fit to call their proper place.”

  Pulaski began to attract violent white men who were assaulting blacks and any known Union supporter. Sheriff Bryant Peden still listed his former slaves as his personal property and boasted of whipping them as he deemed necessary. A young white man, widely known to be guilty of murdering a Negro, went free after his white jury acquitted him.

  As those crimes became too flagrant to ignore, Governor Brownlow struck back by sending in his state militia and requesting a squad of federal troops from Louisiana. Former Confederates claimed that Brownlow was plotting to manipulate the new black voters and perpetuate his power with military force.

  As Republican Reconstruction policy replaced President Johnson’s state governments, any lingering prankishness died away within the Klan. Members became determined to reverse the South’s defeat and safeguard the white man’s future.

  In April 1867, men from various supremacist groups scheduled a meeting at a Nashville hotel called Maxwell House to draw up a blueprint for subverting a state government increasingly hateful to them.

  Security was intense as they debated an agenda drawn up by George W. Gordon to reorganize the Klan and redefine its purpose. Gordon came to the task with his own grievances. As a young brigadier general with the Confederacy, he had been captured and imprisoned by the Union army.

  With Klan goals expanding, their titles were rapidly inflating. The South became the Empire, presided over by a Grand Wizard, elected for a term of two years and assisted by ten Genii. Individual states were Realms, each with its own Grand Dragon and eight Hydras. The organizational chart included a “Council of Yahoos,” its name taken from military manuals, not from the satire of Jonathan Swift.

  The official pennant featured a flying dragon with a Latin phrase that translated as “What Always, What Everywhere, What by All Is Held to be True.”

  The Klan’s penchant for secrecy extended to designating the months of the year only by eerie adjectives—Dark, Dismal, Furious. For newspaper notices of future meetings, days of the week were indicated by colors.

  The Klan creed rang with nobility. “This is an institution of Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy and Patriotism,” with its object “to protect the weak, the innocent and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal.” The Klan promised special care for the widows and orphans of Confederate soldiers.

  But prospective recruits had to answer ten questions, including whether they had ever belonged to, or endorsed, the principles of the Radical Republican Party. They were also asked whether they opposed Negro equality—both social and political—and whether they advocated restoring the vote for white Southerners.

  To lead this ambitious white resistance, the members named as their first Grand Wizard a forty-six-year-old Confederate lieutenant general, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had joined the
Pale Faces the previous year.

  • • •

  The oldest of twelve children born to the wife of a poor Tennessee blacksmith, Forrest grew to be a burly—and hot-tempered—six-foot-two. Despite only six months in school, he became a successful cotton planter. Devoted to gambling and horse racing, Forrest invested shrewdly and turned a profit as a slave trader, although it was a business usually considered unworthy of a Southern gentleman.

  By the time Forrest enlisted in the war, he was one of the South’s wealthier men. He joined as a fellow private with his fifteen-year-old son, but since Forrest’s extensive property would have exempted him from service, the governor quickly commissioned him as a lieutenant colonel.

  Forrest set up his own regiment, advertising for five hundred men with their own horses and weapons who wanted “a chance for active service.” He also offered to free forty-five of his own slaves if they would act as teamsters for his troops, and they agreed.

  Forrest won a reputation for a brawling courage. Sounding like Ben Wade in the North, Forrest once sent into battle those soldiers whose normal duty was to hold the regiment’s horses. “If we are whipped,” Forrest told them, “we’ll not need any horses.”

  At Shiloh in April 1862, a musket ball struck his spine, but Forrest managed to elude the Union troops who pursued him. As he recovered from surgery, Forrest prepared for his next campaign by publishing a challenge in the Memphis Appeal: “Come on, boys, if you want a heap of fun, and to kill some Yankees.”

  • • •

  Promoted to brigadier general despite the primitive spelling in his dispatches, Forrest won fresh praise for his skill as a cavalry officer and for his unsparing demands on his men. Disciplining a junior officer, he once had been struck when Lieutenant A. W. Gould’s pistol discharged. Lunging from his chair, Forrest stabbed Gould with the pocketknife he had been using to clean his teeth.