After Lincoln

by A. J. Langguth

  Gould ran off. Forrest brushed aside a doctor rushing to his side. “Get out of my way!” he shouted. “I am mortally wounded and will kill the man who shot me!”

  Forrest tracked Gould to a tailor shop where his wound was being treated and shot him. When Gould died, however, it was from the stabbing. Forrest’s injury turned out to be a flesh wound, and he was back on his horse twelve days later.

  Forrest fought his most famous battle in the spring of 1864 and never lived down his victory. Fort Pillow sat high on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River near Henning, Tennessee. It had been evacuated by Confederate troops two years earlier, and since then about six hundred Union troops had occupied the fort. Many were former slaves, others were white Tennesseans. Some of the white soldiers had deserted from Forrest’s ranks.

  While Forrest was riding around the fort to reconnoiter, Union gunfire shot his horse out from under him, and Forrest took a severe fall. But he was satisfied that his men could overwhelm the fort, and he sent a flag of truce with a demand for surrender. Forrest promised the defenders that they would be treated as prisoners of war.

  The Union commander sent back a note: “General: I will not surrender.”

  Forrest’s men scaled the earthworks, took the fort, and tried to stop the Union troops from escaping to the river. In the confusion, the defeated soldiers threw down their weapons and raised their arms in surrender. Some waved white handkerchiefs.

  It was no use. A Confederate soldier wrote to his sister that “the poor deluded negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. The white men fared but little better. The fort turned out to be a great slaughter pen. Blood, human blood stood about in pools, and brains could have been gathered up in any quantity. I with several others tried to stop the butchery and at one time had partially succeeded but Gen. Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs, and the carnage continued.”

  Even though other officers would testify that Forrest had, in fact, ordered the killing to stop, he could not shake off the accusations against him. Charles Fitch, a Union doctor from Iowa, was among those who absolved Forrest of instigating the bloodbath. But their exchange offered an insight into the general’s emotions after the battle.

  When Fitch requested the protection that was due a prisoner, Forrest said, “You are surgeon of a damn Nigger regiment.”

  Fitch replied, “No, I am not.”

  “You are a damn Tennessee Yankee, then.”

  Fitch told him he was from Iowa.

  “Well, what the hell are you down here for?” Forrest demanded. “I have a great mind to have you killed for being down here. If the Northwest had stayed home, the war would have been over long ago.”

  Forrest turned Fitch over to a soldier, but with instructions that he was not to be harmed.

  In his official report to Jefferson Davis, Forrest exaggerated Union losses and underestimated his own. He made no mention of a massacre but did add that he hoped that his troops’ overpowering of the black recruits “will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with the Southerners.”

  In its account of the battle, the Chicago Tribune described Forrest as “tall, gaunt and sallow-visaged, with a big nose, deep-set black, snaky eyes.” The paper reminded readers that the general and his brothers had been slave traders but that only Nathan Forrest with his “cowardly butchery” had run up “such a record of infamy.” According to the Tribune, bribery had won Forrest his high rank in “the women-whipping, baby-stealing rebel Confederacy.”

  When the scandal reached the White House, Lincoln’s cabinet agreed not to take any “extreme” action in the case. With the impending 1864 election in doubt, Republicans preferred not to launch an investigation that might disturb undecided voters.

  • • •

  General Forrest went on to victory at the battle of Brice’s Crossroads in June 1864. A month later, he was defeated by General William Sherman’s men in the Battle of Tupelo. Although shot in the foot, Forrest was able to lead his surviving men in retreat.

  Later that same year, Forrest and two brothers were among eighty residents of Memphis indicted for treason against the United States. Forrest posted a ten-thousand-dollar bond, and the quixotic indictment was never pursued.

  At the war’s end, Forrest won praise for the tenor of his farewell address to his troops. He acknowledged that civil war engendered “feelings of animosity, hatred and revenge.” But, he added, “It is our duty to divest ourselves of all such feelings.”

  When Forrest returned to Memphis, he found that without slave labor, his plantations could not turn a profit. As he cast about for ways to restore his fortune, Forrest was often called upon to defend his role in the massacre at Fort Pillow. His reputation worked against him when he returned to court in 1866, charged with killing a former slave working on his property.

  Forrest’s defense claimed that the victim, Charles Edwards, had been a brute who regularly whipped his wife; Edwards’s wife denied that he had ever abused her. Testimony developed that Forrest had become outraged at Edwards’s “impudence” and struck him down with an axe.

  Former slaves on Forrest’s plantation built fires around its perimeters to prevent him from escaping before the sheriff could arrive. When a deputy showed up, he assured the Negroes that justice would be done. But the judge hearing the case instructed the all-white jury that if Forrest acted in self-defense, he should be acquitted, and that was their verdict.

  • • •

  On November 25, 1866, Forrest wrote directly to Andrew Johnson asking that he be pardoned for his role in secession. Forrest acknowledged that “I am at this moment regarded in large communities in the North with abhorrence, as a detestable monster, ruthless and swift to take life, and guilty of unpardonable crimes in connection with the capture of Fort Pillow on the 12th of April, 1864.”

  When Johnson approved his pardon, a survivor of the battle protested futilely to Ben Wade in the Senate that “a foul fiend in human shape” like Forrest had received a speedy pardon rather than “the punishment which his atrocious crimes richly deserved.”

  Joining the Pale Faces, Forrest described them as being much like the Masons in their dedication to preserving society’s highest values. Although Forrest would become skittish about his membership in the Klan, witnesses claimed that during the 1867 conference, he became Grand Wizard in Room 10 at the Maxwell House.

  • • •

  The Klan was depending upon a tactic called night-riding, although an early example had occurred on a bright Christmas morning in the town of Columbia, north of Pulaski, in 1867. Police had told a group of parading Negroes to muffle their drums. When they protested, two Klansmen in red robes rode off amid rumors that they were rounding up men to enforce the order and that three hundred Klansmen would soon be on their way.

  The Negroes prudently ended their parade. The local newspaper hailed the incident as proof that white men would not permit Negro disobedience.

  By the following spring, the Klan was running notices in the Pulaski Citizen, defending the reputation of an organization still unknown to most of the nation. One early announcement carried a hint of threats to come: “This is no joke either. This is cold, hard, earnest; time will fully develop the objects of the Kuklux Klan!” Until then, members requested that the public “please be patient.”

  The wait was brief. On June 5, 1868, seventy-five Klansmen paraded through Pulaski. A Citizen reporter wrote that the leader was “gorgeously caparisoned” and “his toot, toot, toot on a very graveyard-ish sounding instrument seemed to be perfectly understood by every ku kluxer.”

  That flamboyant pageantry was attracting recruits from far beyond Pulaski. Dens were being set up in small towns throughout the piedmont, although less often in the larger cities. By the time the dens came together for a secret convention in Nashville, their leaders were bracing for political war against the congre
ssional Republicans and the state governments of men who had opposed secession.

  Officials of the Democratic Party remained hostile to Negroes voting. If it were inevitable, however, they hoped the emancipated slaves would follow the lead of their former owners. In South Carolina, where Negroes constituted a majority of the state’s population, Democrats refashioned themselves into the Union Reform Party and ran black candidates for local offices.

  But when black voters stayed loyal to the Republicans who had fought for their freedom, the former Confederates turned to the Klan. Persuasion had failed. Intimidation would not.

  The effect in Pulaski’s home county was immediate. Captain Judd of the Freedmen’s Bureau no longer believed assurances from “the best citizens” that the Klan had been established “by the young men merely for fun.”

  “Unless something is done immediately by the governor to protect the colored citizens of the county,” Judd wrote, “the cities will be flooded by poor, helpless creatures who will have to be supported by the State or United States government.”

  The Klan’s defenders pointed to the Union League—sometimes called the Loyal League—a Northern patriotic group that had come South with the victorious army. It, too, was a secret society, but speakers at its rallies and barbecues openly defended the Republicans and courted black voters for their party. Although there were no signs that the league promoted violence, Klan members claimed to find its secrecy threatening, and both groups began to carry guns to their meetings. Captain Judd was accused of running the League, a charge that succeeded in evicting his family from their boardinghouse.

  Advertisements in local newspapers were becoming a potent Klan recruiting tool. Typical was one headed “KKK”:

  “Speak in whispers and we hear you . . . . Hovering over your bed we gather your sleeping thoughts while our daggers are at your throats. . . . Unholy blacks, cursed of God, take warning and fly.”

  By the end of 1868, the Klan controlled several counties in mid-Tennessee. Republicans who had expected Klan activity to abate after that year’s elections found instead that it was becoming more random and more brutal.

  In later testimony, General Forrest estimated that the Klan had grown to fifty thousand in Tennessee, “and I believe the organization is stronger in other states.” In North Carolina, the Klan was reaching its peak of thirty to forty thousand members and the total throughout the South was estimated at five hundred thousand.

  A Methodist elder on a fact-finding trip through northern Alabama was invited to stay overnight with the state’s leading families, and everywhere he heard the same refrain: “That they would never submit, that they would never yield; they had lost their property, their reputations; and last and worst of all, their slaves were made their equals, or were likely to be, and perhaps their superiors, to rule over them.”

  They were counting on the Klan to multiply throughout the South and “rid them of this terrible calamity.”

  • • •

  In Washington, President Johnson was more concerned with the 1868 national elections than with the hooded terrorists in his home state. He believed that the people would ultimately appreciate his courage and took heart in early June from a victory by Oregon Democrats in their state elections.

  In his few remaining months, the president waited for the Democrats to turn to him as their nominee. But Johnson had left too many scars on the party—by running with Lincoln as a Republican, by appealing at first to moderates and by not staffing his government exclusively with Democratic appointees. And he was pitted for the nomination not only against stalwart party loyalists but against Salmon Chase.

  At the Democratic convention in July, delegates repaid any obligation to Johnson with flowery tributes—“entitled to the gratitude of the whole American people”—but on the first vote he placed only second and by the twenty-second ballot, far lower. Johnson had been braced for failure: “I have experienced ingratitude so often,” he said, “that any result will not surprise me.”

  Horatio Seymour, a former governor of New York, was promoting Salmon Chase, abetted by Chase’s daughter Kate and by the son of former president Martin Van Buren. Their strategy had been to avoid entering Chase’s name too early in the balloting, but as they hesitated, their moment slipped away.

  Realistic about the long odds, Chase had been concerned about damage to his reputation as Chief Justice. “Have a care,” he instructed his daughter. “Don’t do or say anything which may not be proclaimed from the housetops.”

  By the time the Democrats turned to Governor Seymour, Andrew Johnson’s delegate count had sunk to four men from Tennessee. Despite his claim that he would not be disappointed, Johnson threatened to sit out the election until Sam Ward brokered a truce with Seymour.

  As he filled out his term, Johnson not only paid off his political debts to men like Ross of Kansas, but he kept his word to the other conservative Republicans that he would no longer try to subvert the Reconstruction Acts or interfere with the army’s chain of command. In William Fessenden’s view, “Andy has behaved very well so far.”

  Although Johnson was not yet fully informed about the Klan, he had become more forthright about his views on race. In his final message to Congress, he wrote that even if a state constitution gave Negroes the right to vote, “it is well-known that a large portion of the electorate in all the States, if not a large majority of all of them, do not believe in or accept the political equality of Indians, Mongolians, or Negroes with the race to which they belong.”

  Over Johnson’s veto, Congress passed an omnibus bill to admit back into the Union all Southern states except Virginia, Texas, and Missouri; Arkansas had already qualified with its new constitution. Upon the admission of those states, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified on June 25, 1868. Johnson balked for three weeks but finally had no choice but to proclaim the legality of a measure he detested.

  The president could not be dissuaded, though, from pressing for constitutional amendments to alter the terms of federal offices. Over the advice of Henry Seward and much of his cabinet, Johnson recommended one six-year term for the president and the elimination of the electoral college. He proposed direct elections for the Senate, rather than having senators chosen by their state legislatures, and he called for U.S. Supreme Court justices to be elected for one term of twelve years.

  As those measures were being defeated, Johnson lost his most implacable enemy. Thaddeus Stevens died on August 11, 1868, ten weeks after the president’s acquittal.

  Much as Stevens had hated Johnson, he reserved a measure of scorn for the men who were drafting the Republican platform in Chicago. Stevens favored a new constitutional amendment—the Fifteenth—that would assure every American male the right to vote. To Stevens, that safeguard was the only way “you and I and every man can protect himself against injustice and inhumanity.”

  The convention backed away from his challenge. The Republican platform endorsed suffrage for black men in the former Confederate states but allowed Northern and border states to set their own policies. Stevens called that evasion “tame and cowardly,” but he predicted that the Democrats “from instinct and long practice will make a more villainous platform.” He felt vindicated when the Democratic platform denounced “Negro supremacy” and avoided the issue of voting altogether.

  Stevens recognized a disturbing trend in the recent Republican congressional victories around the country. Of the forty-four men elected from the newly enfranchised Southern states, twenty-six were Northerners—the hated Carpetbaggers. In the North, Stevens’s home state of Pennsylvania had voted down Negro suffrage. Despite its Republican majority, Michigan had done the same.

  And yet, Stevens was confident that a Fifteenth Amendment would eventually pass the Congress. With little enthusiasm he was also predicting the election of Ulysses Grant over Democrat Horatio Seymour, who had called the Emancipation Proclamation “a proposal for the butchery of women and children.” Seymour’s running mate, the abrasive Frank B
lair, Jr., was promising to nullify the Reconstruction Acts.

  In his last weeks, Stevens fretted that the Democrats might win and then refight the late war. “My life has been a failure,” Stevens complained to a friend. “I see little hope for the Republic.”

  Stevens turned away the clergymen who descended on him hoping for a deathbed conversion. But for a spiritist who claimed to have made contact with Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Stephen Douglas, Stevens offered a message: “Especially present my compliments to Douglas,” he said, “and tell him I think he was the greatest political humbug on the face of the Earth.”

  Stevens died at a charity hospital for colored people that he had supported. On his last night, Thaddeus Stevens—nephew and namesake—gave two nuns permission to baptize his uncle. Ten minutes afterward, Stevens died peacefully.

  Stevens’s will left five hundred dollars a year for life to Lydia Smith. Thaddeus would get most of his estate, but only if he gave up drinking. If that proved impossible, proceeds from the estate were to endow an orphanage that would be open to children of all races.

  Stevens’s body lay in state in the Capitol rotunda, watched over by a black honor guard from Massachusetts. As a final note of respect, his local Republican Party nominated Stevens for Congress one last time, and he was elected overwhelmingly.

  • • •

  The memory of Stevens did not die with his burial. New York newspapers acknowledged the sweep of his influence, but the Times, which had opposed him on Reconstruction, called him “the Evil Genius of the Republican Party,” and the editor of the Herald, while granting that his friends had found Stevens genial and courteous in private, concluded equivocally, “Publicly, he was an evil, but a necessary evil.”

  Despite his lifetime of disbelief, it was Thaddeus Stevens’s fate to be reincarnated. In 1905, an evangelist and writer named Thomas Dixon, Jr., dedicated his new novel, The Clansman, to the memory of “a Scotch-Irish leader of the South, my uncle, Colonel Leroy McAtee, Grand Titan of the Ku Klux Klan.”