Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  In less than a decade, the political maps of Europe and North America and the Far East were redrawn, but not, as in 1815, by agreement of the leading statesmen; rather by the competing policies and surging ambitions of statesmen. Where the European leaders after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars joined to impose an agreed peace, 50 years into the Pax Britannica, Lincoln, Bismarck, Cavour, Palmerston, Thiers, and others (including the founder of Canada, the very capable John A. Macdonald) changed the world in consequence of less general wars and the riptides of international political trends and events. It was a process that could not be expected to maintain a general peace indefinitely, unless Britain and Germany could reach a comprehensive understanding to contain their natural rivalry. If they could not, the United States would ultimately hold the balance of power, whether it wished it or not.

  8. RECONSTRUCTION

  The problems of Reconstruction preoccupied the United States for about 15 years after the Civil War, without impeding its economic development or political integrity. Lincoln had contended that the Confederate states had never actually left the Union, as force of arms eventually confirmed, and stayed as free as he could of the “pernicious abstraction” of constitutional dogmas. Lincoln favored amnesty for all but a very few of the former rebels, as long as they took a firm oath of loyalty to the Union, and acceptance back into the full perquisites of statehood in all Confederate states where 10 percent of the residents who had voted in 1860 had sworn an oath of loyalty to the Union and the state had voted emancipation (which was, in any case, accomplished by constitutional amendment in December 1865). In the Wade-Davis Bill, which Lincoln had killed by non-signature in 1864, the Congress had sought to make readmission of states conditional on more than half the electorate taking such an oath. Arkansas and Louisiana had qualified for readmission under Lincoln’s terms in 1864, but Congress refused to seat their representatives. The vindictive fervor of the Republican congressional leadership was inflated by fears of a revived Democratic Party that, it was assumed, would be more secure in the hearts of southern voters than ever after the Republicans had crushed the late effort to quit the Union. President Johnson, Tennessee Unionist Democrat, was now left like Tyler 25 years before without a party behind him (but he was a much more honorable and principled man than Tyler). He was in conflict from the start with the Radical Republicans who controlled the Congress. It was a difficult and unstable position from the beginning.

  Starting on May 29, 1865, Johnson began to amnesty Confederates who took the loyalty oath, and well-to-do individuals and some other particular categories had to petition the president personally. He was generally quite obliging. He organized provisional governments for the remaining states that had seceded, and provisional governors were authorized to hold conventions of those who had been elected by those who had taken the oath. The conventions were expected to abolish slavery specifically and repudiate the states’ war debt. By April of 1866, all states had complied and in his message to the Congress in December 1865, Johnson announced the restoration of the Union. The Republican congressional leaders, led by Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, had other ideas. They declined to endorse Johnson’s actions and set up a committee of 15 (nine congressmen and six senators). Stevens considered the returning southern states to be “conquered provinces,” and Senator Charles Sumner declared that they had “committed suicide.” These men took the position that only the Congress could readmit states and determine the conditions required to do so.

  On the other side, the old Confederate states set up stringent vagrancy and curfew laws to curtail the movement of African Americans and to negate as much as possible the consequences of their emancipation. Congress had set up the Freedmen’s Bureau in March 1865 to assist emancipated slaves, and its activities were expanded to administer southern lands that had been abandoned in the wake of General Sherman’s armies’ devastating pass through Georgia and the Carolinas, and to provide military commissions to try those accused of restraining the rights of the emancipated in drumhead proceedings. Johnson vetoed these measures as ultra vires to the Congress in the absence of any state concurrence, and a violation of the Fifth Amendment requirement of due process for those whose military trial was proposed. The Congress overrode his veto in July 1866. In April 1866, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, and confirmed it over Johnson’s veto. The act affirmed the citizenship of former slaves, an apparently redundant procedure made necessary by the absurd and infamous Dred Scott decision. (Roger Taney had died in 1864, after 29 years as chief justice. And Lincoln had replaced him with Salmon P. Chase, who was closer in his views to Stevens than to Johnson.)

  The Court eventually struck down the Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional, but the Fourteenth Amendment enabled the provisions of the act, and revoked the three-fifths clause of the Constitution, which had attributed more congressmen and electoral votes to the southern states. Congress made the ratification of the amendment a condition of readmission to the Union. Tennessee accepted these conditions and was readmitted, but the other southern states balked. The midterm elections in November 1866, partly in reverence for the late president, ironically, and partly on approval of the Stevens hard line against the South, gave the Republicans majorities exceeding two-thirds in both houses of Congress, from which almost the whole South remained absent. The first Reconstruction Act, passed over Johnson’s veto in March 1867, divided the South into five military districts, which were deemed to be under martial law. To regain their status as states, the states of the South were to summon new conventions by universal suffrage of adult males, guaranteeing the freedom to vote of blacks and ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment. The subsequent Reconstruction Acts authorized the military to enroll the voters and to promulgate new state constitutions, regardless of the numbers of people participating. Johnson did as the new laws required, sending 20,000 soldiers and militiamen into the South, and 703,000 blacks and 627,000 whites were deemed to be voters. New conventions in the southern states met in 1868 and guaranteed black civil rights and disqualified ex-rebels from voting. By now only four southern states had not completed the readmission process. The Congress required them to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, forbidding disqualification of voters for reason of race, color, or former servitude, and by 1870 they had done so.

  In February 1868, the Congress, which had virtually taken over the authority of the executive branch by preventing the president from appointing Supreme Court justices and requiring that all military orders be subject to the approval of the commander of the army, and prohibiting the president from removal of officials confirmed by the Senate without approval of the Senate, impeached Johnson on 11 counts of defiance of the Congress and for bringing “disgrace and ridicule on the Congress.” The effective cause was Johnson’s dismissal of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a tiger whom even Lincoln sometimes had some difficulty restraining. (This was, in the abstract, preposterous, and Congress had managed to bring disgrace and ridicule upon itself.) Never was the tragic and untimely death of Lincoln more keenly felt. Johnson survived the spurious assault on May 16, 1868, on a vote of 35–19, one short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction. Johnson was inept at putting his case to the public, and suffered badly from being perceived as a southerner and a poor substitute for his illustrious predecessor, but he was, withal, the legitimate president who was trying to carry out Lincoln’s policy and was, in every case, on the right side of the Constitution. The impeachment was a mockery and an outrage, saved from being a coup d’état only by the courage of a few senators and the fair conduct of the Senate trial by Chief Justice Chase.

  In foreign affairs, Johnson had to deal with an invasion of Canada by a few hundred Fenian Irish Anglophobes at Niagara Falls in May 1866. This and a successive attack were easily repulsed by the Canadians, and the Fenian leaders were eventually arrested by U.S. border authorities. On February 12, 1866, which would have been Abraham Lincoln’s 57th birthday, Seward delivered the French min
ister in Washington an ultimatum demanding the withdrawal of French forces from Mexico, after Johnson had dispatched General Sheridan at the head of 50,000 veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic to the Mexican border. Napoleon III obediently abandoned the insane enterprise; his protégé Maximilian, the putative emperor of Mexico, bravely remained behind and was taken into custody by the Mexican guerrillas led by Benito Juárez, and executed by firing squad on June 19, 1867. This was a conspicuous humiliation for France, and illustrated the distinction between Napoleon III, an uncalculating adventurer, and his uncle, who led French arms from Portugal to Russia, and whose legend of conquest and wise law-giving generated the nostalgic pride that enabled Napoleon III to win election as president of the Second Republic, and recognition as France’s second emperor. In December 1866, Seward negotiated the acquisition of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, a sum appropriated by the House of Representatives, with the encouragement of generous bribes from the Russian minister in Washington, whose government considered Alaska a costly liability of which they were well quit. A U.S. Navy captain, William Reynolds, discovered Midway Island, 1,130 miles west of Hawaii, and claimed it for the United States. None could imagine that its name would be immortalized 76 years later, as a decisive turning point in the struggle for the Pacific in the greatest war in human history.

  9. ULYSSES GRANT AS PRESIDENT

  The Republicans met at Chicago in May 1868 and nominated General Ulysses S. Grant for president almost unopposed, and House Speaker Schuyler Colfax of Indiana for vice president, on a platform that repudiated Johnson and endorsed the radical reconstruction of the South. The Democrats met in New York in July and after 22 ballots chose former New York governor Horatio Seymour for president, and the former Union general Francis Blair of Missouri as vice president. Seymour had opposed Lincoln as too belligerent in 1860, and had placated the anti-draft rioters in New York in 1863. The Republicans “waved the bloody shirt” and stood on Grant’s prestige as supreme commander of the Union armies and the just successor to Abraham Lincoln. Seymour, a benign but indecisive man, was portrayed virtually as a traitor, and Blair did further damage to the Democrats with a hysterical campaign against alleged Republican pandering to African Americans, who were described as a “semi-barbarous race of fetishists and polygamists” who would be unleashed, to subject white women to their “unbridled lust.” Grant won, by 3 million to 2.7 million, 53 percent to 47, and took 26 of 34 states, 214 to 80 electoral votes. In all of the circumstances, it was not an impressive victory by Grant, and shows the innate moderation of a very large number of Americans, toward both the Confederacy and the emancipated slaves. (As before the war, Democrats had more sympathy for the southern whites than for blacks, and with Republicans it was generally the other way round.)

  Johnson departed Washington fairly unlamented, but had himself reelected U.S. senator from Tennessee—again, as in his impeachment trial, by only one vote in the state legislature; returned to Washington; and, after being left to languish for some time, finally got to give a stirring and plausible vindication of his public career and to warn about the state of Reconstruction in Louisiana. He was very warmly received in the Senate, including by some who had voted to impeach him as president, but he died soon afterward, in July 1875, aged 66. Andrew Johnson was an odd character, and far from an apt leader, but he stood for the Union in a secessionist state, and for reconciliation against a hurricane of mindless revanchism, and he was able to render some assistance to both fine causes. He was never tainted by the corruption that afflicted the post-Lincoln Republicans and always identified with the common people, of whom he was certainly an exemplar. William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s closest collaborator and one of the founders of the Republican Party and a very able secretary of state in the difficult times of the war, who helped eject France from Mexico and bought the future state of Alaska, retired with distinction in 1869, ending an esteemed public career of 40 years.

  Grant briefly appointed Lincoln friend and influential congressman Elihu Washburn as secretary of state, in which office he served only 12 days before retiring to become minister to France. He performed prodigies in this role, assisting in ending hostilities after the Siege of Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. He was followed as secretary of state by Hamilton Fish, a distinguished lawyer, opening a new phase in American foreign policy management. Prior to the resolution of the Civil War, the United States, always sensitive to its position in the world as it made its way, alternated career foreign-service men (Jefferson, Monroe, J.Q. Adams, Buchanan) with powerful domestic politicians who could be relied upon to judge the compatibility of foreign policy objectives and domestic achievability (Randolph, John Marshall, Clay, Van Buren, Webster, Calhoun, Everett, Marcy, Cass, Seward). Now, unbound from the ambiguities of the slave interest and secure in the world’s perception of the United States as a mighty and unified and rising nation, the powerful politicians were more often spelled by noteworthy lawyers, foreign policy being, it was imagined, reduced to mere negotiation of technical points in a demarcated world where the United States took what it wanted in its hemisphere and relations with other continents tended to be niceties of secondary importance. The Grant administration was little troubled with foreign affairs; Fish successfully negotiated the claims arising from British building and delivery of Confederate commerce raiders (the Alabama, etc.) for $15,500,000, far less than Sumner and the Radicals were seeking. The arbitration was something of an international-law pioneering act, as the tribunal included land-locked Switzerland, the new kingdom of Italy, and Brazil, an insignificant country in maritime terms. Grant’s desire to annex the Dominican Republic was not ratified by even the cabinet, much less the Senate, and Fish had to make do with vague noises about the Monroe Doctrine. He did get compensation for the Spanish execution of some Americans on an arms-running ship to the Cuban rebels in 1873 and gained approval of a treaty with Hawaii assuring that no Hawaiian territory would be surrendered to a third power, in 1875.

  The Grant administration funded the national debt; regularized specie payment and the circulation of paper money; frustrated a scheme to corner the gold market by Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, working with Grant’s brother-in-law, a lobbyist whom the president repudiated; and prosecuted the graft-ridden regime of New York’s Tammany Hall92 boss, William M. Tweed. Grant set up the Civil Service Commission to reduce the excesses of patronage and sale of favors and services, but the first head of the commission resigned when his recommendations were ignored. Though the president’s own probity was never at issue, he was unfamiliar with the antics of low-level political operatives, and scandal recurred in many places. When he ran for reelection in 1872, Grant replaced Vice President Colfax with Senator Henry Wilson as nominee, because Colfax was implicated in accepting stock from Credit Mobilier, a construction company formed to build the Union Pacific Railway, whose stock was used to encourage helpful politicians. Unfortunately, Wilson accepted stock as a gift from the same source as did, allegedly, rising Republican star congressman James A. Garfield of Ohio.

  Grant was reelected in 1872 over the erratic publisher of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley. Greeley began as a liberal Republican splinter nominee, complaining against corruption in the Grant administration, and about the continued Union Army occupation of the South, which was undoubtedly a very corrupt, and sometimes oppressive, regime. The Democrats also nominated him, but Greeley proved a naïve campaigner, prone to wild claims and easily embarrassed by some of the odd editorial positions he had taken over the years. His running mate, Missouri governor B. Gratz Brown, an old anti-slavery ally of Thomas Hart Benton and the previous Democratic vice presidential candidate, Francis Blair, further embarrassed the campaign with his conspicuous alcoholism, at one point in a campaign picnic trying to butter a watermelon. Grant stood as the victor of the war, a hero and a wise president untouched by the shortcomings of some of his officials, and was massively supported by some of the lions of the private sector, including John Jacob As
tor and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Grant won, 3.6 million to 2.8 million, 56 percent to 44 percent, 286 electoral votes to 86. (Greeley died after the election but before the Electoral College met, and his votes were scattered among Brown, future vice president Hendricks, and others.)

  The secretary of the Treasury, WA. Richardson, resigned in 1874 to avoid censure by Congress, and Grant intervened personally to prevent the conviction of his private secretary, General O.E. Babcock, for participating in an embezzlement scheme in the collection of tax on bottled liquor. The secretary of war, W.W. Belknap, resigned in 1876 to avoid impeachment for taking bribes in the sale of Indian trading posts. (The whole Bureau of Indian Affairs was honeycombed with corruption for many decades.) Apart from the repeated problems of lassitude over official conflicts of interest, it was a competent administration that allowed the country to get on with economic growth, pell-mell industrial expansion, and settlement of the West, despite the death of General George Armstrong Custer and 264 of his cavalrymen, killed at the Battle of the Little Big Horn on June 26, 1876, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, after 15,000 gold prospectors had invaded Indian territory. (This was effectively the last armed stand of the Indians.) The failure of the financial house of Jay Cooke in 1873 caused a financial panic that required about two years for a full recovery. But taxes and debt were both steadily reduced and Grant represented victory, peace, and prosperity. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 banned all racial discrimination, but in 1883 the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had no ability to protect civil rights from the actions of individuals, as opposed to state governments, which did have such a right (but in the South were unlikely to use it). Federal efforts to protect the civil rights of African Americans now effectively stopped for almost 80 years.