Stanton proposed to allow all “loyal citizens” to vote in this election, and he included Negroes in this category, as he had promised Sumner that he would, in order to break the deadlock between the White House and the Republicans in Congress that had so far balked the reconstruction process. Stanton did not know that Johnson had already told young Frank Blair that he “meant to … make the [Southern] states qualify their own voters.” When Stanton asked for a poll of the cabinet officers to determine whether the majority were for or against Negro suffrage in the Southern states, Welles, who, like Johnson, never realized that this issue could not remain static, objected that Lincoln had already decided this matter in the 1863 reconstruction proclamation. The President nevertheless called for a vote. The cabinet divided equally. Stanton, Dennison, and Speed favored Negro suffrage; Welles, Usher, and McCulloch opposed it. On returning to the cabinet after his close call with death, Seward lined up against votes for the blacks.
Johnson took no part in the discussion. He said he would reserve his decision pending further study of the question. It soon became evident that he had no intention of forcing Negro suffrage on the South. Stanton had fulfilled his promise to Sumner that he would include a provision for Negro voting in his proposal. But Stanton’s conviction on the issue was still plastic. He knew that Grant did not favor votes for Negroes and he recognized that the President’s mind was fixed. Stanton made no attempt to change it.8
During the next two weeks, Johnson, with some advice from Stanton and Grant, worked out two proclamations dealing with reconstruction and amnesty. The Secretary and the general agreed that almost anything was better for the Army than the present rudderless drifting; the President’s proposals would certainly serve as a stopgap until Congress met.
On May 29, Johnson put his plan into effect by proclaiming the appointment of William H. Holden as provisional governor of North Carolina. Every member of the cabinet assented to his exclusion of Negroes from voting for delegates to the state constitutional convention, which in turn was to determine the qualifications for future voting and the eligibility of persons to hold office.
At the same time that he issued this proclamation, Johnson issued another granting amnesty and pardon, with certain exceptions, to all persons who had taken part in the rebellion. To obtain this pardon a person had only to swear that he would henceforth be loyal and would abide by all laws and proclamations relating to emancipation.
Johnson excluded from the benefits of the proclamation certain civil and military officers of the Confederacy, disloyal Northerners, all persons who had taken the oath of allegiance under Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation and had subsequently violated it, and Southerners owning property valued at more than $20,000 who had voluntarily aided the rebellion. This reflected Johnson’s conviction that the planter class should pay for its sins. He left a way open for even the excluded classes to obtain relief, however, by allowing anyone denied the benefits of the proclamation to petition him individually for pardon. His policy was based upon an expansive view of national executive power, and the Army was the keystone of the President’s mechanism.
Meanwhile Johnson also announced the recognition of the Pierpont government in Virginia. In the course of the summer he extended his reconstruction policy to encompass Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Alabama. South Carolina, and Florida. He also confirmed the so-called “ten per cent” governments that Lincoln had instituted in Louisiana and Arkansas, and the government that he himself had inaugurated in Tennessee during the war.
Thus the reconstruction process, furthered by the Army, moved forward rapidly, and showed signs that it might be fully in operation before Congress assembled in December. Stevens, Wade, and Sumner, among many other legislators, became increasingly dissatisfied with the lenient terms that Johnson was offering the South, and unsuccessfully urged him to either call a special session or refrain from going any further until Congress met. Even men of moderate views complained that the President was usurping legislative powers.
Stanton and Johnson, however, seemed to be in substantial agreement on the course of affairs. The Secretary, Sumner learned, was convinced of the desirability of a moderate policy concerning the South.9 That Sumner’s information was correct is evidenced by a cabinet discussion on the subject of the “ironclad” test oath.
In 1862 Congress had prescribed that all federal officials must swear to this attestation of past loyalty as a requirement for employment. The “ironclad” oath was becoming a symbol of the radical Republicans’ views on what a proper reconstruction should be, for its enforcement in the South would exclude almost all Southern whites from participation in government.
Late in June, McCulloch reported that he could not find qualified Southern whites to fill the great number of reopened revenue offices there. Stanton agreed with the President that McCulloch should modify the oath so that it would amount only to a promise of future loyalty or waive it altogether. Similarly, Stanton paid out of army funds the salaries and expenses of the provisional governors and the subordinate officials whom Johnson had chosen to lead the Southern states back into the Union, though none of those men could qualify for any federal position under the “ironclad” oath’s stipulations concerning past loyalty. Each of the Southern governors had received a pardon from the President for their participation in the rebellion. In mid-1865, Stanton thought that when Congress assembled, the legislators would accept reconstruction as an accomplished and desirable fact and would sustain the executive officers in their evasion of the oath law.10
Whether such swift forgiveness for the defeated rebels marked the course of wisdom depended on the sincerity of the South’s repentance and the quality of the state governments set up by Lincoln and Johnson. According to some observers, the Southerners were thoroughly whipped and knew it. They were ready to rejoin the Union in good faith, recognize the new status of the Negro, and deal justly with him.
Other observers, however, saw conditions as less idyllic. To be sure, they reported, the erstwhile rebels had been humble in the hour of defeat, when they feared Northern vengeance, and had been most friendly for a while with the triumphant federal soldiers and the Unionists and seemed disposed to accept their leadership. But once convinced that they had nothing to fear, their attitude had stiffened. Unionists, Negroes, Yankee veterans now living in the South, and occupation soldiers were being ostracized, if not worse. Treason, far from being odious, was becoming the badge of social acceptability.11
In his office at the War Department, Stanton found himself daily more and more enmeshed in the realities that lay behind these generalizations. He thought for a while that the Freedmen’s Bureau, established as an autonomous unit of the War Department by Congress on March 3, 1865, would afford the Southern Unionists and Negroes adequate protection. On May 10, Stanton named one-armed General O. O. Howard, “the Christian soldier,” as head of the Bureau, an appointment that Lincoln had wanted made. The Bureau became a sort of welfare agency for Southern blacks, and it also took over the administration of justice in cases where the rights of Negroes were involved, as well as control of abandoned and confiscated Southern lands.
Howard was a conscientious, high-minded man, but some of his subordinates were not always capable, discreet, or even honest. Northern Democrats professed to believe that the Bureau was only a Republican job-making machine, whereas Southerners regarded it as a “foreign” agency supported by an army of occupation. Bureau officers reported on unfriendly Southern reaction to their work, and through Howard, Stanton saw these accounts. He also received news from army occupation commands of increasingly serious jurisdictional conflicts between the Bureau’s special tribunals, provost courts, and the state civil courts now revived by the Northern soldiery. Stanton took no sides in this dispute at first; the Bureau was the radical Republicans’ pet and he and President Johnson were careful, at this point at least, to stay in a middle course.12
But the situation in the South worsened as the summer of 1865 advanced. A
rmy commanders were irked that Bureau personnel bypassed them and reported directly to Howard. Bureau officers professed to believe that most regular army men were anti-Negro. Southern state government officials damned them both.
Grant and Stanton tried to work out these conflicts as they arose, but the Secretary was becoming convinced from the reports he received that Southern whites were unregenerate. Army officers complained that the civil officials of the restored state governments which they were nurturing on their bayonets, had little gratitude; state officers were refusing to protect Union Army personnel and veterans now living in the South from insults and, in many instances, from actual physical assaults by civilians. Stanton endorsed one such report from Florida: “Look into this; see the Gen.” Grant agreed with the Secretary that it was intolerable that American soldiers and veterans should be so rudely handled by the former enemy. They agreed, too, that authenticated reports of Southerners defiling the graves of fallen Northern troops, of deliberately plowing up Union Army cemeteries, mutilating the corpses, and destroying markers, could not be ignored. But the President, receiving these reports, apparently did nothing about them.13
The progress of Johnson’s pardon and amnesty program became the most telling argument to Stanton that the President was on the wrong track. After the amnesty proclamation was issued, Stanton ordered army personnel in the South to administer the loyalty oaths as prescribed. Many soldiers were disgusted at the sight of prominent former rebels rushing to swear loyalty to the Union they had tried to destroy. “Now the scramble is to who shall get down first and lowest,” Badeau wrote. Most Union Army officers felt that Southerners were knowingly perjuring themselves by their oath taking.
President Johnson, ignoring criticisms of his policy, continued to pardon rebels in an increasing volume. The business of securing these prized pardons became a scandal in Washington, and Stanton grew offended at what he saw daily in the capital. So far as is known, however, he protested only once to Johnson concerning a pardon petition. After reviewing the petitioner’s contributions to the rebellion, Stanton wrote: “It shows that if the rebellion were any crime his guilt is without apology.” But Johnson granted the pardon.14
Stanton was not, however, at one with the radicals, who did not, in any case, have a cohesive position for him to agree with. But he did have a professional dedication to his work and a personal loyalty to the military institution. Johnson’s pardon policy, he began to fear as the summer wore on, must return to power in the South the very men for whose downfall the Union armies had shed so much blood. Stanton admitted to Chase in mid-August that he was becoming apprehensive that Johnson would accede to the demands of the Southern provisional governors for a complete withdrawal of Union troops.
At his fingertips were the facts of what was going on in the South. Although the provisional governors reported directly to the President, the army commanders in the South and the Freedmen’s Bureau officials sent their accounts to the War Department. Stanton did not like what he saw, and he confided some of his misgivings to Lieber under the strictest injunction to secrecy.
In addition to being disturbed by Southern developments, Stanton disliked the fact that in Washington the President was cold-shouldering the Republicans who had elected him to office and favoring advocates of a soft policy toward the South, Democrats in the main. But though uneasy, Stanton was still honestly in support of Johnson. He deplored any talk of a break between Johnson and the Union party.15
Johnson, taciturn to the point of secretiveness, found that he was displeasing extremists in both political camps. Conservative Democrats condemned him for authorizing the use of any military force in the South at all and for sustaining the sentences of the Lincoln conspirators and war criminals such as Henry Wirz. They conspired to oust Stanton from the cabinet as the first step in redirecting the President’s course. And they dangled before Johnson the lure of the headship of a Democratic party reunited in its Northern and Southern branches and again capable of sweeping the polls against any contenders that the young, faction-ridden, and sectional Republican party could pit against it. For the present, Johnson held aloof.
Radical Republicans were equally perturbed. Not only was reconstruction proceeding in defiance of their expressed views, but party conventions, both Republican and Democratic, dominated by moderates, which met during the summer in various Northern states, pledged support of the President’s reconstruction program.
Inside Johnson’s cabinet, the moderates who hoped that the Union party coalition would assume a permanent postwar form, and who favored Negro suffrage for the South—Stanton, Speed, Dennison, and Harlan—concluded that the majority of the people in the North would not support votes for the black man. Stanton, in addition, heard opinions from Grant, Garfield, and others that the Army’s professional officers, rapidly replacing the wartime volunteers in command positions, were advocates of white supremacy and were unsympathetic to the Republican politicians’ plans for raising the Negro to the ballot box in the South. Temporarily accepting this conclusion, although he later became convinced of its error, Stanton shared his friend Pierrepont’s belief that the President was sincerely concerned with advancing the Negro’s welfare.
To differ with Johnson might drive him completely into the hands of the Democrats. At the very least it would lead to a split among the Republicans. There was no conclusive reason yet for Stanton to believe that the President’s basic assumptions concerning reconstruction were in error, though details were going awry. So Stanton and the others continued to support Johnson’s policy—or, more accurately, they did not oppose it—and Sumner complained that the cabinet “had turned into a company of courtiers.”16
Meanwhile, however, the trend of events in the Southern states strengthened the hands of Stevens and Sumner. When Johnson’s provisional governors began calling elections for delegates to state constitutional conventions, and it became evident that not many of the men chosen in the seceded states could qualify for political office without a pardon, Johnson continued to grant pardons freely. He let it be known, however, that the state conventions would be expected to take action formally abolishing slavery, renouncing the ordinances of secession, and repudiating the Confederate war debts. Johnson also wired Governor Sharkey, of Mississippi, whose convention was the first to assemble, that he hoped the delegates would grant voting privileges to Negroes who were able to read and write or who owned real estate worth $250, so as to “completely disarm the adversary and set an example the other States will follow.”
Though very few Negroes could have voted under such a provision, neither Mississippi nor any other state saw fit to follow the path of political wisdom by granting this or any similar concession. Northern moderates found reason for suspicion when a number of Southern states repudiated their rebel war debts only with extreme reluctance and worded their resolutions so as to make it clear that not they but the national government had abolished slavery.17
In the Southern state elections that followed the conventions, so many unpardoned rebels were elected to local offices and to Congress that even Johnson began to lose patience. As President, he could pardon individual past acts of rebellion. But in 1864 Congress had extended the provisions of the “ironclad” test oath to its own members. Few of the men that the South chose as delegates to Congress could swear to their past loyalty to the Union without perjury. Some stood charged with treason against the United States.
Johnson, again forgetting his theories concerning the autonomy of the states, pressured the South to choose men for Congress who could swear to the test oath. By selecting officeholders from among white Unionists like himself, the former Confederate states could have found representatives qualified for admission to Congress on the basis of past loyalty to the Union. Such strategy would have forestalled Republican claims that the South was unregenerate, made it impossible for the radicals to gain the support of moderate Republicans in excluding Southern delegations from Congress, and helped to convince most Nor
therners, Stanton included, that Negro suffrage was unnecessary in the South.
But instead of heeding Johnson’s sage advice, Southerners persisted in choosing their wartime leaders to represent them in Congress. In addition to being abysmally poor politics, this was an arrogant assumption that the only fault in the South’s treason had been its failure. Southerners, it appeared, expected to suffer no consequences at all for the rebellion. In Louisiana the Democratic platform called for Congress to grant compensation for the emancipated slaves and appealed for a general amnesty and prompt restitution of confiscated property. It seemed to Stanton, as to many other Northerners, that the South’s supplications were becoming demands. The South’s insensitivity to the fact that it had recently been in rebellion, and to the opinion of moderate Northerners, played directly into the hands of the Republican radicals.18
Equally unsettling to Stanton and other distrustful Northerners were the “Black Codes” being enacted by Southern state legislatures. To be sure, new state laws, now that Negroes were no longer property, were needed to stabilize the restless, wandering hordes of freedmen. In every Southern state, the codes uniformly acknowledged that slavery was ended, recognized the marriage relationship between Negroes, and allowed them to assume responsibility for their children.
Certain other aspects of these codes, however, struck Northerners as unfair and discriminatory. Negroes could sue and be sued and testify in court, but only in cases involving other Negroes. In all instances the codes put black workers into a status less than free if no longer slave, barred Negroes from jury duty and forbade their bearing arms, and in many cases prescribed harsher penalties for Negroes than for white men committing the same crime.19
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