There had evidently been a skirmish. One journalist later reported that he had seen “several negroes lying dead” on the sidewalk.
Someone had fired a weapon—a black man in the procession that had marched to the Mechanics’ Institute? A policeman nearby? All of a sudden, it seemed, a dense white mob had formed. Wearing white handkerchiefs tied round their necks or their hats facing backward so they could recognize one another, the police and the white mob attacked the black marchers, firing at them and kicking and clubbing them where they fell. The marchers ran toward the Mechanics’ Institute, hoping to take shelter there. The firemen arrived. They too attacked the marchers.
“I’ll shoot down every damned son of a bitch in the building!” a white man yelled. “We’ll go and tear down the Institute, and we’ll get a cannon.” The police in front of the Mechanics’ Institute blasted out the windows, and together, the mob, the police, and the firefighters pushed open the doors of the building. The delegates inside picked up whatever they could lay their hands on. “It seemed ridiculous to me that men should with chairs, battings, and pieces of railings contend against an armed force, regularly organized,” recalled one of the delegates. Black men scrambled up to the second story, but the police followed them, and soon more than two inches of blood were congealing on the floor. The uninjured jumped out of windows and were shot when they landed. The wounded were stabbed, their heads beaten with clubs.
The Reverend Dr. Horton waved the white handkerchief he’d tied on one of the little flags in the room. “Stop firing; we are noncombatants; if you want to arrest us, make any arrest you please, we are not prepared to defend ourselves,” he shouted. “God damn you,” replied one of the men in the mob. “Not one of you will escape from here alive.” The reverend was shot in the arm, one of his fingers was broken, his skull was crushed by a brick, and he died the next day.
Later, when a congressional committee investigated the New Orleans mélee, they heard that some men were shot while kneeling and praying for their lives; others were kicked, cudgeled, and stabbed after they were already dead. One old, gray-haired man walking at a distance from the Institute was shot through the head when a policeman riding in a buggy fired his gun from the carriage into a crowd of black men. Another policeman boarded a streetcar on Canal Street, aimed his gun at a black boy, and then dragged him onto the street, where he beat him. Bodies were stacked in carts. Whites and blacks were hauled off to jail in wagons and then thrown into small, rancid cells with the wounded, the dead, and the dying. That night, drunken white boys prowled the streets, breaking into homes. A son of former vice president Hannibal Hamlin, who happened to be in New Orleans that day, said, “I have seen death on the battlefield but time will erase the effects of that, the wholesale slaughter and the little regard paid to human life I witnessed here on the 30 of July I shall never forget.” A reporter cried in horror, “It is ‘Memphis’ ” all over again.
Memphis, early May, same year, 1866: During three days of violence, forty-six black men and women and two white men had been killed, and five black women had been raped, during an unmitigated assault on the black community by white mobs and white policemen. Homes, businesses, and churches had gone up in flames.
But cosmopolitan New Orleans? With its lacelike iron balustrades and narrow streets, its shuttered courtyards and courtly palms, its Acadians and Irish and its mixed-race elite, its commerce and its urbanity, its vast numbers of former slaves, its free people of color, and its lively and strategically significant port, New Orleans seemed a place of grace and pleasure. But it was a place of crime too, as well as simmering resentment: under Federal control since 1862, it was the city that Beast Butler had ruled with his crooked and steely fist.
Then, in 1864, Lincoln had contacted Michael Hahn, the Unionist governor of Louisiana, to ask him confidentially whether “some of the colored people may not be let in—as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.” Not only did Lincoln wish to keep a Republican base of power in the South; he had begun a kind of reconstruction of his own. The “colored people,” Lincoln had said, “would probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.” The next year, and just days before his assassination, Lincoln had stood on the second-story balcony of the White House and told his audience—John Wilkes Booth included—in public what he’d told Hahn in private: that certain Louisiana blacks should be enfranchised.
After the war, Louisianans had been among the Confederates headed for Mexico, their filibustering dreams of yesteryear transformed but not quite dead; they hoped to acquire land, and some hoped to go to Brazil, where they could resurrect their shattered Southern way of life. A number of former slaveholders had stayed put, however, and by 1866, the state legislature was so full of ex-Confederates and secessionists that it was often called the “Rebel Legislature.” Members included Duncan Kenner, the man who had traveled to Europe at Jefferson Davis’s behest in a last-minute effort to save the Confederacy. President Johnson had issued a special pardon to Kenner, who, by the fall of 1865, had repossessed his plantation, recouped his war losses, including his sleek racehorses, and, sitting in the state legislature, had sponsored bills regulating (black) labor. Investing in sulfur mines, levee construction, banks, railroads, and real estate, by the year of his death, 1887, Kenner was again one of the wealthiest men in the South.
To mollify men such as Kenner and bolster the ancien régime, Johnson had also ousted the assistant superintendent of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Louisiana, a man who supported black suffrage, and installed General Joseph S. Fullerton. Fullerton, one of the men who had denounced Rufus Saxton, was charged with returning confiscated lands to pardoned Confederates and enforcing vagrancy laws to keep freedmen from rural areas out of New Orleans. It was bad enough to have black soldiers walking along the streets in their blue uniforms; Fullerton didn’t want poor, hungry, unemployed blacks hanging around. The returning and embittered Confederate soldiers hated them—and hated the government that had occupied their city for so long. The Confederate veterans were welcomed, however, by the police force, and by the time of the July 1866 riot, two-thirds of the 550-man force were Confederate veterans.
The man who replaced Michael Hahn as governor, J. Madison Wells, was a conservative Unionist who had campaigned for Stephen Douglas in 1860, opposed secession, and served as lieutenant governor under Hahn, whose policies he would reverse, or so former Confederates believed, when Wells was elected governor in 1865. But he swiftly lost the support of the rebel legislature, whose members wanted to get rid of him and eliminate the Unionist state constitution of 1864. The legislature offered to nominate Wells for the U.S. Senate and pack him off to Washington, but Wells refused.
Currying favor with the more radical Republicans, Wells decided to back the idea of a new convention. It was he who had appointed Judge R. K. Howell president pro tem so that the 1864 Constitutional Convention could be reconvened in 1866. After all, Wells reasoned, during the 1864 convention, the country had been at war and many of the state’s parishes hadn’t been represented. He also said he would issue writs of election for new delegates who advocated black suffrage. This was their chance to pass it. He thus had two motives: to preserve the Republican Party in Louisiana, which was in danger of extinction, and to preserve the rights of the black population, which would in turn sustain the Republican Party.
So when black leaders and Republicans decided to reconvene the 1864 state Constitutional Convention, the Democrats of New Orleans were hostile, rancorous, edgy, and spoiling for a fight. The New Orleans Daily Crescent firmly declared, “It is our general belief, fixed and unalterable, that this country was discovered by white men, peopled by white men, defended by white men, and owned by white men, and it is our settled purpose that none but white men shall participate in its government.” And those white men would stop, by force if need be, any convention bent on ousting them.
Which is
what happened. On July 30, if federal troops had not arrived when they did—even as late as they did—the rioters would likely have killed all the freedmen and Union supporters in the city. The historian W. E. B. DuBois later concluded, “Reconstruction in Louisiana was a continuation of the Civil War.”
General Sheridan rushed back to New Orleans. President Johnson let it be known that he wanted the mob to be found innocent of wrongdoing, which Sheridan could not in good conscience do. For within three hours, over one hundred men and women lay dead or dying and as many as three hundred were wounded, perhaps more. Grimly, Sheridan wrote a long telegram to General Grant, which the president released to the press—omitting a key passage in which Sheridan said that what had happened in New Orleans was unnecessary and atrocious murder. It had been “no riot,” he had already told Grant. “It was an absolute massacre which was not excelled in murderous cruelty by that of Fort Pillow.”
IN WASHINGTON, AT the opening of the Thirty-ninth Congress in December 1865, just seven months before the riot, Republicans had refused to seat the representatives from the former Confederate states. Those states had to be “reconstructed,” to use the Republican term; yet no one could quite define what the term meant, and no person or agency had been given the authority to define it. With more than a three-to-one majority in both houses, Republicans in Congress believed that they and not the president possessed that authority—especially since, to them, Johnson had been restoring the Confederacy, not reconstructing the Union.
Johnson continued to insist that the seceded states never actually seceded because they never had the right to do so. That’s like saying a murderer could not kill because killing was against the law, quipped Thaddeus Stevens. But Johnson was intent on pursing his own course, which included his argument for states’ rights. To Republicans, of course, states’ rights was what the war had been fought to prevent: slavery packaged as a state prerogative. Inflexible, Johnson also insisted that civil rights fell under the purview of the state and not the federal government—and he bolstered his argument, paradoxically, by pardoning high-ranking ex-Confederates, restoring rebel property, appointing governors, and dispensing patronage. He wanted the reconstruction policy implemented to be his, or none at all.
And so he would not relent on the matter of citizenship for black men and women. The Thirteenth Amendment had not addressed the issue; in fact, by not granting blacks the right of citizenship, the Thirteenth Amendment left the door wide open for the Black Codes that soon followed, which prevented the almost four million freedmen and -women from making contracts, filing lawsuits, appearing in courts as plaintiffs, assembling—and, of course, voting. Thus the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery also managed to perpetuate the fatal compromise of the Constitution, which had counted the slave as only three-fifths of a person, and that is no person at all.
The Radicals in Congress approached the president privately, but to no avail. Johnson would not take suggestions about civil rights from the likes of Charles Sumner, a pretentious Boston intellectual who counted Longfellow among his close friends. Before Sumner left the president’s office, Johnson had made his feelings clear by using Sumner’s hat as a spittoon. Johnson also met with a delegation of blacks, including Frederick Douglass, to talk about universal suffrage. That did not go well either. His racism unabating and unapologetic, the president afterward railed that Douglass was “just like any nigger, & he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”
Johnson vetoed a bill to renew the Freedmen’s Bureau in February 1866. He was on the attack. He declared he wouldn’t sign a bill negatively affecting the South since the South was not represented in Congress, and since he was elected by all the people, North and South, he represented all of them, which was to say he also represented the South. In March, when Congress passed a civil rights bill intended to block the Black Codes by granting former slaves such rights as renting or owning property or making and enforcing contracts, Johnson again vetoed the bill. Congress overrode Johnson’s veto, but it was clear that the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, formed in January, had to hammer out an amendment to define and protect citizenship constitutionally.
Duplicating the civil rights bill, the Fourteenth Amendment conferred citizenship (but not suffrage) on all those people born or naturalized in the United States, and it guaranteed these citizens due process. The amendment also reduced Southern representation in the House of Representatives—unless, that is, a state was to enfranchise black men. For though the amendment was intended to appease all the factions within the Republican Party (not everyone had agreed that suffrage could or should be mandated by the federal government), it also encouraged each state to grant suffrage to black males for the purposes of representation in Congress, which was of course based on the number of men allowed to vote.
The amendment’s third section denied the vote to Confederate military personnel and former officeholders in the Confederacy until 1870. That too was a compromise measure, for a two-thirds vote of Congress could reinstate those former Confederates. The fourth section of the amendment declared Confederate debts null and void.
True, the amendment ignored the question of the confiscated land and sidestepped the issue of universal suffrage—but did not preclude it, or so Republicans hoped. The amendment passed both houses of Congress in June. And in July, over the president’s objection, Congress passed a new Freedmen’s Bureau bill that extended and shored up the initial Freedmen’s Bureau Act.
All that legislation meant that Congress was instituting its own plan of reconstruction by working out compromises between the radical and moderate Republicans—and in spite of the vetoes and the ire of the president.
“We have at last agreed upon a plan of reconstruction,” Senator Grimes of Iowa sighed in relief. “It is not exactly what any of us wanted; but we were each compelled to surrender some of our individual preferences in order to secure anything, and by doing so became unexpectedly harmonious.”
HARMONY SEEMED TO be the great theme of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “Snow-bound: A Winter Idyll,” which was published in early 1866 and, by the time of the New Orleans massacre, had sold an impressive 20,000 copies.
Though Whittier had written such popular wartime ballads as “Barbara Frietchie,” the abolitionist Quaker seemed now to conceal the war and its complicated aftermath under a blanket of forgetful snow. “Snow-bound” was a mawkish hymn to childlike innocence—or so critics later interpreted the poem. But Whittier, born in poverty, knew that childhood bliss had never existed—it certainly hadn’t for the slave—and knew too that there was much work to be done. “There is no possibility of a safe reconstruction of the States,” he declared, “without his [the black man’s] vote.”
Rather than an exercise in escapism, “Snow-bound” is an elegiac postwar meditation on loss: the loss of friends, the loss of youth, the loss of blinkered innocence. It is also a statement of faith that a new generation
Shall Freedom’s young apostles be,
Who, following in War’s bloody trail,
Shall every lingering wrong assail;
All chains from limb and spirit strike,
Uplift the black and white alike.
Scatter before their swift advance
The darkness and the ignorance,
The pride, the lust, the squalid sloth,
Which nurtured Treason’s monstrous growth,
Made murder pastime, and the hell
Of prison-torture possible.
Whittier had not forgotten the darkness, ignorance, and pride that had caused the war, and he too was disgusted with the president and the president’s fantasy of a prelapsarian white America. “I have been opposed to impeachment hitherto,” said Whittier, “but it may be necessary yet.” And then there was the president’s embarrassing, Barnum-like stumping tour, an unprecedented spectacle of self-promotion widely known as a “Swing Around the Circle.” In the late summer, Johnson traveled across the country to campaign for him
self and against the Fourteenth Amendment. “If he left Washington the ninth part of a man,” Whittier remarked, “what a pitiful decimal fraction he brings back.”
General Grant and Admiral David Farragut, along with Gideon Welles and William Seward, had accompanied Johnson in his Swing. Uncomfortable and pleading illness, which detractors took to mean that he was drunk, Grant often declined to appear on the platform with the president. Wanting to distance himself from Johnson, the popular general reportedly said that he “didn’t like attending a man who was making speeches at his own funeral.” And though he tried to stay nonpartisan, he told his wife that he considered Johnson and his speeches “a National disgrace.”
The appearance of such heroes as Grant at his side was of no help to Johnson, who anyway compared himself to Jesus Christ (they both pardoned sinners) and who answered hecklers yelling out “New Orleans!” that the blood of the New Orleans dead wasn’t on his hands but on those of Thad Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Wendell Phillips. And again, in Cleveland, when someone shouted, “Hang Jeff Davis,” the president shouted back, “Why not hang Thad. Stevens and Wendell Phillips?”
Johnson was turning himself into a buffoon. “If there is any man that ought to hang,” Carl Schurz said, “it is Andrew Johnson.” Senator John Sherman told his brother that the president had “sunk the Presidential office to the level of a grog-house.” Democrats shuddered too. “Does Seward mean to kill him off by this tour?” asked one of them.
Johnson was doing the job himself. Three members of his cabinet resigned their posts after he approved the formation of a new National Union Party (the “coppery” party, as one magazine writer called it) with Democrats such as Clement Vallandigham. The party was the intended antidote for Radical Republicanism, and though it attracted conservative Republicans such as Henry Raymond of The New York Times to its Philadelphia convention—Vallandigham stayed away—one of the vice presidents of that convention was the former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest of Fort Pillow infamy.
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