Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  No new national party was formed. New Orleans and the “Swing Around the Circle” had irreparably damaged Johnson. Republicans swept into office in the congressional elections in November, gaining a two-thirds majority in the House and the Senate. New Orleans had been proof that his policy had failed, was failing, would fail. He was weak, vain, and vulgar. The London Spectator called him blind and crazy. James Gordon Bennett and his conservative New York Herald abandoned him. He was a bully, a fool, an autocrat. He had usurped power not delegated to him by appointing provisional Southern governors, for instance, and prescribing the terms of reconstruction, such as pardons for former rebels. These were misdemeanors if not high crimes, and the man was responsible for the New Orleans massacre, make no mistake. The noisy Beast, Benjamin Butler, began to call for the president’s impeachment.

  Thomas Nast, the popular caricaturist for the widely circulating Harper’s Weekly, lambasted Johnson as “King Andy,” the regent presiding over the promised execution of Thaddeus Stevens, whose head is on the chopping block. Waiting in line behind him are such other leaders as Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, Benjamin Butler, and Anna Dickinson. At the end of the line is Nast himself and his sketchbook.

  Born in Germany in 1840, the rather dapper and plump idealist had been hired by Harper’s Weekly in 1862 as an illustrator, and though he had also been drawing for magazines such as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News, Harper’s Weekly would be his main forum. During the war, he was befriended by officers such as Philip Sheridan, who invited him to set up shop in his headquarters, and he drew warm campfires and domestic scenes intended to bolster the morale of both soldier and civilian. “Thomas Nast has been our best recruiting agent,” Lincoln reputedly said. He invented Santa Claus in 1862 as a jolly fat man draped in the Stars and Stripes.

  After the war, combining coruscating satire with a bit less patriotic corn, Nast often referred in his cartoons to the New Orleans bloodbath. In a cartoon he called “The Massacre of the Innocents,” the imperial Andy, wrapped in a ceremonial toga, impassively watches the slaughter below from his balcony seat in the “Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum.” A hawk-nosed Secretary Seward bends over him, his minister-in-waiting. Secretary of the Navy Welles leans over the balustrade, and with his long curls partly concealed under his helmet, General George Armstrong Custer looks on. In the lower left hand of the cartoon, General Ulysses Grant holds back General Philip Sheridan, who seems to want to help.

  Nast joined forces with the humorist writer David Ross Locke, better known to newspaper readers as Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby, to publish Andy’s Trip to the West, Together with a Life of Its Hero. Nast and Locke together ridiculed Johnson as the president who throws the Constitution out the window while a citizen asks, in one cartoon, “How about New Orleans?” As Nasby’s Johnson explained, “I have great confidence in the American people, all except Members of Congress, Unionists and Niggers; they are all traitors, and I mean to fight them with the help of General Grant.”

  WHETHER THE TAILOR from Tennessee had been seduced by the planter class he had despised, whether his racism had upended his judgment, whether his Democratic animus against the Republican Party was deep-rooted and long-standing, whether he was trying to do right by the light in which he saw it, or whether his combination of obstinacy, paranoia, and vanity had prevented him from working with Congress is difficult to say.

  Yet the matter went deeper than petty policies, personalities, or any strict constructionist reading of the Constitution. Those were important issues, to be sure, but there was also a feeling of postwar disquiet. The corpses had been tallied, or they were being tallied. The figures were horrifying. Clara Barton was looking for missing soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of unknown soldiers lay in undocumented, unknown places. “These poor men have lost not only their lives,” said Barton, “but the very record of their death.”

  Those in the North who had fought in the war, those who had sewn for it and made bandages and scoured the bloody fields for their loved ones, or those who had just supported it needed to feel the war had meaning. And for the sake of those who perished in unmarked graves, it was necessary to verify again that theirs had been a great cause, a real cause, an important and just cause. “What like a bullet,” Melville exclaimed, “can undeceive!” To James Russell Lowell, then, the war had been fought—it had had to be fought—“as an effort of the ideal America.”

  “If we had looked upon the war as a mere trial of physical strength between two rival sections of the country,” Lowell said, “we should have been the first to oppose it, as a wicked waste of treasure and blood. But it was something much deeper than this.”

  Johnson had spoiled that, what “with his paltry offer of ‘my policy,’ in exchange for the logical consequences of all this devotion and this sacrifice. What is any one man’s policy,” Lowell continued, “and especially any one weak man’s policy, against the settled drift of a nation’s conviction, conscience, and instinct?” Even the veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the person most often associated with postwar skepticism, could lace his cynicism with nostalgia. War had been fought by men touched with fire. “To fight out a war,” Holmes said, “you must believe in something and want something with all your might.”

  Conviction in the rightness of the cause despite the carnage and cruelty that resulted had to be an article of faith maintained, and Johnson seemed to undermine the very reasons for the war. That was intolerable. And it might account for why certain Republicans began to seek the inexpedient expedient of pushing him out of office when another presidential election would soon be on the horizon.

  Thaddeus Stevens, the acerbic congressman from Pennsylvania, who hurled epithet after cutting epithet at Johnson then and later, became the poster boy for Radical Republican obduracy. A clever parliamentarian with an acid tongue, a sincere abolitionist who believed secession to be treason and slavery a moral outrage, Stevens had in his long career favored colonization, but he deplored the Fugitive Slave Act and fought it with force and rigor. He unfailingly protected runaway men and women in his native Pennsylvania and in the 1852 Christiana case had courageously defended the men charged with killing and wounding would-be captors of runaways. For that apostasy, he had briefly lost his congressional seat. But when he returned to the House of Representatives during the war, he was the chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, which oversaw the difficult task of financing the war, and as its chair, worked hard to make sure that former slaves were armed—and freed.

  Afterward, he was the first chairman of the Appropriations Committee, which monitored Reconstruction expenditures, and later, as a member of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, he fought hard and consistently for black suffrage and equal rights. As a result, he was the butt of a great deal of ridicule and opprobrium. Considered the kind of ideologue whose bleak face, Lincoln once said, was always “set Zionsward,” Stevens was certain of himself and also an unafraid, unprejudiced, formidable, and farsighted leader. He insisted on black suffrage, on the distribution of confiscated land to the freedmen, and on Southern economic development—and not necessarily for the benefit of the Northern speculator or entrepreneur, though he was accused of that. When his colleague from Pennsylvania William Kelley importuned Congress to aid a Northern railroad, claiming that it would help impoverished freedmen, Stevens tartly asked, “May I ask my friend how many of these starving people he thinks are stockholders in this road?”

  Stevens continued to press the issue of land redistribution regardless of opposition from the more moderate members of his own party. The redistribution of land was a radical measure, for it would drastically realign the propertied classes in the South. The New York Times protested that land redistribution would also “strip the Southern [white] people of the little property the war has left them” and “prolong the derangements of industry, the suspension of business and the general prostration and suffering of the Southern states.” Stevens believed, however, that racism motivated such arguments.
“A deep-seated prejudice against races has disfigured the human mind for ages,” he said. “For two centuries it has oppressed the black man and held him in bondage after white slavery had ceased to exist. Now it deprives him of every right in the Southern States. We have joined in inflicting these wrongs.”

  No more. “This doctrine of human equality may be unpopular with besotted ignorance,” he declared. “But, popular or unpopular, I shall stand by it until I am relieved of the unprofitable labors of earth.” He was true to his word. As one historian later noted, when Stevens died, so did an abiding commitment to racial justice.

  Because of that commitment, Stevens was described as a ferocious character straight out of Hawthorne, his “whole countenance,” said one contemporary, “from the grand arched forehead to the hard chin . . . the very ideal of cold, pitiless intellect.” And in spite of his great commitment to social justice and a better life for the poor, powerless and abused, his prevailing mood was one of hopelessness. Just before his death, when he learned that the cemetery plot he had purchased in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, did not allow black men and women to be buried there, he sold the plot and bought one in the integrated Schreiner Cemetery near Lancaster, stipulating that the inscription on his gravestone read “I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited by charter rules as to race, I have chosen it that I might be enabled to illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life— equality of man before his Creator.”

  Yet for years Stevens would be remembered as a diabolical revolutionary who, along with radical senators such as Ben Wade, waged a fanatic’s campaign against property owners in an effort to unite blacks and poor whites against the planter class. The mixed-race (then called mulatto) woman living with him could not have been his housekeeper but must have been his mistress; and his clubfoot, a birth defect, was surely the sign of the devil. When the novelist Thomas Dixon and the filmmaker D. W. Griffith portrayed him, thinly disguised, in The Clansman and in The Birth of a Nation, he appeared as a scowling cripple of lascivious tastes and pernicious intent who wore an awful wig atop his tyrannical head.

  ALTERNATIONS OF GRIEF and jubilation, disillusion and high moral purpose—what Melville called wail and triumph in his poetic Battle-Pieces, published in 1866—surged through the North after Appomattox and Lincoln’s death. Whitman recalled the white skeletons of young men, “debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,” but he also remembered them in the “glad serenades” of meaning, eternity, nature, regeneration. It was not senseless death if meaning could be wrested from it—first, in retribution, with the executions of the alleged Lincoln conspirators and the Andersonville prison commandant, Captain Wirz.

  The craving for such overt retribution did not last, and in fact, Andrew Johnson and opponents of the Radical Republicans accused the friends of the freedmen of desiring only vengeance, not justice. Meaning had to be found elsewhere. For Johnson, it was in a restored white Union. For the Radicals, it was in Reconstruction, suffrage, fairness.

  In the South, where there was little jubilation, meaning would be located elsewhere: in the return of home rule. For in the South there was poverty and untold distress among white and black, and with such poverty and distress came anger, violence, the blood on the streets of Memphis and New Orleans, the bashed heads, the hardened hearts. In Columbia, South Carolina, which had been burned, the poet Henry Timrod told a friend in 1866 that for the last year his life had been one of “beggary, starvation, death, bitter grief, utter want of hope!” He had been selling furniture and heirlooms to buy food: “we have eaten two silver pitchers, one or two dozen silver forks, several sofas, innumerable chairs, and a huge—bedstead!!” The next year, just months before he died of tuberculosis, he wrote the ode to the Confederate dead recited at Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston, a poem commemorating the valorous “martyrs of a fallen cause,” never to be forgotten.

  The elegiac Timrod was not alone in sprinkling perfume over the defeated South. The former secessionist and prolific writer Edward Pollard produced his best-selling version of what had happened in The Lost Cause, explaining how the garish and clattering North had coveted power and wealth while the South had defended liberty, individuality, honor. And slavery? It had been nothing more than a pretext for war, Pollard claimed; the war’s real cause had been the incompatibility of separate civilizations.

  To Pollard that remained the case: the North seeking power, the South a stalwart champion of liberty. “The extreme Black Republican party” aimed “to disfranchise the whole Southern people, to force negro suffrage upon the South, to prevent the South from being represented in Congress so as to perpetuate the power of the Radicals, and afford them the means of governing the Southern States as conquered and subjugated territories.” As Henry Timrod had said, Thaddeus Stevens, if he could, would outlaw the changing seasons.

  For Pollard and the others who would write magnolia-scented history, Lee had been nobler in defeat than Grant in his victory, Lincoln’s assassin had been indefensible but brave, the Confederates were the finer men and, best of all, the South had abandoned the contest of the last four years only to resume it in a wider arena: in its literature, manners, intellect, refinement, in its very civilization. Defeat was victory, failure the measure of grace, fortitude the hope and watchword of the future. As James Branch Cabell would say, “No history is a matter of record; it is a matter of faith.”

  With Pollard succoring the destitute and defeated Southerner, the Confederacy and its cause were now writing history. Meanwhile, Pollard gave the Northerner a warning. “Civil wars, like private quarrels,” he cautioned, “are likely to repeat themselves.”

  (19)

  POWER

  Society in America was always trying, almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize and understand itself,” Henry Adams would reflect in old age. Certainly it was true in 1868, when Adams was thirty: a protracted war had freed the slaves, cost 750,000 people their lives, killed one president, and triggered an acrimonious debate about the concept of citizenship. The devastated South had been partitioned into military districts, which were policed by federal generals. A sitting president was facing impeachment charges. All that had been unthinkable back in 1861, when Adams had been headed for the Court of St. James’s in London, where his father, Charles, Sr., was the U.S. ambassador for the duration of the war.

  At the time, Fort Sumter had just been fired upon, but young Adams and his father, the descendants of two presidents, had assumed that the war would be of short duration and the earth would not shake. After all, the United States was still largely an agrarian nation ruled by men of goodwill, like themselves; its industry was respectable and profitable but not ostentatious, like themselves; the railway system was regional and unexceptional, the South was strong, everyone knew his place, and Boston was the hub of the cultural universe, at least according to its residents. Adams and his father were wrong, all wrong.

  The war lasted four years and changed everything. Carl Schurz measured the change in terms of freedom for the former slave, but Henry Adams would say that he weighed change in terms of power, raw power, the power of coal, of iron, of steam. In places such as Lawrence, Massachusetts, the drab brick factories near the Merrimack River produced man-made shoes by the hundreds each day; the stockyards of Chicago were famous for their prosperous stench, and the mining camps in the new state of Nevada seemed to gush gold and silver. Ships, firearms, textiles, wheat, corn, beef, railroads, and railroad lines, as well as copper and quartz and coal; massive oil production, steel manufacture and the discovery of new ore deposits, the burgeoning meatpacking and agricultural industries, to say nothing of powerful industrialists and financiers: the war had created a huge demand for all kinds of items, from uniforms and boots to bullets and boats, and though those items had been manufactured before the war, the war had created new, ravenous markets, new inventions, new forms of standardization in prod
uction, and new entrepreneurs and swindlers.

  Adams realized that he was out of place in this new world. His inheritance had been political power, which he understood as moral power, and here he now was, small and fastidious and confronting a world not of moral force or of what he considered moral force but of material might. “The truth is,” Senator John Sherman had told his brother the general in 1865, “the close of the war with our resources unimpaired gives an elevation, a scope to the ideas of leading capitalists, far higher than anything ever undertaken in this country before. They talk of millions as confidently as formerly of thousands.”

  If a civil war had divided the country, it had also united it. In 1862 Congress chartered the Union Pacific Railroad with the Pacific Railway Act, and it finally passed the Homestead Act, which set aside 160 acres of surveyed land, per applicant, in the western territories for purposes of settlement and improvement. That was a boon to a population made increasingly mobile by the new railroads. Two years later, in 1864, Lincoln reported that twenty miles of track for a transcontinental railroad had just been laid in California; it wasn’t much, but it was the beginning of what would be a national bonanza, particularly because a second Pacific Railway Act, in 1864, allocated $50 million worth of guaranteed government bonds to the railroads for thirty years and also provided the railways with land grants. That the donated land often belonged to the Indians was a question that would cause more war, but for now, it all looked good to financiers, land developers, and territorial governments.