American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Within six months these hopes were dimming. Within one year the President and the Republican leadership were at odds. Within three years a President was being impeached, the North was aroused, the South inflamed. Within a decade a great experiment in liberty and equality was coming to an end, the blacks abandoned. By century’s end the freed people were restored to a condition of virtual servitude, Northern blacks were still suffering discrimination, Northern whites had turned away from the quest for equality, Southern whites had won a Pyrrhic victory, the South was still mortgaged to the past, and racism lay like a blight across the land.

  What happened in late 1865 and early 1866 to disrupt a Northern leadership apparently united on Reconstruction, and to turn the freed people of the South—and indeed all Southerners—back toward the path leading ultimately to reconstruction of the old racial tragedy? The question has long been debated. Since the first histories are usually written by the victors, the early postwar historians laid the blame largely on Johnson and the men immediately around him, on their alleged ineptness, narrowness, conservatism, vindictiveness, even wickedness. A later generation of historians shifted the blame to the Radical Republicans, accusing them of the same failings, plus extreme fanaticism. Still later, the failure was seen to stem from psychological, economic, institutional, and other complex sources, or even from sheer stupidity—the notion that the politicians of the 1860s happened to comprise a leadership generation of unusual ineptness.

  All these factors doubtless had some part to play, for the great wrenching movements of history spring out of a profusion of forces. But the more recent historians, rising above the passions of olden times, have pointed to the psychological and other forces that tend directly to shape the actions of political leadership. The crises of the late 1850s and early 1860s brought to the top leaders of bounding political hopes and expectations and of considerable political skill. Not only had these men learned to operate the machinery of groups and parties, nominations and elections, legislatures and bureaucracies, and to calculate in terms of the arithmetic of nominations and elections; they possessed as well a heightened sense of the geometry of politics—of the new policy that had arisen during the Civil War, of a new nationalized and centralized system that, in Morton Keller’s words, created and allocated power as the economy allocated and created wealth. Even more, they would act openly and boldly on the basis of values and purposes that had been hardened in the fires of civil conflict.

  Andrew Johnson possessed more power than any of these men, but less grasp of the strategic factors. In the spring of 1865 he had much the same political advantage that Lincoln had held four years earlier—he could take the initiative in an unresolved political situation until Congress convened in December. He had an unparalleled political opportunity, if he would but grasp it—to follow a conciliatory mid-course between Radical Republicans and old-time War Democrats, enabling him to “command the center” and isolate his rivals on each flank. Then he could dismantle the old Southern secessionist leadership—men he had long hated—and mobilize a new leadership acting for the people he had always loved, the Southern white yeomanry, at the same time protecting the civil rights of Southern blacks, as he was pledged to do. Ultimately he could reunite South and North on a new basis of popular democracy. “The only safety of the nation,” he said, “lies in a generous and expansive plan of conciliation.”

  Perhaps Johnson could have become the “great unifier,” even if this required building a regenerated Union party that would unite moderate Democrats and Republicans, incidentally giving him a presidential term “in his own right” in 1868. It was not clear, though, that he had the comprehensive vision, the political skill of isolating politicians and playing them off against one another, the finesse at political management of his own followers, or the ability to rise above his seething resentments over the slights of “aristocratic” Southerners and of moralizing, condescending Northerners, to bring off such a realignment of parties and leaders.

  He got off to a quick start in the late spring of 1865, leaving congressional leaders on the sidelines. In a series of proclamations and executive actions he struck at the old Southern leadership by granting amnesty to Confederates who took the oath of allegiance, except for large property holders and other influentials. Members of such excepted categories could, however, apply for special pardons. The President empowered provisional governors to call conventions made up of delegates elected by eligible voters; the conventions would then arrange elections for state offices and for Congress. Conspicuously absent from this plan was any provision for black suffrage.

  Congressional Republicans were by no means idle during these spring days of 1865. With Congress out of session, they could not shape grand strategy, but at first they felt little need to because of their continuing confidence in Johnson. Sumner himself was so untypically trusting that he wrote to a friend that on “the question of colored suffrage the President is with us.” Indeed, one of the Radicals’ main reservations about Johnson at this time was that he was too vengeful toward the old Southern leaders. Many Radicals felt that the issue was far less the punishment of Confederate “traitors” than the combining of civil, political, social, and economic reforms as necessary for the freed people truly to achieve freedom. The more Johnson remained silent on these crucial matters, the more uneasy many party leaders became. And the more he seemed to be following a policy of vengeance against the old Confederate leadership, the more he appeared to be astride two horses that were beginning to buck in opposite directions.

  Which horse would Johnson stick with? As it turned out, he was left with little choice, for his increasing involvement with Southern leaders and Northern conservatives entangled him in a “pro-Southern,” pro-states’ rights constellation of forces, while it was temperamentally impossible for him—and, he doubtless felt, politically unrewarding—to work with the Radical leaders whom, in his hierarchy of hatreds, he loathed even more than most Copperheads. As he moderated his policies in the South, as he recognized Southern state governments that met his requirements, as he received endless delegations pouring out their grievances and playing on his vanity, as he issued thousands of special pardons to onetime Confederate leaders, he slowly became tied to the Southern structure of leadership and power that he had hated. He became, in Kenneth Stampp’s words, virtually the prisoner of the men he had set out to destroy. Thus he lost his chance to mobilize a new leadership among Southern yeomanry and Unionists.

  And Southern leadership was ready to assert itself. As provisional state governments were established under Johnson’s plan, their legislatures, elected by whites only, began to pass “Black Codes” that gave freed people some basic legal rights, such as to marry and make contracts, but that also included vagrancy and apprenticeship provisions designed to keep blacks virtually in a condition of peonage. If Johnson felt politically embarrassed by the Southern leadership, he hardly showed it. He urged the legislatures to liberalize their racial policy, but he barely demurred when they defied him. Nothing was done for the Negro’s basic needs and education. Carl Schurz, whom the President himself sent on a fact-finding tour of the South, reported that hundreds of times he was told that “learning will spoil the nigger for work” and that the elevation of the blacks would be the “degradation” of the whites. Johnson ignored his reports.

  Sumner visited Johnson just before Congress convened. For two and a half hours the men sparred warily. Complaining that the “freemen” of Georgia and Alabama were mistreated by the “rebels,” Sumner accused the President of throwing away the victories of the Union army. Johnson bridled.

  “Mr. Sumner, do murders ever occur in Massachusetts?”

  “Unhappily yes, Mr. President.”

  “Do people ever knock each other down in Boston?”

  “Unhappily yes, Mr. President, sometimes.”

  “Would you consent that Massachusetts should be excluded from the Union on this account?”

  “No, Mr. President, surel
y not.” The breach between the two men was unbridgeable—especially after the senator, on leaving, picked up his silken tophat from where he had laid it on the floor and discovered that Johnson, in his excitement, had used it for a spittoon.

  By the time Congress convened in early December 1865, the South was busy reconstructing its old political, social, and economic system and the President was actively abetting it under the banner of states’ rights. Moderate as well as radical Republicans were furious—but no longer frustrated, for now they could take the initiative away from the White House. The legislators did so through the classic weapons of parliamentary battle: controlling entrance into their own ranks, holding up the executive’s program, and using congressional investigations as a form of attack. At the opening of the session, the Clerk of the House simply omitted from the roll call the names of men elected from formerly seceding states. Now it was the Southerners who were furious—and helpless.

  The Republicans, solidly in control of both chambers, proceeded to set up a fifteen-member Joint Committee on Reconstruction to plan and assert the role of Congress in Southern policy. The President could do nothing to stop this. Under the stinging parliamentary whip of Stevens and the moral lash of Sumner, the Radical Republicans along with many moderates began to act with unprecedented unity on procedure. On policy Republicans as a whole were still fundamentally divided, as later events would demonstrate; probably the only major issue on which all of them agreed was the end of slavery, and it was symbolic that the Thirteenth Amendment, passed earlier by two-thirds majorities in House and Senate, and then ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures, was proclaimed in effect two weeks after Congress convened. At last, black emancipation was part of the United States Constitution.

  Emancipation—but not freedom. And on this distinction turned some portentous differences among Republicans. Some felt that simply eradicating slavery was enough, while the vast majority recognized that the federal government must guarantee the freed people’s legal and civil rights. A lesser number of Republicans would protect the blacks’ political rights, especially their right to vote. Some Republicans—mostly Radicals—were eager to provide land, sustenance, and education on the premise that in the long run the blacks’ civil and political liberties had to be buttressed by social and economic freedom; to some Republicans this notion was radical and dangerous. These differences over the substance of policy were multiplied by differences over the execution of it—whether the federal or state governments should direct Reconstruction, whether Congress or the President should control federal policy, how much power should be granted the Freedmen’s Bureau or other bureaucracies, how much authority should be left in the hands of federal and state judges.

  With all these permutations and combinations, it was a tribute both to the resolve of the Republicans and to the strength of their caucuses that the party remained united in the early months of 1866. Moving quickly to protect the freed people’s civil rights through the use of military courts, Congress voted to extend the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and enlarge its powers. Though moderate Republicans favored the bill and radicals felt it was far too limited, the President vetoed it. Earlier, Congress passed a Civil Rights Act granting citizenship to the newly freed—thus overturning Dred Scott—and granting equal civil rights to all persons born in the United States, with the notable exception of Indians. Johnson vetoed this bill as an invasion of states’ rights. Congress passed both bills over his vetoes.

  Thus were the great constitutional catapults of Congress and President wheeled into position; the test now, as debate among press, politicians, and public rose to white heat, was one of leadership. Politicians were already maneuvering for advantage in the congressional elections of 1866, which they viewed as both an immediate sounding of public opinion and as a prelude to 1868 and beyond. Bypassing the President, the Joint Committee drew up a proposed Fourteenth Amendment in order to secure blacks’ civil rights and to thwart any effort by the Supreme Court to invalidate the Civil Rights Act. This proposal was a supreme test of the Republicans’ solidarity—especially over the issue of states’ rights, for the proposed amendment barred the states from passing laws “which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” or from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” or of the “equal protection of the laws.” Republican ranks held firm, but at a price—the amendment did not firmly grant the black man the right to vote.

  Excluded from the Joint Committee at the start for his “extremism,” Sumner infuriated congressional Republicans by opposing the amendment on highly political grounds—he had to deal with moderate Republicans back home—but he redeemed himself with a fervent five-hour address, “The Equal Rights of All,” which concluded: “Show me a creature, with erect countenance looking to heaven, made in the image of God, and I show you a MAN, who, of whatever country or race, whether darkened by equatorial sun or blanched by northern cold, is with you a child of the Heavenly Father, and equal with you in all the rights of Human Nature.... It is not enough that you have given Liberty. By the same title that we claim Liberty do we claim Equality also…. One is the complement of the other....”

  The state of liberty and equality in the South three years after the Emancipation Proclamation was not good. At the end of April 1866, following three months of almost daily hearings, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction reported its findings. Well over a hundred witnesses, including Freedmen’s Bureau agents, Southern unionists, and a few black men, had testified that floggings and killings of freed people continued, with many of the crimes not prosecuted or even disclosed. The celebrated Clara Barton, reporting with a nurse’s precision, testified that a young woman, black and pregnant, had come to her for help; she had been whipped for not “spinning properly”—whipped with a “lash half as large as my little finger,” whipped to the bone, the flesh completely cut out along most of the gashes. Southerners charged the committee with bias, but Northerners were horrified, and they were further aroused by news of race riots in Memphis and New Orleans; in each case more than a hundred blacks were killed or injured by white police and civilians who had gone on a rampage of shooting, stabbing, burning, and lynching.

  Johnson watched in dismay as the country polarized, for the mounting division threatened his “middle way.” But instead of dampening the fires, he poked them up with intemperate statements. Responding to a group of serenaders on the White House grounds, he branded the Joint Committee as an “irresponsible central directory”; he had fought traitors in the South, he thundered, and was prepared to fight them in the North. Goaded into naming names, he listed Stevens, Sumner, and Phillips. He could not veto the Fourteenth Amendment, but he could and did urge Southern states not to ratify it. As moderates as well as radicals broke away from him, he tried all the harder to rally the forces of the center. He not only replaced moderates in his Administration with more conservative types—including the supplanting of postmasters by the hundreds—but he summoned a National Union Convention to meet in Philadelphia to launch his new party. The convention made a fine show of unity, symbolized by Massachusetts and South Carolina delegates marching into the hall in pairs, but potential Democratic supporters held back, largely because they wanted to protect the standing of their state and local parties in the North. The still potent New York Democracy, in particular, preferred to concentrate on electing its own to state offices rather than backing an apostate Republican President.

  Johnson fought on. In August he set out on a daring venture—a “swing around the circle”—to arouse support. Warned by a supporter, Senator James R. Doolittle, that he would be “followed by the reporters of a hundred presses who do nothing but misrepresent you”—who indeed might report one of his “outbursts”—the President was undeterred. He assembled a glittering presidential party headed by Secretary Seward, General Grant, and Admiral Farragut. The party took the old “presidential route” to Baltimore, Philadelph
ia, and New York, journeyed by yacht up the Hudson, then turned west for stump speeches along the Erie Canal. In the Eastern cities Johnson attracted huge, fervent crowds, who emboldened him to new attacks on the rump Congress, disunionists and “traitors,” the “subsidized and mercenary press.” But in the Midwest, as Johnson gave his one set speech over and over again, the press grew bored and hostile and crowds turned ugly, Grant deserted the presidential party, the President fell into shouting matches with hecklers, riots broke out, platforms collapsed, Seward came down with cholera and almost died. The “swing” was judged a disaster; the President had fired up issues without defining them, asked support for pro-Administration candidates without naming them, sought some kind of middle way without explaining it.

  Most “off-year” elections, lacking the focus of a presidential contest, produce sketchy results; 1866 turned out to be a dramatic exception. Republicans carried every gubernatorial contest and every state legislature in the North. They would command huge majorities in the Fortieth Congress—42 to 11 in the Senate, 143 to 49 in the House. To the jubilant radicals, the results were as meaningful as they were decisive. The campaign had been vituperative on both sides, but it had sharply defined the lines of conflict. After years of isolation and frustration the radicals not only had a mandate; with their two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress they now had power.

  A Revolutionary Experiment

  For a brief fleeting moment in history—from late 1866 to almost the end of the decade—radical senators and congressmen led the Republican party in an audacious venture in both the organization and the goals of political power. To a degree that would have astonished the constitution-makers of earlier years, they converted the eighty-year-old system of checks and balances into a highly centralized, majoritarian system that elevated the legislative branch, subordinated the executive and judicial branches, and suspended federalism and “states’ rights” in the South. They turned the Constitution on its head. The aims of these leaders were indeed revolutionary—to reverse age-old human and class relationships in the South and to raise millions of people to a much higher level of economic, political, social, and educational self-fulfillment. That such potent means could not in the end produce such humane and democratic ends was the ultimate tragedy of this revolutionary experiment.