Branches of the National Equal Rights League were also springing up, particularly in the South. Founded in 1864 in upstate New York by Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and John Mercer Langston, the League was committed to securing full citizenship for blacks—and voting rights for black men who’d fought in an American war. Langston, a Virginia-born lawyer and the League’s first president, had encountered Johnson in Tennessee, and saw the new President just days after Lincoln’s assassination. On behalf of the League, Langston asked that Johnson continue the work begun by Lincoln: executing all laws that protected the rights and privileges of citizenship for black people. Johnson told Langston that as the friend of “colored fellow-citizens,” he’d make sure slavery was fully abolished and black men enfranchised, Langston recalled. Johnson added that his own past history as a staunch Unionist and a protector of the Constitution guaranteed that his future conduct could be trusted, which in a way it could: when the League petitioned Congress to pass a constitutional amendment guaranteeing that every state government prohibit such discriminatory legislation as the black codes, Johnson was indifferent.
The lawyer John Mercer Langston, leader of the National Equal Rights League, later served as consul-general in Haiti. He was the first African American elected to Congress from Virginia; he was also the great-uncle of the twentieth-century poet Langston Hughes.
Having issued proclamations and a huge number of pardons, more and more with each passing day, Johnson was roundly praised as evenhanded, unprejudiced, and magnanimous, particularly by the Democrats. Advertising themselves as broad enough to embrace all patriots, in its state by state conventions, Democrats began to welcome, or entice, Johnson back into the fold, many of them contending that he’d never left. Its press reminded readers that though the Democrats weren’t instrumental in the election of Lincoln and Johnson, “it did not desert the former when the nation was in peril, and it will not be the less ready to support the latter with its counsels and its cooperation.” Johnson “sailed before the wind,” The New York Herald praised him. After meeting with Johnson in Washington, Democratic leader Samuel Tilden reassured another leader, Samuel Barlow, that the President would soon be withdrawing federal troops from the South.
Johnson supporters among the Democrats—and even some Republicans—were weary of what they called the “everlasting negro question.” The more cautious and conservative Republicans, like the Democrats, balked not just at voting rights but at any kind of federal aid to freedpeople. “We are in danger of too much northern managing for the negro,” the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher said. “The black man is just like the white in this—that he should be left, & obliged, to take care of himself & suffer & enjoy, according as he creates the means of either.”
And conservative Republicans and Democrats assailed Radicals: Wendell Phillips was the king of lunatics, Thad Stevens a bully, and Charles Sumner an officious bore nattering ad nauseum about equality and suffrage. Democrats also liked to remind Radical Republicans about their hypocrisy: they would give black men the vote but exclude white women. White women were at least able to read and write, and while they couldn’t vote, they didn’t make a fuss about it.
Actually, they were making a fuss. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the National Women’s Loyal League had collected almost 400,000 signatures of people in favor of women’s right to vote. But many Radical Republicans flinched, saying they did not want to confuse the issue: mixing up women in the call for the vote “would lose for the negro far more than we should gain for the woman.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton would have none of it. “Do you believe the African race is composed entirely of males?” she briskly replied.
“As Abraham Lincoln said: ‘One war at a time,’ ” Wendell Phillips answered her. “This hour belongs to the Negro.” To Phillips and other Radical Republicans, and even some women, the war had been a just war, fought to abolish slavery. And there would be no justice until de facto slavery—the means by which Southerners and Northerners still treated the black population unfairly—had been eradicated. Only the vote could do that.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn’t back down. “Is there not danger that he, once intrenched in all his inalienable rights, may be an added power to hold us at bay?” That is, if men and men only were allowed to vote, then all women, black and white, would still be subject to men. “The disfranchised all make the same demand,” she told Phillips, “and the same logic and justice which secures suffrage for one class gives it to all.”
It didn’t matter. Phillips and a number of Radical Republicans failed to see that if the door closed against women, it would likely remain shut for a very long time—Stanton predicted as many as a hundred years. Though a firm supporter of women’s rights for more than two decades, Phillips, who’d never before caved to political expediency, believed he had to omit them. On many other issues—abolition, workers’ rights, justice for Native Americans—he would in the future fight hard. Still, for him, voting rights for black men was now essential, and it would have to come first even if he might admit, in a pinch, that voting rights for women would not come easily or soon.
* * *
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BACK IN 1864, Wendell Phillips had called Abraham Lincoln a first-rate second-rate man. Worried that Lincoln wouldn’t fight to enfranchise black men, he refused to support Lincoln’s re-election, passionately believing that only the ballot guaranteed justice for all. “Give the negro a vote in his hand, and there is not a politician, from Abraham Lincoln to the laziest loafer in the lowest ward in this city, who would not do him honor,” Phillips had cried. “From the possession of political rights, a man gets means to clutch equal opportunities of education, and a fair space to work. Give a man his vote, and you give him tools to work and arms to protect himself.” But many of his friends in the anti-slavery movement, notably William Lloyd Garrison, seemed to think that with slavery abolished, their job was finished.
If anyone was utterly unlike Andrew Johnson, it was Wendell Phillips. Tall and lean, patrician and handsome, a Mayflower descendant and a graduate of the prestigious Boston Latin School, Wendell Phillips finished Harvard University when he was just sixteen (he was born in 1811) and then studied the law, also at Harvard. In 1835, when he was twenty-four, he saw a proslavery mob drag Garrison, a rope tied round his neck, through the crooked streets of Boston. From that moment on, Phillips said, “I never could have been anything but an abolitionist.”
Two years later, at Faneuil Hall in Boston, Phillips spoke without notes, as he always would, to protest a proslavery mob’s murder of abolitionist editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy in Illinois. The doors of Faneuil Hall had been closed to abolitionists or anyone condemning Lovejoy’s murder, but Phillips defiantly strode to the lectern to call out those weak-kneed Bostonians in public office, particularly the attorney general, or anyone else who’d condoned the murder or looked the other way. Phillips’ speech effectively ended his career in the law. Clients deserted him, friends dropped him, conservative Boston rejected him. “He knew the penalty of his course,” a friend recalled. “He paid it cheerfully.”
Married to Ann Greene, an invalid heiress who seldom left her room but whose radicalism was said to be even more intense than his, Phillips embarked on a public career as agitator, tirelessly traveling from city to city—he was famous by the 1850s—to campaign against slavery. Detractors christened him the great apostle of the abolitionist cranks, a badge he wore with pride. “The republic which sinks to sleep, trusting to constitutions and machinery, to politicians and statesmen, for the safety of its liberties, never will have any,” Phillips declared. With a broad-brimmed, slightly battered gray hat pulled down over his disappearing hairline, he looked like an old botanist, an acquaintance said, and you couldn’t really believe that a man “so simple, so affable, is the nettlesome speaker, and the one placed by everybody in the foremost ranks of American orators.”
His method was conversational, ex
plained abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Phillips would begin a speech in a fairly low voice, as if he were confiding something to a good friend, and when he repeated what he’d said, which he frequently did, he began to raise his voice ever so slightly. “The effect was absolutely disarming,” Higginson recalled. Phillips used no spread-eagle rhetoric, and he spoke without affectation. And though his many critics called him sarcastic, impudent, and violent, at least in his speeches, he had fans who called him “direct, simple, persuasive, and luminous.” They loved the tenor of his voice, his point-blank candor, and his obvious sincerity.
Nationally renowned Wendell Phillips gave up the profession of law and his social standing to speak out on causes such as equal rights; the inscription on his calling card read, “Peace if possible. Justice at any rate.” Phillips detested Andrew Johnson (who returned the favor) and considered most members of Congress cowards.
Opposition roused him, and he relished it. Detractors often met him with raised fists. A man of courage, he couldn’t have cared less—he’d been pelted with apples, eggs, and rocks. “Always aristocratic in aspect,” Higginson remembered, “he was never more so than when walking through the streets of his own Boston with a howling mob about him.” But to be safe, Phillips packed a gun—he was a good shot—particularly during the secessionist crisis of 1860–1861, for which he was blamed. He was blamed for many things: for John Brown’s raid, for example, in which he had no part. He seemed to court blame. As the historian Richard Hofstadter once observed, Phillips viewed himself as an inveterate agitator. The inscription on his small white calling card read, “Peace if possible. Justice at any rate. W. P.”
Men and women flocked to hear him, particularly during the summer of 1865, when he insisted that Johnson’s policies were betraying Republicans, Unionists, and blacks, and he declared the President “a force to be resisted, not one to be counted on our side.” That fall, he went further. Bostonians packed the gorgeous Music Hall on Winter Street to hear Phillips proclaim “The South Victorious.”
The South victorious? How was that possible? Phillips suavely answered: What principle had the South surrendered? Certainly not state sovereignty. “The same oligarchy that broke up the Union condescends to reenter it, with the same steps, with the same usage, under the flag of the same principle,” he sang out. Former Confederates are taking cover under Johnson’s wing, Phillips continued, and if Johnson isn’t a traitor, he’s definitely an enemy. Yes, sure, slavery has been abolished, and black men and women can no longer be sold on the auction block. But were they free to set their own price for their labor? Could they own property? Get married? Could they choose to live where they wanted or travel freely? Could they attend schools—and what schools? What about the ability to bear witness or sit on a jury? Could they vote? In short, were they U.S. citizens with all the rights of their neighbors? Didn’t they possess natural rights and shouldn’t there be sufficient civil rights, never mind political rights, legislated to protect them? “That is liberty.” Phillips was by now shouting. The audience cheered, and Phillips, boarding trains from town to town, took his blazing speech on the road. The battle lines of peace were taking shape.
* * *
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ANDREW JOHNSON WAS sure he knew Major-General Carl Schurz, so when Schurz returned from a fact-finding expedition to the Southern states, Johnson was equally sure Schurz had come to the conclusion about the South that Johnson wanted to hear.
Johnson had met General Schurz during the war when their objectives had been the same: to crush the rebellion. The Prussian émigré hated the very idea of disunion. Once in America, he had settled in Wisconsin, was admitted to the bar, and became the fluent anti-slavery advocate who, in 1860, as chair of the Wisconsin delegation to the Republican national convention, helped secure the German-American vote for Lincoln. Lincoln rewarded him with a consulship in Spain, and the pointy-bearded Schurz gracefully accepted. But he found the duties of a diplomat insipid, so after the war began, he returned to America, and commissioned as brigadier-general, he fought at Second Bull Run, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. He soon discovered, though, that his performance on the battlefield was not quite as indispensable as his performance with a pen.
Shattered by Lincoln’s death, for a while Schurz, like so many others, retained his faith in Johnson. What Johnson saw in Schurz, beyond their shared Unionism, is more baffling. After Johnson decriminalized most of the former Confederates and began pardoning the rest, Schurz began to criticize the new President. “I fear that he has not that clearness of purpose and firmness of character he was supposed to have,” Schurz told Charles Sumner. Southern delegations were crowding into Washington, “almost all governed by their old prejudices,” Schurz reported, and these prejudiced delegations were influencing Johnson. Schurz was alarmed, informing Johnson that, strictly speaking, Johnson’s North Carolina proclamation—his appointing a civil governor and ordering him to call a convention—was an unconstitutional usurpation of power.
It’s not clear why Johnson sent Schurz to the South to offer his observations on conditions there. As one bystander remarked, Johnson was a man of moods, and his mood must have been just right when he and Schurz discussed the idea. In any case, the foreign-born Schurz could not run for President, and Johnson had no reason to fear him. He told Schurz to go, and that he’d heed his recommendations. Egotistically, Schurz believed him.
Almost certainly Schurz misunderstood his mission from the start—or misrepresented it—because he allowed Charles Sumner to arrange that his reports be printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser, without attribution, for a fee. That way, Schurz could pay for his trip, or so he later claimed. It was alleged, not without good reason, that he was happy to go South to furnish Radical Republicans with propaganda for their crusade to get black men the vote.
Despite whatever Johnson or Schurz thought the other man intended, or what either of them wanted or hoped the other might do, a collision was inevitable. It occurred when Mississippi Governor William Sharkey began organizing a state militia, composed of ex-rebels, to serve as the state police. General Henry Slocum, head of the Department of Mississippi, protested. The federal army was the state’s enforcement agency; a state militia was not. Johnson initially agreed with General Slocum, but Sharkey heatedly explained to both men that the presence of black troops—some of these federal troops were black—posed a threat to the people (white); that all federal troops, or at least those posted in the South, should be white; that the Freedmen’s Bureau was nothing but a curse that humiliated the (white) South; that there were rumors of an insurrection (black) brewing. The state therefore needed its own militia, Sharkey concluded.
Schurz was shaken. Who would put a fox in charge of the henhouse?
Sharkey may appear to be a Unionist, Schurz told Johnson, but he was surrounded by secessionists with whom Sharkey, a former slaveholder, seemed to agree. Imagine allowing the militia of a belligerent country to be reorganized right after that country had been defeated: impossible. And the Mississippi that Schurz visited was nothing like the one Sharkey liked to describe. Schurz found the black troops to be honest, reliable, and disciplined. Outrages weren’t perpetrated by them—but against them. And the presence of federal troops, black or white, was absolutely necessary if law and order were to be maintained not just in Mississippi but in the whole of the South. “It is a stubborn fact that our truest friends are threatened and persecuted and that the negro is denied his freedom wherever the population has a chance to act upon its own impulses without being immediately checked,” Schurz said. “The struggle against the results of the war is by no means at an end.”
Johnson telegraphed Sharkey that if the new state convention were to draft a constitution that enfranchised literate blacks and those who owned property worth more than $250, “you would completely disarm the adversary and set an example other states would follow,” he suggested. Johnson assumed there w
ere few literate blacks or property-owners and that his suggestion was therefore harmless. But smart: “As a consequence,” Johnson continued, “the radicals, who are wild upon negro franchise will be completely foiled, in their attempts to keep the Southern States from renewing their relations to the Union.”
Sharkey did nothing. And Johnson never followed up, in Mississippi or elsewhere.
Schurz was angry. “If the President persists in pursuing a false course,” he told his wife, “he must not be surprised if, later, I bring into the field against him all the artillery I am assembling now. He will find the armament pretty heavy.”
Schurz did launch an attack in a scathing forty-six-page report, followed by sixty pages of documentation, which he composed on his return to Washington. Men and women of questionable loyalty were taking the loyalty oath, Schurz wrote, and they were thereby legally capable of holding office despite their continued sympathy with the rebels. Take Mr. Rodgers in New Orleans, who as superintendent of schools during the war had rubbed out the initials “U.S.” in the history books and replaced them with “C.S.” (for Confederate States). By the fall of 1865, Rodgers had been appointed to his old job. Meanwhile, Yankees and Union soldiers were still considered enemies, and Southern Unionists lived in a state of fear should federal troops be recalled and the Freedmen’s Bureau eliminated. Highwaymen ruled the roads, and cotton-, horse-, and cattle-stealing were rampant.
Treason was not odious in the South, Schurz concluded. “Men who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors, will cheat a Negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor. To kill a Negro, they do not deem murder; to debauch a Negro woman, they do not think fornication; to take the property away from a Negro, they do not consider robbery. The people boast that when they get freedmen’s affairs in their own hands, to use their own expression, ‘the niggers will catch hell.’ ”
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