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ANDREW JOHNSON’S POLITICAL instincts were failing him. Whatever combination of talent and skill and cheek and sheer bravery that had taken him from obscurity to the U.S. Senate, and from the Senate to the vice presidency, no longer sufficed. If the winning combination had been demagoguery and orneriness, with a touch of malice, that combination too no longer worked so well. Johnson had no gift for oratory or singing phrases like Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature.” He possessed little humor, less wit, and not much reputation for unassailable kindness. And if the backwoods Lincoln or the rugged Jackson had challenged the old myth of the President as a well-born, noble patriarch, staid like General George Washington, Johnson further undermined it with intransigence, prejudice, and a whiff of strong whiskey.
On March 27, 1866, Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Bill.
“Fraught with evil,” he labeled it. The bill placed too much power in the hands of the federal government. It deprived individual states of the ability to make or enforce their own laws—such as black codes, presumably. It operated “in favor of the colored and against the white race.” Johnson said immigrants had more of a right to citizenship than black people did. And most repugnant of all, the bill had been passed by what Johnson called a “rump” Congress—that is, a Congress that had not yet seated representatives from the eleven former Confederate states.
Johnson’s veto electrified the nation. It stupefied Senator John Sherman, who’d assured audiences that the President would never throw over loyal voters. In fact, as Sherman told his brother the general, the bill was “so clearly right that I was prepared for the very general acquiescence in its provisions.” Representative Henry Dawes, also a moderate, was distraught: “I am forced to the conclusion that the President is lost to us, depriving every friend he has of the least ground upon which to stand and defend him.” William Cullen Bryant was baffled. “The President probably did not know what he was doing when he returned it to Congress,” he guessed. The Republican Congress was livid. “It [Congress] grows firmer every day, knowing that it stands for the Right,” House Speaker Schuyler Colfax declared.
Astonished and offended, Lyman Trumbull frostily reminded the President why those eleven Southern states had not been seated: recall, they had rebelled against the federal government, and their representatives were “fresh from the rebel congress or rebel armies, men who could not take the requisite oath to entitle them to admission to seats” since they couldn’t swear they’d never borne arms against the United States.
Trumbull proceeded to refute the President’s argument at every turn. The rights of citizenship did not confer political privileges, as in the case of white women and children, who were American citizens but couldn’t vote. Foreigners were already protected by the rights enumerated in the bill. And since the President had weirdly alluded to marriages between blacks and whites in his veto message, Trumbull inquired why he had mentioned marriage at all—except, he specifically added, as “an argument to excite prejudice—the argument of a demagogue and a politician.”
Illinois Republican Senator Lyman Trumbull, chair of the Judiciary Committee, wrote the Freedmen’s Bureau and Civil Rights Bills, and was astonished when President Johnson vetoed them.
Johnson didn’t seem to notice. On his own, he proclaimed that the war was over (except in remote parts of Texas, where fighting continued), and even though the Joint Committee on Reconstruction was continuing its work, collecting information about conditions in the South and interviewing witnesses.
In early April, blacks and whites crowded into the Capitol to learn what Congress would do, and when the House and the Senate overrode the President’s veto on April 9, the Civil Rights Act, major legislation passed over a presidential veto.
True, the Senate had unseated the Democrat John Stockton of New Jersey to make sure Republicans had the two-thirds vote necessary to override Johnson, charging that the New Jersey legislature had elected Stockton illegally; the case had been debated for some time, and Stockton had even at one point voted for himself. But the packed gallery applauded and cheered passage of the Civil Rights Bill, and the perceptive journalist Mary Clemmer Ames reported that “even Charles Sumner, the grim Greek, hat in hand, unbent his brows and condescended to look delighted.”
“The people have made too many sacrifices to give up the fruits of victory at his bidding,” Indiana Representative Godlove Orth wrote a friend. “If the rebels under the misguided and mischievous policy of the Prest. could obtain control of the Govt. all will be lost. But they will not succeed.” Not only had Johnson alienated moderate Republicans like Orth, he was again unifying the entire Republican party against him. “He is fool enough or wicked enough, I don’t know which, to furnish them with material fuel for the flame,” Dawes complained, “depriving every friend he has of the least ground upon which to stand and defend him.” To Republicans, Johnson had cold-shouldered or showed contempt for Congress, usurping its prerogatives to indulge the very foes he’d said he despised, the Southern foes of the Union. “What a pity he had not stuck to making trousers,” one woman joked without humor, “and been a good rebel, like the rest of Tennessee.” James Russell Lowell dismissed Johnson as a stump speaker “with a plebeian tone of mind,” and the essayist Edwin Whipple said Johnson listened only to news that justified what he already thought—and anyway the man didn’t understand the Constitution he professed to love so much.
At the same time, the conservative press in Memphis hailed the President as the savior he claimed himself to be, a forgiving and merciful man who didn’t give an inch, particularly not to Radical Republicans.
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THE PROTECTIONS OFFERED in the Civil Rights Act, now a rule of law, meant nothing in Memphis. On a warm spring morning, April 30, 1866, three weeks after Congress overrode the President’s veto, three black soldiers in blue uniforms were walking down Causey Street in South Memphis when they bumped into four white policemen headed the other way. The two groups exchanged some heated words, which was no surprise since they didn’t much like each other, and black men wearing Union blue particularly irritated Southern white police officers. Eyewitnesses later admitted they couldn’t hear exactly what was said. Nor would it be clear what happened next. When the soldiers moved aside to let the policemen pass, apparently one of the police shoved one of the black soldiers, who tripped and fell. The policeman then stumbled on top of the soldier.
The police officers drew their weapons. One of them struck a soldier so hard with the butt of his gun that the gun broke. Another soldier grabbed a stick and whacked the policeman, while a different police officer hit one of the soldiers with a brick.
A skirmish like this was not unusual, and it would probably have gone unnoticed if there hadn’t been a bigger brawl the next day.
A party of black soldiers, noisily celebrating their discharge from the Union army, was toasting Abraham Lincoln, much to the annoyance of a few white police nearby. “Your old father, Abe Lincoln, is dead and damned,” a policeman with red whiskers yelled at the soldiers. The police soon arrested two of the soldiers for disorderly conduct. While the police were marching them off to jail, a different band of black soldiers indignantly followed, firing their pistols in the air. Assuming the shots had been meant for them, the police fired back. In the confusion, one police officer was killed, though it was later discovered he’d shot himself with his own gun.
Most of the other black soldiers had already returned to Fort Pickering, their base. But rumors had already begun spreading through Memphis that black soldiers were rioting and shooting anyone and anything in sight. Enraged and armed, white mobs of firefighters, shopkeepers, and police took to the streets on the lookout for black offenders or, for that matter, any black person, male, female, or child.
“Boys, I want you to go ahead and kill the last damned one of the nigger race, and
burn up the cradle, God damn them,” John C. Creighton, a judge in the recorder’s court, shouted from atop his horse. “They are very free indeed, but, God damn them, we will kill and drive the last one out of the city.”
John Prendergast, a white grocer, grabbed his guns, and with one in each hand, joined the gang in the streets. Impatient for action, he aimed at the back of a man’s head and after he pulled the trigger realized he had killed a white neighbor, Henry Dunn. “I have shot one of our men,” Prendergast wailed. “I thought it was a damned yellow nigger.” To make things right, he then shot Lew Robinson, a black man, and proceeded to beat Robinson with his pistol.
Austin Cotton, a black carpenter, was walking home from work. “Halt, you damned nigger, or we will knock you on the head,” someone yelled. Cotton took off, but a couple of men caught him and pounded him with their guns. Jackson Goodell, a black drayman, had gone to the store to buy cornmeal for his wife. Two men knocked him down and punched him fifteen or so times before they shot him and, not quite satisfied, shot him again. Seven white men, two of whom were police, burst into the home of a washerwoman, Frances Thompson. She was living in a small place with sixteen-year-old Lucy Smith, who helped out with chores. The men demanded supper. Thompson nervously lit a fire and served some biscuits and coffee, but when the men saw pictures of Union officers in the house and a quilt of red, white, and blue cloth, four of them raped her. The others raped Lucy Smith, who had tried to escape through the window.
Around dusk, the constable Bill O’Hearn, riding a pony, arrived on Mulberry Street where two policemen held a black soldier. “Gentlemen,” O’Hearn said, “let me shoot that fellow.” He took aim and fired into the soldier’s neck.
That same night several white men broke into the home of a pregnant Lucy Tibbs and raped her. Nearby, when Jane Sneed’s daughter Rachael ran into the house next door to hers to rescue her neighbor, the men who’d set fire to the place warned Rachael that they’d shoot her if she came out. She did. Her clothes were on fire, and the men shot her while she burned.
“Colored men, women & children were shot in open day light [sic] as if they were mad-dogs—& when night came on then began scenes which were more inhuman & diabolical,” noted Yankee missionary Reverend Ewing Tade. Barbers were gunned down at their chairs, laborers at the wharves, hackmen in their hacks. Men, women, children were pistol-whipped, clubbed, knifed. Mary Black’s house went up in flames, as did Lucy Hunt’s. A blacksmith shop was torched and so was Caldwell Hall, where public meetings were held. At night, flames lit the sky, and on the streets of Memphis lay the fly-covered corpses that relatives were afraid to retrieve.
A cheer went up for “Andy Johnson” and a “white man’s government.”
The tall, clubfooted, inexorable Thaddeus Stevens demanded that the House of Representatives investigate the Memphis melee, and the committee learned that by the next day, May 2, 1866, few black men or women would venture out into the streets. Understandably: as early as seven in the morning, John Callahan was shooting any black person who happened along, and there were widespread reports about a black insurrection—the old and feared idea that had haunted white communities before the war. Businesses did not open. By ten o’clock, white policemen and citizens, many of them still drunk from the night before, were riding into South Memphis. They shot Fayette Dickerson, a veteran of the 15th Colored Infantry. They invaded Harriet Armour’s home and asked if her husband was a soldier. When she said yes, the men raped her.
Memphis Sheriff Patrick Winters asked General Stoneman, commanding officer of the Department of Tennessee, to send in federal troops, but the general said he couldn’t spare men to quell a mere civil disturbance. He had too much government property to defend.
Black men and women had rushed for protection to the offices of the Freedmen’s Bureau. General Benjamin Runkle, in charge, said he had all he could do just to protect the office. But Runkle decided to speak to General Stoneman personally. Stoneman finally took action, after a fashion, a day later, on May 3, when almost forty-eight insane and savage hours had gone by. Claiming, as he already had, that he had too few troops and must in any case guard government property—and that his white soldiers didn’t much like blacks either—he ordered the black soldiers at Fort Pickering to stay inside, and he ordered his white troops to restore order to sections of South Memphis.
In all, forty-six black people were killed in the Memphis riot; at least five black women were raped, and fifty-three people wounded. Two white men were dead, one of them the policeman who shot himself.
When U.S. Representative Elihu Washburne, as part of the congressional investigating committee, arrived in Memphis in late May, he saw the brick Baptist Church on Main Street, the oldest black church in the city, in ashes; so too the black church on Poplar Street and the Lincoln Chapel, where all that remained were just one Bible, the mainspring of a clock, and a fragment of the melodeon. More than seventy homes and schools and every black church had been torched. Ninety-three robberies had been recorded—likely there had been more. Washburne told his colleague Thaddeus Stevens that General Stoneman admitted, with some remorse, that “it was no negro riot, for the negroes had nothing to do but to be butchered.”
“The civil-rights bill,” Washburne added, “is treated as a dead letter.”
Illinois Representative Elihu Washburne was a savvy patron of Ulysses S. Grant both during Grant’s military career and during his for bid the presidency.
General Stoneman may have been slow to act but there was blame enough to go around. The city’s respectable white folk—lawyers and doctors and newspaper publishers and former secessionists—said it was a terrible event that would never have happened if only they, the former secessionists, had been allowed to hold political office. The spiteful Republican party of Lincoln and the abolitionists had prevented former secessionists, those Confederates who had left the Union, from entering the government. After all, they said, they wanted only the best for their former slaves.
No, others replied; the fuse had been lit by the Irish police because the Irish feared that free blacks would steal away their jobs. Still others blamed a Memphis press that branded black people as barbarians, and called the Freedmen’s Bureau a bunch of “negro-worshippers.” This same press then crowed, with satisfaction, that the black man and his Union friends had just received a good first lesson in civil rights.
Many also pointed a finger at President Andrew Johnson. Johnson’s magnanimous policy toward former rebels, his willingness to forgive and embrace them and to welcome them back into the Union, reassured them that white supremacy was true and right and to be defended to the hilt, if not with legislation then with torches, bricks, and guns.
CHAPTER NINE
Mutual Concessions, Mutual Hostilities
“I will take all I can get in the cause of humanity and leave it to be perfected by better men in better times.”
—THADDEUS STEVENS
“Our difficulties here are not over,” Senator Sherman of Ohio told his brother, the general. “Johnson is suspicious of every one.” Clerks in various government positions heard that they’d be fired if they didn’t support the President. “If Andrew Johnson turns out everybody who despises his recent course,” an observer remarked, “he will have naught left to fill the offices.”
Jane Grey Swisshelm was sacked from the quartermaster’s office mainly because, since 1865, she’d also been publishing a newspaper, The Reconstructionist, critical of the administration—and staffed by women without regard to color, giving it twice the circulation of any Washington newspaper, Swisshelm had joked early on.
A divorcée and single mother, a longtime publisher in Pennsylvania and Minnesota advocating women’s rights, a freelancer for Greeley’s Tribune, and a nurse during the war as well as a clerk in the War Department, where she and Stanton became friends, Swisshelm was small in stature and described by those who hated he
r as having a face like a hatchet. They hated her because she was intentionally provocative. She’d rented two floors of a building on Tenth Street between N and O Streets, and declared in the prospectus of The Reconstructionist that “liberty is in danger of betrayal.” And liberty’s leading betrayer was Andrew Johnson: “His ambition was and is, to be the hero of Southern chivalry, to restore to slaveholders their lost dominion over their slaves, and to do this he will risk all.” Swisshelm dubbed Johnson’s veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill “the Sumter guns of this second era of the war” and accused Johnson of murdering Lincoln yet again by killing the peace—and the freedmen.
Johnson asked why the government should employ a traitor like Swisshelm.
But Swisshelm lost more than her job. Her printing press was doused in coal oil and set on fire. Arriving in the nick of time, a servant put out the fire before the entire house went up in flames. Puddles of oil were discovered near the press. “An enemy so reckless is not one to be defied,” Swisshelm said and closed down the paper.
Thirty years earlier, the burning of a printing press had sparked national outrage—and galvanized abolitionists—but in 1866 the fire that shut down a newspaper went unheeded, and its editor was ridiculed as a female scourge.
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FLAMBOYANT DURING THE war, partial to bright white hats and soft velvet shirts, General George Armstrong Custer reported to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that in Texas Union men were being murdered for no crime other than being Union men, and when he’d left that state the previous winter, the number of murders had been increasing. Ditto the number of freedmen killed.
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