The Impeachers

by Brenda Wineapple

  Madison Newby, a free black from Surrey County, Virginia, said that groups of about fifteen white men would ride up to the homes of black people at night and beat those who lived there. The Committee on Reconstruction listened to story after hair-raising story of unrepentant Southerners who didn’t consider the oath of allegiance binding, of wanton brutality, of ruthless night-riders and of cold-blooded murder. The Committee also listened to stories about black soldiers who arrested white men and treated them harshly, just as they’d been treated for longer than some of them could remember, their antagonism a form of resistance. A black soldier had killed a white man in late December, and several black soldiers murdered a white shopkeeper the same month. For there were Bureau agents sympathetic to slavery, or as Northern journalist John Trowbridge noted, agents who, intending to do right, were nonetheless seduced “by the dinners to which they were invited by white planters with favors to ask.”

  Were any of the stories true? If some were exaggerated, the sheer preponderance of the testimony, delivered in public and in private correspondence, suggests that the conditions in the South may have been even worse than described. “Quite a number of negroes have been shot lately who have been over near the main land to fish or hunt,” Daniel Richards, a tax commissioner in Fernandina, Florida, told Elihu Washburne. According to a former army surgeon, former secessionists now invested with state authority said they’d “accomplish by law and Legislation what they failed to accomplish by Arms in the war. We have no peace.”

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  IT WAS CLEAR to Congress that something had to be done. Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill suggested that basic freedoms needed constitutional protection. As James Garfield put it, the war had been fought to break the chains of bondage, but it would have been fought in vain if the injustices sustaining bondage weren’t abolished as well. And since laws like the Civil Rights Act could be repealed when political tides changed, as they surely would, a constitutional amendment would be less vulnerable. That had been the reasoning behind the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery.

  But the unintended consequence of the Thirteenth Amendment directly affected Congress, as Congress well knew, since every black person counted as a whole person, not three-fifths of one. As a result, about a million and a half people were added to the census of the former slave-holding states. The South, as a bloc, would have more than twenty more congressional seats and electoral votes. And so Northern Republicans continued to worry that if blacks were denied the vote, a South of former rebels would surely rise again, join with Northern Democrats, and control the legislature just as they had before the war, endangering the rights of black men and women.

  Moderate Republicans still believed that there should be some qualifications attached to the right to vote, such as literacy or property ownership. But if black voters had to be qualified, shouldn’t the same qualification apply to whites? And, at the very least, shouldn’t loyalty to the Union be a qualification for a voter, black or white? “To those who say they [blacks] are unfit for the franchise, I reply they are more fit than secessionists,” the late Henry Winter Davis, a Radical, had insisted. Yet there was another, serious question to be considered: could you federally mandate suffrage in just one part of the country? Shouldn’t the states determine their own voting regulations, as they always had? Most Northern states didn’t allow black men to vote, and Connecticut had recently refused to pass a suffrage amendment.

  The Joint Committee on Reconstruction suggested a new constitutional amendment stipulating that if males over twenty-one were prevented from voting because of their race or color, the state’s overall representation would be reduced by the total number of persons excluded. This would hurt the South, where the black population was significantly greater than in the North.

  Charles Sumner tried to kill the new proposed amendment. He said there should be no denial of rights, civil or political, on account of race or color, in any state, period. All persons were equal before the law. Attacking the amendment, Sumner helped ensure its initial defeat, for many Republicans were all too eager to jettison the whole suffrage question, and Democrats opposed any reduction in Southern representation.

  Sumner’s position infuriated Thaddeus Stevens. The amendment was “slaughtered by a puerile and pedantic criticism,” Stevens later exclaimed in exasperation, “by the united forces of self-righteous Republicans and unrighteous Copperheads.” William Pitt Fessenden thought Sumner an ass. “The only ground of his opposition was mortified vanity,” Fessenden declared. “Sumner is not only a fool but a malignant fool,” Charles Eliot Norton fumed. “Sumner receives as little support as the President. Nobody but Longfellow approves his course; & in politics Longfellow is a mere sweet simple child.”

  Concerned that protracted Republican bickering might convince people that Congress had no plan, no direction, and no backbone, Representative Elihu Washburne sadly complained to his wife that “our friends are all split up among themselves.” Norton urged the editor of The Nation to speak out. Congress must act.

  But Lydia Maria Child felt there were good reasons to kill this new amendment. “If the South have to choose to diminish her representation for the sake of maintaining her pride of caste,” Child said, “she would keep the blacks forever in civil bondage, if the proposed amendment to the Constitution were carried. Moreover,” she gloomily added, “such an amendment would act as a temptation to get rid of the blacks, by expatriation, starvation, or slaughter.” The Radical Republican Thomas Durant, formerly attorney general in Louisiana under General Nathaniel Banks, watched in dismay. Johnson’s generous pardoning policy had allowed these ex-rebels to sit on local court benches, to serve in law enforcement, and to run for local office; they had little motivation to go to Washington if forced to give blacks the vote. Former Confederates sashayed into office, and as Durant wryly noted, “the oligarchy doesn’t care for a representative in Congress if you allow them permanent control of the state.”

  Congressional debates dragged on until June. A newly proposed Fourteenth Amendment, revised and revised again, did confer citizenship—but not the right to vote—on all people born or naturalized in the United States. It also guaranteed these citizens equal protection and due process under the law.

  Furthermore, its second section decreed that representatives would be apportioned according to a state’s population unless the state denied the vote to male citizens over the age of twenty-one. In this case, the state’s representation would be reduced in proportion to the number of men excluded.

  The amendment did not therefore mandate suffrage. Rather, those states (Southern states, it was assumed) that denied black men the vote were penalized by having their representation in Congress reduced. In addition, anyone who’d engaged in rebellion against the Constitution was disqualified from holding state or federal or military office, although Congress could vote to remove that restriction.

  In the fourth section, the federal government forgave the Confederate debt, and the fifth section allowed Congress to pass laws to enforce the amendment.

  In its final form, the Fourteenth Amendment was what historian Eric McKitrick called an “odd contraption” that fully satisfied no one. A farrago of political jockeying, political compromise, and nagging anxiety about the future of a country where all people are created equal, it ignored the question of what to do with confiscated land, and certainly it sidestepped the issue of black suffrage, although it did open the door to a black vote, or so many Republicans wanted to believe. The amendment also implicitly addressed the question of a Union that still excluded eleven states, though it saw the question through a glass darkly. It wasn’t clear, for instance, if the Southern states would be readmitted to Congress if they ratified the amendment. As it happened, only Tennessee ratified it right away, and Tennessee was allowed into the Union, the first of the eleven states to be so admitted.

  Wendell
Phillips hated the Fourteenth Amendment, saying it was a “fatal and total surrender,” as he told Thad Stevens. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton hated it too. They’d strongly protested the introduction of the word “male” into the amendment, which revealed the longstanding bias against a woman’s right to vote—and against women. But hammered together by congressional leaders with clashing visions for the future, this ground-breaking legislation, changing our concept of citizenship, was passed in a spirit of hopefulness. “We were each compelled to surrender some of our individual preferences in order to secure anything, and by doing so became unexpectedly harmonious,” Iowa Senator James Grimes told his wife.

  Exhausted, Charles Sumner went along, and Thaddeus Stevens, yielding temporarily on suffrage, declared it was no sacrifice of principle to admit you can’t undo the past at one sitting. “I would not for a moment inculcate the idea of surrendering a principle vital to justice,” Stevens explained with passion. “But if full justice could not be obtained at once, I would not refuse to do what is possible.” That is, if the states would not yet ratify an amendment giving black men the right to vote, so be it. “I shall not be driven by clamor or denunciation to throw away a great good because it is not perfect,” Stevens declared. “I will take all I can get in the cause of humanity and leave it to be perfected by better men in better times.

  “Men in pursuit of justice,” Stevens concluded, “must never despair.”

  Thaddeus Stevens spoke again, this time elegiacally. “In my youth, in my manhood, in my old age, I had fondly dreamed that when any fortunate chance should have broken up for a while the foundation of our institutions, and released us from our obligations the most tyrannical that ever man imposed in the name of freedom, that the intelligent, pure and just men of the Republic, true to their professions and their consciences, would have so remodeled all our institutions as to have freed them from every vestige of human oppression, of inequality or rights, of the recognized degradation of the poor, and the superior caste of the rich.

  “This bright dream has vanished,” he concluded. Our institutions are not yet devoid of human oppression or inequality, he went on to say. And yes, we might have done better if we had the cooperation of President Johnson. But we don’t. The President would have the former Confederacy remain a slave empire under a different name. We cannot allow that or forgive that. So we must not delay, we must not give up, we must take and do what we can: “Mutual concession,” Thaddeus Stevens added, “is our only resort, or mutual hostilities.”

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  LEGISLATION IN WASHINGTON didn’t stop the murders—and definitely not in New Orleans that summer. New Orleans, where, as Thomas Durant had said, ex-Confederates had taken control of government.

  The Louisiana state government was chock-full of former secessionists, and Confederate veterans made up two-thirds of the police force; some still liked to wear their gray uniforms. New Orleans’ mayor, John T. Monroe, was himself a proud Confederate—jailed during the war as a traitor and elected mayor before he’d even been pardoned. And the state governor, James Madison Wells, was a conservative Unionist who forced Unionists out of office to reinstate former rebels, and at President Johnson’s urging revamped the Freedmen’s Bureau and installed there a Johnson lackey, General Joseph Fullerton. Governor Wells and Fullerton proceeded to give land back to former planters and discouraged poor rural blacks from coming to the city, arresting them on trumped-up charges and then jailing them indefinitely.

  Then, strangely enough, Governor Wells supported a call for a state constitutional convention intending to remodel the state’s 1864 Unionist constitution and to include, this time, amendments guaranteeing black suffrage. A number of state legislators and office-holders, particularly the wealthiest and most prominent ex-rebels, had wanted Governor Wells gone. The legislature offered to nominate him for the U.S. Senate and pack him off to Washington, but Wells refused. “The Governor has become fully convinced that the late returned Rebs are not to be trusted with power in their hands,” an observer noted.

  The governor therefore supported the call for a convention to shore up the Radical Republicans and strengthen his own position by doing so. “He intended to beat the rebels and keep them from power,” Henry Warmoth wrote in his diary, “even if in so doing he destroyed the state government and produced anarchy for twenty years.” Wells thus took up the Radicals’ appeal for a new state constitutional convention. After all, he reasoned, during the 1864 convention two years ago, many of the state’s parishes hadn’t been represented. And since a loophole in the constitution allowed the convention to be reconvened if its president issued a call for one, the convention would be legal, at least technically. When the convention’s original president refused, Governor Wells appointed Judge Rufus K. Howell as president pro tem. He also issued writs of election for new delegates who advocated black suffrage.

  The whole thing seemed extraordinary, particularly to New Orleans Democrats. The New Orleans Crescent declared that “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.” These white men would stop, by force if need be, any convention bent on ousting them, especially the one slated to meet on Monday at the redbrick Mechanics Institute.

  The Friday before the state convention, about 1,500 people, black and white, rallied at the steps of City Hall in support. There were speeches, but not the rabble-rousing kind reported in the press, at least according to one journalist, who didn’t find anything he heard that night any more extreme than the speeches he’d heard at any other political rally. But the conservative papers said the rally augured revolution, and that a dentist, Anthony Dostie, a Radical Republican from the North, was telling the crowd to drench the streets in blood.

  The next day, Saturday, Mayor Monroe called a private meeting at which he told General Absalom Baird, in temporary command of Louisiana, that there was to be an illegal assembly on Monday that might disturb the peace, never mind subvert the present government. General Baird more or less brushed him off, saying that if the convention wasn’t legal, as Monroe claimed, the mayor should think of it as a bit of “harmless pleasantry.” According to Henry Warmoth, on that same Saturday, Mayor Monroe gave the police orders to kill every member of the convention, especially its leaders.

  Albert Voorhies and Andrew Herron, state lieutenant governor and state attorney general, contacted President Johnson: the convention, they said, was illegal, and they planned to arrest its delegates, and they wanted to make sure the military wouldn’t meddle. Johnson’s reply was just what they’d hoped: the “military will be expected to sustain, not obstruct or interfere with, the proceedings of the courts,” he reassured them. The President then contacted Governor Wells: what was going on, he wanted to know, and by what authority was this illegal convention to be held? Wells dodged. So on Monday, July 30, the day of the convention, President Johnson told Andrew Herron to “call on Genl. Sheridan, or whoever may be in command for sufficient force to sustain the civil authority in suppressing all illegal or unlawful assemblies who usurp or assume to exorcise [sic] any power or authority without having obtained the consent of the people of the State.”

  That day, by noon, about twenty-five delegates arrived at the Mechanics Institute, but since there was no quorum, a recess was called so the sergeant-at-arms could round up absentees. Outside the Institute, a crowd of mostly black men and women had been waiting around for hours when a procession of black Union army veterans, accompanied by fife and drum, came marching from the French Quarter to Dryades Street. They waved the Stars and Stripes, and the crowd cheered, or some of them did, for there were a number of white men standing by, apparently as many as a thousand, who began to hoot and hiss.

  Information about what exactly happened th
at day is contradictory. There was a scuffle. One journalist reported he saw “several negroes lying dead” on the sidewalk. Someone had fired a shot—perhaps it had been the police. No one knew, but the police had brought pistols with them; nightsticks wouldn’t do.

  The drums of the marchers stopped pounding, the fife fell silent. More shots. In minutes, a white mob, white handkerchiefs knotted round their necks and their hats facing backward so they could recognize one another, fired at the black marchers. After the marchers fell, the mob shot at their corpses. The firefighters showed up, and they too attacked the marchers.

  “I’ll shoot down every damned son of a bitch in the building,” a member of the mob yelled as many of the black men from the procession, seeking refuge, ran toward it. “We’ll go and tear down the Institute, and we’ll get a cannon.” The police stationed in front of the Mechanics Institute blasted out the windows, and together, the mob, the police, and the firefighters pushed inside. The delegates grabbed whatever they could to defend themselves. “It seemed ridiculous to me that men should with chairs, battings, and piece of railings contend against an armed force, regularly organized,” recalled a delegate. Another of them dropped to the floor so that the bullets might pass over him. Others scrambled to the second story. The police followed, and though a few protected the delegates they recognized, soon the walls were splattered with blood, which congealed on the floorboards. A couple of delegates jumped out of windows onto the broken glass below. They were shot when they landed. The mob grabbed another delegate. “Hang him,” they cried.

  Waving a handkerchief that he’d tied on to one of the little flags in the room, the Reverend Dr. Horton tried to surrender. “Stop firing,” he shouted. “We are noncombatants; if you want to arrest us, make any arrest you please, we are not prepared to defend ourselves.”