Anderson had grown up with slavery, but since he had gone on record early as an opponent of Ohio’s Black Laws, his opinions on the so-called “Negro question” carried some credibility. Denying the franchise to newly freed slaves was a nuanced position for abolitionists. They deplored the moral depravity of slavery but recognized the dangers inherent in such radical change. Anderson predicted that giving the vote to blacks immediately would “Africanize—yes, worse still, Mexicanize our people and institutions, which would, in consequence, pass through wildest anarchy into a settled despotism.” He urged the party to end this radical agitation or risk ruining both the party and the Union itself.10
The topic remained in the forefront of political debate, and everyone seemed to have an opinion. Anderson’s close friend General William T. Sherman shared his views on the Negro and other moderate measures of reconstructing the Union. Sherman’s opinions, expressed in a social situation, had been published without his consent, thus violating the custom that soldiers should stay out of politics. Anderson was vocal in defending the general. In a private letter to Anderson, Sherman maintained that he had done and was prepared to “do as much toward ameliorating the condition of the negro as anyone,” but to give them the franchise would lead to “the utter ruin of their race,” or to the damage of the “national character.” Giving blacks the franchise was a political ploy by the radicals to manufacture votes, Sherman argued. “Our country needs repose,” the general counseled. To place newly freed slaves on the same political and social footing as whites would create new troubles. These attempts were, in Sherman’s words, “mischievous and dangerous.” Sherman wanted the president to stop wasting his time pardoning individuals, declare a general amnesty for the South, and get on with the business of an orderly and peaceful reunion. Anderson shared these hopes. Both men suffered disappointment as reunion devolved into partisanship.11
Early in 1865, Brough had turned down Lincoln’s offer to succeed Salmon P. Chase as treasury secretary. Now that his term as governor was winding down, Brough had to decide whether to run again or go back to his business career. It was an easy decision. The governor had grown unpopular with military officers when he insisted on awarding promotions strictly on seniority rather than merit. The public had become accustomed to the refined manners and dignified bearing of previous chief executives. They did not love the hard-working but gruff “Fat Jack.” On June 16, Brough announced that he would not stand for reelection. He had taken the job only out of a sense of duty, he declared, and he had done his work honestly and conscientiously. Just days after the announcement, Brough was walking across the State House yard when he stumbled and fell, bruising his hand and badly spraining his ankle. This seemingly innocuous event had significant consequences for Anderson.12
While Brough nursed his ankle, Anderson continued to campaign for a diplomatic assignment. The United States minister to the Kingdom of Italy, George Perkins Marsh, had been appointed to the post by Lincoln in 1861. Marsh was already an accomplished diplomat, having served under President Zachary Taylor as minister to the Ottoman Empire. In 1864 he wrote a book titled Man and Nature that would establish his fame as the father of the U.S. conservation movement. In 1865, however, Marsh’s son was dying, so he was granted leave to return home and care for him. The word on the street was that Marsh would soon resign his post. Anderson trotted out a series of big names to support his candidacy to succeed Marsh, but Secretary Seward was still recovering from a near fatal encounter with one of Booth’s co-conspirators. In the meantime, the indefatigable Brough was trying to move his immense frame around with a cane, which inflamed his injuries. Gangrene set in. On July 19, Sidney Maxwell, Brough’s aide de camp, reported that the governor was hemorrhaging and had developed a “congestive chill.” He did not believe that Brough would recover.13
While Charles Anderson was filling in for the bedridden governor, Ohio senator Robert C. Schenck had made some headway with President Johnson. “Andy wants a note calling attention to your case,” Schenck wrote. The senator sat down and wrote the note in front of the president, who endorsed it, instructing Seward to give it special attention. Seward acted as if he had never met Anderson, despite having greeted him just eighteen months earlier at Gettysburg. In the meantime, Governor Morton of Indiana was sponsoring his own candidate for the expected vacancy—a poet and artist named Thomas Brennan Read. Morton had even convinced General William T. Sherman to endorse the recommendation. Sherman sheepishly admitted that he did not know that Anderson was seeking the post. Ohio senator Benjamin Franklin Wade also saw the president, who made it clear that he would defer to Seward. “It passes my comprehension,” John Sherman wrote on August 2, “that Seward says he did not know of your application.” It was all a big waste of energy, as Marsh decided to return to his post. He ended up holding the position for twenty-one years, the longest such service in U.S. history.14
General Benjamin Rush Cowen wrote Anderson on August 26 to tell him that Brough had again taken a turn for the worse. “Friends have given up all hope of his recovery,” Cowen lamented, “and the governor himself has ceased to hope.” Two days later, Brough died and Anderson became governor. One of his first official acts was to declare a day of mourning on September 1. He asked that businesses close their doors from ten a.m. to three p.m. in remembrance of their departed leader. Those who knew Anderson well wondered if this unexpected honor would be a blessing or a curse to a man so utterly fed up with politics. George Henshaw, a Cincinnati furniture dealer and family friend, was unsure if he should offer “congratulations or condolences.” Noting that Anderson’s name would now go down in Ohio history, Henshaw remarked to his friend “Whether this is a source of gratification to yourself you alone know.”15
Anderson began his four-month gubernatorial tenure by lobbying Secretary of War Stanton to allow Ohio’s volunteer army units to muster out of service. The war was over, Anderson reminded the secretary. The brave men who volunteered their service in that cause should be discharged immediately. In September, Governor Anderson ordered the books of the state treasury audited. He discovered that Ohio treasurer Godwin Volney Dorsey had been embezzling state funds during wartime. This revelation turned Anderson’s stomach. He ordered the popular Dorsey arrested. When critics accused the governor of exceeding his authority by exercising judicial powers without a trial, Anderson’s reply was straight from Lincoln’s own playbook. “Powers legally wanting must be forcibly usurped,” he argued, “to meet an exigency and danger to the public.” Ohio attorney general Chauncey Olds backed the governor’s decision.16
Anderson spent the balance of his lame duck term networking with old friends and planning his future. Being elected governor was never a consideration. He did not want the job and, besides, party leaders had already made their choice. Union general Jacob Dolson Cox, a former Whig state senator and ardent abolitionist, had helped found Ohio’s Republican Party in 1855. He was an advocate for President Johnson’s reconstruction policies. Cox hated slavery but did not think that freedmen had demonstrated that they were ready to assume all of the privileges of citizenship. They should certainly not be allowed to vote. Other former abolitionists, such as Henry B. Payne, shared the same moderate views on black suffrage. They courted Anderson as a potential dark horse for the U.S. Senate race in 1866. It was another false hope, as both John Sherman and Robert Schenck, whom Payne expected to align with radicals like Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, refused to show their hands on the controversial issue.17
When it came time to deliver the traditional annual state message for the year 1866, Anderson saw an opportunity to give his political views their widest airing to date. While he did not address the issue of full black citizenship directly, he did weigh in obliquely. The now fractious Union Party and Governor-elect Cox had been unable to agree on a unified platform and deferred the matter to the incoming legislature. Radical senators from the the northeast corner of Ohio introduced a resolution to strike the word “white” from t
he state constitution. Anderson took a firm stand against the proposal and pointed out that any amendments to the constitution in such times were probably unwise and would need to be considered in the election of 1867. The issue was not settled until the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which prohibited states from denying the franchise to men on the basis of race. The Ohio legislature approved the Fifteenth Amendment by just one vote in the senate and by a mere two votes in the house.
Besides the typical reporting on public works, finance, railroad, and pending legislation, Governor Anderson felt compelled to offer his opinion on what the press was calling the “Mexican Imbroglio.” Mexico’s domestic affairs had been a mess for years. The French had taken advantage of this internal strife and America’s preoccupation with its own civil war by invading Mexico. They had established a Catholic-sponsored government headed by Maximillian Ferdinand, a Hapsburg archduke from Austria. The United States had been vocal in sponsoring republican movements to oust European colonial governments throughout Latin America, and the thought of a permanent French colony on its southern doorstep was unsettling to say the least. Now that the war was over and the Union controlled a huge army, some were invoking the Monroe Doctrine and suggesting that the United States conquer Mexico as part of its manifest destiny.
Anderson bristled at the very prospect of another bloody war based on what he believed were false principles. The governor invoked Washington’s farewell address, which warned against “entangling alliances,” arguing that the Monroe Doctrine proscribed that the United States assume “guardianship over all the imbeciles of the continent or globe.” Mexico could never be a true republic after forty years of anarchy, Anderson maintained. He called Mexicans a “population of fanatics and barbarians” and wished “they could only go back into Aztecs.” He could not help but revisit the annexation of Texas that he had so strongly opposed. “Without that fatal golden apple of discord,” Anderson audaciously claimed, “we should not have had our War of Rebellion.” Anderson equated the aim to “propagandize Liberty” to Mexicans with past efforts to promote Christianity to the “Saracens of Jerusalem or the Chinese at Peking.” He closed by again invoking Washington’s “eleventh commandment”: mind your own business.18
Anderson’s state of the state message created a sensation. Dozens of letters poured in from all over the country requesting copies of the speech. The New York Times published a long article on the address, with fully half of the text devoted to the governor’s position on the Mexican question. General William T. Sherman weighed in immediately with his complete endorsement of Anderson’s position. The general was convinced that it would be “suicide . . . as a nation to engage in a new war with an old one yet smoldering.” Sherman was aware that some of his peers, including General Ulysses S. Grant, were pushing for action against France in Mexico. “I don’t care,” declared Sherman, “and will assert my own convictions regardless of their popularity.” Little wonder Sherman and Anderson were such close friends.19
War hawks attacked Anderson’s New Year message. Famed archeologist and U.S. commissioner to Peru, Ephraim George Squier, described the reaction in New York. Anderson’s address was greeted by “mingled groans and hisses,” according to Squier. Cries of “Turn him out!” came presumably from less informed listeners who did not realize that the governor had only a few days left to serve. “When you come to New York,” Squier advised, “be sure to register yourself under another name.” Anderson rewrote the speech in French so that even the colonists in Mexico would know exactly where he stood. In the end, however, Seward rattled the saber, France backed down, and Benito Juarez established a Mexican republic.20
Anderson’s four months back in the national spotlight were over. He had few plans and essentially no political capital. He had always stood resolute on principle in the face of whatever forceful winds might be blowing against him, but he had never encountered a gale as strong as that being produced by Sumner and his Radical Republican acolytes. The changes they wrought were certain to wipe Anderson clean off the political map and transform his beloved country in ways he had barely begun to imagine.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Dreams Lost and Fulfilled
IT DID NOT TAKE CHARLES ANDERSON long to realize that the country that he had loved since boyhood was gone forever. The great republican Union of free and slave states had been tenuously stitched together like a garment that was beautiful in its outward appearance but flawed in its construction. It had literally come apart at the seams. Anderson had dedicated his very soul to preventing disunion, predicted its disastrous consequences, and risked his own life to hold it together. Now the war had been won, not to preserve the Union that his father had fought to create but to usher in a radical new government construct that departed from the practical vision of the Founding Fathers.
Anderson spoke a few words early in the 1866 election canvas at Dayton for which he was roundly condemned, thus signaling the abrupt end of his political career. He called the U.S. Congress “traitors to their principles.” They fought a war while denying that there was ever any secession, then passed laws and amendments while eleven of the thirty-six states were disqualified from participating. “I must tell the North,” Anderson predicted, “that in following the lead of Congress, they are plunging into another civil war.” He warned that radical measures create “national and social destruction . . . through anarchies and despotism.” Anderson was revolted by “petty, paltry politicians filling the olden places of our departed statesmen.” Republicans howled in protest at his brazen attacks.1
President Johnson’s moderate reconstruction policies suffered a death blow in the midterm elections of 1866, when Americans elected huge Republican majorities of more than two-thirds in both houses of Congress. Radical Republicans like Senator Charles Sumner and Representative Thaddeus Stevens were unhappy with what they saw as measures by Southern white leaders to restore their own political rights while squelching economic and political opportunities for freedmen. They demanded universal manhood suffrage and finally had the political power to attain that goal. Ignoring Johnson’s veto of both the Freedman’s Bureau and Civil Rights bills, Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed birthright citizenship and equal protection under the law. To enforce the new statutes, the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867 split the former Confederate States into five militia districts administered by the U.S. Army. The South became a police state.2
Anderson was heartbroken. He moved his family to Eddyville, Kentucky, near the Lyon County iron lands he had purchased previously where he could divert his mind from his “ruined, lost country (a wreck of prosperities and liberties).” He tried to express his grief at the aftermath of the war but struggled to find the proper words. “Suffice it to say,” he lamented, “this is no longer a free country.” Anderson drafted a letter to Senator John Sherman, admitting “an inextinguishable desire to leave this Country” and suggested that the vacant mission to Vienna would be appropriate. But he knew that he had killed that dream by his own irresistible impulse to alienate former political allies. He never posted the letter.3
Abraham Rencher, a former U.S. congressman from North Carolina and former governor of the New Mexico Territory (whose daughter had married Anderson’s son), was less remorseful and more defiant. “Almost any alternative would be preferable,” Rencher exclaimed, “to that of having your property and character and even life itself depend on stupid Negroes recently emerged from a state of slavery . . . directed and controlled by those who would feel nothing for us but bitter hatred.” Reconstruction was not reconciliation, as Lincoln, Johnson, and Anderson had hoped it would be. It was retribution.4
When Governor A. G. Curtin of Kentucky invited Anderson to a convention of Union war veterans in Philadelphia in 1869, he could not bring himself to attend. “I certainly do sympathize with the cause for which we fought,” Anderson explained, but he could not abide “the present motives of a majority of
[his] associates in that war.” He found himself in a “strange position between the two parties,” and his conscience would not allow him to align with either. Anderson believed that the Republicans intended to create a partisan, sectional dynasty that would be just as evil as the slavery-based Confederate oligarchy they had so recently defeated. Despite the deep despair Anderson felt in separating from his former comrades, his conviction that the Republican Party had further “debased into a vast, organized faction to secure personal plunder and power” disgusted him. He would rather abandon politics altogether than throw in with his old allies or certain Southern Democrats, who looked the other way as groups like the Ku Klux Klan used violence and intimidation in an attempt to preserve the old social order.5
The political landscape that Anderson had known was inverted, as black legislators entered the hallowed halls of Congress while many of the South’s former white leaders were denied the franchise. In a time of political extremism, Anderson retired to his rural surroundings, determined to start a new life for himself and his family. The long-deferred boyhood dream of becoming a gentleman farmer had become a reality, only this time Anderson’s ambitions were much grander. He aimed to create a model community from scratch. His new home would incorporate all the beauty, economic prosperity, and high-toned social intercourse that he so loved. The project continued for the rest of his life and never came to full fruition, but it gave Anderson a chance to fill a void in his soul. At his new paradise he called Kuttawa, Anderson finally became the man he had always wanted to be.
He chose his retirement place carefully. Much of the land was part of a failed iron mining speculation. He was certain that it still held great promise with the proper application of capital. Anderson’s experience with railroads in the Ohio legislature helped him foresee that a need to build new rail lines meant a postwar boom in iron production. But such growth was slow to develop in the economically devastated South. The property incorporated great scenic vistas of the Cumberland River, mineral hot springs, and plenty of pasturage for his stock. It was an ideal location for the country lifestyle that the younger Anderson had envisioned. It also suited his goal of founding an entire community based on his own elaborate plans, since it had natural beauty, abundant resources, and the potential for easy access to the Illinois Central Railroad. Such ambitions required significant investment, however. In 1873, Anderson’s description of his finances boiled down to three words: “poverty, debt, and hopelessness.” Despite these challenges, he laid out the new town of Kuttawa in 1874 and solicited residents and investors.
The Lost Gettysburg Address Page 19