General Sherman had ordered one locomotive and a railway carriage to take him to Durham at eight o'clock on the morning of April 17. Just as he was boarding the train, the camp's telegraph operator stopped him—a very important dispatch was just coming in, and General Sherman ought to see it before leaving. The telegraph was from Secretary of War Stanton, informing him of President Lincoln's assassination. General Sherman ordered the operator not to reveal the contents of the dispatch to anyone until he returned from his meeting with General Johnston.
At Durham, General Sherman and a detachment of cavalry rode off to meet General Johnston and his attendants. After all the handshakes and preliminaries had been seen to, the two generals rode to a nearby farm house. This was the first time the two men had met. Their staff officers waited outside in the garden while the two generals went inside the house to talk.
The first thing General Sherman did was to show General Johnston the assassination dispatch. He carefully watched Johnston's reaction. “The perspiration came out in large drops on his forehead, and he did not attempt to conceal his distress,” General Sherman recalled. “He denounced the act as a disgrace to the age, and hoped I did not charge it to the Confederate Government.”11 General Sherman put Johnston's mind at ease by saying that he did not think General Lee or any Confederate officers had anything to do with it—“but I would not say as much for Jeff. Davis…” He also explained that his men had not yet been informed of the assassination and feared what might happen when they found out. His particular fear was “that a foolish woman or man in Raleigh might say something or do something that would madden our men,” which would result in the army burning Raleigh to the ground. As it turned out, General Sherman's fears were unfounded. When word of the assassination was read to the men, “there was not a single act of retaliation” by any of his soldiers.
General Sherman did not discuss surrender terms with General Johnston until the following day, April 18. In his surrender document, Sherman offered Johnston terms that were more than generous and lenient, issued in the spirit of both President Lincoln and General Grant. But in addition to issues pertaining to the surrendering of Johnston's army, the document also addressed political matters. Lincoln had expressly prohibited General Sherman from even mentioning politics or matters pertaining to the government, and Sherman did not have the authority to discuss these items. In his generosity, General Sherman had overstepped and exceeded his authority. His intentions were well meant, but his actions would bring the full fury of a vengeful North down on him.
“Sherman thought, no doubt, in adding to the terms that I had made with General Lee, that he was but carrying out the wishes of the President of the United States,” General Grant would later write.12 The general did not hear from Sherman until April 21, when he received a dispatch dated April 18: “I enclose herewith a copy of an agreement made this day between General Joseph E. Johnston and myself, which, if approved by the President of the United States, will produce peace from the Potomac to the Rio Grande.”13 As soon as he read the message, Grant realized that General Sherman had gone far beyond his authority, and he could see that the surrender terms Sherman had given General Johnston would be the cause of a great many problems.
According to the agreement drawn up by Sherman and Johnston, the Confederate armies would disband and move to their various state capitals, where they would deposit their weapons in their state arsenals. Every officer and man would then agree “to cease from acts of war and abide by the action of both State and Federal authority.” The surrendered troops would be under the jurisdiction of both Federal and Confederate state governments, which actually gave the state governments as much authority as the federal government in Washington, DC.
Another clause in the agreement called for “the recognition by the Executive of the United States of the several State governments on their officers and legislatures taking the oaths prescribed by the Constitution of the United States.” General Sherman had given himself the authority to require the President of the United States to recognize the governments of the Confederate states, as well as the power to require officers and legislatures to take oaths prescribed by the US Constitution. There was more to the agreement than this, but these were the two principal items that bothered General Grant.14
Grant sent the agreement along to Secretary of War Stanton, along with the recommendation that President Johnson and his cabinet take action pertaining to the document as soon as possible. The president and his entire cabinet abided by General Grant's suggestion. They met that day and rejected the agreement immediately—General Sherman knew that he was going beyond his authority, and he had made it a point that all terms should be conditional and would not take effect unless approved by Washington. Washington emphatically did not approve. General Grant was ordered go to North Carolina to visit General Sherman and take control of his army.
But President Johnson did more than just order Grant to go and see General Sherman. “Instead of recognizing that Sherman had made an honest mistake in exceeding his authority,” Colonel Horace Porter commented, “the President and the Secretary of War characterized his conduct as akin to treason, and the Secretary denounced him in unmeasured terms.”15 General Grant left for North Carolina on April 22. He did not notify General Sherman of his visit, for two reasons. The first consideration was security—no one wanted to alert a possible assassin that the general was traveling by train to North Carolina. Also, General Grant did not want to embarrass his old friend with news that he was coming down from Washington to chastise him.
Grant arrived at Raleigh, North Carolina, during the early morning hours of April 23. He discussed the surrender agreement with General Sherman in detail, and informed Sherman in no uncertain terms that the agreement had been rejected by the president and his cabinet. Under the circumstances, Sherman had no other option than to make another appointment to meet with General Johnston to renegotiate the terms of the surrender. But when General Sherman went to talk to Johnston, Grant was not present. He made a point of remaining discreetly in the background—back in Raleigh, according to Horace Porter—“lest he might be seen to share in the honor of receiving the surrender, the credit for which he wished to belong wholly to Sherman.”16
As soon as the rewriting of the surrender document had been accomplished—essentially under the same terms that General Grant had offered General Lee at Appomattox—Grant returned to Washington and General Sherman put the incident behind him.
But the incident was far from over. Newspapers throughout the country printed Secretary Stanton's negative remarks about the surrender document, which infuriated Sherman and turned the entire North against him. In his comments, Stanton listed reasons why he considered General Sherman's surrender terms to be not only insubordinate but also treasonable. The last of these was probably the most damning: “It formed no bases of true and lasting peace, but relieved rebels from the pressure of our victories and left them in condition to renew their effort to overthrow the United States Government, and subdue the loyal States, whenever their strength was recruited, and any opportunity should offer.”17 In Secretary Stanton's opinion, General Sherman's surrender agreement not only wasted the army's victories in the field but also put the rebellious states in a position to start another war against the US government.
When the North read what Secretary Stanton had to say, the general reaction was resentment and outrage toward General Sherman. President Lincoln had been dead for just over a week, and anger toward the South had not dissipated at all during this time. If anything, it had increased. The public was indignant toward General Sherman because of his lenient attitude toward the rebels. “Some people went so far as to denounce him as a traitor,” General Grant wrote.18 The North was in no mood to show any forgiveness toward the South, and had no use for anyone who showed any mercy toward the rebels. This included General William Tecumseh Sherman, in spite of his war record.
Most of the army felt the same way about the South as the c
ivilian population. On April 19, the War Department issued an order that all army units should stop where they were as a gesture of respect for President Lincoln's funeral, which was taking place in Washington that day. General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had the idea of holding a memorial service for the president in camp, to have their own funeral. Headquarters tents were draped in black for the day, along with all regimental flags, and the senior chaplain was asked to give a memorial sermon eulogizing the president.
When the time came for the memorial service, the men formed a hollow square, flags were brought to the head of their regiments, arms were stacked and, after a stirring hymn played by a regimental band, the pastor began to speak. He reminded the soldiers of President Lincoln's love for them all, and also spoke about the assassination. “And you will endure this sacrilege?” he shouted. “Can heavenly charity tolerate such crime under the flag of this delivered nation?”19
General Chamberlain could see the men reacting to the pastor's sermon; their faces tensed up and turned red. He quietly asked the chaplain to tone down his rhetoric, but his warning was ignored. “Better to die glorious than to live infamous,” the pastor continued. “Better to be buried beneath a nation's tears than walk the earth guilty of a nation's blood. Better, thousandfold, forever better, Lincoln dead than Davis living.” General Chamberlain may have been upset by these remarks, but the chaplain was only saying out loud what most of the North was thinking. Even General Grant's wife, Julia, possibly with the assassination attempt of her husband in mind, did not agree with a policy of clemency toward the South. “Too much precious blood has been shed, too much treasure wasted, for the great sin of rebellion to be too lightly condoned by the government so lately threatened,” she would write.20
One of the most obvious targets for the North, and especially for the Radicals, was Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy's most famous general. President Johnson wanted to have General Lee put on trial for treason, but General Grant threatened to resign his command if the president arrested Lee, which would violate the surrender terms he had signed at Appomattox. In June 1865, General Lee wrote a letter to Andrew Johnson regarding the restoration of “all rights and privileges” he had lost when Virginia seceded from the Union and Lee went out of the Union with his state.
Richmond, Virginia, June 13, 1865
His Excellency Andrew Johnson,
President of the United States
Sir: Being excluded from the provisions of amnesty & pardon contained in the proclamation of the 29th ult; I hereby apply for the benefits, & full restoration of all rights & privileges extended to those included in its terms. I graduated at the Mil. Academy at West Point in June 1829. Resigned from the U.S. Army April ’61. Was a General in the Confederate Army, & included in the surrender of the Army of N. Va. 9 April ’65. I have the honor to be, very respectfully,
Your obedient servant,
R. E. Lee21
Although he freely admitted that he had resigned his commission in the US Army and had been a general in the Confederate army, General Lee did not see that his behavior was any different from that of another famous rebel: George Washington. “At one time, he [Washington] fought against the French under Braddock, in the service of the King of Great Britain,” he wrote to P. G. T. Beauregard, “at another, he fought with the French at Yorktown, under the orders of the Continental Congress of America, against him. He has not been branded by the world with reproach for this; but his course has been applauded.”22 But the Radicals in Congress were not satisfied with such an explanation and were of the considered opinion that Robert E. Lee was a traitor and should be treated like one. The son of the US ambassador to Great Britain, Henry Adams, thought that General Lee should have been hanged.
Andrew Johnson opposed the Radical Republicans and their program for Reconstruction, but he did not have the diplomacy or the political ability to do anything about it. He was a veteran politician, beginning his career as an alderman and working his way up to the Tennessee legislature and then to governor of Tennessee, serving two terms, and then to the US Senate. But throughout his political career, he made few friends and even fewer allies. Gideon Welles complained that Andrew Johnson had no confidants and did not want any. During his two terms as governor, he rarely made any effort to work with the legislature.
As a politician, Johnson was solitary at best and difficult at worst. For one thing, he was convinced of his own self-righteousness—according to his point of view, he was always right and anyone who disagreed with him was wrong. The office of president, especially in the days immediately following the Civil War, required tact and diplomacy and the ability at least to try to cooperate with the opposing Radicals. Abraham Lincoln had all of these qualities, along with the ability to make deals and reach compromises. Andrew Johnson lacked every one of these attributes. Instead of being flexible and willing to negotiate, Johnson was stubborn, intolerant, and obstinate. These traits would not serve him well during the next four years.
During Andrew Johnson's four-year term in the White House, four Reconstruction Acts were passed by Congress. President Johnson vetoed all four of these acts; Congress overturned every one of the president's vetoes. Three of the reversals came on the same day that the president issued his veto. The president's unwillingness to compromise was playing into the hands of the Radicals. When the first Reconstruction Act had been introduced, he had been advised to exercise a pocket veto to override the act, which would have at least temporarily defused any confrontation with the Radicals. But President Johnson decided to ignore his advisors and defy Congress, which allowed both the House and the Senate to override his veto and to give him a decisive political defeat.
President Johnson had vetoed the First Reconstruction Act with a message that condemned the measure as “absolute despotism.”23 Under the provisions of the act, the South would be divided into five military districts, much like the division of Germany after the Second World War. Each district was to be placed under the control of a Union general, who was given the authority, and the troops, to enforce Federal laws. The act also instructed the ten former Confederate states to draw up new constitutions that would guarantee universal male suffrage, and also stipulated that after a state adopted a new constitution and elected a new governor and legislature, the new government would not be recognized until it ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. (The first section of the Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to freed slaves; the second section specifies that all persons residing within a state, including freed slaves, would be counted toward representation in Congress, but that a state that denies any of its citizens the right to vote would have its representation in Congress decreased in proportion; the third section denies the right to hold office to any former Confederate officials; the fourth section prohibits questioning the validity of the United States public debt. The fifth section gives Congress the authority to enforce the previous four sections of the amendment.)
Andrew Johnson might have responded to the First Reconstruction Act with a moderate response to Congress, listing the reasons for his disagreement with the act's provisions in a reasonable and cogent manner. But he did not have the personality or the political finesse to respond in such a way, which Abraham Lincoln would have done. Instead, he stated that the act was unconstitutional and unnecessary, and went on to say that it reduced the position of the ten affected states to “the most abject and degrading slavery,” and that it would also “force the right of suffrage out of the hands of the white people and into the hands of the negroes.”24 Congress was not impressed by Johnson's scolding. Both houses voted to override his veto on the same day: the Senate vote was 38 to 10; the House voted 135 to 48.
General Grant called President Johnson's veto statement “one of the most ridiculous messages that ever emanated from any president.”25 By this time, any hope of Abraham Lincoln's policy for leniency and benevolence toward the South was long dead. The Radicals had completely overturned Lincoln's—and Johnson's—Reconstruction progr
am and replaced it with their own, much harsher, version. Under the Radical's program, the South was treated like an occupied and conquered territory. Lincoln's notion of malice toward none and charity for all died with him.
On the same day that President Johnson's veto of the First Reconstruction Act was overridden, which was March 2, 1867, Congress also acted to override another of the president's vetoes. In February, both houses had passed the Tenure of Office Act, which prohibited the president from removing any official that had been appointed by the Senate unless the Senate approved the president's dismissal. President Johnson considered the act an infringement on the power of the chief executive, and vetoed it. On March 2, Congress voted to overrule the president's veto.
The Tenure of Office Act would turn out to be Andrew Johnson's undoing. It would give the Radicals the legislative excuse they needed to impeach the unpopular president. In August, 1867, President Johnson dismissed Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton from the cabinet and replaced him with Ulysses S. Grant. Six months later, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Andrew Johnson on eleven charges, including violation of the Tenure of Office Act. The trial began in the Senate in March and lasted until May; Johnson was acquitted by one vote.
In July of 1868, Horatio Seymour received the Democratic Party's nomination when Andrew Johnson received less than one-third of the votes necessary for the nomination. But replacing Johnson as their candidate did not help the Democrats in November. They lost the election, and the White House, to Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant.
The Last Weeks of Abraham Lincoln Page 28