A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (78 page)

Nevertheless, for the first time, under these Reconstruction governments, African Americans won seats in the U.S. government. Black Reconstruction, as Southerners called it, put a number of freedmen in positions of power. Between 1869 and 1901, there were two black U.S. senators and sixteen congressmen elected. Like many of his colleagues, Blanche Kelso Bruce (1841–98), the U.S. senator from Mississippi, was highly qualified. Born into slavery in Virginia, Bruce was tutored by his master’s son and worked as a printer’s apprentice. When the Civil War started, he escaped north, and after the Union Army rejected his attempt to enlist, he taught school, attended Oberlin College, and worked as a steamboat porter. After the war Bruce moved to Mississippi, where he became a prosperous landowner and served in low-level elected offices. Serving as sheriff of Bolivar County, he gained the favor of the Republicans at Jackson, and after a few high-profile appointments, was elected to the Senate by the Mississippi legislature in 1874. Bruce fought against the Chinese Exclusion Act, spoke in favor of Indian rights, and became the first African American to chair a Senate committee. Once the Redeemer Democrats regained power, they ousted him, but Bruce had so impressed the national Republicans that he received a handful of votes for vice president in 1880.
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Another black U.S. senator, Hiram Revels, was a free man in North Carolina before attending school in the North. Ordained a minister by the African Methodist Church, Revels headed congregations in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and Kansas before moving to Maryland. After April 1861 he worked for the Union cause in Maryland by organizing black regiments and then recruited African Americans to serve in Missouri. Like Bruce, he settled in Mississippi after the war and held local alderman positions, then state senator positions in Adams County before the Mississippi legislature named him to fill Jefferson Davis’s seat. His appointment actually preceded Bruce’s, though it was much shorter, lasting only until the end of 1871, when he returned to assume the presidency of Alcorn College, Mississippi’s first black university.

Bruce, Revels, and other African Americans elected during Black Reconstruction, regardless of their qualifications, only stayed in office by the good graces of the Republican governments. More precisely, they could only hold office as long as the military allowed them to. The presence of black elected officials exaggerated the perception that the Radical governments ruled only through force. Increasingly, there was also a real awareness that some were horribly corrupt. Their legislatures issued bonds for any project, no matter how financially unstable. Virtually all the governors accepted bribes to grant charters or franchises: Governor Henry Warmoth in Louisiana, for example, reputedly stashed away a cool $100,000 from public works contracts.
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Alabama printed $18 to $20 million worth of railroad bonds, and the overall debt of the eleven former Confederate states was estimated to exceed $132 million by 1872, yet with no tangible results for the expenditures.
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Printing costs mysteriously soared: in South Carolina, the cost of state printing from 1868 to 1876 surpassed the total printing expenses from the entire period from 1789 to 1868! Legislators put in requests for “supplies” such as perfume, hams, ladies’ bonnets, and champagne—all (obviously) essential to passing good laws.
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Reconstruction governments thus featured a disturbing mix of Northern reformers, Southern opportunists, and a sea of inexperienced blacks with practically no capital and little economic clout. Had all the motives of the actors been pure, the task of running the governments efficiently and without corruption would have been difficult. And without doubt, many in the Reconstruction governments sincerely wanted to improve the lives of all. They introduced the first public schools in the nation, enacted prison and asylum reforms, and enforced the Fourteenth Amendment rights of the freedmen. Without the support of Southern whites, absent their own economic base, and lacking any political experience, the governments did what governments often do: they threw money at the problems. No transportation? Issue railroad bonds that would never be paid. No education? Throw up a school and assume educated blacks would somehow be respected by their former masters.

It would be a mistake to assume that the Radicals lacked Democratic support for these measures. Even in the South, most of the railroad bond measures were bipartisan and remained so until the Panic of 1873.
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Only after a new group of Bourbon (Redeemer) Democrats had appeared—those interested in repudiating the debts and rejecting state aid to railroad projects—did support for the measures dry up. Moreover, concern over graft and government excess grew to the point that when the Bourbons took the scene after 1870, they found voters receptive to reducing the size of government and lowering taxes.

As these trends unfolded in the South, Republicans in Washington had a veto-proof majority, although Johnson still had enforcement powers. As commander in chief of the army—the only institution capable of actually putting Reconstruction policies into practice—Johnson could still control the pace of change. He also found a surprising ally in the Supreme Court, which in the
Ex parte Milligan
case (1866) unanimously ruled against imposition of martial law in cases where civil administration still functioned. This cut the legal legs out from under the military governance in the South, and the Court proceeded to rule against loyalty oaths and allowed civil suits against military governors for damages. Congress, sensing where the Court was headed, used its discretionary powers granted in Article III of the Constitution to state that the Court had no jurisdiction in cases of habeas corpus, the issue that had been spawned by
Milligan.
Congress succeeded in evading the Constitution’s stipulation that only wartime suspension of civil government was legal—the war was over—but the Court had no way to enforce its ruling. Checkmated, the Court withdrew from accepting most other Reconstruction-related decisions.

Now only Johnson stood between Congress and its vision of a prostrate South. Concerned the president might outmaneuver them by using his constitutional power as head of the executive branch to go directly through the officer corps in the Union Army, in February 1867 the Radicals passed the Tenure of office Act, a measure that prohibited Johnson from removing federal office holders without Senate approval. This act violated a seventy-eight-year precedent and in essence handcuffed the president from removing incompetent or even dangerous officials if they had allies in the Senate. Johnson, as expected, vetoed the measure, and Congress, as expected, overrode the veto. At the same time, Congress passed the Command of the Army Act, requiring presidential orders or orders from the secretary of war (Radical sympathizer Stanton) to go through the general of the army (in that case, Ulysses S. Grant). Moreover, it stipulated Grant could not be assigned to duty in any area other than Washington (anticipating that Johnson might send him on a “fact-finding” mission to, say, China!).

In fact, Grant wanted to maintain a low profile. Although he seldom agreed with Johnson, Grant appreciated the separation of powers and understood the necessity for keeping the executive branch an independent powerful check on Congress. Although his sympathies in matters of Reconstruction favored the Republicans, he nevertheless supported Johnson’s orders and attempted to execute them.

Johnson, convinced many of these congressional acts were unconstitutional, decided to challenge the Tenure of Office Act. He removed Stanton in August while Congress was adjourned, replacing him with Grant as secretary of war. He sent the Senate an explanation of his reasons in a December communication, but it was too late. The Senate rejected Johnson’s statement for removing Stanton by a whopping 35 to 6 vote, and on January 14, 1868, it was time for Grant to pick up his things and vacate the War Department office. Scarcely a month later, in February 1868, Johnson dismissed Stanton a second time, and replaced him with Lorenzo Thomas.

Modern readers must note that in the nineteenth century context of separation of powers, the Congress had no constitutional right of review for executive appointment officers. In firing and hiring cabinet members, Johnson was not only fully within his constitutional rights, but he was in keeping with the actions of virtually every chief executive before him. Realistically, however, the Radicals saw Johnson as an obstacle to their programs, and neither the law nor the Constitution could be allowed to stand in the way.

At any rate, with the Thomas appointment, a truly extraordinary scene unfolded. Stanton refused to vacate his office and had a warrant issued for Thomas’s arrest; whereas Johnson sent Thomas’s name—the second in a few months—to the Senate for approval. This time, there was no doubt among the House Judiciary Committee members, who recommended eleven articles of impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Nine articles specifically related to Stanton’s (illegal, in the eyes of the House) dismissal; one involved Johnson’s speeches; and the eleventh catch-all article lumped together every charge the Radicals could find. It was Thaddeus Stevens’s moment of triumph: so ill that he had to have the clerk read his speech inaugurating the impeachment committee, he was nevertheless so obsessed by enmity toward Johnson that he lashed out, “Unfortunate, unhappy man, behold your doom.”
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So spiteful was Stevens’s speech that the Northern press stood back aghast. The New York
Herald
wrote that Stevens had “the bitterness and hatred of Marat, and the unscrupulousness of Robespierre.”
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Although many historians condemn the impeachment process as rash, reckless, and unwarranted, it is significant that the full House vote was a substantial 126 to 47. This was a ratio far higher than the House impeachment vote against Bill Clinton a century later (228 to 206 on the key article of perjury following a sexual harassment suit brought against him). A Senate trial of Johnson soon followed.

Although modern Americans are slightly more familiar with the processes of impeachment because of the Clinton case, the mechanics are nevertheless worth restating. After a full House vote in favor of articles of impeachment, the president is officially impeached, but then must stand trial before the Senate. The prosecutors of the case are House managers who present the evidence for removing the chief executive. According to the Constitution, the House, and only the House, determines whether the offenses constitute “high crimes and misdemeanors”—in other words, once the House has turned out articles of impeachment, the Senate’s
only
constitutional function is to determine guilt or innocence. Senators cannot (at least, according to the Constitution) determine that a president is guilty, yet conclude that removal is too great a penalty. Rather, the House has already found that
if
the president committed the acts of which he was accused, the penalty is automatic.

This structure, however, produced an unfortunate flaw in practice; namely that since the Senate would always be the second and final body to judge a president, its members could ignore the requirement that they rule on guilt or innocence only and instead reargue the question of whether the behavior fits the high-crimes-and-misdemeanors bar. Both American impeachment trials resulted in the Senates’ of the respective day ignoring their constitutional charge and insinuating themselves into the powers and prerogatives of the House.

When the House managers prepared their case, John A. Bingham of Ohio headed the prosecution. Formerly opposed to impeachment, Bingham had finally concluded that Johnson had to go. Radicals dominated the prosecution team and took the most extreme positions, attempting to paint Johnson as a wild-eyed dictator bent on overthrowing the government. In a remarkable display, Senator Benjamin Butler “waved a nightshirt allegedly stained with the blood of an Ohio carpetbagger, who had been flogged by Mississippi ruffians” to show the lawlessness of the South.
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From that point, in every election, Republicans would “wave the bloody shirt,” and the tactic proved effective until the mid-1880s. It was less useful for Bingham, however.

Johnson’s defense attorneys made eloquent speeches on the president’s behalf. More important, no one could produce evidence of treason or truly criminal intent by Johnson, who had sought only to challenge a constitutional question. All this made the moderates uneasy about the precedent of unseating a sitting president. When the Senate voted on the catch-all Article 11, the total was 35 to convict and 19 not guilty, providing Johnson with a single-vote margin needed to keep him in office. The Senate had voted to keep an unpopular president in office on the basis that his crimes were not sufficient to warrant his removal.

Other acquittals for Johnson quickly followed, and the trial ended. Some assumed that merely the impeachment and the trial would chastise and restrain Johnson, but the stubborn Tennessean dug in his heels even more. The trial did chasten the Radicals, who realized they had pushed too hard, and they reluctantly concluded that the nation was not yet in agreement with their vision of absolute black equality or Northern domination of the South. They concluded that winning the White House again in 1868 would require someone not obviously associated with their faction and someone the public trusted. The Republican national convention in Chicago took only one ballot to choose Ulysses S. Grant as the party’s nominee.

Johnson vainly attempted to form a Lincoln-type coalition, but he could not win the nomination of his own party. Instead, the Democrats turned to Horatio Seymour, New York’s wartime governor who had castigated Lincoln as a dictator and despot and called the Irish draft rioters “my friends.” Republicans had no trouble painting Seymour as a Copperhead, nor was he helped by a new wave of Klan racial violence in the South. Seymour’s running mate, Frank P. Blair Jr. of Missouri, made matters worse by referring to the “corrupt military despotism” that still governed the South.
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Statements such as Blair’s terrified Northerners. Edward Pierrepont, a Democrat from New York City, wrote, “I cannot conceive how any intelligent man, who does not wish the Rebels returned to power…and the ‘Lost Cause’ restored, can vote against Grant.”
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