Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (90 page)

The most visibly outrageous result of presidential Reconstruction involved the people who found top-level state employment in the Johnson governments, and the representatives they sent to Washington to sit in Congress. Across the lower South, former Confederates moved right back into the places of state power they had held before the war. Alexander Stephens, former Confederate vice president and now pardoned by Johnson, was elected by the Georgia legislature to the Senate; Herschel
V. Johnson, who had sat in the Confederate Congress, was picked for the other Georgia Senate seat. In the House of Representatives, Cullen Battle, until recently a Confederate general, showed up to represent Alabama; William T. Wofford, who had commanded a Confederate brigade at Gettysburg, was there for Georgia; two of Virginia’s eight representatives had been members of the state secession convention in 1861. Along with the restoration of white power came an upsurge of anti-black violence. “You have doubtless heard a great deal of the Reconstructed South, of their acceptance of the results of the war,” wrote a Freedmen’s Bureau agent in South Carolina. “This may all be true, but if a man … had the list of Negroes murdered in a single county in this most loyal and Christian state, he would think it a strange way of demonstrating his kindly feelings toward them.”
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When Congress finally reassembled in December 1865, the mutterings against presidential Reconstruction had become loud and irritated. The representatives of the new Johnson-approved governments appeared on December 4 to take their seats, but the clerk of the House of Representatives, Edward McPherson (whose property at Gettysburg had been fought over on July 1, 1863), omitted their names from the roll call and refused to recognize them. The House Radicals, with Thaddeus Stevens in the lead, then seized the initiative by referring the entire matter of Reconstruction to a joint House-Senate Committee on Reconstruction (which would be, for all practical purposes, a reincarnation of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War), thus grabbing the oversight of Reconstruction out of Johnson’s hands, as Ben Wade and Henry Winter Davis had tried to do in 1864. In the Senate, Wade and Sumner were ready with a bill for black voting rights in the District of Columbia and resolutions banning the readmittance to the Union of any state that did not also endorse equal voting rights for all adult males, regardless of color. “I deny the right of these States to pass these laws against men who are citizens of the United States,” spluttered Henry Wilson, and he was seconded by Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who introduced a federal civil rights bill just after the New Year that contained a forthright definition of federal citizenship, based on
jus soli
: “All persons born in the United States … are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States,” declared the new bill, “and such citizens, of every race and color … shall have the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States … as is enjoyed by white citizens.”
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But Wilson and Trumbull were soon to learn that Reconstruction was no easier to accomplish in Congress than in the White House. Wilson was promptly interrupted
by John Sherman of Ohio, who pointed out that “there is scarcely a State in the Union that does not make distinctions on account of color. … Is it the purpose of this bill to wipe out all these distinctions?” And in the House of Representatives, Wisconsin Democrat Charles Eldridge accused the promoters of the civil rights legislation of an “insidious and dangerous” plan to “lay prostrate at the feet of the Federal Government the judiciary of the States.” The only citizenship Eldridge knew was the citizenship of the states: “I hold that the rights of the States are the rights of the Union, and that the rights of the States and the liberty of the States are essential to the liberty of the individual citizen.” Garret Davis of Kentucky called the bill “a bald, naked attempt to usurp power and to bring all the sovereign and reserved powers of the States to the foot of a tyrannical and despotic faction in Congress,” crying that it gave the vote “to a race of men who throughout their whole history, in every country and condition in which they have ever been placed, have demonstrated their utter inability for self-government.”
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This was deliberately seeing ghosts for bedsheets. The Radicals were driven by neither a demonic thirst for centralized government nor an idealized passion for racial egalitarianism. “This doctrine does not mean that a negro shall sit on the same seat or eat at the same table with a white man,” Thaddeus Stevens replied in 1867. “That is a matter of taste which every man must decide for himself. The law has nothing to do with it.” But insofar as the black man born in the United States and the white man born in the United States were considered politically, their identity was based not on being black or white but on being citizens. “We will have no permanent settlement of the negro question,” warned the New York editor Theodore Tilton, “till our haughtier white blood, looking the negro in the face, shall forget that he is black, and remember only that he is a citizen.”
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The stage was now set for a direct confrontation between the president and the Radical wing of what was supposed to be his own party. The Radicals began by setting out once again their version of Reconstruction’s primary question: that secession was tantamount to state suicide, that the former Southern states were now in the position of territories, and that the Constitution clearly placed territories under the oversight of Congress. “Congress alone is authorized to deal with the subject of reconstruction,” wrote one Radical congressman to Charles Sumner, and that grant of authority included an unprecedented level of intervention in local Southern affairs, just as it would in any Federal territory. That included the requirement of black voting rights and land reform: “Our safety and the peace of the country require us to
disenfranchise the rebels and to enfranchise the colored citizens in the revolted states and thereby confide the political power therein to … safe hands.” This led the Radicals to push not only for the civil rights bill but also for renewal of the Freedmen’s Bureau (since the Bureau would be given much of the responsibility as a federal watchdog for violations of the civil rights bill) and confirmation of Sherman’s forty-acre order.
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Johnson interpreted these actions as an assault on his presidential authority as well as on his old Democratic deference to state and local power—which is precisely what they were. But unlike Lincoln, who had defused attacks like these by moving softly around them, Johnson hurled the full force of his anger at the Radicals. On February 7 Johnson received a delegation of African American leaders, headed by Frederick Douglass, and proceeded to harangue them on the impossibility of granting political equality to blacks. When Douglass tried to object, Johnson cut him short: “I do not like to be arraigned by some who can get up handsomely-rounded periods and deal in rhetoric, and talk about abstract ideas of liberty, who never periled life, liberty, or property.” Douglass took his objections out the door with him and published them in a Washington newspaper. “I know that d——d Douglass,” screeched Johnson when he read Douglass’s comments; “he’s just like any nigger, & he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”
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Having turned from playing Moses to playing Pharaoh, Johnson struck back at Congress. On February 19 he vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau renewal bill, arguing that Congress had no right to fasten federal oversight agencies on states it was determined to bar from their due representation in Washington—and he let people draw their own conclusions from his contention that the Southern states were still
states
. Three days later, in a Washington’s Birthday speech at the White House, Johnson linked himself to Andrew Jackson, fighting off a new set of enemies of the Union. “Who has suffered more than I have?” Johnson whined. When a voice in the crowd asked him to name names, Johnson singled out Stevens, Sumner, and Wendell Phillips, as though they were public enemies. And then, as if to crown these gaffes, Johnson vetoed the civil rights bill on March 27, effectively burning whatever bridges he still had to the Republican Party that had nominated him only a year and a half before. Even moderate Republicans were aghast at Johnson’s recklessness, especially since the civil rights bill had been written and rewritten by Lyman Trumbull of Illinois specifically to appease Johnson.
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Rather than managing Congress in Lincoln’s style, Johnson had only succeeded in colliding with it and making himself look the worse for the wear. On April 9, Congress successfully overrode Johnson’s veto of the civil rights bill (although the Senate managed the override only by a single vote); a second version of the Freed-men’s Bureau bill was passed, and when Johnson vetoed it again, Congress overrode that veto as well. Finally, on April 30, determined to put black civil rights beyond the reach of Johnson’s interference and Johnson’s vetoes, William Pitt Fessenden in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in the House introduced a proposal for a new constitutional amendment, bluntly establishing a
jus soli
baseline for defining United States citizenship, and subordinating state citizenship to it.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

This effectively removed the definition of both citizenship and voter eligibility from state jurisdiction and handed it to the federal government. But this was not all: the amendment went on to expel from Congress any member of the House or Senate, or any civil or military officer of the United States, who had been “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” and imposed repudiation of the Confederate debt on the former Confederate states, so that anyone still holding Confederate securities and expecting to get them redeemed was left to use them as wallpaper. Predictably, Johnson gagged on the amendment. But since amendments to the Constitution do not require a presidential signature, both houses of Congress passed this Fourteenth Amendment by the required two-thirds majority in June 13, 1866, and forwarded it to the state legislatures for ratification without even bothering to send Johnson the customary notification resolution.
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Johnson attempted to fight back with what powers he still had in hand, but by the summer of 1866 even the small standing he had as president was dwindling. The popular songwriter Henry Clay Work set his contempt for Johnson to music:

Who shall rule this American nation? Say, boys, say!

Who shall sit in the loftiest station? Say, boys, say!

Shall the men who trampled on the banner?

They who now their country would betray?

They who murder the innocent freed men? Say, boys, say!

chorus: No never! no, never! The loyal millions say;

And ‘tis they who rule this American nation, They, boys, they!

Who shall rank as the family royal? Say, boys, say!

If not those who are honest and loyal? Say, boys, say!

Then shall one elected as our servant

In his pride, assume a regal way?

Must we bend to the human dictator? Say, boys, say!

Shall we tarnish our national glory? Say, boys, say!

Blot one line from the wonderful story? Say, boys, say!

Did we vainly shed our blood in battle?

Did our troops resultless win the day?

Was our time and our treasure all squander’d? Say, boys, say!
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With congressional elections looming in the fall of 1866, Johnson embarked on a desperate bid to rally popular support for his collapsing Reconstruction plan, making a whirlwind speaking tour of the North, a “swing round the circle,” and dragging a reluctant General Grant with him to provide moral support. A National Union Convention, designed to unite moderate Republicans and Northern Democrats behind Johnson, met in Philadelphia in August, but it was upstaged by a Radical-sponsored Southern Loyalists’ Convention, which paraded through the streets of Philadelphia in September to hear Frederick Douglass and Quaker activist Anna Dickinson offer impassioned appeals for black equality. Johnson, for his part, could not seem to open his mouth without offending people, and his rough country mannerisms (in contrast to Lincoln’s, which had been smoothed by a lifetime of trying to elude his backwoods origins) dampened support across the North rather than rousing it. “I care not for dignity,” Johnson boasted, and promptly provided all the proof necessary. When a heckler in Cleveland on September 3 shouted that Johnson couldn’t look a man in the face, Johnson lost all self-control and began shouting,

I wish I could see you; I will bet now, if there could be a light reflected on your face, that cowardice and treachery could be seen in it. Show yourself. Come out here where we can see you. If ever you shoot a man, you will stand in the dark and pull your trigger … Those men—such a one as insulted me here tonight—you may say, has ceased to be a man, and in ceasing to be a man shrunk into the denomination of a reptile, and having so shrunken, as an honest man, I tread on him.
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