• • •
Stevens had stubbornly supported a different candidate before the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln in 1860, which explained why he did not join his colleagues in a pilgrimage to Illinois to congratulate the president-elect. Lincoln returned Stevens’s distrust, but both men knew Lincoln would need his support, and Stevens briefly entertained hopes of a cabinet position.
With secession looming, Stevens attacked the South’s position on the House floor so bitingly that an observer reported, “Nearly fifty Southern members rose to their feet and rushed toward him with curses and threats of personal violence.”
But Stevens was more concerned with his Northern allies. He was especially wary of Henry Seward for his willingness to admit new slave states in order to keep the Union intact. Stevens worried that Lincoln might be won over to that fatal compromise rather than show the mettle to stand fast.
When war burst upon the nation, Stevens was appointed chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means. In that post, he was both highly effective and unyielding. Should it turn out, Stevens said, that the entire South “must be laid waste and made a desert to save the Union from destruction, so let it be.” Better, he added, to let the whole region be repopulated with free men than to assist Southerners in the destruction of their slaves.
Throughout the war, Stevens met with the president only when their positions required it. He could resist Lincoln’s warm personal appeal, and humor was not a bridge between them. Lincoln laughed heartily as he recounted stories from his vast fund; Stevens had kept a straight face when he once remarked in the House, “I yield to the gentleman for a few feeble remarks.”
And when Lincoln asked Stevens whether his fellow Pennsylvanian Simon Cameron was honest, Stevens answered judiciously, “I don’t think he would steal a red-hot stove.”
Relishing the remark, Lincoln told it widely, even repeating it to Cameron. Stevens had demanded to know why.
“I thought it was a good joke,” Lincoln said, perhaps disingenuously, “and didn’t think it would make him mad.”
Stevens replied that Cameron was in fact very mad, and since he was demanding a retraction, Stevens was prepared to oblige him. “I believe I told you,” Stevens said to Lincoln, “he would not steal a red-hot stove. I will now take that back.”
• • •
Although Stevens chided the president for not being sufficiently committed to the antislavery cause, in Lincoln’s view they shared the same goals but Lincoln was simply more adroit in reaching them. Although Lincoln had overruled the generals who had freed slaves on their own authority, he signed Stevens’s bill in March 1862 forbidding any member of the armed forces to return fugitive slaves to their masters.
When the president announced that emancipation would take effect on January 1, 1863, Stevens wrote to his constituents, “Lincoln’s proclamation contained precisely the principles which I had advocated.”
Even so, Stevens went far beyond Abraham Lincoln in his determination to punish the rebels. Lincoln had permitted the confiscating of rice plantations around Port Royal in the Sea Islands, the experiment that had so impressed Oliver Howard. But the president backed away from supporting Stevens when the senator said, “I would seize every foot of land, and every dollar of their property” from the Southerners who were trying to destroy the Union.
Uncompromising as he could sound, Stevens’s position was not restricted to his fellow Radicals in Congress. On a trip to England, Thurlow Weed predicted that the North would give the South’s plantations “to well-deserving officers and men.” And as military governor of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson had seemed determined to see the rebels “impoverished.” Even after he entered the White House, Johnson had pledged to a delegation of Radical Republicans: “Treason must be made infamous, and traitors punished.”
But as Johnson moved further into his presidency, that unity of purpose seemed lost.
• • •
In the looming battle over reconstruction, Stevens could expect little effective support from Charles Sumner. Always tentative, Sumner’s standing with his colleagues appeared to be headed toward its nadir. When he tried to convert cabinet officers to his own disillusionment with Johnson’s policies, Sumner had been rebuffed.
Navy Secretary Gideon Welles assured him that Southerners were “patriotic” and not “irreclaimable.” At the Treasury, Hugh McCulloch was chafing under a requirement that Sumner had forced through Congress that all federal employees swear an oath to the Union. Unable to find enough qualified agents, McCulloch was ignoring the law and hiring former rebels.
Sumner was often disappointed as well by the Northern press. He considered The Nation, a fledgling New York weekly, too timid in supporting Negro voting rights, and he wrote to one of the magazine’s backers, “Suspend the Nation. It does more harm than good.”
Amid his flailing, Sumner got an angry letter from a fellow Radical, Ohio senator Benjamin Wade, who could sound like John Brown. Letting his imagination run free, Wade conjured up a bloody scenario:
If “the colored people of the South” staged an insurrection and managed to slay half of their oppressors, Wade wrote, “the other half would hold them in the highest respect and no doubt treat them with justice.”
Sumner was not shocked. Two years earlier, he had worried that the North might win the war but Henry Seward would insist on an amnesty for the South that left slavery intact. To a British friend, Sumner wrote that before the war’s end, he wished for “two hundred thousand Negroes with muskets in their hands, and then I shall not fear compromise.”
• • •
In New York, the historian George Bancroft had been working in secret for a month on Johnson’s first message to Congress. But, like Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens was suspicious of Henry Seward, and he surmised that it would be Seward who drafted the president’s address. Stevens was determined to set out his own vision for Reconstruction first.
Voting rights for the newly freed blacks were not on Stevens’s agenda. He worried that former slaves, deprived of education all their lives, would simply vote the way their prewar owners told them. “The infernal laws of slavery,” Stevens concluded, “have prevented them from acquiring the education, understanding of the commonest laws of contract or of managing the ordinary business of life.”
If he was not ready to bestow the vote, Stevens had devised a formula for compensating the slaves in more material ways. In early September 1865 he laid out his incendiary ideas in a speech in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Stevens would treat Southerners as a conquered people, and he had devised a mathematical formula for punishing them:
He calculated the total property owned by the wealthiest slave owners at 394 million acres. From that figure, he proposed allotting land to the South’s former slave families—forty acres for each of the one million adult males. That would dispose of forty million acres.
Stevens claimed that his plan would leave another 354 million acres for sale to the highest bidder. Predicting that an average acre would sell for ten dollars, the result would deliver to the U.S. government $3.54 billion. Some of that money could be used to pay for veterans’ benefits and for damages to Southerners who had remained loyal to the Union.
But speaking as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Stevens recommended that the bulk of the funds go toward paying down the national debt.
Anticipating his critics, Stevens assured them that his plan would confiscate land from only the wealthiest seventy thousand plantation owners and would not affect nine-tenths of all Southerners. As for that seventy thousand—former plantation owners who would indeed lose their property—let those “proud, bloated and defiant rebels” go into exile. Better that than trying to repatriate four million former slaves to Africa.
• • •
As the Congress prepared to convene, Stevens acknowledged that, at seventy-three, he was finding the duties of the Ways and Means Committee too strenuous, and he agreed instead to head a new co
mmittee on appropriations. But no member doubted that, whatever title Stevens might hold, when he caught the Speaker’s eye, he would be heard.
Although Stevens’s step might be slower, his mind still raced ahead of most colleagues. Because he was reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, he would answer ironically when asked about his health: “Growing weaker and weaker every day, thank God.”
The Thirteenth Amendment, near ratification, promised to change America’s electoral mathematics. Ever since the queasy compromise of 1787, slaves had been counted politically as three-fifths of a citizen. In electoral voting, one hundred slaves counted as sixty persons. But if blacks were now counted as whole votes, the rebel states would gain twenty-eight more congressmen.
To prevent that calamity, the Republican leadership accepted Stevens’s plan to bar all new Southern representatives approved by President Johnson from taking their seats. To enforce that strategy, Stevens could count on the connivance of his former law student Edward McPherson, who was now clerk of the House of Representatives.
As he read the roll, McPherson omitted the Southerners’ names. When he finished, a Tennessean who had been left out demanded to speak. Thaddeus Stevens replied smoothly that he would not yield the floor “to any gentleman who does not belong to this body.”
• • •
The president’s address read to Congress on December 6, 1865, began with ritual praise for the Founding Fathers and then sounded a more recent note of the triumph. Looking ahead twelve days to the expected ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, Johnson praised it as “one of the greatest acts on record, to have brought four millions of people into freedom.”
The president segued into the same stern warning that had cost George Hartsuff a job in the Freedmen’s Bureau. The former slaves’ “future prosperity and condition must, after all, rest mainly on themselves.” Johnson added a chilling afterthought. “If they fail, and so perish away, let us be careful that the failure shall not be attributable to any denial of justice.”
In Johnson’s view, the black man’s hopes must not rest with Washington but with the Southern states. “When the tumult of emotions that have been raised by the suddenness of the social change shall have subsided, it may prove that they will receive the kindest usage from some of those on whom they have heretofore most closely depended.”
He made no reference to the Black Codes that were pending in state legislatures or the version that had been passed in Mississippi two days before his address. Mississippi had also defiantly elected as its governor Benjamin G. Humphreys, a Confederate general, and its convention delegates had rejected Johnson’s demand that they ratify the Thirteenth Amendment.
On this day, Johnson’s target was the Southern aristocracy. He argued that by closing their fields to white laborers and foreign workers, they had kept such men in a different, but very real, bondage. Now at last, he predicted, the Confederate South, with “soil of an exuberant fertility, a climate friendly to long life,” could absorb the Northern laborer and men “from the most cultivated nations in Europe.”
• • •
The reasonable tone of Johnson’s address was favorably received in the North, nowhere more approvingly than in New York by George Bancroft, who said that everyone he spoke with—“all sorts of people”—endorsed the president’s message, especially its “total want of asperity and passion.”
The historian ventured a prediction: “In less than twenty days, the extreme radical opposition will be over.”
Bancroft followed up his letter with praise culled from British and French journals. In Paris, La Presse had hailed the address as a model “of intelligence, of moderation, of wisdom.”
Maryland senator Reverdy Johnson extolled Johnson’s message as he interpreted it: “The moment the insurrection was terminated, there was no power whatsoever left in the Congress of the United States over those states.”
• • •
Lulled by their sense of relief, Republicans in Congress drafted an extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau and expected Johnson to sign it. But the mild tone of Johnson’s ghostwritten address had been as misleading as his equivocal conversations with Charles Sumner.
Johnson’s low expectations for the freedmen had been revealed two months earlier when he addressed a black regiment returning to the District of Columbia after serving in the South. Johnson had praised their patience and had urged them to be peaceful at home before he began to sound like one of the Southern plantation owners who were petitioning his office:
“Freedom is not simply the principle to live in idleness,” he said. “Liberty does not mean merely to resort to the low saloons and other places of disreputable character.”
Now Johnson, facing the first test of his commitment to Reconstruction, was being asked to guarantee assistance to men who, not long ago, had been his slaves.
The terms of the bureau’s extension were straightforward: It would continue until Congress abolished it. Bureau authority would be expanded throughout the country wherever there were freedmen. The president was authorized to reserve three million acres of unoccupied public land to be rented in forty-acre parcels to freedmen and to Union loyalists dispossessed by the war. They would have the option of buying that land.
Penalties for depriving citizens of their rights included a thousand-dollar fine, a year in jail, or both. The president was charged with enforcement.
Critics complained that the bureau was unconstitutional, that it was on the way to becoming permanent, and that it was too expensive—Oliver Howard had requested $11,745,050. One Delaware senator used the debate for a belated challenge to abolition itself, claiming that even though three-fourths of the states might agree to the Thirteenth Amendment, Congress had no right to outlaw slavery.
Other senators noted that the bill was premature since the Freedmen’s Bureau would continue to operate for several months under the existing legislation.
Although some conservative Republicans shared those misgivings about the bill, the Senate passed it in January 1866, by a vote of thirty-seven to ten.
In the House, Stevens wanted to strengthen its terms along the lines of his Lancaster speech. He tried to add the “forfeited estates of the enemy” to the federal acreage, but his amendment failed. As reported out by the House Judiciary Committee the following month, the bill passed, 136 to 33.
• • •
Southern protests, which continued loud and unrelenting, were receiving a sympathetic hearing at the State Department. When Henry Seward took his family to the Caribbean in January, he announced that the trip was part of his protracted convalescence.
At the Navy Department, however, Gideon Welles concluded that Seward wanted to duck the rupture over Reconstruction until “the way is clear for him which course to take.” Welles assured his diary, “The talk about his health is ridiculous.”
If evasion had been Seward’s intention, it failed. He was back in Washington for the House vote on the Freedmen’s Bureau, and he agreed with Johnson that the bureau should not be expanded until the Southern states were represented again in Congress.
Seward wrote a veto message for the president that termed the bill not only unconstitutional but unnecessary because the current condition of a freedman was “not so bad.” The message explained that “his labor is in demand, and he can change his dwelling place if one community or state does not please him. The laws that regulate supply and demand will regulate his wages.”
Johnson also rejected a provision that would continue to permit Union military officers to serve as judges in the South for cases involving civil rights. The president wrote the final salvo himself, claiming that he could legitimately criticize Congress since he was the only official “chosen by the people of all of the states.”
The implication that Congress had no right to interfere in a state’s affairs stung Stevens into action. But in trying to override the veto, he found that six members from his own party were siding with the Democrats. He co
uld not muster the required two-thirds vote needed to override the veto. The president was upheld, thirty to eighteen.
Consulting with General Howard, the Republican leadership set to work. Members drew up a new bill to extend and strengthen the Freedmen’s Bureau, and they soon got an unexpected boost from the White House.
Andrew Johnson was showing himself to be a sore winner. He intended to demonstrate that while Thaddeus Stevens might hold forth on the House floor, the president could dominate the hustings.
Johnson had convinced himself that Stevens was a dangerous adversary, a schemer who planned to seize control of the nation and exile Johnson to Tennessee. His suspicions seemed confirmed when Stevens brought to the House a resolution from its powerful Joint Committee of Fifteen that only Congress could declare a state entitled to representation.
The timing suggested to Johnson that the Radicals were bent on denying Tennessee’s readmission, even though Radical sympathizers were firmly in charge of the state. To the president, it looked as though the delay was part of the strategy to depose him.
Johnson’s view was endorsed by his allies, who protested that Stevens was ramming through the resolution without debate. Stevens said his opponents were simply fighting the prewar battles of 1861 all over again. Back then, Stevens said, he had waited them out, and now “I am ready to sit for forty hours.”
• • •
Three days after his Freedmen’s veto, Johnson was scheduled to speak before a huge celebration to honor George Washington’s birthday. Advisers who remembered his disastrous ad-libbing urged him to prepare written remarks. But Johnson, feeling both beleaguered and virtuous, wanted the nation to know how badly he was being treated.
The ceremonies began with a hundred-gun salute in New York City and praise for Andrew Johnson as even greater than his famous namesake from the Hermitage. The most unlikely tribute used bookbinding as a metaphor: Johnson “was a modern edition of Andrew Jackson bound in calf.”
After Lincoln Page 14
