McClellan had gone on to run as a Democrat against Lincoln in the 1864 election, campaigning on a promise to end the war through negotiations with the Confederacy. His party won 45 percent of the vote, Lincoln’s Republicans 55 percent.
Long after the war ended, men were still debating McClellan’s behavior. General Grant had no explanation for it. “McClellan,” he acknowledged, “is one of the mysteries of the war.”
But in writing to his wife, McClellan may have provided an explanation. His letter also demonstrated why, to the end, he remained popular with his men.
“I am tired of the sickening sight of the battlefield, with its mangled corpses and poor suffering wounded!” McClellan wrote. “Victory has no charms for me when purchased at such cost. I shall be only too glad when it is all over and I can return where I best love to be.”
• • •
Through the failures and successes on the battlefield, the president and Stanton remained united, although Lincoln sometimes had to rein in his high-jumping secretary. After reviewing strategy, Stanton commanded one general, “Go ahead, begin now!” To which the president said mildly, “Mr. Secretary, I have not yet given my consent.”
Lincoln’s need to cope with the temperaments within his cabinet had drawn sympathy from a young Ohio reporter who served briefly as the president’s bodyguard. William Coggeshall observed the president’s attempts to cobble together his policy from various rival philosophies and likened Lincoln to a boy carrying a big basket of eggs when he faced an urgent dilemma:
“Couldn’t let go his basket to unbutton his breeches—was in sore distress from a necessity to urinate—& stood dancing, crying—What shall I do?”
The individuals of the cabinet might be sharp and even positive, Coggeshall concluded, “but thrown together neutralize each other & the result is an inspid mess.”
While he lived, Lincoln would listen to the contending voices and often trust events to guide him to his goals. After the assassination, each survivor could claim to be following the path Lincoln had marked out for the country. Much as it outraged the Radicals, Andrew Johnson was able to cite decisions and quote casual remarks that proved his fidelity to Lincoln’s vision.
• • •
Johnson had entered the presidency with high regard for Stanton’s effectiveness at the War Department. But as the breach developed with the Radical Republicans, Stanton turned to a tactic that had served him in the past: He opened a channel with the Speaker of the House so that each of them would have advance information on matters involving the army and the Congress.
The arrangement served to bond Stanton with Johnson’s congressional critics, and Navy Secretary Welles was suspicious enough to urge that the new president remove Stanton from his cabinet.
Johnson refused. He had come to appreciate the fact that Stanton might argue against his policies—as when he opposed a presidential veto of the civil rights bill—but once he saw that Johnson had made a decision, Stanton withdrew his objections.
The secretary could not always move so nimbly. When he was forced to state his position on the Fourteenth Amendment to a crowd of Johnson loyalists, Stanton admitted that he had endorsed its original provisions, except for denying voting rights for five years to House members who had supported the Confederacy.
Gradually, however, Johnson was coming to prefer a secretary of war more attuned to his thinking. He had held off replacing Stanton before the congressional campaign of 1866, and as the campaign grew bitter, Stanton became convinced that a higher duty required him to cling to his position.
Ellen Stanton rejected her husband’s definition of duty and urged him to resign. Stanton was clearly tired and sick, and she herself was coughing in a way that suggested pneumonia.
Stanton responded by quoting to her Lincoln’s words from a time when Stanton had been tempted to leave his post: “Reconstruction is more difficult than construction or destruction,” Lincoln had said. “You have been our main reliance. You must help us through the final act. It is my wish and the country’s that you remain.”
With the Radicals’ decisive victory at the polls and with Ellen Stanton’s health improving, Stanton felt more than ever that it was his patriotic obligation to fight on.
At the White House, Generals Grant and Sherman were letting Johnson know that if the president did dismiss Stanton, they would refuse to replace him. Johnson understood that a move was under way to draft Grant for the presidency in two years’ time and hesitated to cross him.
As the president prepared his second December message to Congress, he continued to ignore Stanton’s suggestion that he temper Radical hostility by accepting the inevitability of the Fourteenth Amendment, advice that Grant was seconding.
Johnson preferred a last-ditch effort to scuttle the amendment. Speaking to officials from Alabama, the president called for them to stand firm because the amendment would “change the whole character of our government.”
To the president’s satisfaction, all but one of the Confederate states rejected the amendment. The exception was Tennessee, and Congress rewarded that state by seating its senators and representatives.
• • •
Johnson learned just how outraged congressmen were by his rigidity when Representative James Ashley of Ohio introduced a bill that he claimed sprang from his feeling of “a painful but, nevertheless, to me, an imperative duty.” Ashley called on the House to impeach Andrew Johnson on the grounds of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Ashley’s indictment accused Johnson of usurpation of power, violations of the law, and corruptly using his powers of appointment, pardon, and the veto. Ashley added that Johnson had also “corruptly disposed of public property” and “corruptly interfered in elections.”
On January 7, 1867, the House voted 107 to 39—with 45 members not voting—to authorize its Judiciary Committee to pursue an inquiry into the president’s conduct.
• • •
With Stanton staying on, Johnson knew he could not yet withdraw the troops from the Southern states, but he might find ways to curtail the army’s power. The president’s hand had been strengthened by decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court, which had ruled, by a five-to-four vote, against loyalty oaths, but which upheld the president’s right to issue pardons over the objections of Congress.
The Court also outlawed martial law in those Southern states with functioning civil courts. As a result, Southern courthouses could punish the Northern soldiers charged with keeping the peace. The Radicals found a mocking irony in the idea of the vanquished passing judgment on the victors.
And if a Northern military commander challenged Southern justice, he got no support from the White House. Brigadier General Daniel Sickles, deemed to have recovered from his insanity in killing Philip Key, had gone on to command troops at Gettysburg, where he lost a leg in battle. Sent to the Carolinas after the war, Sickles was appalled by Negroes’ often being whipped for trivial offenses, and he banned all public whipping.
The civilian governor traveled to Washington to intervene with the president. Johnson countermanded Sickles’s order and the whippings went on.
• • •
As the investigation proceeded on James Ashley’s call for impeachment, his Ohio colleague, Senator John Sherman, introduced a series of reconstruction bills that would undo the effects of the Supreme Court’s rulings. Before they were enacted, however, the Radicals cast an early vote that demonstrated they could override any veto.
Their test was a bill to extend voting rights in the District of Columbia to any male twenty-one years old. The exceptions included spies and men on welfare or convicted of major crimes or guilty of having sheltered Confederate troops. But those exceptions did not prohibit black men from voting. Alone among the cabinet members, Stanton recommended that Johnson sign the bill.
Instead, the president vetoed it on January 5, 1867, noting that white voters in the District had rejected Negro suffrage two years earlier. Three days after the veto, Co
ngress approved it—the first bill in U.S. history to give the vote to black men. The margins were 112 to 38 in the House, 29 to 10 in the Senate.
Johnson had also given notice that he would veto statehood for Nebraska and Colorado, since their territories were too sparsely populated to entitle them to even one representative. Over his objections, Nebraska was accepted into the Union as the thirty-seventh state on March 1, 1867. The congressional session ended before Colorado statehood could be reintroduced.
Senator Sherman’s proposals represented Congress’s most determined effort to take control of the South. Provisions of his Military Reconstruction Bill divided the former Confederacy into five military districts, replacing the civilian governments that Congress had declared void.
U.S. Army generals would administer each district under martial law. Local governments were to be “provisional” until they were set up under new state constitutions. Delegates to those assemblies would be of “whatever race, color or previous condition” so long as they had resided in the state for one year and were not disqualified under the Fourteenth Amendment.
The effect would be to qualify former slaves for public office while excluding the most prominent white slave owners.
The president was ready to fight. Meeting in private with Charles Nordhoff of the New York Evening News, Johnson was angry and unguarded. He denounced the Reconstruction laws as promising only anarchy and chaos, and he called the people of the South poor, quiet, unoffending, and harmless people who were to be trodden underfoot “to protect niggers.”
When Nordhoff protested, the president used the reasoning with which he had silenced Charles Sumner. He began by telling of a rape case in New York he had read about. He claimed that if it had taken place in the South and the victim had been black, there would be national public outrage. The president concluded, “It’s all damned prejudice.”
Like Carl Schurz, Nordhoff was a German immigrant who sympathized with the former slaves. He left the White House that day convinced that Johnson was “a pig-headed man.” The president seemed opposed to voting rights for blacks and, Nordhoff concluded, with “a determination to secure the political ascendancy of the old Southern leaders.”
Nordhoff had summed up the president’s transformation in office. Throughout his political life, Johnson had been outraged at being denied power and respect by the South’s aristocracy. Over the last two years, however, those plantation owners had knelt before him to receive his pardon. These days he was despised instead by the Northern Radicals with their commitment to the nation’s former slaves.
For Johnson, race now mattered more than social class, and he had chosen to side with his fellow white men.
• • •
At a cabinet meeting, Secretary Stanton once more spoke on behalf of the reconstruction bill, knowing very well that it was offensive to the president. Once more, Stanton’s arguing was futile. Johnson vetoed the bill. On March 2, 1867, Congress passed it over his veto.
The Radicals rallied to protect Stanton’s job. Their Tenure of Office Act represented the most sweeping challenge ever attempted by Congress to limit presidential powers. Under the Senate draft, if the approval of Congress had been required for a presidential appointment, the president could not then remove that man unless Congress also approved the dismissal.
The Senate bill had exempted the president’s cabinet. In the House, Thaddeus Stevens’s version not only included cabinet appointees but applied the protection to them even if, like Stanton, they had been named by a previous president.
And for section six of his House bill, Stevens crafted language that warned a president that violating the act could cost him his job.
Eighty years earlier, the framers of the U.S. Constitution had modeled the entire impeachment process on British tradition. From the end of the Middle Ages to more recent times, Parliament had prosecuted errant nobles through charges in the House of Commons followed by a trial in the House of Lords.
When the American constitutional convention struggled with how and why to remove a bad president, bribery and treason had been obvious justifications. But for less easily identifiable offenses, George Mason of Virginia had first proposed “maladministration” and, when that was rejected as too vague, had come up with the more high-flown but equally murky “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
To give his Tenure of Office bill unmistakable heft, Stevens condensed the charge to “high misdemeanors.”
• • •
Stanton called the bill unnecessary and spoke publicly against it. His enemies took that opposition as another proof of Stanton’s habitual deceit—professing one position, maneuvering behind the scenes for another.
He soon gave them new reason for distrust. Stanton had learned that the president was issuing private orders to friendly Southern commanders that he did not share with either the War Department or General Grant.
Stanton worked quietly with members of the House to make it a misdemeanor for a president to issue such orders and for an officer to act on them. Thaddeus Stevens then attached that language as an amendment to the Army Appropriations Bill.
Johnson fumed over the insult, but he signed the bill since he considered it vital for maintaining the army.
• • •
In the field, the military commanders were generating their own controversies. While still in his thirties, General Philip Sheridan, who was now commanding Texas and Louisiana, had become a hero in the North by razing Virginia’s breadbasket in the Shenandoah Valley and by blocking General Lee’s retreat at Appomattox.
As he had demonstrated after the New Orleans riot, Sheridan was not courting popularity in his territory. Newspapers quoted him saying, “If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell.”
Sheridan had involved himself again in the riot’s aftermath by removing Major J. S. Monroe and other officials who refused to prosecute the white men responsible for the bloodshed.
However much Radicals might endorse those specific actions, conservative Republicans were troubled by the questions Sheridan presented about the limit to military power. Congress had set no date for ending military rule, and Thaddeus Stevens had defused any attempt to impose one.
When Stanton again stood alone in asserting that Sheridan’s authority in Louisiana exceeded even the president’s, Johnson was determined at last to purge him from his cabinet.
• • •
With Congress passing its first Reconstruction Act and Louisiana again a political maelstrom, Pinckney Pinchback decided it was time to end his two-year rustication in Alabama. He moved his family to a large frame house on Derbigny Street and plunged into renewing alliances from the war years.
His time away had given Pinchback a perspective that he thought other black leaders lacked. He ridiculed their grandiose talk of running white Democrats out of the state and warned that a working government had to include white men. Pinchback added frankly that most former slaves were not ready to take over the state legislature.
But as Philip Sheridan waited for specific instructions from General Grant about how to proceed with military reconstruction, Pinchback set about organizing the Fourth Ward Republican Club. Given that base, he then claimed a seat at a new constitutional convention, which had been called to accomplish what the rioting had blocked.
To many delegates on the convention floor, Pinchback was a new face, and his speech had been relegated to the ninth day when everyone would be surfeited with oratory. But Pinchback was intent on impressing the state’s Republican leadership and counting on his street-corner rallies in Alabama to have honed his gifts.
His speech was a calculated blend of settling scores and generous forgiveness. Pinchback accused the Southern aristocracy of having worked to “feed the prejudices of the whites against the blacks,” and he warned his fellow black men to guard against “the hissing of the serpent” that would infect their hearts with the same “damnable jealousy and prejudice.”
Looking to the
future, Pinchback concluded, “No more will our people be killed by mobs, no more will our women be exposed to the violence of a privileged class. No more will our cries and supplications be treated with contempt, no more will our demands for justice be disregarded and answered by the lash.
“But peace, blessed peace, will again bless the land.”
Pinchback had fallen into the cadences of the pulpit. When he finished, silence was followed by an ovation, and Pinchback was elected to the Republican Party’s executive committee.
• • •
Elections for the drafting of Louisiana’s state constitution resulted in Republicans winning ninety-eight of the hundred places, with delegates equally divided between white and black.
Pinchback had been taken up by Henry Clay Warmoth, the suave carpetbagger popular with black voters. Warmoth was now only twenty-six and preparing a bid to become one of the nation’s youngest governors. Although Warmoth had backed Pinchback to be a delegate, his protégé was following no party line.
Pinchback attacked a measure to strip several categories of white Southerners of their votes in retaliation for their backing the Confederacy. He lost that debate by a vote of forty-four to thirty. When he rewrote another civil rights bill until it satisfied him, his version was rejected as too extreme.
Pinckney Pinchback had been defeated on two major issues, but throughout Louisiana his eloquence had established his reputation.
• • •
As Congress prepared to adjourn on March 2, 1867, the House Judiciary Committee reported itself unable to conclude its investigation into the charges against Andrew Johnson.
Committee members had heard eighty-nine witnesses, several of them called back two and three times. General Lafayette Baker from the War Department offered the sort of dubious testimony that proved typical.
Baker was remembered as the compromised head of the Union Intelligence Service, and his reputation had suffered further from his claim that the journal of John Wilkes Booth proved that Edwin Stanton had been part of the conspiracy to kill Lincoln. When the journal was produced and proved nothing of the sort, Baker insisted that eighteen damning pages had been removed.
After Lincoln Page 18
