Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  Johnson’s defense ably questioned the constitutionality of the Tenure of Office Act and also argued that, regardless of its legitimacy, it did not protect Lincoln’s cabinet appointments, such as Stanton (even though Johnson had kept Stanton in the cabinet and treated him as if he were his own cabinet appointee). While the legal issues were being debated, Johnson may also have cut a few deals behind the scenes—seven Republican senators voted for his acquittal—assuring moderate Republicans such as Senator James Grimes of Iowa that he would no longer obstruct Congress and promising to appoint the conservative General John Schofield, with Grant’s permission, as secretary of war. Moderates wanted those assurances: impeachment was an unprecedented and grave legal step as well as a political one, as war had been and as the assassination had been and as Reconstruction was proving to be. “The dignity of the nation is at stake,” The New York Times intoned, “and all feel that a great event is at hand which is pregnant with serious consequents, for good or evil, in regard to which passion is folly.”

  Moderates thus made certain that Johnson’s impeachment embraced a narrow definition of the grounds necessary for such an historic undertaking, and partly on that basis—regardless of whether or not Johnson had committed a specific crime, what his intentions were, and what constituted impeachable offenses—Johnson was acquitted by the Senate. There were other reasons, too. Republicans had not been faring as well in recent elections, and conservative Republicans knew that if Johnson were convicted, the passionate president pro tempore of the Senate, Old Benjamin Wade, would become president of the United States. Republicans might lose more seats because of him, for Wade was as contentious and problematic as Johnson; Representative James Garfield speculated that many of his colleagues were more afraid of Ben Wade than of the president. A longtime antislavery man loudly committed to civil rights and impartial suffrage, Wade believed in women’s suffrage, high tariffs, and the rights of labor.

  And Wade had been one of the senators who had refused to seat the elected officials from the South under the terms of the president’s Reconstruction.

  To many moderates, then, the Radicals were much too radical—but not to Thaddeus Stevens, who called the reluctant Republicans spineless. “I see little hope for the Republic,” he cried when he learned Johnson had been acquitted by a vote of 35 to 19, which was only one vote shy of the two-thirds majority needed for conviction. To the ailing Stevens, Republicans in the South and black men and women all faced a real and imminent danger. “May God save our country from the consuming conflagration,” a Republican from Florida agreed. “The eyes of the rebels sparkle like those of the firey [sic] serpent.”

  Johnson’s vindication did warm the hearts of his supporters in the South, where fireworks brightened many a night sky. “Safe deliverance out of the hands of the Radical Philistines,” exulted a former Confederate officer. “Radicalism has gone to h—, and the country is safe,” rejoiced the Memphis Daily Avalanche. And the Richmond Daily Dispatch said that Johnson’s acquittal “will only be to inflict a terrible rebuke on the radical party, and diminish its physical force (it never had any other).”

  Yet Johnson had become an albatross even to admiring Democrats, who knew the unpleasant man couldn’t possibly win a national election, which he nonetheless hoped to do. “What can we do with him?” asked a party member. The answer was obvious: unload him.

  Republicans too had been mindful of the upcoming election—and mindful of the acrimony that the impeachment trial had created in their own ranks. As the radical financier John Murray Forbes admitted to the moderate Republican William Pitt Fessenden, one of the senators who had voted against impeachment, “Nobody feels more deeply than I do the misfortune of seeing impeachment fail; but it is sheer madness to add to this great disaster the risk of splitting up the Republican party, now the only bulwark of freedom.” So, who might better secure the bulwark than the hero who had fought for it—General Ulysses S. Grant?

  AS CHIEF JUSTICE of the Supreme Court, Salmon Chase had presided over the impeachment trial of President Johnson with visions of the presidency still dancing in his head. But Chase was not comfortable with the Republicans, nor they with him. He hadn’t been in favor of Johnson’s impeachment, and though he had been an ardent abolitionist before the war and supported universal suffrage after it, he hated how the Republicans had moved to centralize and consolidate federal power, particularly with their Military Reconstruction Act. He opposed what he called arbitrary military governments and military trials for civilians in peacetime, as was made evident in his support of the 1866 ex parte Milligan decision, which declared that in a state where the courts were open, even if habeas corpus had been suspended, a resident citizen could not be tried, convicted, or sentenced by a military tribunal. Chase also disagreed with the Radicals about disfranchising former Confederate military and political personnel. All that made him attractive to moderate Republicans and, perhaps, he hoped, to Democrats: he represented constitutional law, not military power.

  The Republicans were rejecting him. Chase is “on every man’s tongue, but in no man’s heart,” said one Republican, who felt that Chase had betrayed the party. Even his friend the financier Jay Cooke observed, “People don’t like the Chief Justice and his last position in the impeachment business has effectually squelched out all his claims upon the Republicans.”

  There was another issue too on which he differed from most of his party. On the question of the currency, hotly debated since the end of the war, Salmon Chase was a free trader who believed in hard money (payment in gold or silver). Yes, as secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln, he had approved, although reluctantly, the circulation of paper currency, which was supposed to be only a wartime measure. Now he wanted the government to return to an economic policy that included the retirement of the greenbacks issued during the war and the resumption of the use of specie (gold and silver).

  Moderate Republicans agreed with Chase on this and on the matter of free trade. Henry Adams and Carl Schurz, both free traders, believed that the protective tariff favored special interests, inhibited laissez-faire capitalism, and promoted the gargantuan growth of corporations. But Radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens, a protectionist, remembered that the South had argued for free trade. To Stevens, the protective tariff not only shielded industry from foreign competition but kept the South at bay; yet it was said he was merely sheltering the iron foundries of Pennsylvania, his home state, in which he allegedly had an economic share.

  So Chase reminded the Democratic National Committee that regarding the tariff and finance, he was still one of them, a Democrat, and he let it be known he would not be averse to accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination, should it be offered. But no Democrat could ever endorse a man who supported the Fourteenth Amendment and universal male suffrage, even if the South and the West seemed to approve of him. “C. is as radical as ever,” warned one. “Chase is out of the question,” the Democratic delegate Sanford E. Church told Samuel J. Tilden of New York. “We will use him well, but must not think of nominating him.”

  Instead, Democrats nominated the courtly Horatio Seymour, the wartime governor of New York who had opposed conscription and been forever stained by his coppery behavior during the New York City draft riots. Standing near “Boss” Tweed, Seymour had attempted to pacify the rioters and took his time calling for federal troops. But with Seymour, the Democrats hoped to squelch the Radicals once and for all, which they believed the progressive Chase might not have done.

  A surprised Seymour reportedly wept on hearing of his nomination, either out of joy or fear. Charles Dana of the New York Sun deeply regretted the choice. Chase would have saved the party, renewed it, strengthened it. Seymour’s nomination was party politics as usual. He would hand the election to Grant by reducing it to a fight between a former disunionist and a man who had put his life on the line.

  AFTER THE ASSASSINATION of a president who had spoken of charity and the better angels of our nature, and af
ter three years of an unyielding president whose idea of charity was Southern appeasement in a spectacle of spite, the country listened to General Grant. General Grant was no longer associated with the lame-duck Andy Johnson. Grant could unite the Republican Party. Grant had saved the Union. And Grant promised peace, not war. “Let us have peace”: the general did not want peace at any price; he wanted the peace promised by the North’s victory.

  Still, his slogan was sometimes regarded as a sop to people frustrated with Reconstruction, weary of it, or who had just grown indifferent. “Everybody is heartily tired of discussing [the Negro’s] rights,” The Nation had declared in its very first issue, back in 1865.

  Or, as Henry Adams would cynically say, the general’s “let us have peace” meant nothing more than—leave me alone.

  The presidential election of 1868 did not bring peace to Wilkie James in Florida. Bands of white men, guns raised, prevented black men from voting there. The day before the election, five whites rode up to a black man’s cabin and shot at him through the door and windows, and then they chucked a fiery knot of wood into the place. The man ran out, whereupon the five white men, Wilkie said, “put eight holes through his body with their rifles.”

  “There is going on a fierce and most relentless war,” said Frederick Douglass, who cautioned voters not to be gulled by the South’s peaceful facade. The black men near Wilkie’s colony armed themselves. Wilkie advised them not to seek more bloodshed but to join him though his own life was at risk. He wouldn’t scare off, he said. Instead, he rebaptized himself in his father’s secular religion, which included trust in the goodness of mankind and a commitment to brotherhood and equality. “To tell the plain truth,” he said, “I feel that any moment I may be called upon to give up my life for the faith of the principle I professed when I was a soldier in the open field.”

  Confiscated lands were being handed back to their former white owners; men such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, after presiding over the capture—and massacre—of black troops at Fort Pillow, was leading the newly founded Ku Klux Klan, and when the farms of Unionists in the South weren’t being robbed at gunpoint, they were laid waste by inclement weather or falling prices (though falling prices are the result of the other two). Property was losing its value everywhere in the South, and the Ku Klux Klan, spreading from Tennessee to every Southern state, was specifically targeting blacks and their white Republican friends. Klansmen visited them in the middle of the night, dragged them from their beds and whipped them with hickory switches, and then rode off laughing. Blacks and whites were lynched, raped, burned to death, kidnapped, mutilated. Schools were torched. Klansmen even appeared in the broad light of day. John Stephens, a North Carolina state senator, was murdered in the grand jury room of the court house in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he was stabbed on a Saturday afternoon and then hanged on a hook. According to the Radical Republican judge Albion Tourgée, himself a carpetbagger from Ohio living in North Carolina, the Ku Klux Klan would soon murder more men in the state than there were members of the legislature. The Ku Klux Klan also killed hundreds of black men and women in Louisiana and Georgia.

  Wilkie James might have wanted to make a difference, but he had no organization and no economic or political power beyond the money donated by a solicitous parent. He was not nominated as a delegate to the Florida Constitutional Convention, as he’d hoped to be, and in any case the polls near him had been barred. He possessed only personal charisma and principled tenacity, but he was growing tired. One of Wilkie’s best friends refused to talk to him again after learning that Wilkie had enlisted to fight with a Negro regiment. And a group of armed men prowled around the Gordon colony at night, pistols cocked. “Do not understand me as backing out of the enterprise,” Wilkie assured his father.

  “No Northern man likes to bring his family into such a nation of fighters,” said Charles Stearns, a Garrisonian abolitionist gone South to try his hand at cooperative farming. Stearns had purchased a 1,500-acre plantation in Georgia and planned eventually to sell off parcels to his black labor force. In a matter of weeks, though, he was sleeping with a revolver under his pillow and had to take his breech-loading rifle to church. “This is about as bad as it used to be in Kansas in border ruffian times,” he said, “and I feel even more insecure than I did then, for we have no friends but the blacks, and they are very poorly armed.”

  Although the conditions in Florida as well as much of the South had worsened, Wilkie James held on for another three years. Facing bankruptcy, he was able to raise money in Massachusetts and turn his plantation into an agricultural colony. Not until the country’s financial crisis in 1873 did he have to close down his operation for good. The experiment had failed.

  Wilkie James eventually settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, near his brother Bob, who had found employment there as a clerk for the St. Paul Railway. Meantime, his father, citing his losses in the Florida venture, excluded Wilkie from his will. Wilkie James died in 1883 at the age of thirty-eight.

  GRANT POSSESSED MORE power than any other man in the United States, though he shunned any outward show of it. At first he claimed he didn’t want the nomination, and after he accepted it, he claimed he’d been “forced into it in spite of myself.” “Backing down would leave the election to be contested between mere trading politicians,” he sheepishly explained his about-face to Sherman, “the elevation of whom, no matter which party won, would lose us, largely, the results of the costly war which we have just gone through.” He meant what he said, in part at least, but his motives weren’t always clear. Ulysses S. Grant was a cipher. “It is difficult to comprehend the qualities of a man who could be moved by a narrative of individual suffering,” said Massachusetts congressman George Boutwell, “and who yet could sleep while surrounded by the horrors of the battles of the Wilderness.”

  Running against Grant and Schuyler Colfax (the speaker of the House) was the Democratic ticket of Horatio Seymour and that resilient politician Frank Blair, who had been General Frémont’s nemesis, had served under General Sherman, liked Lincoln, and had supported Andrew Johnson to the hilt. With a campaign motto of “This is a white man’s country, let white men rule,” they declared all Reconstruction acts null and void. Dourly, Frederick Douglass wondered, “Does anybody want a revised and corrected edition of Andrew Johnson in the presidential chair for the next four years?” He endorsed Grant.

  Yet Democrats rightly noted—with some aspersion—that while Republicans had mandated universal male suffrage in the South, black men still could not vote in the North.

  In November Grant won the presidency with a sizable electoral count—214 electoral votes from twenty-six states for Grant versus 80 electoral votes from eight states for Seymour—but he received only 52 percent of the popular vote; the margin of victory was but 300,000 ballots—and since 500,000 black men in the South had voted for Grant, that meant white men overwhelmingly hadn’t. Yet the country had made a choice. It did not want a politician or an ideologue. It preferred a winner: a manager of huge armies who adroitly handled tough generals and stubborn government men, who preserved law and order, which he could enforce with unswerving might, but who also spoke, when he spoke at all, of peace. The taciturn Grant had won with silence. Saying very little, he revealed nothing of what he thought. “He could depend on that countenance of his in all emergencies,” Mark Twain would later remark. “It never betrayed him.”

  Grant was a drunk, Grant was a butcher, cried the Democratic opposition. All war is butchery, was the reply. Let us not look further. Let us read Whittier’s “Snow-bound” as comforting us. Let us forget. Let Wilkie James go back North. Let us make money. Let us have peace.

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  DEEP WATER

  Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams had said, but it seemed that no one had. “I have argued with [Wendell] Phillips and the whole fraternity and all will favor enfranchising the negro without us,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton told Susan B. Anthony as soon as the war was over. “Woman’s ca
use is in deep water.”

  For almost two decades Stanton had been passionately committed to securing equal rights for American women. The author of the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments that had been read at the Seneca Falls woman’s rights convention in 1848, which she had helped to organize, Stanton had been married for twenty-five years to Henry Brewster Stanton, a well-known abolitionist whom she had met at the home of her cousin Gerrit Smith. Defying stereotypes about women activists being mean, mannish, and unmarried, she had given birth to seven children; she was round and rosy; her hair was snow white, her manner amiable, her dress an unoffending and forgettable calico. Said a friend of the fossilized men who sat open-mouthed when Stanton appeared in public, “Our fossil is first amazed—next bewildered—then fascinated—then convinced—not exactly of the doctrine of woman’s suffrage, perhaps—but at any rate that a woman to be an advocate of that doctrine need neither be a fright nor a fury.”

  As a girl, she had been accomplished in chess, horseback riding, Greek, and the law (her father was a judge), and now, at fifty years old, she had not forgotten being told she should study only French, music, and dance—or that her father wished she had been a boy. She hadn’t wanted to be a boy; she just wanted to be a person who enjoyed the same privileges.

  Growing up in Johnstown, New York, she had been influenced by the remarkable evangelist Charles Grandison Finney, one of the burned-over district’s most charismatic preachers. At twenty-nine, while practicing law in Adams, New York, Finney had undergone a conversion experience during which he committed himself to teaching the Gospels. He was ordained three years later, in 1824. In cities such as Utica, Auburn, and Troy and then Boston and New York, he sermonized in a plain but vigorous evangelical style that galvanized listeners; speaking at a giant revival in Rochester, New York, he told his audience that each individual was a moral agent, that slavery was wrong—he refused to give communion to slaveholders—that liquor, tobacco, and caffeine were pernicious, and that men, and women too, could relinquish sin, renew themselves, and love God without intermediaries. He actually welcomed women into the prayer meeting, where they were invited to testify, and took his sense of equal rights to Oberlin College, a pioneering institution in coeducation that, regardless of race, admitted women as well as men. “Men came to Oberlin for various reasons,” the activist Lucy Stone would say, “women, because they had nowhere else to go.”