Johnson continued to cold-shoulder Congress. “Nothing since Chancellorsville,” Charles Sumner cried, “has to my mind been so disastrous to the National Cause.”
For Johnson not only ignored black suffrage, he hinted that he would favor sending blacks to Africa, “a clime and country suited to you, should it be found that the two races cannot get along together.”
The President then appointed James Johnson (no relation) provisional governor of Georgia and proceeded to issue similar proclamations for the remaining unreconstructed states. (Acting as a wartime President, not a peacetime one, Lincoln had already appointed provisional governors in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas.) “Among all the leading Union men of the North with whom I have had intercourse,” Stevens warned Johnson in July, “I do not find one who approves your policy.” Chief Justice Salmon Chase called Johnson’s policy “a moral, political & financial mistake.”
Of course there were no precedents for any of this, and there was something improvised about these lurchings into peace. Yet as far as Johnson was concerned, certain individuals may have rebelled against the Union; the states had not. He repeated himself: the eleven states of the Confederacy had never actually been out of the Union because they did not have the legal right to secede. (That’s like saying a murderer could not kill because killing was against the law, Thaddeus Stevens acidly remarked.) According to Johnson, since these states hadn’t seceded, they had not relinquished their right to govern themselves as they wished.
“There is no such thing as reconstruction,” he added. “These States have not gone out of the Union, therefore reconstruction is unnecessary. I do not mean to treat them as inchoate States, but merely as existing under a temporary suspension of their government, provided always they [now] elect loyal men.”
Johnson also insisted that his policy was based on Lincoln’s point of view: the “erring” sister states hadn’t left the Union. Ignoring Lincoln’s further statement that the question about the legal right of secession was academic, he could allege that he was fulfilling the mission of the great martyred President.
Charles Sumner vehemently differed with Johnson. By passing ordinances of secession, Sumner said, the rebel states had forfeited their status as states. They had committed suicide. The rebel states could no longer exist as states because they had been “vacated”—as Sumner put it—“by all local governments we are bound to recognize.”
Thaddeus Stevens thought Johnson’s position absurd. “The theory that the rebel states, for four years a separate power and without representation in Congress, were all the time here in the Union,” he said, “was a good deal less ingenious and respectable than the metaphysics of [Bishop] Berkeley, which proved that neither the world nor any human being was in existence.”
Because the rebel states were tantamount to conquered provinces—even Lincoln had treated Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee as such—Stevens proposed they be “held in a territorial condition until they are fit to form State constitutions, republican in fact and in form, and ask admission into the Union as new States.”
But Johnson’s ally Gideon Welles, the fusty secretary of the navy whom Lincoln called Old Neptune, wanted to let the sister states back into the Union as soon as possible, and Welles had no use for a black man voting. He made his position clear when Johnson took a straw vote in the cabinet. War Secretary Edwin Stanton might have wanted suffrage to be part of the President’s proclamations; Welles did not.
Secretary of State William Seward hadn’t been able to vote—he was still at home, recovering from the wounds he had received on the night of Lincoln’s assassination. Sympathetic to Seward, whose fractured jaw had been fitted with some sort of metal contraption, Gideon Welles nonetheless considered Seward a turncoat temporizer who cared less for states’ rights than a strong federal government—and a complicated man who could slyly adapt to any situation he couldn’t control.
Welles assumed that Seward wouldn’t support suffrage—but Welles also assumed that when Seward came back into the cabinet, he’d be aiming to control Andrew Johnson.
* * *
—
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD was a genial, pliable optimist—and a survivor. He’d survived President Buchanan and the Buchanan administration, he’d survived the pressure of the Radicals, he’d survived an attempt on his life.
Secretary of state under Presidents Lincoln and Johnson, the very complicated William H. Seward so loyally supported Johnson that he was called the President’s “ill-genius.”
Raised in upstate New York, Seward had been an outspoken anti-slavery Whig before the war as well as a state senator and the governor of New York; in 1849 he’d been elected to the U.S. Senate. But during the secession crisis, Seward broke with the Republican platform, which forbade extending slavery into the territories, and he tried to conciliate the South with a plan that would have approved it. He also proposed that the country should consider a constitutional amendment forever forbidding congressional interference with slavery in the states where it already existed. Smacking of appeasement, the proposal appalled many Republicans, who viewed it as a sop to the secessionists. “God damn you Seward,” a Republican senator shouted on the floor. “You’ve betrayed your principles and your party.”
Seward had been working to reconcile North and South. Regardless, or maybe because of this, Lincoln had placed him in the cabinet as his secretary of state. Assuming he knew more than the President, Seward was certain that Lincoln would do what he told him, and during the first overwrought days of that administration, he told Lincoln not to buck the Confederates of South Carolina but rather to surrender Fort Sumter to pacify them. He then leaked information to them that Sumter would be evacuated, which of course it was not.
He had also advised Lincoln to provoke an international crisis, believing that a war with Spain and France would prevent war at home. Lincoln did not adopt Seward’s plans, which, if anything, revealed Seward’s Machiavellian tendencies. But as historians have persuasively argued, Seward helped collect Democratic votes for the Thirteenth Amendment in exchange for a reconstruction policy lenient toward the South and the promise of a new political party, a Union party, composed of conservative Republicans like himself and willing Democrats. But hardline Democrats loathed Seward almost as much as they disliked Edwin Stanton, and they wanted Johnson to remove both Seward and Stanton immediately from the cabinet in return for their support.
Radical Republicans too distrusted the shifty Seward. Johnson’s decision to welcome back into the Union those whom he’d called traitors bore Seward’s mark, they thought. “Seward entered into him,” Thaddeus Stevens said, “and ever since, they have been running down steep places into the sea.” Carl Schurz, the noted German refugee who had recently served as a Union general, agreed that Johnson’s recent policy toward the South reeked of Seward.
Having mostly recovered from the wounds he’d received on the night of Lincoln’s assassination, though still swollen around the jaw, Seward soon returned to his office as secretary of state and promptly became Johnson’s staunch ally. They too were an odd couple: William Seward was cultured, conniving, and a wily strategist enormously sensitive to the political climate, while Andrew Johnson was uncultured, stubborn, and frequently off marching to his own drummer. Yet both of them wanted to curb the power of the federal government, or so they claimed.
At sixty-four, the ebullient Seward was showing some signs of age. His hair was gray, his eyebrows frizzled, his chin almost nonexistent, his nose long and droopy. He spoke well, and he liked to speak. In July, the scar on his face from the assassination attempt quite visible, Seward addressed an audience in his upstate New York hometown. Praising President Johnson as a man of integrity and bravery, a man without personal caprice or selfishness, and a man who merely wanted to heal the breach caused by war, Seward also suggested that it was he, William Seward, who’d been master-builder o
f the President’s policy of reconciliation. (Enemies called him Mephistopheles.) He reminded his audience that the terms now on the table had already been worked out by Lincoln and his cabinet—namely, again, by William Seward. Who could argue with the wisdom of Lincoln, the great national martyr? Andrew Johnson merely wanted the same things: reconciliation and peace. We can now trust each other, North and South, Seward repeated; we are again friends.
The radical National Anti-Slavery Standard labeled Seward’s speech an act of cowardice. Charles Sumner hated it. By trusting former Confederates, Sumner declared, “we give them political power, including the license to oppress loyal persons, whether white or black, and especially the freedmen. For four years we have met them in battle; and now we rush to trust them, and to commit into their keeping the happiness and well-being of others. There is peril in trusting such an enemy.”
Charles Sumner, at one extreme, and Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, at another, weren’t the only ones who mistrusted Seward. Longtime Democrats, the dynastic Blair family had no use for him. Montgomery Blair, who seemed to have Johnson’s ear, thought Seward an underhanded liar. Formerly Lincoln’s postmaster general, and before that an accomplished lawyer who had argued before the Supreme Court that the former slave Dred Scott was free because he resided in free territory, Blair firmly opposed giving black men the vote. Any hint of racial equality repulsed him, and fearing miscegenation above all, he hoped to rid the country of blacks by deporting them. Before the election of 1864, Radical Republicans demanded Lincoln remove Montgomery Blair from the cabinet, which Lincoln did.
Blair was at first enthusiastic about Andrew Johnson, and the Blairs had been good to the Tennessean. After Johnson’s embarrassing performance at his vice-presidential inauguration, his friend former New York senator Preston King stowed Johnson at the Blairs’ Maryland home, where the Blairs hospitably provided him with cover and circulated a plausible reason—illness—for his drunken blathering. Once Johnson was President, the Blairs believed he had deftly hoodwinked the Radicals when he ordered the trial of the accused Lincoln assassination conspirators, noting that, in the end, “there will be but few [Southerners] punished after all.” Montgomery Blair also assured Democratic power-brokers that Johnson had promised the federal government would not interfere with the states. If Democrats dawdled, or withheld their support from Johnson, “there may be mischief done.”
But Democratic power-brokers were lukewarm on Johnson. By summer, he still hadn’t tossed Edwin Stanton or William Seward out of the cabinet. “Public events have shown, ever since Johnson’s ascension, that he is entirely in the hands of Stanton and Seward,” fumed George Ticknor Curtis, the government commissioner famous for hurling the fugitive Thomas Sims back into slavery in Georgia in the 1850s. “His [Johnson’s] adoption of the military trial,” Curtis referred to the Lincoln conspirators’ case, “and his execution of the victims have clearly rendered his retreat from their [Radical] control an impossibility.” Johnson then kept Montgomery Blair waiting so long in the antechamber of his office that Blair never saw the President that day. “What chance at conservative ideas to the mind of Johnson,” Curtis wondered, “if he keeps thus at arm’s length a man who is presumed to be his personal friend and is one of the leading politicians of the country?”
“Seward & Stanton are jubilant,” former Congressman Samuel Sunset Cox, himself a conservative leader, warned his Democratic friends about Johnson. “There is the best of reasons for believing that all our efforts to help him would be met with a lecture on our derelictions as Dems.”
Johnson’s proclamations therefore concerned Democrats as much as they upset the Radical Republicans, although for different reasons. “He is nominally a President of a republic, but in reality an absolute ruler issuing decrees (not executing laws), and carrying them out by naked military force. This seems to me to be his present attitude,” jurist William Shipman declared. Johnson was acting autocratically, exercising war powers when the war was over. “I shall be glad to see him change his position, and disavow both by word and deed the monstrous assumptions of executive power,” Shipman continued. “If he does not do so, then in the struggle which is to come between him and the radicals, we must take care that we do not commit ourselves to his support.”
These Democrats actually preferred black suffrage to presidential tyranny: “Now while the President would doubtless appoint better men, he would do it by the exercise of a power utterly inconsistent with free institutions. The negroes would elect them by ballot, at least in formal harmony with the principles upon which our government, state and national, are founded.”
Andrew Johnson was gradually alienating almost everyone in the North.
CHAPTER FOUR
Moses
“I care not whence the blows come. And some will find, before this thing is over, that while there are blows to be given, there will be blows to receive.”
—ANDREW JOHNSON
In 1860, and in the months just before the outbreak of war, no one had seemed braver than Tennessee Senator Andrew Johnson. When indignant secessionists in South Carolina wanted to sever ties with the United States, he had boldly defied them. “I am opposed to secession,” Johnson had declared, not mincing words, on the floor of the Senate just a month after Abraham Lincoln’s election. “He that is unwilling to make an effort to preserve the Union,” Senator Johnson thundered, “or, in other words, to preserve the Constitution, I think is unworthy of public confidence, and the respect and gratitude of the American people.” On these points, preserving the Union and the Constitution, Andrew Johnson never wavered.
Andrew Johnson lived for and by the U.S. Constitution, and during that secession winter of 1860, he reminded colleagues again and again that the Constitution makes no provision for a state ever to leave the Union. About this, he was clear. And he said he’d cling to the Constitution “as the ship-wrecked mariner clings to the last plank, when the night and the tempest close around him.”
Senator Johnson was also very clear about his position on slavery. The U.S. Constitution guaranteed its protection, including its spread into the territories. If Lincoln and his fellow Republicans were to be stopped from tampering with slavery—which they must be—Johnson said they must be stopped from inside the government, not outside it.
Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis shook his head in disgust.
Burned in effigy from one end of Tennessee to another, Andrew Johnson was blasted as a traitor to the South. “Hanging is too good for such a degraded old wretch,” said a Georgia newspaper. Johnson had to be an ally of that repulsive abolitionist Benjamin Wade, it was alleged. Or he was the tool of an underhanded William Seward, then senator from New York. Anyway, what could anyone really expect of Andy Johnson, whom Southern planters disdained as a “scrub”: a gauche, backwoods Tennessee tailor who by the age of twenty couldn’t even recite the alphabet. What could a scrub know about the Constitution? Soon it was also rumored that Andy Johnson had challenged Texas Senator Louis Wigfall to a duel over secession, but Wigfall didn’t duel anymore—which was lucky for Andy, his detractors snorted, since Wigfall was a damned good shot.
Yet Andrew Johnson had taken his stand, and he held his ground. Still, he couldn’t stem the South’s slide into secession.
For months, he’d been pleading with Southern friends and colleagues not to secede, and he’d even proposed amendments to the Constitution that might please them. He suggested that the President and Vice President be elected directly by popular vote and that half of the Supreme Court justices be selected from slave-holding states. He proposed a permanent line be drawn between slave and free states and that slavery be protected in the slave states. Most important, he declared that these amendments should be unamendable. If they were passed, he insisted, there’d be no need for secession. The proposals went nowhere. On December 20, 1860, church bells in Charleston celebrated South Carolina’s leaving the Union, and b
y February 1861, seven states had passed secession ordinances.
Again Johnson protested. He invoked the specter of his beloved hero President Andrew Jackson, born in poverty, like Johnson himself; a committed Democrat, like himself; a committed Unionist, also like himself; and a self-proclaimed man of the people, like himself. President Jackson had trusted the yeoman farmer and the hardworking mechanic and men who weren’t members, as Andrew Johnson put it, of an “upstart, swelled-headed, iron heeled, bobtailed aristocracy.”
“If Andrew Jackson were President of the United States, this glorious Union of ours would still be intact,” Johnson chastised fellow Southerners. Andrew Jackson had chided his own Vice President, John C. Calhoun, when Calhoun insisted that a state possessed the right to veto, or nullify, any federal law it found unconstitutional. In 1832, the South Carolina legislature had declared a federal tariff to be null and void—and it also claimed that the federal government’s failure to uphold the state’s decision on nullification was grounds for secession. But President Jackson had argued that the Constitution established a national government, not a series of independent, strutting states that could ignore the federal laws they had all made together.
This was essentially the same case that Andrew Johnson made about secession in the Senate two days before Lincoln’s inauguration. It didn’t fly. Immediately charged with pandering to the North, Johnson hotly replied that to him the Northern abolitionist was as fanatical as the Southern secessionist—wild extremists bent on destroying the very best government on earth. And if those extremists wanted to attack him, go ahead, Johnson dared his Senate colleagues. “I care not whence the blows come,” he cried. “And some will find, before this thing is over, that while there are blows to be given, there will be blows to receive; and that while others can thrust, there are some who can parry. They will find that it is a game that two can play at.”
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