Yet Schurz was not completely unsympathetic to Southern whites—whether those who lost their plantations or whose farms were heavily mortgaged, or widows with children left to fend for themselves. He was aware of the many destitute people who indirectly depended on these farms and plantations to keep their own businesses afloat. He was aware too that the returning Confederate soldier did not easily find employment, as did his counterpart in the North. He saw wrecked homesteads, blackened chimneys standing in empty fields, shoeless boys and girls, and entire communities ravenous and sulky. These people were understandably suspicious.
But large numbers of freedmen still worked on plantations and were not being paid; they were subject to unfair contracts, poor conditions, and physical violence. The white planters believed that a system of free labor could never succeed—one Georgia planter, to prove his case, said that his black employee had actually refused to submit to a whipping. Other freedmen and -women flocked to cities and seaports, where they were penniless, jobless, and reviled. “Black codes,” as they were called, deprived them of the freedom to travel, to testify in court, to open a business, to carry arms, to hunt or fish without permission, and in one weird case to buy or sell goods without written consent. And murder? “During my two days sojourn at Atlanta, one negro was stabbed with fatal effect on the street, and three were poisoned, one of whom died,” Schurz wrote. “While I was at Montgomery, one negro was cut across the throat evidently with intent to kill, and another was shot.”
These were not isolated incidents.
Schurz’s conclusions—the conclusions that most incensed Johnson—were unambiguous: “One reason why the Southern people are so slow in accommodating themselves to the new order of things is, that they confidently expect soon to be permitted to regulate matters according to their own notions.” This was a slap at Johnson’s policy. “Every concession made to them by the Government has been taken as an encouragement to persevere in this hope,” Schurz continued. “Hence their anxiety to have their State governments restored at once, to have the troops withdrawn, and the Freedmen’s Bureau abolished.”
It was obvious to Schurz that the federal government would have to prevent the South from falling at once “into the chaos of a general collision between its different elements.” But if the black man had a voice in government—if he had the right to vote—then he would find the “best permanent protection against oppressive class-legislation, as well as individual persecution.”
“A voter is a man of influence,” Schurz declared, “small as that influence may be in the single individual, it becomes larger when that individual belongs to a numerous class of voters who are ready to make common cause with him for the protection of his rights.”
Johnson is said to have quipped that so far his only mistake as President was letting Schurz go South. He had hardened, and when pushed, he lost his temper. Again he proclaimed, this time to the governor of Missouri, that “this is a country for white men and, by God, as long as I am president it shall be a government for white men.” Many Republicans professed shock yet some of them defended the President. “We think it likely he did say so,” temporized The Chicago Times, which then lay the blame at the feet of Radical Republicans. “If he used the language attributed to him, it was undoubtedly in reply to fanaticism and impudence.”
Charles Sumner arranged to print Schurz’s report—over 100,000 copies were distributed—at around the same time that the balmy observations of General Ulysses S. Grant appeared. Assuming that Grant would support Johnson’s policy, which he then did, in November the President hurriedly dispatched Grant to the South to offset the Schurz testimony. And since Grant, the general who had vanquished the South, had not tarnished his reputation with incautious or partisan speech—under the guidance of advisers, the general hardly spoke at all—he would be admired for his forbearance and, better yet, the public would believe him.
Grant did not disappoint. Or at least he did not disappoint the President. When he arrived in South Carolina, soldiers who eagerly awaited him discovered a “plain, unpretentious, farmer like–looking man….One would scarcely pick him out of the crowd as the hero he is.” But Grant was on a whirlwind trip and spent only one day in Raleigh, two in Charleston, and a day each in Savannah and Augusta. Generously entertained by gracious white Southerners, who doubtless swayed him, Grant presumably said that if suffrage were insisted upon as a condition of reconstruction, it would certainly lead to a “war of races.”
Grant did advise Johnson against removing the military from the region, although he agreed that the presence of black troops was incendiary and demoralizing—to the local whites, that is. He suggested that only white troops be stationed there. The young French correspondent for the Paris Temps, Georges Clemenceau, called Grant’s milquetoast report a prop in Johnson’s theater of restoration.
Were Northern visitors to the South finding what they wanted to find and seeing only what they wanted to see? Grant’s senior aide-de-camp, Cyrus Comstock, thought not, and in his diary recorded the bitterness that white Southerners bore black men and women. Seeing what he wanted to see was the charge leveled against Schurz, a charge Schurz had anticipated, vowing he’d never have taken the mission in the first place “had I not felt that whatever preconceived opinions I might carry with me to the south, I should be ready to abandon or modify, as my perception of facts and circumstances might command their abandonment or modification.” But his worst fears seemed to have come true. And he confirmed the worst fears of Sumner and of Stevens and of Phillips and of all those others growing disenchanted, if not outright hostile, to the policies of Andrew Johnson.
* * *
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MEN IN GOVERNMENT or near it—whether William Seward or Salmon Chase or Montgomery Blair or Andrew Johnson—may be motivated by ideals but are just as often driven by a love of power and are susceptible to personal aggrandizement. The same could be said for Carl Schurz who, toying with the idea of becoming a journalist, took a position as Washington correspondent for the New-York Tribune. (He did not stay at the post long; soon he relocated to Detroit and then St. Louis to edit newspapers there.) Even the seventy-two-year-old Thaddeus Stevens briefly wondered if he might leave the House of Representatives for the Senate, although his enemies would never let that happen. But the imposing, pedantic Charles Sumner seemed as free of mixed motives as anyone in government could be, and in any case his congressional seat was fairly secure.
Having tried to persuade Andrew Johnson of the wrongness of his position and the rightness of his own, Charles Sumner had lost patience. “He has all the narrowness and ignorance of a certain class of whites,” Sumner complained, “who have always looked upon the colored race as out of the pale of humanity.”
Many Republicans still hoped that Johnson could be persuaded to consider giving the black man the vote, despite the President’s insistence that suffrage was a matter for the states to decide—and despite his dogged assertion that suffrage would bring on a war between the races. Yet though many moderate Republicans were convinced that black suffrage, and suffrage alone, could prevent rebels from returning to power, they counseled patience. “Some foolish men among us are all the while bristling up for fight and seem anxious to make a rupture with Johnson,” Ohio Representative James Garfield moderately said. “I think we should assume that he is with us, treat him kindly, without suspicion and go on in a firm, calmly considered course, leaving him to make the breach with the party if any is made. I doubt he would do it under such circumstances.” Similarly, the mercurial publisher of the New-York Tribune, Horace Greeley, wrote to the speaker of the house, Schuyler Colfax, “I pray you to take care that we do nothing calculated to drive the President into the arms of our adversaries. Let us respect his convictions and thus impel him to respect ours.”
Republicans were also aware that in October and November, three states (Connecticut, Minnesota, Wisconsin) had voted down a bal
lot that included a constitutional amendment allowing the enfranchisement of black men. Republicans in those states had largely backed suffrage, but Democrats had voted against it. “The Connecticut vote is a very heavy blow, and a very bad indication,” the editor Charles Eliot Norton acknowledged. “Johnson will feel much relieved by it.” Going forward then, Norton moderately advised not advocating “negro rights” so much as “the principles of American democracy.”
“Negro suffrage is not the main point,” Norton starchily continued, “but equal political rights & privileges.” In Pennsylvania, the Republican convention hadn’t even mentioned black suffrage. It was “premature and unpopular,” Thaddeus Stevens sighed. In light of these recent votes—and Johnson’s intransigence—Republicans would have to change their political strategy. They would have to play down black suffrage and push hard instead for civil rights: the rights of citizenship, such as equal protection under the law.
For the President’s behavior continued to be worrisome—and it was not just his proclamations that troubled the Republicans. “Prest. Johnson is said to be sick—seriously so,” remarked Henry J. Raymond of the Johnson-leaning New York Times, “while others speak mysteriously of his habits.” The allusion to “habits” was obvious: the chief executive was drinking far too much.
Johnson remained indifferent to gossip and unresponsive to criticism. For Andrew Johnson relied on Andrew Johnson. He could defy and then outlast the Jefferson Davises and the Southern planters who scorned him. As the grouchy but loyal Navy Secretary Gideon Welles would comment, Andrew Johnson would never truckle to partisans, fanatics, Radicals, Republicans, office-seekers—or to blacks, whom Welles also dismissed. Johnson was a proud, vain, and insecure man who distrusted almost everyone, and his talent for pitting himself against almost everyone, his friend Welles went on to say, would pillory him and warp the course of the entire country for years and years to come.
CHAPTER SIX
Not a “White Man’s Government”
“This is not a ‘white man’s Government.’ To say so is political blasphemy.”
—THADDEUS STEVENS
December 1865
Edward McPherson, the balding clerk of the House of Representatives, banged his gavel and opened a new chapter of American history.
For almost eight months, Andrew Johnson had been running the government completely without Congress. The legislature had not been in session since Johnson took the oath of office, and so he’d been governing without its approval, approbation, or interference, as if he were king. That had to stop. On Monday, December 4, 1865, the Thirty-Ninth Congress, with its Republican majority, was convening at last.
In the corridors and the galleries, it might have been a normal day. People shook hands and greeted one another pleasantly, although everyone was anxious about what might happen when delegates from the former rebel states appeared. Would they sweep into the very Congress from which they had seceded, or would they be turned away, their entrance to the great halls blocked?
Because the Constitution allowed Congress to judge the qualifications of its own members, the House managers could refuse to seat anyone they wanted, and Radical Republicans certainly hoped to bar men like Alexander Stephens, who’d been the Vice President of the Confederacy. For according to the terms of the Amnesty Proclamation, their military rank or government position in the former Confederacy should have prevented them from taking office, yet a number of these men, having been pardoned by Andrew Johnson, now occupied high-ranking positions in the South. Of them, nine former Confederate army officers, seven former members of the Confederate Congress, and three members of the secession conventions of 1860–1861 had arrived in Washington, intending to enter Congress. Many Radicals thus openly worried that this “old oligarchy” of planters, secessionists, and white supremacists would again dominate the South, and the nation.
“Either keep them out of Congress,” the newspaper editor Horatio Woodman pleaded, “or find a way to let the negroes vote,—and this practically and not theoretically or philanthropically.”
The atmosphere was so tense that Secretary of State William Seward, usually imperturbable, begged the navy secretary to find him a Cuba-bound steamer so he could duck the whole thing.
Horace Maynard had received the necessary certificate of election to Congress from none other than Tennessee Governor Parson Brownlow, the same fire-eating Radical who’d once bellowed “we must keep Southern rebels out of Congress, who only seek to get in to do mischief.” Horace Maynard was no rebel. In 1861 he’d worked hard to keep Tennessee in the Union, so much so that he tried to make East Tennessee a separate Union state; Andrew Johnson, when military governor there, appointed Maynard attorney general. Slim and tall with a long, skinny face, Maynard, though he actually disliked Johnson, had crucially promoted his nomination as Vice President in 1864. Of all men, Maynard seemed the Southern representative most likely to be seated.
But many moderate and even conservative Republicans, horrified by reports from the South, and especially by the black codes, were not eager to seat the Southern delegates any more than the Radicals were. If representatives from the seceded states were immediately admitted to Congress without any guarantee of good faith other than the surrender of their armies—and without Congress or the states having secured full rights of citizenship for the recently emancipated blacks—the clock would be turned backward, with nothing left but “degradation, misery, & servitude, for the blacks,” as Charles Eliot Norton observed with disdain.
McPherson cleared his throat and read the roll. He skipped the name of Horace Maynard. Maynard jumped up to speak, but McPherson refused to recognize him. Tennessee was not in the Union.
New York Democrat James Brooks also jumped up. “If Tennessee is not in the Union, and has not been in the Union, and is not a loyal State, and the people of Tennessee are aliens and foreigners to this Union,” Brooks shouted, “then by what right does the President of the United States usurp his place in the White House?” If Tennessee was not in the Union, Brooks was saying, then Andrew Johnson must be an alien and a foreigner with no right to be President.
Thaddeus Stevens replied that any question about credentials could not be posed until the House had elected its new Speaker.
Stevens understood House rules and regulations better than anyone. As always, he had come to Congress prepared. He was seventy-three, he’d been ill, he could barely walk, and as Carl Schurz noted, “he looked very much aged,” but having met with Republican party leaders before Congress convened, he’d garnered their support for what he planned to do. After Schuyler Colfax was elected Speaker, Stevens swiftly moved to suspend the rules, cutting off debate. Stevens then proposed the establishment of a Joint Congressional Committee on Reconstruction to be composed of fifteen members, nine from the House and six from the Senate. This Reconstruction Committee would be charged with investigating conditions in the former Confederacy—in particular, the many reported murders and assaults—and determining under what terms representatives from those states could be admitted to Congress.
The resolution easily passed, 129 to 35, and having also passed the Senate, the Joint Committee was promptly formed with Maine Senator William Pitt Fessenden, a moderate Republican who leaned toward the conventional, as its chair. Three Democrats sat on the Joint Committee—Henry Grider of Kentucky, Andrew Rogers of New Jersey, and Reverdy Johnson of Maryland—but Democrats were generally indignant, complaining that Stevens had cracked his whip—which he had, and successfully. They groused about whether the Joint Committee on Reconstruction would act responsibly and prevent a “perpetually recurring wrangle” over the readmission of Southern states. They were particularly angry at Republicans like Henry Raymond, the youthful founder of The New York Times, whom they had considered reliably on their side. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1864, and though supposed to be a Seward man, Raymond had evidently surrendered to Thad Stev
ens.
In his annual speech to Congress, which the esteemed historian George Bancroft had skillfully helped to write, Johnson tried to calm the battling antagonists. He failed. Rehashing the debate about secession that Lincoln had called academic, Johnson insisted again that the Constitution had forbade secession and therefore it hadn’t happened. The Southern states had not seceded; they’d merely, he repeated, “placed themselves in a condition where their vitality was impaired, but not extinguished—their functions suspended, but not destroyed.” These states could therefore assume their rightful place in a representative government.
Stevens thought Johnson’s argument ridiculous. “Nobody, I believe, pretends that with their old constitutions and frames of government, they [the former rebel states] can be permitted to claim their old rights under the Constitution. They have torn their constitutional States into atoms,” he explained. “Dead States cannot restore their own existence ‘as it was.’ ” And only Congress could readmit them.
Then Stevens posed another problem: the three-fifths issue. Once the Thirteenth Amendment was part of the Constitution, those persons once counted as three-fifths a person were to be counted as full persons; that would increase the number of representatives allowed in the House from the Southern states once those states were readmitted to Congress. How was that fair, if non-white persons couldn’t vote?
Stevens wasn’t finished. Governor Perry of South Carolina and the other provisional governors appointed by Johnson—and reputedly Johnson himself—had proclaimed “this is a white man’s government.” That kind of declaration revolted Stevens. “What is implied by this?” he trenchantly asked. “That one race of men are to have the exclusive right forever to rule this nation, and to exercise all acts of sovereignty, which all other races and nations and colors are to be their subject, and have no voice in making the laws and choosing the rules by whom they are to be governed? Wherein does this differ from slavery except in degree?
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