A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  In the struggle that followed, on one side stood Johnson, virtually alone, although in a pinch some Democrats and a core of so-called moderate Republicans backed him. Moderates of 1865 had strong principles—just not those of the Radicals, who favored more or less full equality of blacks. Confronting and bedeviling Johnson were Radical leaders in Congress, most notably Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner (who had finally returned to his seat after his caning at the hands of Preston Brooks). They held together a shaky coalition of diverse-minded men, some of whom favored suffrage for all freedmen; others who supported a limited franchise; and still others who advocated voting rights for blacks in the South, but not the North.6

  The third and final phase of Reconstruction occurred when Radical Reconstruction lost its steam and public support faded. At that point, Southern Democrats known as Redeemers restored white supremacy to the state governments, intimidated blacks with segregation (“Jim Crow” laws), and squeezed African Americans out of positions of power in the state governments. Reconstruction ended officially with a Redeemer victory in the Compromise of 1877, in which the final Union troops were withdrawn from the South, leaving blacks unprotected and at the mercy of Southern Democratic governments.

  It is worth noting that both Lincoln and Johnson sparred with Congress over control of Reconstruction on several occasions, and thus some overlap between presidential and congressional Reconstruction occurred. Although Lincoln had enacted a few precedent-setting policies, the brunt of the initial Reconstruction efforts fell on his successor, Andrew Johnson.

  Time Line

  1865:

  Civil War ends; Lincoln assassinated; Andrew Johnson assumes presidency; Thirteenth Amendment

  1866:

  Radical Republicans emerge in Congress; Ku Klux Klan founded

  1867:

  Military Reconstruction Act; purchase of Alaska

  1868:

  Johnson impeachment trial ends in acquittal; Fourteenth Amendment; Grant elected president

  1870:

  Fifteenth Amendment

  1872:

  Crédit Mobilier Scandal

  1873:

  Crime of 1873; Panic of 1873

  1876:

  Disputed presidential election between Hayes and Tilden

  1877:

  Compromise of 1877; Hayes becomes president; Redeemers recapture Southern governments; Black Republicans in the South begin to decline

  Andrew Johnson Takes the Helm

  The president’s death plunged the nation into grief and chaos. No other chief executive had died so suddenly, without preparation for a transition; Harrison took a month to expire, and Taylor five days. Lincoln’s assassination left the nation emotionally and constitutionally unprepared, and his successor, Vice President Andrew Johnson, was detested in the North and distrusted in the South. Having stumbled through a decade of mediocre leaders in the Oval Office, the nation had risen on the greatness of Lincoln, only to deflate under the Tennessean who now took his place.

  Not that Andrew Johnson was in any way dishonorable or unprincipled. Born in North Carolina in 1808, Johnson grew up in poverty not unlike that which Lincoln experienced, and, like Lincoln, he was largely self-educated. His parents worked for a local inn, although his father had also worked as a janitor at the state capitol. While a boy, Johnson was apprenticed as a tailor, but once he’d learned enough of the trade, he ran away at age thirteen to open his own shop in Greenville, Tennessee, under the sign a. johnson, tailor. In 1827 he married Elizabeth McCardle, who helped refine and educate her husband, reading to him while he worked and improving his math and writing skills, which gave him sufficient confidence to join a debating society at a local academy. After winning the mayorship of Greenville as a Democrat, Johnson successfully ran for seats in the Tennessee House, then the Tennessee Senate, then, in 1843, he won a seat in the United States House of Representatives, where he supported fellow Tennessee Democrat James Polk and the Mexican War. After four consecutive terms in the House, Johnson ran for the governorship of Tennessee, winning that position twice before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1857.

  A Douglas Democrat, Johnson supported the Fugitive Slave Law, defended slavery, and endorsed the 1852 Homestead bill advanced by the Whigs. During his time as governor, he had not hewed a clear small-government line, increasing state spending on education and libraries. More important in defining Johnson, however, was his strict adherence to the Constitution as the final arbiter among the states and his repudiation of secessionist talk. Andrew Johnson was the only Southerner from a Confederate state to remain in the Senate. This made him Lincoln’s obvious choice for military governor of Tennessee, once the federal troops had recaptured that state, and he remained there until 1864, when Lincoln tapped him to replace Hannibal Hamlin as vice president in order to preserve what Lincoln anticipated would be a thin electoral margin by attracting “war Democrats.”

  When Johnson was sworn in early on the morning of April 15, 1865, he assumed an office coveted by virtually every other cabinet member present, none of whom thought him ideologically or politically pure enough to step into Lincoln’s shoes. To most Radicals, Lincoln himself had not been sufficiently vindictive, insisting only that blacks remain free and that the former Rebels’ citizenship be restored as quickly as was feasible. His last words about the Confederates were that no one should hang or kill them. Lincoln lamented the tendency of many unionists to “Frighten them out of the country, open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off…. I do not share feelings of that kind.”7

  Lincoln, of course, was now gone, so at ten o’clock in the morning, at the Kirkwood Hotel, then Chief Justice Salmon Chase administered the oath of office to Johnson in the presence of the entire cabinet, save the wounded and bedridden William Seward. Each cabinet member shook Johnson’s hand and promised to serve him faithfully, then Johnson settled into what everyone expected would be a harmonious and efficient continuation of the dead president’s policies. It did not take long, however, for Ben Wade and other congressional Radicals to presume they had the new chief executive’s ear, and to demand he form a new cabinet favorable to them. “Johnson,” Wade exclaimed in one of history’s worst predictions, “we have faith in you. By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government.”8

  Had the Radicals dominated the government as they’d wished, they would have slapped every Confederate officer in leg irons and probably executed the Rebel political leaders for treason. Instead, Lincoln’s sentiments prevailed with Johnson. Aside from Booth’s conspirators, only one Confederate, Major Henry Wirz, who had presided over the hell of Andersonville Prison, was executed for war crimes. Even Davis’s two-year incarceration was relatively short for a man who had led a violent revolution against the United States government.

  It is doubtful many Americans thought they could return to their lives as they had been before Fort Sumter. From an economic perspective alone, the Civil War’s cost had been massive. The North spent $2.2 billion to win, the South just over $1 billion in losing.9 Economists calculated that in addition to the destruction of $1.4 billion in capital, the South also lost $20 million in “undercounted labor costs associated with the draft.” Estimating the lifetime earnings from soldiers had they lived an average life uninterrupted by war or wounds, economic historians affixed a value of $955 million to the Union dead, $365 million to Union wounded, and $947 million for Confederate dead and wounded. Accounting for all property, human life, decreased productivity, and other losses, the Civil War cost the nation $6.6 billion (in 1860 dollars). Translating such figures across 150 years is difficult, but in terms of that era, $6.6 billion was enough to have purchased, at average prices, every slave and provided each with a forty-acre farm—and still have had $3.5 billion left over.

  Emancipation had become constitutional law with the Thirteenth Amendment, which was ratified by the states in December 1865. This amendment abolished slavery as a legal institution, in direct terminology, stating:<
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  Section 1: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2: Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

  As part of Reconstruction, Southern states had to incorporate the Thirteenth Amendment into their state constitutions before they would be readmitted to the Union.

  Other wartime costs were sure to grow as veterans began to draw their benefits. Veterans lobbied through a powerful new organization called the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), founded by Dr. B. F. Stephenson in 1866. Organizing in “encampments,” in which prospective members underwent a Masonic-type review process, the GAR constituted a huge block of votes, usually cast for the Republican Party. GAR membership peaked at just over 490,000 by 1890, and for two decades was the voice of Union veterans, who, unless wounded, made a relatively seamless transition into American society. One veteran lieutenant returned to his Illinois farm and recalled that the day after his arrival, “I doffed my uniform…put on some of my father’s old clothes, armed myself with a corn knife, and proceeded to wage war on the standing corn.”10

  War taught many enlisted men and officers important new skills. Building railroads, bridges, and other constructions turned many soldiers into engineers; the demands of communications introduced many others to Morse code and the telegraph; keeping the army supplied taught thousands of men teamster skills; and so it went. One Chicago print shop, for example, employed forty-seven former soldiers.11 Officers could capitalize on their postwar status, especially in politics, but also in a wide variety of commercial activities. Nothing enhanced sales like spreading the word that the proprietor was a veteran.

  Although the Union demobilized much of the army, there still remained a largely unrepentant South to deal with, requiring about 60,000 troops to remain there. Some units were not withdrawn from Florida and Louisiana until 1876. Moreover, as movement to the West revived, a standing military force was needed to deal with Indian hostilities. Nevertheless, by August 1865 a whopping 640,000 troops had been mustered out, followed by another 160,000 by November. Reductions in force continued through 1867, when the U.S. Army counted 56,815 officers and men. The navy slashed its 700 ships down to fewer than 250, essentially mothballing many “active” vessels, including several radically advanced ironclad designs already under construction.

  If the combatants who survived benefited at times from their service, the economy as a whole did not. From 1860 to 1869, the U.S. economy grew at a sluggish 2 percent annual rate, contrasted with a rate of 4.6 percent from 1840 to 1859 and 4.4 percent from 1870 to 1899. The statistics give lie to the left-wing notion that business likes wars. Quite the opposite, the manufacturing sector went into a tailspin during the war years, falling from 7.8 percent annual growth in the twenty years prior to the war to 2.3 percent from 1860 to 1869. The economy then regained steam after 1870, surging back to 6 percent annual growth. In short, there is no evidence to support the position forwarded by Charles and Mary Beard that the Civil War was a turning point and an economic watershed.12

  A Devastated South

  Where the war brought radical change was in the South. Union armies destroyed Southern croplands and towns, wrecked fences, ripped up railroads, and emancipated the slave labor force. Carl Schurz, traveling through South Carolina, witnessed a “broad black streak of ruin and desolation—the fences all gone; lonesome smoke stacks, surrounded by dark heaps of ashes and cinders, marking the spots where human habitations had stood; the fields along the road wildly overgrown by weeds, with here and there a sickly looking patch of cotton or corn cultivated by negro squatters.”13 Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, was little more than “a thin fringe of houses encircl[ing] a confused mass of charred ruins of dwellings and business buildings.”14 At the “garden spot” of Louisiana, the Bayou Teche region, once-thriving sugar fields and neat whitewashed cabins were replaced by burned fences, weeds, and bushes. Around Atlanta, some thirty-five thousand persons were dependent for their subsistence on the federal government. Discharged Confederate troops drew rations from their former Union captors. One Southern soldier expressed his surprise to see “a Government which was lately fighting us with fire, and sword, and shell, now generously feeding our poor and distressed.”15 Captain Charles Wilkes, in North Carolina, reported “whole families…coming in from South Carolina to seek food and obtain employment.” “A more completely crushed country I have seldom witnessed,” he added.16

  Large numbers of Rebels embraced the myth of the Lost Cause, no one more dramatically than General Jubal Early, who left for Mexico before concocting an organization to promote the emigration of ex-Rebels to New Zealand. Scientist Matthew Maury also attempted an ex-Confederate colonization of Mexico. Robert E. Lee urged reconciliation and accepted a position as president of Washington College (later renamed Washington and Lee University); yet Confederate Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin, fearing he would be unfairly linked to the Booth conspiracy, left for England, where he died. John Breckinridge also fled to Europe, where he died in 1875. Confederate colonel William H. Norris, a former U.S. senator from Alabama, organized a group of emigrant Alabama families to relocate to Brazil at the urging of Brazil’s Emperor Dom Pedro II. Confederates colonized the Brazilian cities of Para, Bahia, Espirito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, and Santa Catarina. Americana, founded by Norris, only removed the Confederate battle flag from the crest of the city in 1999. Few took the course of Edmund Ruffin, a fire eater, who committed suicide. More common were the views of Amanda Worthington, a wealthy Mississippi plantation mistress, who complained, “We are no longer wealthy,…thanks to the yankees.”17 A bitter Virginia woman scornfully said, “Every day, every hour, that I live increases my hatred and detestation, and loathing of that race [Northerners].”18 Many pampered plantation women expressed disgust that they had to comb their own hair and wash their own feet. “I was too delicately raised for such hard work,” lamented one.19

  Border states also suffered terrible damage stemming from the guerrilla warfare that pitted the Kansas and Missouri Jayhawkers against Rebels, spawning criminal gangs like the Quantrills and the Daltons. During the war, gangs established support networks of Confederate or Union loyalists when they could claim to be fighting for a cause, but that cloak of legitimacy fell away after 1865.

  In both the Deep South and border states, the problem of maintaining law and order was compounded by the necessity to protect freedmen and deal with confiscated property. Authority over the freedmen fell under the auspices of a War Department agency, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, established in March 1865. In addition to distributing medicine, food, and clothing to newly emancipated slaves, the Freedmen’s Bureau, as it was called, supervised captured Confederate lands. In one form or another most Southern property had supported the rebellion—the Confederacy had seen to that by confiscating most of the cotton crop for secessionist purposes in the last days of the war. After the war the Union took what was left, confiscating perhaps $100 million in total Rebel property and selling it; the U.S. government received only about $30 million. This reflected the lower real values of Confederate property, and it also revealed the fantastic corruption at work in the post–Civil War agencies. All Southern agriculture had been devastated. Cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco production did not regain their prewar harvest levels until the 1890s. Southern per capita income fell 39 percent in the 1860s, and as late as 1880, per capita income stood at only 60 percent of the national average. As late as the Great Depression, the South had yet to fully recover parity in income. In fact, the South had started a sharp economic decline (relative to the Midwest) right after Lincoln’s first election.20 A comparison of income trends in the South and Midwest from 1840 to 1880 reveals that a slight but steady decline in relative Southern income in the 1850s cascaded into a thoroughgoing collapse in the year before Fort Sumter.
These economic data, among other things, suggest the South was losing ground in the 1850s, despite a much superior banking system in some states and a slave labor system. Without the war, the South’s economy would have fallen further behind the North, despite the profitability of slavery itself.

  Work crews repaired much of the physical damage relatively quickly. By 1870 most of the Southern transportation network had been rebuilt to prewar capacity, and manufacturing output grew by about 5 percent. In short, the view that the “prostrate South’s” position could be laid entirely at the feet of Yankee pillage does not hold water.21

  Presidential Reconstruction

  Even before the term “Reconstruction” existed, the process began at the instant Union troops secured a Confederate state. Tennessee, the first to organize under Lincoln’s 10 percent plan, had operated under an ostensibly civil government (with tight military supervision) since 1862. Johnson had run the state as its wartime governor until 1864, then a few months later, a state convention claimed constituent powers and issued amendments to the state constitution to abolish slavery and repudiate secession. W. G. “Parson” Brownlow was elected governor. Brownlow, whom the Confederacy had jailed when he refused to sign a pledge to the CSA, had shared prison cells with Baptist ministers who had committed “treason” against the Confederacy, one of them for shouting “Huzzah!” when Union troops came into his town.