Reconstruction

by Brooks D. Simpson

  The charge of usurpation made by the majority of the Committee is, in a certain sense, valid. There is no doubt that the subject of reconstruction belongs properly to Congress; and we can all now see that it would have been better to assemble Congress before beginning the work. But there is equally no doubt that the action of the President was at the time justified by the country, for the reason that it was felt to be necessary to do something to restore civil government, and because it was supposed that his action was temporary and provisional. It was an assumption of power condoned by the conscious necessities of the situation. But it was not felt to be then, nor do we believe any large number of persons now suppose it to have been, a usurpation with treasonable or injurious intention. It was in no proper sense a high crime, or even a misdemeanor.

  When Congress assembled and it became evident that the President meant to insist upon his theory of Reconstruction as final the hostility between him and Congress began. His theory was undoubtedly both false and foolish. But he maintained it within his Constitutional prerogative. His spirit was hateful as his understanding is mean. But when his theories were confuted and his Constitutional efforts through the veto were overborne; when the Freedmen’s Bureau was continued; when the civil rights of the freedmen were declared; when the Reconstruction bill was passed; the President retained General HOWARD as chief of the Bureau; he did not formally resist the extension of civil rights, although he was morally guilty of the New Orleans massacre; and he appointed under the Reconstruction bill the very commanders who were most agreeable to its framers. He has opposed the whole Congressional policy of reconstruction; he has vituperated Congress and publicly insulted eminent citizens; he has in express terms denied the authority of Congress as now constituted; and his conduct has incalculably prolonged and deepened the difficulty of reconstruction. But while as a stump orator he has denied the authority of Congress, as President he has recognized it; and the encouragement which he has given to the spirit of disaffection is that which a President in opposition may always give to the party opposed to Congress.

  The charge of usurpation is the only really grave charge, and that this was criminal can not be proved. The report of the majority has not revealed, so far as published, any thing new upon the point; and if there were any thing new of importance it would have been published in the abstract of the report. The vague charge of complicity in the assassination of President LINCOLN wholly disappears; and we do Mr. JOHNSON the justice of saying that we do not believe it was ever seriously believed by any body. Indeed we feel more strongly than ever that the impeachment project sprang from the hot impatience of those who felt that the President was an “obstruction” to the rapid success of their views of the true policy of reconstruction; and was not the result of a profound conviction that he was clearly guilty of impeachable offenses. Yet if Presidents are to be impeached because they obstruct or oppose the will of the Congressional majority, it is very evident that it will become an ordinary party measure.

  As we have often said, there can be no doubt that in extreme cases, when the great powers of the Government come into conflict, Congress will prevail. However cunning a system of “checks and balances” and “co-ordinate powers” there may be, the supreme authority of every government resides somewhere, and extreme pressure will develop it. It is none the less true, however, that in our system the Executive is a well-contrived check upon the Legislative Department; while, if it transcends its restraining powers, it is submitted by the same system to trial and removal by the Legislature. The Legislature, however, is again and radically checked by the popular vote which elects it; and therefore its indictment and possible punishment of the Executive becomes also a question of expediency. To impeach and fail to convict would destroy the impeaching party. This consideration should not, of course, restrain any party when the positive guilt of the President is conspicuous and the national injury plain. But a party which believes that its possession of power is essential to the wise and permanent settlement of the most vital public questions ought to hesitate long before it impeaches the President under circumstances like those at present existing in the country.

  It has been lately said with great vigor that a party must be plucky if it would succeed. Undoubtedly; but what is pluck in a party? It is invincible fidelity to principle. It is not obstinate tenacity of a measure merely because it is extreme. This kind of “pluck” in GEORGE III. lost England the American colonies. The same “pluck” in CHARLES X. of France lost him his crown; and in CHARLES I. of England his head. What principle is involved in the impeachment of a President upon doubtful grounds? What principle is involved in straining the interpretation of evidence to reach him? The principle by which the dominant party in this country is solemnly bound is equal rights; and the policy to which it is pledged is reconstruction upon that principle. It holds to that policy because it believes it to be of the highest expediency. But impeachment has never been more than the whim of a few. It has never been sanctioned by the intelligent judgment of the country to which all the facts are familiar; and we do not believe it will be sustained by Congress.

  December 14, 1867

  REPUBLICAN TIMIDITY:

  NORTH CAROLINA, JANUARY 1868

  Albion W. Tourgée:

  The Reaction

  To the Editor of the Standard:

  It is an assertion constantly reiterated by men of almost every shade of political belief, that a political reaction has begun, and is now going on, in the minds of the American people. According to Conservative authority, the people are sickened of “nigger,” “taxation,” “equality,” “loyal rule”; in short, justice applied to political questions. And to escape the omnipresent right and avoid commercial disaster, they are hurriedly crawfishing into the gaping maw of Democracy—that party which is never disturbed by questions of Right or Wrong, and whose acme of prosperity is only reached through the surges of financial ruin. To them it is a reaction from better to worse—from a higher to a lower political morality; a reaction which leads men to inquire upon every political question, not what is right, but what will best subserve the idea of government designed especially for the white man. In short a reaction which is to substitute prejudice for conscience.

  The moderately inclined, constitutionally timid portion of the Republican party, men who are willing enough to be right if they are sure they can win thereby, who worship present success beyond all other gods, insist that their Congressional leaders have been too fast, too radical; that the Republican party has got ahead of the people, and that a movement to the rear is necessary, to prevent it from destruction. The party wire-pullers have sounded a retreat, and the puppets all over the country are advancing backward, each in his own peculiar manner, as circumstances or inclination dictates. Some bolt with such ready impetuosity as to outstrip their leaders and get into the very camp of Democracy, while they are yet dallying with the pickets. Others slowly and painfully drag themselves over the hindrances which time and their own efforts have placed in the backward pathway. Others, having burned their ships, have no recourse but to plunge boldly into the sea of inconsistency, only to be hopelessly choked by their own utterances. The whippers-in of every aspirant for the Republican Presidential nomination, having the same theory of reaction in mind, are peculiarly anxious to establish the fact that their man is moderate, or at least not offensively radical, insisting at the same time that the recent reaction (at the North, as Southern trigger-workers are fond of saying) utterly forbids all hope for the election of an ultra Radical. This reaction, then, according to the timid Republicans, is of the same nature as is claimed by the Conservatives, only a little less decided in its character. Instead of substituting prejudice for conscience, they only propose to make success the test in all political questions.

  Upon this principle, a man who never expressed a political belief in all his life, and one whose chief merits is, that the most persistent quiz could never yet find out with which party even his sympathies lay, and who ca
nnot be proven by any set or utterance to be good or bad, Radical or Conservative, man or mouse, is claimed to be the most feasible candidate for the Republican party in the coming struggle; and for the same reasons the mouths of other candidates are closed, lest they should utter some radical truth to interfere with their chances of nomination. These moderate Republicans, who dream so constantly of the horrors of reaction, whose timid souls can see only defeat in the future, unless half the fruits of the past six years of warfare is given up to the enemy, are very fond of saying, especially to colored men, and to our Southern Unionists, when they are inclined to murmur at the chaff which is offered to them, “You know our only hope is in the Republican party.” As if the people were not greater than the party! As if it were not the party which was dependent upon them, rather than they upon the party! The Republican theory of the “Reaction” is, that the masses of the people, or at least of that party, have pronounced against manhood suffrage and loyal reconstruction, and that now, in order to save the party from defeat, we must perpetrate another Brobdingnagian lie. We must have a candidate who shall be all things to all men, and a platform which is ditto. To the newly enfranchised “brother of the African persuasion,” in North Carolina, the Republican party must stand forth still as the champion of “Liberty and Equality,” the sanctified agency through which freedom came to those in bondage, while to the jaundiced negrophobist in Ohio, it must be represented as only having given a little to the colored man from necessity, and as very willing to revoke that little upon a reasonable opportunity. And this Janus-visaged party is now tried to be foisted on North and South alike, upon the special plea that the reaction in public sentiment at the North renders it imperatively necessary.

  Now, the whole theory on which this outcry of “Reaction” is based is deceptive and false. There has been no reaction among the people in the reference to the great principles now at the issue. They gave their verdict, and sent it into the court of final appeal, sealed with the blood of hundreds of thousands of their sons. You might as well expect the tide of Niagara to reverse its flow, as to expect them to set aside that verdict. And as for us of the South, black or white, we had rather be killed than commit suicide. If our throats must be cut, we don’t care about handling the cleaver. There is no reaction here, and will not be in our day, among the party of freedom and justice.

  “But,” says the objector, “there has been some change in the political world—you cannot deny that; for the elections show it unmistakably.” Evidently there has been a change, and for lack of a better appreciation of its true character, it has been generally denominated a reaction. And because there could not possibly be any reaction or advance in the Conservative party, it being at the best only a sort of political backwater, it was at once concluded that it must of necessity be a retrograde movement among the rank and file of the Republican party.

  Here is the mistake. What we see today is not reaction, but the effects of reaction, and the reaction itself is not of the present, but of the past, and was not a reaction in sentiment among the rank and file of the party, but a reaction in policy among its leaders. It began as soon as the business of the war was over, when Lee and Johnston had surrendered, and Abraham Lincoln had been borne to his prairie tomb. It was first fully developed—so far as the writer knows at least—at the Loyalist Convention in Philadelphia, in September, 1866, and was the result of the most egregious stupidity on the part of the recognized leaders of the Republican party. It is resulting now just as every clear-headed and sound-hearted Radical in that Convention prophecied that it would, either in the death or thorough reformation of the party.

  The Republican party in 1861 was compelled to put itself in array against rebellion. Its very existence depended on the putting down of that war against the Union. The people were opposed to rebellion because it was a great wrong, and the consequences of a still greater wrong. The enormity of the crime of rebellion, the fearful wickedness on which it was based, was so apparent that its contemplation often made the boor a hero. To the leaders of the party its suppression was a political necessity, to the people a holy duty; and when it could no longer be hidden, but was evident to all that the deeply seared conscience of the people was at least touched, that they were determined to right the wrong of the past, that the long slumbering crater showed signs of life—then the Republican party, mindful for the first time of the maxim that “Honesty is the best policy,” concluded to adopt the role of Peter the Hermit, and preach the crusade against rebellion, on the grounds of its justice and righteousness.

  Its leaders approached the limits of the crater doubtfully, and began to stir the seething mass within very carefully. Nobody was to be hurt—nothing disturbed. Love for the “erring sisters” was too strong in their hearts to allow more than a big scare. The fire in the great crater flashed and flamed. They warmed to their work and patted one another gleefully, exclaiming, “See what a fire we have builded.” By-and-by the flames grew hotter and began to burn the hay-straw hobby of the sanctity of slavery which some of them bestrode; and then some tried to put out the fire by blowing on it, as they would cool a plate of soup. But others saw that the sanctified hobby tried to hinder it. So they deserted the hobby, and as they had before cried, “Down with rebellion!” so they now cried, “Down with rebellion and slavery!” and they punched away at the seething mass within the crater, thinking all the time that the great flame which swept the length and breadth of our land and licked up the chaff with which the harvests of ninety years had cumbered the soil’s threshing-floor, was a thing of their own creation.

  Unconsciously to itself, the Republican party at the commencement of the war rose to the dignity of a party of right against wrong, of justice against expediency, of principle against policy. Accident offered it this character, and an overwhelming necessity compelled its acceptance. It was successful during the war simply because this was its character. It inaugurated a new school of political thought in our nation. “Right or wrong” was made the test question upon all political issues. The issues presented were mostly those of direct and apparent right against unmistakable wrong. The people supported the right because it was right and they were true. In so doing they supported the Republican party, because it happened to be on the side of right, and not right because it was on the side of the Republican party. This fact the leaders of that party have never yet apprehended. They regard that mighty exhibition of popular conscience which sustained and carried on the war, as a pleasant humbug, and its rallying cry—Justice, Liberty and Humanity—as one of the most successful tubs ever thrown to that great whale, the people. This was the miserable folly and mistake of the Republican leaders during the war. They thought that they, through the agency of the Republican party, had created the spirit which saved the country from destruction. The contemplation of this imaginary feat has so absorbed the energies of the party leaders, that the Republican members of Congress have had room for but little beside self-gratulation since the close of the war. They flatter themselves with the belief—comfortable, though false—that they are and have been, constantly “ahead of the people.” Well does the writer recollect the quiet assumption with which, at the Philadelphia Convention, one of our well-fed M. C.’s folded his hands over his abdominal developments, and said to him, “We were ahead of the people. If we had not stirred up the people constantly the rebellion could never have been put down. The Republicans in Congress were the leaders of the people as the generals were of the army.” The writer was one of the “people,” and the smoke had scarcely settled about Sumter in 1861 before he had entered the service of the United States to put down rebellion. As he sat and talked with his sleek “leader of the people,” he was a scarred and crippled veteran. He wondered if this “leader” thought that his listener was one of those whom he had stirred up, or who needed his stirring up. And yet he knew that the vast body of the people were as earnest upon this matter as himself, and this idea of being “ahead of the people” was an illusion very flatter
ing to the vanity of our Radical Congressmen, but by no means complimentary to their discernment.

  From this blindness sprung the only actual political reaction which has taken place since the war—a reaction not in the sentiments of the people, but in the policy of the leaders of the Republican party. Having no confidence in the conscience of the people, regarding the war itself as a sort of campaign document for the Republican party, when it was finally over, they adopted another policy. Before the war every party was Janus-faced, one visage gaping toward the North, the other facing towards the Gulf. It was supposed that the people only supported the right when carefully wheedled into so doing by some cunning policy. Many of the leaders of the Republican party were trained in this ante-war school and were no doubt skilled in the mystery of harmonizing the needs of slavery and freedom, in catering at once for North and South successfully. They are men who, having once become settled to one mode of action, can adopt no other. As soon, therefore, as the war was over, they considered that the special pleading of the Republican party was at an end. It would not do any longer to press any political measure because it was absolutely and essentially just, but the dose of righteousness must be sugared over with a coat of policy, or, in other words, covered with a lie. The Republican party had dealt with truths during the war, it must do so no more. The people must be deceived into its support. This was the reaction.