Reconstruction

by Brooks D. Simpson

  The failure to convict is to be regretted for several reasons, but that it leaves Mr. Johnson in the Presidential chair we no longer include amongst the number. In the first place, it is not unlikely that during the remainder of his term he will behave well; in the second, even if he should desire to do mischief, his powers of mischief now, as we have already pointed out, are almost nil; and in the third, if he should commit fresh follies and extravagances, although the scandal will be great, it will be more than compensated for by the fact that they will help the Republican party during the coming campaign. His last follies helped it materially in 1866. Moreover, after the exhibition we have had during the last week or two of the taste and temper of the men who would in case of his deposition have had charge of the Government, it is difficult to believe that the country would have gained by the change, and it is quite certain that the party would have lost by it, for it would have had to bear the burden of their indiscretions.

  But the acquittal, although the largeness of the vote for conviction may justify the House morally, is not likely to strengthen the confidence of the country in the judgment of the majority. Moreover, it has some tendency to create a certain amount of confidence in the President’s judgment. It leaves him less hopelessly in the wrong than he seemed six months ago, and it leaves him in possession of the honors of the field. His escape, to be sure, has been very narrow, but in politics, as in war, an inch of a miss is as good as a mile. He was, before the trial, in the position of a man whom Congress might crush, but would not; now, he is in the position of a man whom Congress tried to crush, but could not. It is certainly not Congress that has gained by this change.

  The House, too, did not shine on the trial. It was not well represented. It tried hard to have the case tried on high moral grounds, or on grounds of general expediency; and yet it put in the forefront of its battle a lawyer whose opinions on high moral questions, or questions of general expediency, nobody heeds, and whose forte lies in his sharpness as pleader in courts of law, and whose want of manners, or rather want of decency, throughout the case gave the President a constant advantage, which increased up to the very last day. Moreover, the ­Managers were overmatched throughout in learning and ability. There is no use now in passing this over without notice. The contrast was patent to everybody throughout the trial, and was a constant subject of comment. What the Managers wanted in law and logic they had to make up by warmth of language; but this, though useful in a short case, is not effective in a trial protracted over several weeks, and before a tribunal of elderly men hardened to rhetoric, and in whom the fires of enthusiasm have long died out.

  What has made the effect of acquittal most injurious, however, has been the conduct of a portion of the Radical press and politicians towards those Republican members of the court who were not satisfied by the evidence and the arguments of the President’s guilt. To fail to convict at all was rather mortifying, of course; but to fail after having spent a week in holding the most honored of the party leaders, its wisest heads and purest characters, up to execration as perjured villains, is more mortifying still. Happily the great body of the party, certainly all the intelligent portion of it, and all its most influential and respected newspapers, made a determined stand against this amazing burst of folly, and thus saved the party from damnation—and, let us add, from well-merited damnation. For a party which coolly informs the world that its most trusted, longest tried leaders and counsellors—men honored for their learning, ability, and integrity—have committed perjury while sitting as judges in the highest court known to the law, and have accepted bribes from the “whiskey ring” as the reward of their baseness—as the Tribune and some kindred sheets informed the public every day during the past week about Messrs. Trumbull, Fessenden, and others—of course ought not to exist any longer. To vote its ticket after such a revelation would be a degradation of the deepest kind. It would be useless for the Tribune to assure us that all the other politicians of the party were honest except these. Nobody could be deceived in this way. Fancy following Messrs. Butler, Stevens, Logan, and Horace Greeley with implicit confidence, after Trumbull, Fessenden, Grimes, Henderson, Fowler, and Van Winkle had turned out shameless and corrupt scoundrels. The party would have had to be broken up as an abomination. No men in it have given such guarantees of honor, and purity, and zeal as the so-called “traitors.” If these be false, it is impudent to ask the country to trust any others the party can produce.

  The more we look into this crusade against the fair fame of the dissentients, the more reason we find for feeling thankful that the main body of the party refused to share in it. As all our readers know, what brought impeachment down on Mr. Johnson was his violation of the Tenure-of-Office Act in removing Mr. Stanton and appointing General Thomas Secretary ad interim in his place. The other charges, including that of bad language in 1866, made in the articles, except the slender one of trying to seduce General Emory, were all brought before the House by the Impeachment Committee six months before the present articles were filed, were fully discussed, and it was solemnly declared by a large majority that they were insufficient to sustain a prosecution. When, however, he removed Mr. Stanton, the House agreed that he had at last done the deed which brought him within the meshes of the law, and voted for impeachment for this act, and in consequence of this act, and this only. Afterwards, and just before the filing of the articles, Thaddeus Stevens secured the addition of the eleventh article, which charged that the removal of Mr. Stanton was a high crime and misdemeanor, committed “in pursuance of ” his declaration, made a year and a half previously, that “Congress was not the Congress of the United States, but only of a part of the States, thereby denying and intending to deny that its legislation was obligatory on him.” The object of this article, therefore, was to connect the removal of Stanton in February, 1868, with a speech delivered in August, 1866; and this was an afterthought, too. It was not on this that impeachment was first voted; it was on the removal of Stanton taken by itself, as a violation in terms of a valid law of Congress. Now it is admitted that large numbers of the Republican senators would vote “not guilty” on the charge of violating the law in removing Stanton and appointing Thomas—that is, on the very charges which produced the impeachment. In fact, these charges, it now appears, are considered to have broken down in the course of the trial, so that a Republican senator may vote “not guilty” on them without laying himself open to the suspicion of corruption. Mr. Stevens, indeed, has declared that they have no weight; that the real weight is in his article; and his article was submitted first to the vote as the strongest and therefore the best test.

  The position of Messrs. Trumbull and Fessenden’s assailants, therefore, is just this. A Republican senator might say on his oath, and yet be an honest man, that the removal of Mr. Stanton and the appointment of General Thomas did not constitute a high crime or misdemeanor; and he might say on his oath, and yet be an honest man, that the wild speeches of 1866 did not constitute a high crime or misdemeanor; but if he says on his oath that he believes the removal of Mr. Stanton in February, 1868, was not done “in pursuance of ” a plan formed by Mr. Johnson in 1866, and of which the only evidence is a fragment of a stump speech made in that year—popularly supposed to have been delivered under the influence of whiskey—although Mr. Johnson has ever since gone on acknowledging the validity of Congressional legislation day by day in the ordinary course of business, he must be a corrupt scoundrel—bribed to violate his oath by fraudulent distillers. His guilt is evident; he is not only to be driven out of the party, but to be held up to execration as a dishonorable man. This is a strictly correct statement of the case. This is the charge against the dissentient Republican senators, and the whole of it. There is not nearly as much reason for suspecting a man’s good faith who refuses to convict on the eleventh article as on the second and third, on simple grounds of evidence. The reason why the eleventh article has been made a test of morals is the will of the extremists. They choose to consider it so,
and “there’s an end on ’t.” They say simply, “To this article we require your adhesion; on the others we give you your liberty. Vote it, or we blacken your character to the extent of our ability.” We cast no imputation on anybody who voted guilty on that article; but we venture to say that the number of trained lawyers who could do so is small. Few, we venture to say, swallow it who have not worked themselves into the state of mental inflammation which seems to be endemic at Washington, and of which Mr. Boutwell offered such a striking symptom when he showed that Andrew Johnson’s guilt was greater than that of Caius Verres by showing that the superficial area of the United States was greater than that of Sicily.

  We believe, for our part, that the thanks of the country are due to Messrs. Trumbull, Fessenden, Grimes, Henderson, Fowler, Van Winkle, and Ross, not for voting for Johnson’s acquittal, but for vindicating, we presume nobody but themselves knows at what cost, the dignity and purity of the court of which they formed a part, and the sacred rights of individual conscience. They have afforded American young men an example such as no politicians have ever afforded them in the whole course of American history, and at a time, too, when the tendency to put party claims above everything is rapidly increasing, and when we are adding to our voting population a vast body of persons on whom the great laws of morality sit only very lightly, and for whom party discipline has, of course, the attraction it has everywhere and always for those who have little other discipline to guide them.

  The issue of the impeachment trial was no doubt important as regards the actual political situation; but the greatest of all questions for the American people is, whether amongst all the troubles and changes of this and coming ages the popular respect for the forms of law, for judicial purity and independence, can be maintained. As long as it can, all will go well, whatever storms blow; whenever the belief becomes general that a court of justice, and especially a “High Court,” can be fairly used, whenever the majority please, as the instrument of their will, it will make little difference what its judgment will be or who fills the Presidential chair.

  May 21, 1868

  OVERTHROWING RECONSTRUCTION:

  WASHINGTON, D.C., JUNE 1868

  Frank P. Blair to James O. Broadhead

  WASHINGTON, June 30, 1868.

  Colonel JAMES O. BROADHEAD.

  DEAR COLONEL: In reply to your inquiries, I beg leave to say, that I leave to you to determine, on consultation with my friends from Missouri, whether my name shall be presented to the Democratic Convention, and to submit the following as what I consider the real and only issue in this contest.

  The reconstruction policy of the Radicals will be complete before the next election; the States so long excluded will have been admitted, negro suffrage established, and the carpet-baggers installed in their seats in both branches of Congress. There is no possibility of changing the political character of the Senate, even if the Democrats should elect their President and a majority of the popular branch of Congress. We cannot, therefore, undo the Radical plan of reconstruction by congressional action; the Senate will continue a bar to its repeal. Must we submit to it? How can it be overthrown? It can only be overthrown by the authority of the Executive, who is sworn to maintain the ­Constitution, and who will fail to do his duty if he allows the Constitution to perish under a series of congressional enactments which are in palpable violation of its fundamental principles.

  If the President elected by the Democracy enforces or permits others to enforce these reconstruction acts, the Radicals, by the accession of twenty spurious Senators and fifty Representatives, will control both branches of Congress, and his administration will be as powerless as the present one of Mr. Johnson.

  There is but one way to restore the Government and the Constitution, and that is for the President elect to declare these acts null and void, compel the army to undo its usurpations at the South, disperse the carpet-bag State governments, allow the white people to reorganize their own governments, and elect Senators and Representatives. The House of Representatives will contain a majority of Democrats from the North, and they will admit the Representatives elected by the white people of the South, and, with the co-operation of the President, it will not be difficult to compel the Senate to submit once more to the obligations of the Constitution. It will not be able to withstand the public judgment, if distinctly invoked and clearly expressed on this fundamental issue, and it is the sure way to avoid all future strife to put the issue plainly to the country.

  I repeat, that this is the real and only question which we should allow to control us: Shall we submit to the usurpations by which the Government has been overthrown; or shall we exert ourselves for its full and complete restoration? It is idle to talk of bonds, greenbacks, gold, the public faith, and the public credit. What can a Democratic President do in regard to any of these, with a Congress in both branches controlled by the carpet-baggers and their allies? He will be powerless to stop the supplies by which idle negroes are organized into political clubs—by which an army is maintained to protect these vagabonds in their outrages upon the ballot. These, and things like these, eat up the revenues and resources of the Government and destroy its credit—make the difference between gold and greenbacks. We must restore the Constitution before we can restore the finances, and to do this we must have a President who will execute the will of the people by trampling into dust the usurpations of Congress known as the reconstruction acts. I wish to stand before the convention upon this issue, but it is one which embraces everything else that is of value in its large and comprehensive results. It is the one thing that includes all that is worth a contest, and without it there is nothing that gives dignity, honor, or value to the struggle.

  Your friend,  FRANK P. BLAIR.

  ELECTING GRANT:

  AUGUST 1868

  Frederick Douglass:

  The Work Before Us

  IT IS eminently creditable to the sagacity, if not to the honesty, of the Democratic leaders that they prefer to limit discussion of the merits of their party, in the present canvass, strictly to the platform adopted in New York by their Fourth of July National Convention. For very obvious reasons, they are “dead” against dead issues. There is as much shrewdness as apparent resignation in their willingness to let “bygones be bygones.” In this prompt, business-like course there would be much to commend, if one did not see lurking behind it a very ugly fact which it is designed to conceal. In the effort to withdraw the war rec­ord of the Democratic party there is either a sense of its criminality or a conviction of its present odiousness. Their policy evidently is to attack, not to defend; and in this they are wise. They are smart men, and largely gifted with powers of utterance; but the task of defending the policy of their party during the war would leave time for little else, were they once to enter upon it. They therefore cast it aside altogether. They know that, like Lord Granby’s character, there are some things which can only pass without censure, as they pass without observation. No men more readily than they perceive the effect which time and events have wrought in the minds of men. Deeds which were once done with impunity, and even gloried in at the time of their perpetration, by a slight change in the varying current of events, assume an aspect too revolting for defense. It is now much easier to assail the Republican party for its awkward management of public affairs than to defend the efforts of Governor Seymour and his friends to resist the drafts and other necessary measures for the preservation of the Union. So far as the endeavor to divert attention from the position occupied by the Democratic party during the war may be taken as a confession, it is at least valuable to outsiders. It is always a decided gain to the cause of justice to have even an implied admission of guilt on the part of the culprit. Excellent, however, as confession is, it does very little good to anybody unless coupled with an honest purpose to forsake the evil way, and an earnest effort to reform.

  Of course, nothing of this sort is a part of the purpose of the Democratic leaders. No men know better than themselve
s that their party cannot afford to repent. A party without voters is among the most worthless of all worthless things. What the Democratic party now most of all wants is voters—members. These are to be had mainly from those classes of the American people who are proud of their contempt for humanity—who scout benevolence and brotherly kindness as the weakest nonsense. The party can only thrive where pride of race and narrow selfishness would appropriate to a class the rights which belong to the whole human family. To renounce this meanness would be to renounce its existence. Its mission is to keep alive all the malice which the Negro’s loyalty and his limited freedom have kindled against him. This is the necessity of the party. The country is divided; and, when it is impossible for a party to receive support from one part, it must seek it in another. Abuse of the Negro is not, therefore, always to be taken as a matter of choice on the part of Democratic editors and speakers; but rather as a necessity of the party to which they belong.