Capitol Men

by Philip Dray

  Before the 1864 conclave, more than a thousand New Orleans blacks, and some whites, had petitioned Lincoln to include suffrage for the gens de couleur, the free, light-skinned class of Louisiana Negroes, in the new constitution. When Radicals in Congress heard of the petition, they suggested that the franchise be broadened to include all blacks in Louisiana. Formally, Lincoln refused both proposals, but he wrote privately to Michael Hahn, the Unionist governor, to see if certain classes, such as soldiers or intelligent free blacks, might be allowed the vote. Hahn relayed Lincoln's request to the convention, which agreed to grant the state legislature the power to establish limited black voting; but though two such bills were later introduced, neither gained enough support to become law.

  Hahn resigned his position in March 1865 and was succeeded by his lieutenant governor, James Madison Wells, a native-born Louisiana Unionist with marked Southern sympathies, who proceeded to evict many leading Radicals from local patronage jobs and appoint ex-Confederates. This encouraged a formidable Democratic power base to grow rapidly, accompanied by the appearance of reactionary political clubs. When in March 1866 President Johnson allowed a city election to take place in New Orleans against the advice of Governor Wells, the forces of Democratic resistance came to power, led by a new mayor, James T. Monroe, who was known as "an unreconstructed rebel."

  Governor Wells and the state's Unionists, as well as black leaders agitated by this development, announced in early summer 1866 their intention to reconvene the state constitutional convention of 1864. They sought reconvocation to secure the vote for black Louisianians and, the Monroe faction suspected, disenfranchise ex-Confederates, shifts that threatened to dramatically realign the state's political anatomy and destroy the white-patronage network that Southern veterans were eagerly establishing.

  Mayor Monroe informed the local federal commander, Major General Absalom Baird, of his intention to arrest the convention delegates when they gathered on July 30 at the Mechanics Institute, the temporary state capitol on Dryades Street. "The laws and ordinances of the city," Monroe wrote, "declare all assemblies calculated to disturb the public peace and tranquility unlawful." Stronger language about Republican "niggers and half niggers" ran in the Democratic press, along with threats to hang the convention movement leaders Dr. Anthony P. Dostie, a New York-born dentist who had moved to New Orleans before the Civil War, and Michael Hahn, the former governor. It was declared that no man would leave the convention alive. General Baird cautioned Monroe that he had no right to disrupt or defy "the universally conceded right of all loyal citizens of the United States to meet peaceably and discuss freely questions concerning their civil governments, a right which is not restricted by the fact that the movement proposed might terminate in a change of existing institutions." But Monroe, not Baird, had the sympathy of President Johnson, who notified Louisiana's attorney general that federal forces would "sustain the civil authority in suppressing all illegal or unlawful assemblies ... Usurpation will not be tolerated."

  Much as the national policy on Reconstruction remained fluid and unsettled, so officials in New Orleans were left to fend for themselves, with no one—from General Baird to the city police—exactly sure whose rights were to be defended. Baird was "unwilling to assume the attitude of protecting the assembly unless called on by civil authorities" because such activity would only add to local anti-Unionist sentiment, and his superiors likely would not approve of it. Monroe's actions, on the other hand, seemed aimed at making the situation as combustible as possible.

  The opening day of the convention was to focus on preliminaries: ascertaining how many vacancies existed in the body, so elections, where needed, could be held. Outside, a cordon of police surrounded the building. Suddenly, a group of approximately two hundred freedmen appeared, marching up Dryades from Canal Street, tooting horns, thumping a big drum, and waving an American flag in support of the convention. Then, according to some reports, a young white bystander insulted one of the parading blacks, who, in anger, drew a gun; when police waded into the column to arrest him, marchers swarmed the officers to free their compatriot. Turning their hatbands around so that they could not be identified, police officers then followed the marchers into the convention. Conventioneers used pieces of furniture to beat back the police, who tried to ram their way through an inner door that had been closed against them. This scenario was enacted four times, as police assaulted the blacks inside with their clubs and were in turn driven back with chairs and sticks. Adding to this scene of disarray, a mob of whites swept into the building behind the police, shooting and clubbing blacks and white Unionists. Policemen were seen on a landing above the meeting hall, firing down indiscriminately.

  "Stop firing, we surrender, we make no resistance!" one of the delegates implored.

  "God damn you, not one of you will escape from here alive!" was the reply.

  Despite claims (never substantiated) that Dostie and other Republicans had incited their followers to riot and were looking for a fight, few if any of those inside the hall had brought weapons—that they had to defend themselves with wooden chairs attests to that fact. The delegates had expected, at worst, to be arrested, and some had even made arrangements to secure bail quickly.

  "The crowd in and out of the Mechanics Hall were worked up to a pitch of desperation and madness," recorded the New Orleans Daily Picayune, "and firearms were handled as freely as on the battlefield. The reports of pistols were heard in every direction, and balls whizzed by." A former rebel soldier confirmed the combatlike fervor of the confrontation, declaring, "We have fought for four years these god-damned Yankees and sons of bitches in the field, and now we will fight them in the city."

  The terrified conventioneers, once they became convinced that submitting to arrest would not save them, took desperate measures. Some jumped from windows, only to be shot as they attempted to flee. "They ... tried to escape through an alley which runs from Dryades to Baronne, on the Canal Street side," noted the New York Times reporter on the scene. "I do not know that any freedmen succeeded in getting away from the building alive ... I saw several brought in the alley ... and after they fell I saw crowds of ruffians beating them as they were dying." When convention delegates proved in short supply, the mob began pulling blacks randomly from streetcars and shops, beating them down in the street to cries of "Kill the Yankee nigger!" and "Shoot the nigger son of a bitch!"

  More than two hours passed before Baird's federal troops arrived to restore order; the general claimed that he'd been misled about the starting time of the meeting. Baird had obviously been reluctant to insert his men into an emotionally charged local political melee, one in which he did not feel fully empowered to act. In any case, his troops, stationed at the Jackson Barracks three miles southeast of the city, were poorly positioned to respond. All accounts concur that Baird's tardiness had allowed for more carnage, although one official inquiry praised his troops for at least keeping the riot from escalating into the extreme devastation wreaked by the New York Draft Riots of 1863, which had lasted several days.

  Forty-six black men were killed and sixty badly injured in the affair; of the attackers, one died of sunstroke, two others were seriously wounded, and a young white student from a nearby medical college was accidentally shot in the neck and killed when he emerged from the school to watch the fighting. The convention's leader, Dostie, was mobbed to death, shot twice in the head and once in the body, then beaten and dragged through the street, while the former governor Hahn was stabbed in the back and suffered a minor head wound. The Congressional Select Committee's inquiry supplied a graphic account:

  Men were shot while waving handkerchiefs in token of surrender and submission; white men and black, with arms uplifted praying for life, were answered by shot and blow from knife and club; the bodies of some were "pounded to a jelly"; a colored man was dragged from under a street-crossing, and killed by a blow; men concealed in outhouses and among piles of lumber were eagerly sought for and slaughtered or maimed
without remorse; the dead bodies upon the street were violated by shot, kick, and stab; the face of a man "just breathing his last" was gashed by a knife razor in the hands of a woman ... one man was wounded by fourteen blows, shots, and stabs; the body of another received seven pistol balls.

  "The more information I obtain of the affair the more revolting it becomes," General Philip Sheridan wrote to his superior, General Ulysses'S. Grant. "It was no riot; it was an absolute massacre." Congress agreed, concluding, "There has been no occasion during our national history when a riot has occurred so destitute of justifiable cause, resulting in a massacre so inhuman and fiend-like." Sheridan warned President Johnson that "if this matter is permitted to pass over without a thorough and determined prosecution of those engaged in it, we may look out for frequent scenes of the same kind, not only here but in other places."

  A government investigation determined that Mayor Monroe and the town's political clubs bore primary responsibility for what had occurred. Carried out largely by policemen and ex-Confederate soldiers—one old colonel showed up "in full uniform and side arms"—the riot was in a sense a supplemental skirmish of the Civil War, its slaughter of unresisting black men a testament to the local disdain for postwar re-forms. No one, however, was ever held directly accountable for the butchery. The local grand jury resolved that the whole affair was to be blamed on "political tricksters" who, by staging the meeting, had wrongly attempted to usurp recognized authority.

  Legal redress was denied, but the riot's savagery was widely reported, raising concern that President Johnson's version of Reconstruction was insufficiently tough and that stronger federal sanctions were required. Thomas Nast lambasted the president in a cartoon entitled "Amphi-theatrum Johnsonianum—Massacre of the Innocents at New Orleans, July 30, 1866." It portrayed Johnson as a Roman emperor seated with other recognizable national leaders in their box at "the Coliseum," watching indifferently as, in the arena below, Mayor Monroe's rebels slaughter the Louisiana Republicans.

  The riots in Memphis and New Orleans confirmed for many Americans that "the rebel spirit," though momentarily quashed, was far from dead, and that Southerners, in the absence of slavery, would not hesitate to use extreme violence to maintain supremacy over blacks. Such expressions of fear and resentment would be rekindled easily and often in the Reconstruction South in the coming years. But in the short term "New Orleans!" became the Republican rallying cry, dramatizing the need for severe restraint on former Confederates while creating greater sympathy for Southern freedmen.

  In August 1866, with the nation's editorial pages still humming over New Orleans, the president embarked on a circuitous journey through the American heartland, aimed at bolstering his personal image and garnering public support in the run-up to the fall congressional elections. This trip, which became known as the "Swing Around the Circle," included members of Johnson's cabinet, a substantial press corps, and a glittering entourage of heroes meant to set off the president favorably—Generals Ulysses'S. Grant and George A. Custer, as well as Admiral David Farragut, the naval hero celebrated for capturing New Orleans in 1862 and Mobile in 1864, where he had famously cried, "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!" Grant, beloved as "the Man on Horseback" or "the Man with the Black Cigar," was widely credited with winning the Civil War and was hugely popular; many assumed he would soon be president. Custer, with his long yellow curls, thick mustache, and a red bandanna worn as a cravat, was the most dashing military figure of the day. The year before, at a homecoming parade in Washington, he had caught a hurled bouquet on the point of his sword, to thunderous cheers from the crowd.

  The framing device for what would become one of the most ill-starred presidential speaking tours in American history was a visit to the gravesite of Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who had died in 1861. Making the memorialization of Douglas the excursion's theme was a strange choice. A blustering politico renowned for debating Lincoln over slavery, "the Little Giant" was also the author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which in 1854 granted not Congress, but rather the settlers in the new western territories, the right to decide whether a given territory would be slave or free—a bitterly controversial piece of legislation whose passage helped bring on the Civil War. Now the war's outcome had rendered Douglas's views, and his legacy, mostly irrelevant. "Although [he] died five years ago, he seems to have been dead for half a century," wrote one Northern editor. The absurdity of Johnson's homage to Douglas made for some bizarre moments en route, such as when the presidential train slowed near the home of Douglas's elderly mother in upstate New York so that Johnson and Grant could doff their hats from the rear platform as she watched from a chair on her porch.

  The tour did not start altogether badly. Johnson's message of national unity and reconciliation carried him through several East Coast appearances—Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City—but as the train steamed west, the crowded schedule, the almost identical words spoken at every station, and the crush of local well-wishers and dignitaries took their toll. Reporters found Grant stealing a nap in the baggage car. Johnson's stamina seemed about to give out when the tour reached Cleveland, where he came to the balcony of the Kennard Hotel exhausted, maybe a bit tipsy, his voice feeble. After he asked the crowd to tell him when he had ever been false to his own principles, a heckler cried, "New Orleans!"

  "Let the negroes vote in Ohio before you talk about negroes voting in Louisiana," Johnson scolded.

  "Never!" someone shouted back.

  "Hang Jeff Davis!" another voice hollered.

  Johnson initially ignored the remark but a few minutes later suggested rhetorically, "Why not hang Thad Stevens or Wendell Phillips?" This prompted the crowd to gasp.

  When someone cried "Traitor!" Johnson, in unkind words, chastised his listeners for being cowards who did not volunteer to fight in the war.

  "Is this dignified?" a voice asked.

  Johnson had never been known for statesmanlike restraint. His political style, honed in the village squares of rural Tennessee, was to give as good as he got, to spar and debate anyone who challenged him. At the moment, such instincts seemed misplaced, and unfortunately the popular Grant, whose appearance always soothed a crowd, had temporarily left the entourage, promising to rejoin it in Detroit.

  "President Johnson, in his speech at Cleveland, remarked that he 'did not care much about his dignity,'" observed the New York Times. "In our judgment this is greatly to be regretted ... The President of the United States cannot enter upon an exchange of epithets with the brawlers of a mob, without seriously compromising his official character and hazarding interests too momentous to be thus lightly imperiled."

  A few days later in St. Louis, the president was on the defensive again, challenged once more about New Orleans. Apparently stewing about the press coverage of the earlier exchange in Cleveland, Johnson launched into an explanation of how the riot in New Orleans had been caused by Radicals, then lapsed into a self-pitying denunciation of his critics:

  I have been slandered. I have been maligned. I have been called Judas Iscariot ... If I have played the Judas, who has been my Christ ... Was it Thad Stevens? Was it Wendell Phillips? Was it Charles Sumner? Are these the men that set up and compare themselves with the Savior of Man, and everybody that differs with them in opinion and that try to stay and arrest their diabolical and nefarious policy, is to be denounced as a Judas?

  The New York Tribune, like much of the country, was dismayed. "We had thought the President had exhausted his power to offend a national sense of decency," the paper scolded. "This was a mistake. In his speech at St. Louis he passed from vulgarity to blasphemy with a boldness which is almost appalling...[and] disgusted every Christian in the land. He has dragged that which is dearest to our hearts into the dirt of his politics and his outrageous defense of the massacre at New Orleans."

  Belligerent banter with hecklers, the nation agreed, was not what a president did. Yet the pattern was established; in town after town they descended, interrupting J
ohnson, demanding that Grant appear, even ordering the president of the United States to "shut up." In the Ohio town of New Market, when Johnson was shouted down, General Custer assumed the role of presidential protector, striding onstage to deal with the harassers. "I was born two miles from here," he fumed, "and I am ashamed of you!" By the time the tour reached Pittsburgh, all was lost; Johnson refused to come to the podium, and after an hour of jeers from the crowd, Grant appeared, only to tell people to go away.

  "Never in history had a President gone forth on a greater mission—to appeal for constitutional government and the restoration of union through conciliation and common sense," the historian Claude Bowers would write, "and never had one been so scurvily treated." The newspapers had a field day, depicting Johnson as inept, overly defensive, possibly drunk; rumors also surfaced that Grant's "disappearances" were due to his need to rendezvous with a bottle. The poet James Russell Lowell, writing in the North American Review, called the expedition "an indecent orgy" and described Johnson as a performing bear, clownish but excitable, being led about by his handlers. "It was a great blunder of [Secretary of State] Seward to allow [Johnson] to assume the apostolate of the new [Reconstruction] creed in person, for every word he has uttered must have convinced many ... that a doctrine could hardly be sound which had its origin and derives its power from a source so impure." Lowell judged correctly that a large part of the trouble with Johnson's effort to reach out to America was Johnson himself. He had little aptitude for seeking the middle ground; his character and lack of eloquence ill fitted him for promoting the theme of reconciliation; the public simply did not accept him as the successor to Abraham Lincoln. After all the pain and sacrifice of the recent national conflict, people expected something more.