Andrew Johnson—The Liberal Convention in 1872—Carl Schurz—The
“Quadrilateral”—Sam Bowles, Horace White and Murat Halstead—A Queer
Composite of Incongruities
I
Among the many misconceptions and mischances that befell the slavery
agitation in the United States and finally led a kindred people into
actual war the idea that got afloat after this war that every
Confederate was a Secessionist best served the ends of the radicalism
which sought to reduce the South to a conquered province, and as such
to reconstruct it by hostile legislation supported wherever needed by
force.
Andrew Johnson very well understood that a great majority of the men
who were arrayed on the Southern side had taken the field against their
better judgment through pressure of circumstance. They were Union men
who had opposed secession and clung to the old order. Not merely in the
Border States did this class rule but in the Gulf States it held a
respectable minority until the shot fired upon Sumter drew the call for
troops from Lincoln. The Secession leaders, who had staked their all
upon the hazard, knew that to save their movement from collapse it was
necessary that blood be sprinkled in the faces of the people. Hence the
message from Charleston:
_With cannon, mortar and petard We tender you our Beauregard_—
with the response from Washington precipitating the conflict of
theories into a combat of arms for which neither party was prepared.
The debate ended, battle at hand, Southern men had to choose between
the North and the South, between their convictions and predilections on
one side and expatriation on the other side—resistance to invasion, not
secession, the issue. But four years later, when in 1865 all that they
had believed and feared in 1861 had come to pass, these men required no
drastic measures to bring them to terms. Events more potent than acts
of Congress had already reconstructed them. Lincoln with a forecast of
this had shaped his ends accordingly. Johnson, himself a Southern man,
understood it even better than Lincoln, and backed by the legacy of
Lincoln he proceeded not very skillfully to build upon it.
The assassination of Lincoln, however, had played directly into the
hands of the radicals, led by Ben Wade in the Senate and Thaddeus
Stevens in the House. Prior to that baleful night they had fallen
behind the marching van. The mad act of Booth put them upon their feet
and brought them to the front. They were implacable men, politicians
equally of resolution and ability. Events quickly succeeding favored
them and their plans. It was not alone Johnson’s lack of temper and
tact that gave them the whip hand. His removal from office would have
opened the door of the White House to Wade, so that strategically
Johnson’s position was from the beginning beleaguered and came
perilously near before the close to being untenable.
Grant, a political nondescript, not Wade, the uncompromising extremist,
came after; and inevitably four years of Grant had again divided the
triumphant Republicans. This was the situation during the winter of
1871-72, when the approaching Presidential election brought the country
face to face with a most extraordinary state of affairs. The South was
in irons. The North was growing restive. Thinking people everywhere
felt that conditions so anomalous to our institutions could not and
should not endure.