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.