A HISTORY OF
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
BY
WOODROW WILSON, PH.D., LITT.D., LL.D.
IN FIVE VOLUMES
VOL. V.
Reunion and Nationalization
[Illustration: GROVER CLEVELAND]
A HISTORY OF
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
BY
WOODROW WILSON, PH.D., LITT.D., LL.D.
PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS, MAPS,
PLANS, FACSIMILES, RARE PRINTS,
CONTEMPORARY VIEWS, ETC.
IN FIVE VOLUMES
VOL. V.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
MCMVII
Copyright, 1901, 1902, by WOODROW WILSON.
Copyright, 1901, 1902, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. RECONSTRUCTION 1
II. RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS 115
III. THE END OF A CENTURY 198
INDEX 301
NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
GROVER CLEVELAND _Frontispiece_
HENRY WILSON.—From a photograph by Hardy 5
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN WADE.—From a photograph by Loomis 12
ANDREW JOHNSON.—From a photograph by Gardner 15
EDWIN MCMASTERS STANTON.—From an engraving by H. W. Smith after
a photograph 19
THADDEUS STEVENS.—From a photograph 25
ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT, ABOUT 1867.—From a photograph by Guerney
& Son 27
THE FENIAN RAID IN CANADA. RUINS OF FORT ERIE.—From a sketch
by a staff artist of _Harper’s Weekly_ 30
BRITISH FLAG CAPTURED BY THE FENIANS.—From a sketch by a
staff artist of _Harper’s Weekly_ 31
U. S. GRANT.—From a photograph by Fredericks _Facing p._ 32
THE RIOT IN NEW ORLEANS. SIEGE AND ASSAULT ON THE
CONVENTION.—From a sketch by a staff artist of
_Harper’s Weekly_ 35
THE RIOT IN NEW ORLEANS. STRUGGLE FOR THE FLAG.—From a
sketch by a staff artist of _Harper’s Weekly_ 37
ARCHDUKE MAXIMILIAN.—From an old German print 39
NAPOLEON III.—From _Harper’s Monthly Magazine_ 41
MAP OF ALASKA SHOWING THE GOLD-BEARING REGION.—From
Adney’s _The Klondike Stampede_ 43
SLUICE-WASHING FOR GOLD IN THE KLONDIKE.—From Adney’s _The
Klondike Stampede_ 45
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN BUTLER.—From _Harper’s Monthly Magazine_ 48
AN EXCITING DAY IN THE BOARD OF BROKERS, “ON THE RISE,” NEW
YORK CITY, 1862.—From an old lithograph 51
HORATIO SEYMOUR.—From a steel engraving 56
TWO MEMBERS OF THE KU KLUX KLAN.—From a sketch by a staff
artist of _Harper’s Weekly_ 61
CHARLES SUMNER.—From a photograph by Soule. _Facing p._ 64
SCENE IN THE GOLD ROOM, NEW YORK CITY, ON “BLACK
FRIDAY.”—From a sketch by a staff artist of _Harper’s Weekly_ 65
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS.—From _Harper’s Weekly_ 68
THE BURNING OF THE JACOB BELL BY THE ALABAMA.—From
_Harper’s Weekly_ 70
HÔTEL BEAU-RIVAGE, GENEVA, HEADQUARTERS OF THE AMERICAN
ARBITRATORS.—From a photograph taken for _Harper’s Weekly_ 71
THE FINAL AWARD. THE LAST SITTING OF THE GENEVA
CONFERENCE.—From a sketch by a French artist 73
ROBERT TOOMBS.—From _Harper’s Weekly_ 77
HORACE GREELEY.—From a photograph 81
CARL SCHURZ.—From a photograph 83
BENJAMIN GRATZ BROWN.—From a photograph 85
SCHUYLER COLFAX.—From _Harper’s Weekly_ 91
JAY COOKE.—Redrawn from a steel engraving 94
WILLIAM WORTH BELKNAP.—From _Harper’s Weekly_ 96
SITTING BULL.—From _Harper’s Weekly_ 101
GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER.—From a crayon drawing in possession
of Mrs. Custer 103
RUTHERFORD BIRCHARD HAYES.—From a photograph by Pach 105
SAMUEL JONES TILDEN.—From _Harper’s Weekly_ 107
WADE HAMPTON.—From a photograph 109
JOSEPH P. BRADLEY.—From _Harper’s Weekly_ 111
A TYPICAL SCENE IN THE APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS.—From a painting
by Julian Rix 117
INTERIOR OF THE MAIN BUILDING AT THE PHILADELPHIA CENTENNIAL
EXHIBITION.—From a sketch by a staff artist of _Harper’s
Weekly_ 119
HORTICULTURAL HALL AT THE PHILADELPHIA CENTENNIAL
EXHIBITION.—From a sketch by a staff artist of
_Harper’s Weekly_ 123
IN YELLOWSTONE PARK. GRAND CAÑON, POINT LOOKOUT, AND GREAT
FALLS.—From a photograph 125
LOGGING IN THE MINNESOTA PINES.—From a photograph 127
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.—From a photograph. _Facing p._ 128
GALUSHA AARON GROW.—From a photograph by Stokes 135
ELBRIDGE GERRY.—From Higginson’s _History of the United States_ 138
BLOCKADE OF ENGINES AT MARTINSBURG, VIRGINIA.—From a sketch
by a staff artist of _Harper’s Weekly_ 141
BURNING OF THE ROUND HOUSE AT PITTSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA.—From
a sketch by a staff artist of _Harper’s Weekly_ 142
RICHARD P. BLAND.—From a photograph 147
WILLIAM B. ALLISON.—From a photograph by Bell 148
CHESTER ALAN ARTHUR.—From a photograph 150
WINFIELD SCOTT HANCOCK.—From an engraving after a daguerrotype 152
WILLIAM H. ENGLISH.—From a photograph by Judkins 153
JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD.—From a photograph by Bell 155
THOMAS COLLIER PLATT.—From a photograph 157
CHARLES JULES GUITEAU.—From a photograph by Bell 159
ROSCOE CONKLING.—From a photograph by Bell 161
AN OBSERVATION CAR ON THE PACIFIC RAILROAD.—From a sketch
by a staff artist of _Harper’s Weekly_ 165
JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE.—From a photograph 173
THOMAS ANDREWS HENDRICKS.—From a photograph by Gutekunst 183
THE ANARCHIST RIOT IN CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. A DYNAMITE BOMB
EXPLODING AMONG THE POLICE.—From a sketch by a staff
artist of _Harper’s Weekly_ 188
SAMUEL JACKSON RANDALL.—From a photograph by Bell 190
BENJAMIN HARRISON.—From a photograph by Kitchell 193
A PRAIRIE STOCK FARM.—From a photograph 201
JOHN SHERMAN.—From a photograph 207
THE RUSH OF SETTLERS INTO OKLAHOMA.—From _Harper’s
Encyclopaedia of United States History_ 211
OKLAHOMA ON THE DAY OF OPENING.—From _Harper’s Encyclopaedia
of United States History_ 213
OKLAHOMA FOUR WEEKS AFTER THE OPENING.—From _Harper’s
Encyclopaedia of United States History_ 215
SAN FRANCISCO FROM THE BAY.—From _Harper’s Encyclopaedia of
United States History_ 217
INSIDE A TREASURY VAULT AT WASHINGTON. TAKING BAGS OF SILVER
OUT TO BE WEIGHED.—From a sketch by a staff artist of
_Harper’s Weekly_ 219
MR. CLEVELAND AND HIS CABINET.—From a painting by Louis Loeb 221
A SILVER MINING TOWN, GEORGETOWN, COLORADO.—From a photograph 223
BULLION AT THE AMERICAN SMELTER, LEADVILLE, COLORADO.—From
a photograph 225
DON M. DICKINSON.—From _Harper’s Weekly_ 229
THOMAS FRANCIS BAYARD.—From _Harper’s Weekly_ 231
WILLIAM FREEMAN VILAS.—From a photograph 233
L. Q. C. LAMAR.—From _Harper’s Monthly Magazine_ 235
COXEY AND HIS ARMY APPROACHING WASHINGTON.—From a sketch
by a staff artist of _Harper’s Weekly_ 237
COXEY BEING ESCORTED FROM THE CAPITOL.—From a sketch by a
staff artist of _Harper’s Weekly_ 238
GEORGE M. PULLMAN.—From _Harper’s Monthly Magazine_ 239
THOMAS B. REED.—From a photograph by Chickering _Facing p._ 240
LILIUOKALANI, QUEEN OF HAWAIIAN ISLANDS.—From a photograph 241
GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS, HONOLULU.—From a photograph 243
SETTING OUT FOR A DAY’S FISHING, HAWAII.—From a photograph 244
THE EARL OF SALISBURY.—From a photograph by Weston & Son 246
WALTER QUINTON GRESHAM.—From _Harper’s Weekly_ 249
DON VALERIANO WEYLER.—From a photograph 251
WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN.—From a photograph 259
WILLIAM MCKINLEY.—From a photograph by Sarony _Facing p._ 264
THE UNITED STATES BATTLESHIP MAINE AT ANCHOR IN HAVANA
HARBOR.—From a painting by Carlton T. Chapman 271
CITY OF SAN JUAN, PORTO RICO.—From a photograph 277
PASCUAL CERVERA.—From a photograph 279
WILLIAM R. SHAFTER.—From a photograph 281
THE CAPTURE OF THE BLOCK HOUSE AT SAN JUAN.—From a painting
by Howard Chandler Christy 283
THE CAPTURE OF EL CANEY.—From a painting by Howard Chandler
Christy 285
WILLIAM T. SAMPSON.—From a photograph 287
WINFIELD SCOTT SCHLEY.—From a photograph 288
GEORGE DEWEY.—From a photograph taken by Frank D. Millet,
in the cabin of the U. S. S. _Olympia_ while lying in
Manila Bay 289
WESLEY MERRITT.—From a photograph 291
THE BOMBARDMENT OF SAN JUAN, PORTO RICO.—From a painting by
Carlton T. Chapman 293
FORT AND EARTHWORKS, CAVITÉ, SILENCED AND CAPTURED BY ADMIRAL
DEWEY.—From a photograph 294
EMILIO AGUINALDO.—From a photograph 295
TWO-STORY TENT OF COLORADO TROOPS, CAMP DEWEY, LUZON,
PHILIPPINE ISLANDS.—From a photograph 297
THE U. S. S. OLYMPIA ON THE MORNING SHE LEFT MANILA WITH
ADMIRAL DEWEY ON BOARD.—From a photograph taken by a staff
correspondent of _Harper’s Weekly_ 298
LIST OF MAPS
PHYSICAL FEATURES OF THE UNITED STATES _Facing p._ 96
WEST INDIES, 1902 _Facing p._ 274
PHILIPPINE ISLANDS _Facing p._ 288
THE UNITED STATES, 1902 _Facing p._ 296
A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
CHAPTER I
RECONSTRUCTION
Mr. Lincoln’s death made Mr. Johnson President. The first tasks of peace
were to be hardly less difficult than the tasks of war had been; and
the party which had triumphed was left without executive leadership
at their very beginning. Mr. Johnson was a man who, like Mr. Lincoln
himself, had risen from very humble origins to posts of trust and
distinction; but his coarse fibre had taken no polish, no refinement
in the process. He stopped neither to understand nor to persuade other
men, but struck forward with crude, uncompromising force for his object,
attempting mastery without wisdom or moderation. Wisdom of no common
order was called for in the tasks immediately before him. What effect
had the war wrought upon the federal system? What was now the status
of the States which had attempted secession and been brought to terms
only by two million armed men sent into the field and the pouring out
of blood and treasure beyond all reckoning? Were they again States of
the Union, or had they forfeited their statehood and become conquered
provinces merely, to be dealt with at the will of Congress? If conquered
possessions, how and when were they to be made States once more and the
old federal circle restored in its integrity? Mr. Lincoln had made up his
mind upon these points with characteristic directness and simplicity.
So long ago as December, 1863, he had issued a proclamation of amnesty
in which he had treated secession as a rebellion of individuals, not
of States, and had offered full forgetfulness and the restoration of
property and of citizenship to all who should take oath to “support,
protect, and defend the constitution of the United States and the
union of the States thereunder,” and respect the action of the federal
government in the emancipation of the slaves. Some classes of persons he
excepted from the amnesty: those who had taken a prominent and official
part in secession or who had left the service of the United States for
the service of the Confederacy; but he invited those who would take the
oath proposed to set up governments once more and make ready to take part
as of old in the federal system, though they should number but one tenth
of the voters of 1860. The qualified voters of Arkansas, Louisiana, and
Tennessee had accepted these terms before the war ended. Mr. Lincoln
had fulfilled his promise to them and given full recognition to the
new governments they set up, so far as the Executive was concerned, as
once more in their places in the Union. He did not stop to discuss the
question of the lawyers, whether these States had been all the while in
the Union, despite their attempts at secession and their acts of war
against the federal government, or had for a time been out of it; and
declared that he thought that merely an abstract inquiry, a question
practically immaterial. “We all agree that the seceded States, so called,
are out of their proper practical relation with the Union,” he said, “and
that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to
those States is to again get them into that proper practical relation.
I believe that it is not only possible, but in fact easier, to do this
without deciding or even considering whether these States have been out
of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would
be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad.”
But Congress had not acquiesced in Mr. Lincoln’s policy. Mr. Lincoln
had been too much inclined, it seemed to the leaders of the houses, to
regard the restoration of the southern States to their “proper practical
relation to the Union” as a matter to be settled by the action of the
Executive. The constitution made each house the sole judge of the
validity of elections to its membership: Congress was at liberty, should
it choose, to exclude all southern members until it should itself be
satisfied with the process by which the States they claimed to represent
had been re-established upon their old footing; and the temper of the
congressional leaders had grown more and more radical as the fortunes
of war had turned their doubt into hope, their hope into triumphant
confidence. At first they had been puzzled how to read the law of the
constitution in so unprecedented a matter; but each victory in arms had
seemed to them to make it less necessary that they should read it with
subtlety. Success seemed to clear the way for other considerations, of
plainer dictate than the law of the constitution. Turn the matter this
way or that, it seemed mere weakness to accord the southern States their
old place in the Union without exacting of them something more than mere
submission. Should their social system be left untouched, their old life
and power given back to them to be used as before for the perpetuation
of political beliefs and domestic institutions which had in fact lain at
the heart of the war? Opinion slowly gathered head to prevent any such
course. Something should be demanded of them which should make them like
the rest of the Union, not in allegiance merely, but in principle and
practice as well.
Mr. Lincoln had himself made it a condition precedent to his recognition
of the re-established liberties and allegiance of those southerners
whom he was ready to permit to bring their States into proper practical
relation with the Union again that the laws of the rehabilitated
governments should “recognize and declare the permanent freedom” of the
negroes and provide for their education; no one, North or South, dreamed
that slavery was to be set up again. But every man mistook his feeling
for principle in that day of heat, and Mr. Lincoln’s cool, judicial tone
and purpose in affairs was deeply disquieting to all who loved drastic
action. The solemn, sweet-tempered sentences with which his second
inaugural address had closed seemed themselves of bad omen to high-strung
men. “With malice towards none; with charity for all; with firmness in
the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish
the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; ... to do all which
may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and
with all nations.” In the proclamation in which he had called upon
all who were willing to return to their allegiance in the South to
reconstruct their governments he had promised that, as President, he
would object to no temporary legislation which should deal in exceptional
fashion with the negroes “as a laboring, landless, homeless class” for
a little while under tutelage, provided only their substantial freedom
should be recognized and their ultimate elevation by education provided
for. There was in all this entirely too much consideration for the
southern people to suit the views of ordinary partisans. An opposition
gathered head against Mr. Lincoln which it seemed likely even his tact,
his genius for leadership and conciliation, his authority in that day of
his final prestige could not overcome.
[Illustration: HENRY WILSON]
Men of many minds and of all morals were arrayed against him: the
philanthropist and the reformer, who saw the Rights of Man involved, the
statesman who wished to see the ground once for all cleared of every
matter of risk and controversy, the politician who was keen to gain the
utmost advantage for his party, the vindictive bigot who wished to weak
exemplary vengeance on the slaveholding rebels. To many of these nothing
was so exasperating as moderation,—moderation in a day of absolute
triumph, when every fruit of conquest they chose to stretch out their
hands and pluck was within their easy reach. It was not an air in which
to judge calmly. Four years of doubt and fear and struggle had wrought
every sentiment, good or bad, to the pitch of ecstasy. A radical course
of reconstruction in the South had come to look like the mere path
of duty,—of duty not to opinion only but to mankind as well. Men of
imagination felt every moment of action dramatic, full of consequence,
and grew self-conscious, each as it were with a touch of the emotional
actor, in what they did. The extraordinary strain and tension of feeling
in the houses of Congress was perceptible to mere lookers on in the
galleries. It had been notably manifest when the House of Representatives
agreed, on the last day of January, 1865, to an amendment of the
constitution formally abolishing slavery in the very terms of the Wilmot
proviso, and the celebrated Ordinance of 1787 upon which so much bitter
history had turned. The Senate had proposed the amendment, the Thirteenth
it was to be,—the first change in the constitution proposed since
1803,—ten months before, on the 8th of April, 1864; but the necessary
two-thirds vote had been lacking then in the House and it had been
laid aside. When it came a second time to the vote a deathly stillness
prevailed in the House while the roll call proceeded, until it became
evident that the requisite majority was secured. Then members of the
House itself broke through all restraint and joined in the great shout
of joy that went up from the packed galleries, and embraced one another,
with tears streaming down their cheeks, to see that prayed for end come
at last. Men dreamed, as they had dreamed in the Constituent Assembly of
France, that they had that day seen a new nation born, a new era ushered
in.
Congress had already abolished slavery in the District of Columbia,
prohibited slavery in the Territories, repealed the Fugitive Slave Law,
and bestowed freedom upon the negroes who had served in the federal
armies. The amendment was to complete the work of emancipation, and make
the results of the war once for all safe against reaction. The votes of
the southern States were necessary to make up the three-fourths vote of
the States required to ratify the amendment. Those which accepted Mr.
Lincoln’s terms of rehabilitation ratified it without hesitation: no
one doubted that a condition precedent to the final closing of the long
strife that had rent the Union; and on the 18th of December, 1865, it was
proclaimed an integral part of the law of the constitution.
But there were men in Congress, true spokesmen of thousands of men
out-of-doors, thoughtful and thoughtless, with consciences and without,
who meant to go much further. By some means they meant to thrust their
hands into southern affairs to control them, to make good the freedom and
the privilege of the negroes even at the cost of all privilege to those
who had been their masters. To some such a course seemed a mere dictate
of humanity: the nation owed it to the negro that he should be supported
by the federal power until he was able to make his freedom good for
himself, unassisted. To others it seemed but the plain way of prudence in
statesmanship. How else could a lasting structure of law be built about
the new citizenship of the one-time slave: how else could he be kept safe
from the intellectual and even physical domination of the white men who
once had owned him? To others it was the course of personal satisfaction:
in no other way could they bring upon the spirits of southern men the
punishment merited by their rebellion. To others it was the obvious means
of party mastery. These last it was who, when Mr. Lincoln was gone,
ruled Congress, the masters of party strategy,—as clear of their motive
as Samuel Adams, as astute to veil it upon occasion: masters always by
consistent and aggressive force of purpose.
The party they spoke for was not one of the historic parties of
the Union. It was the child of the slavery contest. It had come
into existence, an odd mixture of Whigs, Democrats, Free Soilers,
Anti-Nebraska men, to prevent the spread of slavery into the Territories,
and had come into power with a programme which spoke, indeed, of other
matters, with a tone which was chiefly the tone of the older Whigs, but
which carried as its chief, its creative principle that single matter of
the restriction of the slave power. It was without record or tradition
of ordinary service in times of normal life and growth. Its single task
had been war for the preservation of the Union. It could not of a sudden
get the temper of that task out of its thoughts; conciliation it had
never learned; compromise and accommodation seemed to it bad things of
a past age when men were not bold for the right. Mr. Thaddeus Stevens,
of Pennsylvania, was the real leader of the House. He had come slowly
to his final view of what should be done, acted upon by the times and
the confused voices of counsel about him, as every man was in that
shifting air, but he had reached conclusions at last which he spoke with
callous frankness. In his judgment, he said, the southern States “ought
never to be recognized as capable of acting in the Union, or of being
recognized as valid states, until the Constitution should have been so
amended as to make it what its makers intended, and so as to secure
perpetual ascendency to the party of the Union.” The perpetual ascendency
of his party was, in his programme, to be the guarantee of the safe
reconstruction of the southern governments.
The events of the memorable summer of 1865 had hardened his temper to
that view. At first Mr. Johnson had seemed to the radical leaders of
Congress a man to their own mind. His origin, his character, his place
of leadership among the southern men who had doggedly set themselves
against secession, had made him a fit instrument of radical action. He
came of plebeian stock; had risen, not by address, but by blunt force of
character, from among the humbler whites who owned no slaves, boasted
no privilege, had no initiative voice in affairs; and had flung himself
on the side of the Union as much out of antagonism to the men who played
the parts of leadership in secession as out of principle. It was “a rich
man’s war,” he said, “but a poor man’s fight”; and he, for one, would not
fight for the behoof of the rich planters who assumed the mastery in such
a struggle. A “Democrat” he was still, by cast and nature committed to
the elder doctrines of the Jeffersonian creed, which exalted the common
man and knew no rank or privilege of class; but a Democrat for the Union.
He had been put upon the presidential ticket with Mr. Lincoln because
upon every question that touched the war the Republican leaders had
wished to keep men of all opinions upon other matters of policy united
behind Mr. Lincoln. His short and heavy figure, his rugged, swarthy face,
bespoke him a man as strong, as indomitable as Stephen Douglas, for all
he lacked Douglas’s charm and had no gift of persuasion.
Mr. Lincoln had trusted him, and he had justified the confidence reposed
in him, not indeed by wisdom, but by resolute, consistent, efficient
action. When the war came he was one of the senators from Tennessee, and
kept his post, ignoring the secession of his State. When his term as
senator was ended Tennessee was in the hands of the federal troops, and
Mr. Lincoln commissioned him military governor of the State, to bring it
again into “proper practical relation to the Union” in accordance with
the Executive’s plan of reconstruction. Like every man, untouched with
greatness, who has stood out against his own people in matters that have
been carried the length of civil war, there was a dash of bitterness in
Mr. Johnson’s attitude and action in affairs. The first words he uttered
as President showed with what spirit he meant to use his new power. “The
American people,” he said, “must be taught to know and understand that
treason is a crime.... It must not be regarded as a mere difference of
political opinion. It must not be excused as an unsuccessful rebellion,
to be overlooked and forgiven.” The Committee on the Conduct of the War,
to which Congress had throughout the stress of the fighting intrusted the
shaping of its business, called upon him the day following his assumption
of the presidency, and took heart to believe after their interview with
him that they might count upon such executive action as radicals would
relish,—that they were once for all rid of the mild counsels of Mr.
Lincoln. “Johnson, we have faith in you,” cried Mr. Benjamin Wade, the
radical leader of the Senate. “By the gods! there will be no trouble now
in running the government.”
But a few weeks changed the whole aspect of affairs. Mr. Johnson retained
Mr. Lincoln’s cabinet unchanged. More than that, he kept to the plans
Mr. Lincoln had made. Perhaps his judgment was cleared by sudden access
of responsibility; no doubt his knowledge of the southern people enabled
him to see, more clearly even than Mr. Lincoln had seen, the healing
and beneficent effects of a plan of reconstruction which should make as
little of the antagonism and as much of the community of interest between
the sections as possible: for he acted upon experience, Mr. Lincoln
only upon the instinct of a natural leader of men. No doubt men whom
he trusted gave him moderate counsel and instructed his will. Whatever
the forces that ruled him, he proved at once that he meant to take no
radical course of his own, but would follow in Mr. Lincoln’s footsteps.
On the 29th of May he issued his own proclamation of amnesty. Its terms
were substantially the terms of Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation of 1863. The
list of those excluded for the time being was a little extended. Besides
persons still prisoners of war, those who had “held the pretended offices
of governors of States in insurrection against the United States,”
graduates of the military and naval academies who had been officers in
the confederate service, those who had engaged in the destruction of
the commerce of the United States in aid of the Confederacy,—whom Mr.
Lincoln had not specifically included in his catalogue of exclusions,—he
added, as if to please himself and satisfy his instinct of class, all
participants in secession whose taxable property exceeded twenty thousand
dollars in value. But even to those thus specifically excepted he
promised to extend clemency upon very liberal terms, if they would make
personal application for it, dealing with them in as generous a manner
as might seem “consistent with the facts of the case and the peace and
dignity of the United States.”
[Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN WADE]
It was his plan, as it had been Mr. Lincoln’s, to set up new governments
in the South by as simple and expeditious a process as possible. He
knew as well as any man the practical details of what Mr. Lincoln had
meant to do, for he had himself been Mr. Lincoln’s agent in putting his
plan of reconstruction into execution in Tennessee. Each State was to
have a provisional governor, appointed by the President, who should be
authorized to summon a constitutional convention, to be chosen under
its old laws of suffrage by such of the voters of the State as would
take the unqualified oath of submission and allegiance prescribed by the
proclamation of amnesty. It had been Mr. Lincoln’s wish to include among
the voters such freedmen as could read and write and those who had served
in the federal armies; Mr. Johnson confined his view to the white men
qualified under the laws of their States as they had stood in the spring
of 1861. Conventions made up of and selected by those who were willing
and were permitted to take the oath offered were to be given full power
to recast their state constitutions and set their state governments in
order for the final withdrawal of the federal troops and the federal
superintendence, provided only that the voters actually enrolled should
number at least one tenth of the total number shown upon the rolls
of 1861. The persons explicitly excluded from taking the oath and
participating in the reconstitution of the southern governments,—those
who had been the leading spirits and chief agents of the Confederacy,
whether in counsel or in action,—were, of course, the leading men of the
South. Almost no one could take the oath of amnesty except men of the
rank and file, the men who had not been slaveholders, who had fought in
the armies of the Confederacy but who had had no part except the part
of mere acquiescence in bringing the war on,—the men of little property
and no leading part in affairs from whose ranks Mr. Johnson himself had
sprung. His added exclusion of all participants in secession who owned
property valued at more than twenty thousand dollars made it the more
certain that it should be a reconstruction by the third estate, and not
by the old leaders of opinion. He had the greater heart and interest on
that account to see the plan succeed.
[Illustration: ANDREW JOHNSON]
He had come into office at the beginning of the long congressional
recess. The term of the Congress chosen in 1862 had expired on the
4th of March; the Congress chosen in the autumn of 1864 was not to
come together until December. He had eight months before him in which
to act without congressional interference. He was urged to call the
houses together in extraordinary session and take counsel with them
what should be done; but he refused to do so. He wished to act without
restraint. He had no more doubt than Mr. Lincoln had had that the process
of reconstruction, so far as it concerned the reorganization of the
southern governments, was the function and the duty of the Executive,
whose power of pardon covered every offence committed against the Union
upon which Congress had not passed sentence of impeachment. It rested
with Congress, he knew, to determine for itself whether it would receive
the senators and representatives chosen under the governments which the
President should authorize the southern conventions to set up; but the
erection and recognition of those governments he conceived to be his own
unquestionable constitutional prerogative. He filled the year, therefore,
to the utmost with action and the rehabilitation of States. By the autumn
every State of the one-time Confederacy had acted under his proclamation,
had set up a new government, had formally agreed to the emancipation of
the negroes, and had chosen senators and representatives ready to take
their seats the moment Congress should admit them. Eleven of them had
in due form adopted the Thirteenth Amendment, and their votes had been
counted in its ratification.
But other things had happened which had touched Congress quite as nearly
as these processes of reconstruction, and the houses came together in
December in no temper either to accept Mr. Johnson’s leadership or
to admit the southern members who had come to Washington under his
patronage. Critical matters touching the negroes had put opinion in
the North in a mood to insist on radical measures of legislation in
behalf of the helpless multitudes whom the war had set free. Had there
been no question what should be done with the negroes, all might have
gone smoothly enough, whether the leaders of Congress and of opinion
liked the readmission of the southerners to their place and privilege
in the general government or not. But there was much more to be done,
as it seemed to the radicals who now stood at the front of counsel,
than merely to determine the processes by which the governments of the
southern States were to be formally reconstituted and made safe within
the Union: and it was no doubt necessary to do what was to be done before
admitting southern men to Congress, where their presence would reduce
the Republican majorities from absolute mastery to mere preponderance.
They were but “whitewashed rebels,” at best, and in nothing showed their
unchanged temper more clearly than in their treatment of the freedmen.
That, in the view of the radicals, was the crux of the whole matter; and
they had the pity and the humane feeling of the whole country on their
side.
They did not deem the southerners safe friends of the freed slaves. They
had not noted how quiet, how unexcited, how faithful and steady at their
accustomed tasks, how devoted in the service of their masters the great
mass of the negro people had remained amidst the very storm and upheaval
of war; they had noted only how thousands had crowded into their camps
as the armies advanced and plantations were laid waste, homes emptied of
their inmates; and how every federal commander had had to lead in his
train as he moved a dusky host of pitiful refugees. It was a mere act
of imperative mercy to care in some sort for the helpless creatures,
to give them food, if nothing else, out of the army’s stores; and yet
to feed them was but to increase their numbers, as the news of bread
without work spread through the country-sides. When the fighting neared
its end, and it was likely that the whole South would be in the hands of
the federal commanders through a long season of unsettled affairs, it
became obviously necessary that, for a time at least, Congress should
take the negroes under the direct supervision and care of the government.
On the 3d of March, 1865, therefore, while Mr. Lincoln still lived, an
Act had been passed which created in the War Department a “Bureau of
Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands,” whose powers were most elastic
and paternal. It was in every way to succor the negroes: to supply
their physical needs when necessary, to act as their representative and
guardian in finding employment and making labor contracts, to settle
labor disputes and act as the next friend of negro litigants in all
trials and suits at law, to lease to them tracts of abandoned land
temporarily in the hands of the government because of the removal or
disappearance or technical outlawry of their white owners,—in all things
to supply them with privilege and protection.
It was such aid and providential succor the negroes had ignorantly looked
for as the news and vision of emancipation spread amongst them with
the progress of the war. They had dreamed that the blue-coated armies
which stormed slowly southward were bringing them, not freedom only,
but largess of fortune as well; and now their dream seemed fulfilled.
The government would find land for them, would feed them and give them
clothes. It would find work for them, but it did not seem to matter
whether work was found or not: they would be taken care of. They had the
easy faith, the simplicity, the idle hopes, the inexperience of children.
Their masterless, homeless freedom made them the more pitiable, the more
dependent, because under slavery they had been shielded, the weak and
incompetent with the strong and capable; had never learned independence
or the rough buffets of freedom.
[Illustration: EDWIN McMASTERS STANTON]
The southern legislatures which Mr. Johnson authorized set up saw the
need for action no less than Congress did. It was a menace to society
itself that the negroes should thus of a sudden be set free and left
without tutelage or restraint. Some stayed very quietly by their old
masters and gave no trouble; but most yielded, as was to have been
expected, to the novel impulse and excitement of freedom and made their
way straight to the camps and cities, where the blue-coated soldiers
were, and the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The country filled with
vagrants, looking for pleasure and gratuitous fortune. Idleness bred
want, as always, and the vagrants turned thieves or importunate beggars.
The tasks of ordinary labor stood untouched; the idlers grew insolent,
dangerous; nights went anxiously by, for fear of riot and incendiary
fire. It was imperatively necessary that something should be done, if
only to bring order again and make the streets of the towns and the
highways of the country-sides safe to those who went about their tasks.
The southern legislatures, therefore, promptly undertook remedies of
their own,—such remedies as English legislators had been familiar with
time out of mind.
The vagrants, it was enacted, should be bound out to compulsory labor;
and all who would not work must be treated as vagrants. Written contracts
of labor were required, and current rates of wages were prescribed.
Those who did not enter into formal contracts for regular employment
were obliged to obtain licenses for their trades and occupations from
the magistrates or the police authorities of their places of labor,
under the penalty of falling under the law of vagrancy. Minor negroes
were to be put under masters by articles of apprenticeship. Negroes were
forbidden, upon pain of arrest by a vigilant patrol, to be abroad after
the ringing of the curfew at nine o’clock, without written permission
from their employers. Fines were ordered for a numerous list of the more
annoying minor offences likely to be committed by the freedmen, and it
was directed that those who could not pay the fines should be hired out
to labor by judicial process. There was no concert or uniformity between
State and State in the measures adopted: some were more harsh and radical
than others. Each State acted according to the apparent exigencies and
circumstances of its own people. Where the negroes mustered in largest
numbers, as in South Carolina, where they outnumbered the whites,
restriction was, of course, pushed farthest and the most thorough-going
legal tutelage for the freedmen attempted. Where their numbers were
more manageable, where conditions were more favorable, their freedom of
movement and of occupation was less interfered with.
There was nothing unprecedented in such legislation, even where it went
farthest. The greater part of it was paralleled by statutes of labor
and vagrancy still to be found on the statute books of several of the
northern States. But it was impossible it should stand in the same light.
The labor and vagrancy laws of Maine, Rhode Island, and Connecticut,
which they most resembled, were uttered against a few tramps and beggars,
here and there a runaway servant or apprentice, an occasional breach of
duties regularly contracted for; while these new laws of the South were
uttered against an entire race, but just now emancipated. Whatever their
justification, it was inevitable that they should shock the sentiment of
the North and make new and bitter enemies for the South in Congress. It
was no ordinary time of action, when matters could be judged coolly and
on their merits. For the leaders of Congress it was unpalatable enough
that the southern States should have legislatures at all, upon a plan
made and executed without conference with them; that those legislatures
should thus undo the work of emancipation seemed a thing intolerable.
And the new legislation seemed to them nothing less than that. It seemed
to them merely an effort to substitute compulsory contracts of service
and fixed rates of wages for the older rights of control and duties of
support which custom had vouchsafed and assigned masters of slaves,—a
sort of involuntary servitude by judicial process and under the forms of
contract. They did not stop to consider the pressing necessity or the
extraordinary circumstances which justified such legislation. There were
many theories held among them as to the legal powers and remaining rights
of the southern States, but their purpose of mastery in the readjustment
of southern affairs was not materially affected by their differing
theories. They in effect regarded the southern States as conquered
provinces, and looked upon emancipation as the main fruit of conquest.
To make that emancipation good was only to secure the conquest itself.
The negro had got a veritable apotheosis in the minds of northern men
by the processes of the war. Those who had sent their sons to the field
of battle to die in order that he might be free could but regard him as
the innocent victim of circumstances, a creature who needed only liberty
to make him a man; could but regard any further attempt on the part of
his one-time masters to restrain him as mere vindictive defiance. They
did not look into the facts: they let their sentiment and their sense of
power dictate their thought and purpose.
Neither was it any part of the case, so far as they and their leaders in
Congress were concerned, that the restrictive legislation which they so
bitterly resented had been practically without effect, because virtually
set aside by the action of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Everywhere throughout
the South agents of the Bureau practically made the law which should in
fact govern the negro and determine his relation to his employer. It was
a Bureau of the War Department; its head was a general of the army;
and its agents were for the most part army officers. In many instances
they were men of fine purpose and unimpeachable integrity, manly and
anxious to do what was right and just to all concerned; but in many
other instances they were men of petty temper, fond of using arbitrary
power very masterfully, and glad upon occasion to use it for the utter
humiliation of the southern white men with whom they dealt. Sometimes
they were actually corrupt, and apt at every practice which promised them
either added authority or private gain. Their powers, under the Act of
Congress, were in effect unlimited. They interfered with the processes
of the courts; constituted themselves judges of every matter, whether of
law or policy, that affected the negroes; made contracts for them and
released them from their obligations at will; prescribed the services
they should render and the wages they should receive; ignored and set
at naught every provision of state law which touched the action or the
privileges of the freedmen; and, for good or ill, to fulfil their duty or
to please themselves, were masters of the situation.
But that was what the congressional leaders had planned and expected.
It did not lessen their irritation that the southern legislators had
been in large part unsuccessful in what they had attempted to do. When
at last the long recess was over, therefore, and the houses once more
assembled (December 4, 1865), it at once became evident that they had
come together in a mood to insist upon their own way of settling southern
affairs. The names of all the States that had seceded were omitted in the
roll call. As soon as possible after the organization of the House, a
joint committee of fifteen, consisting of nine representatives and six
senators, was set up to take charge of the business of the houses in the
matter of reconstruction. It was commissioned to make thorough inquiry
into the condition of affairs at the South and to advise Congress what
action it should take with regard to the readmission of the southern
States to representation. There was no need that it should be in haste
to report. The houses had already in effect adopted the view of Mr.
Thaddeus Stevens: that the secession of the southern States had suspended
all federal law, whether of the constitution or of statute, so far as
they were concerned; that only the law-making and war-making branch
of the federal government, the Congress itself, could authoritatively
declare that law in force again; and that it might and should refuse to
do so until itself satisfied of the absolute submission and unqualified
obedience of the rebellious communities. There was every reason, if the
President meant to stand in its way, why Congress should keep for the
present its omnipotent party majorities. Each house, as it stood, had a
Republican majority large enough, and compact enough, if it came to a
struggle with the President, to override any veto he might venture to
interpose to check its action. Should the southern States be readmitted
to representation as they stood, under the President’s reconstruction,
they would quite certainly send Democratic members to swell the ranks
of the party which had, in its convention of 1864, declared the war a
failure, and would rob the war party of its predominance. For they must
be accorded an increased representation. The slaves, now that they were
free, must all be counted in apportioning representation; and yet the
whites only would vote. It was that view of the future of party politics
that had led Mr. Sumner to declare, even before the actual struggle of
the war was over, that “the cause of human rights and of the Union needed
the ballots as well as the muskets of the colored men”; and the leaders
of the houses had no mind to yield their complete power until they had
won their final ascendency.
[Illustration: THADDEUS STEVENS]
In February, 1866, their Committee on Reconstruction safely in the
saddle, they found themselves in direct conflict with the President, and
the fight for which they had made ready begun. The Act of March, 1865,
which had established the Freedmen’s Bureau, had limited its operation
to one year. On the 6th of February, 1866, a bill passed the houses
continuing it indefinitely, and at the same time largely increasing its
powers. It made any attempt to obstruct, interfere with, or abridge
the civil rights and immunities of the freedmen a penal offence, to be
adjudged and punished by federal military tribunals. The President vetoed
it. He declared that he withheld his assent both because the measure was
calculated to increase the restlessness and uneasiness of the negroes and
delay their settlement to a normal way of life, and because it had been
passed by a Congress in which the southern States were not represented;
and so joined issue directly with the men who had set the houses in a way
of mastery. An attempt to pass the bill over his veto failed. The full
party vote was not yet at the command of the radicals; some still held
off from an open and final breach with the President.
But not for long. The President was in a mood as bitter and defiant as
that of the extremest radical of the congressional majority. By sheer
rashness and intemperance he forced the consolidation of the majority
against him. In a public speech uttered on the 22d of February, an
anniversary of hope and good omen, he spoke of the majority in unmeasured
terms of denunciation, and of its leaders by name, as men who themselves
entertained some covert purpose of disloyalty to the government, planning
to make it a government, not federal, but consolidated and unlimited in
power,—it might be even encouraging some criminal deed against himself
such as had once already removed an obstacle from the path of their
ambition. Accommodation between himself and the houses was once for
all impossible. It was as if he had openly declared war upon them; and
their temper hardened to crush him. Though the effort to pass the bill
for the continuation of the Freedmen’s Bureau had failed in the Senate,
the houses had in their very hour of failure sent to the President and
published to the country a concurrent resolution in which they announced
that no senator or representative would be admitted from any State
held to have been in insurrection until Congress had upon its own terms
and initiative declared it entitled to representation. Having heard his
bitter speech of the 22d, they moved forward to execute the programme of
their Committee on Reconstruction with a new spirit of mastery.
[Illustration: ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT, ABOUT 1867]
In March they sent to the President a “Civil Rights” bill which declared
“all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign
power,” citizens of the United States; denounced severe penalties against
interference with the civil rights of any class of citizens; and gave to
officers of the United States the right to prosecute, to the courts of
the United States the exclusive right to try, all such offences,—meaning
thus to put the negroes upon a footing of civil equality with the
whites in the South. The President vetoed the bill, as both unwise and
in plain excess of the constitutional powers of Congress. In April,
the houses passed it over his veto. The same month their Committee,
as if less confident of their constitutional ground than of their
parliamentary supremacy, submitted the draft of a Fourteenth Amendment
to the constitution which should embody the principles of the Act in a
form which would give them unalterable validity. It conferred citizenship
in the terms of the bill the President had rejected. In June Congress
adopted the Amendment, and it went to the States, with the understanding
that no southern State which did not accept it should be readmitted to
representation. Tennessee promptly adopted it, and in July was formally
reinstated in her “former proper practical relation to the Union” by the
admission of her senators and representatives to Congress. Her case stood
apart from the rest. Ever since Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation of 1863 was
put into effect she had been in process of reorganization. She had gone
doubting and divided into the Confederacy, more than half her people, it
might be, still staunchly minded to stand by the Union. Her “Union men”
had controlled the process of reconstruction; and were heeded without
serious difficulty when they knocked for admission into the houses. The
other States, being as yet in other hands, were obliged to wait.
The troubled year went uneasily upon every hand. As the spring came on,
and all the country saw how it had come to an open breach between the
President and Congress, movements began on the Canadian frontier which
discovered a new disturbing element in international politics. While the
war lasted New York had become the seat of the offices of a great society
of Irishmen whose purpose was revolution over sea and that liberation of
Ireland which Irishmen had ever prayed for. Across the sea, in Ireland,
it was an association of peasants, not of politicians: it held a rank
and file, not of agitators, but of plain, unsophisticated, earnest men
on its rolls, men who might be taken to stand for the mass of Irish
Catholics. In America it grew strong and drank of the spirit of war from
the thousands of Irish-American soldiers who served as enthusiastically
in the execution of its plans as in the battles for the preservation of
the Union. Servant girls, cab drivers, porters, laborers on the railways
filled its treasury out of their scant earnings. “Fenian,” the name it
bore, was said to have been the name of the ancient Celtic militia of
the emerald isle from which no true Irishman ever really tore his heart
entirely away. Every man who looked below the surface of affairs believed
that some day the secret of this great organization would spring to
light in some burst of revolution which would shake Ireland with the
rising of a whole people; and the close of the war for the Union seemed
the time it had sought for a release of its power. Its first sally was
not in Ireland, but in America,—across the northern border, against the
English empire in Canada. It proved a thing to smile at after it was
over: a few hundred men attempting a set invasion; a fort here and there
set upon by a handful of reckless adventurers; quick defeat, repulse,
dispersion. It was no slight cause of irritation to Canada, none the
less, and to the English government over sea that these foolhardy foes
should come from the territory of a friendly power to attempt their
purpose. The government at Washington seemed singularly indifferent; did
little that was effective to check the criminal business; was apparently
helpless against a handful of outlaws. A touch of tragedy was added to
the perplexities of politics.
[Illustration: THE FENIAN RAID IN CANADA. RUINS OF FORT ERIE]
[Illustration: BRITISH FLAG CAPTURED BY THE FENIANS]
There was tragedy enough in the domestic situation; but it was a moral
tragedy, not the tragedy of bloody raids upon a peaceful border. It
was impossible to come to an understanding with Mr. Johnson. A more
moderate, more approachable, more sagacious, less headstrong man might
by conference have hit upon some plan by which his differences with the
leaders in Congress would have been accommodated and at least a _modus
vivendi_ devised. But to differ with Mr. Johnson was to make an enemy
of him, and Congress had suspected him an opponent rather than a friend
from the first and was disinclined to seek accommodation. His intemperate
fashion of speech exaggerated his views in the mere statement; he seemed
a violent partisan when he wished merely to enforce a conviction or make
a resolute purpose plain. Mr. Sumner came away from an interview with him
convinced that he had spoken with a man who heartily despised the entire
North, felt a genuine contempt for its sentiments, and meant to serve
the South as entirely, as openly, as illegally as Mr. Jefferson Davis
himself. What was quite as bad, the South itself got wind of his partisan
temper in its behalf, nursed the false hope that it would be shielded by
his power, and deepened all the mischief by acting on the hope.
[Illustration: ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT]
It was no time at which to defy northern opinion and strengthen the hands
of Congress by resistance. The autumn of the year was to bring another
congressional election, and the leaders of the Republican majority in
the houses would go to the country with a much better chance of winning
than the President could possibly count upon in the equivocal position
into which he had got himself. In July the houses passed, over the
President’s veto, a bill which continued the Freedmen’s Bureau for
two years; provided for the sale of public lands to the negroes on
easy terms; appropriated the property of the confederate government to
their education; and placed their civil rights under direct military
protection. On the 18th of June the Committee on Reconstruction had
made formal report of its views upon the situation. It was the policy
of Congress enforced by reasons,—reasons which, it might be hoped,
would fortify the minds of members of Congress and please the voters of
the North in the coming contest. It declared that the governments of
the States recently in secession were practically suspended, by reason
both of the irregular character of the new governments which had been
set up and of the reluctant acquiescence of the southern people in the
results of the war; and that it was essential to the peace and sound
policy of the Union that they should not be reinstated in their former
privileges by Congress until they should have given substantial pledges,
such pledges as Congress should demand, of their entire loyalty and
submission. With that appeal the houses went to the country.
The friends of the President and of a moderate course in affairs, both
Democrats and Republicans, came together in goodly numbers in convention,
led by men whom the country knew and had reason to trust, and made
a demonstration in favor of the policy which had been Mr. Lincoln’s
and which should be that of every man who loved peace and sought
accommodation; and their action did not fail to make a considerable
impression everywhere upon those who could put passion aside. But
Mr. Johnson would not let quiet counsel alone. Incapable of prudence,
scornful of soft words, a bitter hater, cast by nature for the rough
contacts of personal conflict and debate, he spoke to the country
himself. At midsummer he made a journey to Chicago, and at almost every
stopping place where the people crowded about his car he uttered, with
that air of passion which always went with what he said, invectives
against Congress so intemperate, so coarse, so hot with personal feeling
that those who heard him looked upon him as almost a man distraught,
thrown from his balance. He, not the leaders of Congress, seemed the
radical, the apostle of passion; and his passion, men could say, was
against the Union, not for it. He had set himself, his opponents
declared, not to bring peace and restore the government to its integrity,
but to perpetuate discord and cheat the party of the Union of its
legitimate power.
Two days after Congress adjourned (July 30, 1866) a New Orleans mob
broke up an irregular “constitutional convention” of negroes and their
partisans with violence and bloodshed. In October the southern States,
as if taking their cue from the President, not from Congress, began, one
after the other, to reject the Fourteenth Amendment; and every impression
that had been formed of reaction and recalcitrancy at the South was
confirmed. The result of the elections was a foregone conclusion. A
Republican majority was sent to the House as overwhelming as that which
dominated the Congress about to expire; the Republican numbers in the
Senate were maintained. The houses came together again in December
heartened, resolute, triumphant, ready to override the President with a
policy of Thorough which should put the fortunes of the South entirely
at their disposal.
[Illustration: THE RIOT IN NEW ORLEANS. SIEGE AND ASSAULT ON THE
CONVENTION]
It was provided, by special Act, that the new Congress, just chosen,
should convene, not in the following December, but on the 4th of March,
1867, in order that there might be no long vacation in which the
President would be left free to exercise his independent authority.
Before the 4th of March came a Reconstruction Act had passed through the
slow fires of debate and become law (March 2d) which embodied in their
unmarred integrity the radical plans of the joint committee of fifteen.
It provided that the States of the Confederacy, with the exception of
Tennessee, which had already been permitted to adopt the Fourteenth
Amendment and resume its place in Congress, should be grouped for
purposes of government in five military districts, under the command
of five general officers of the army to be appointed by the President.
These military governors were to control and direct the processes of
reconstruction. A temporary clause of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment,
which the southern States had rejected, excluded from office, whether
under the States or under the federal government, at the pleasure of
Congress, all who had at any time or in any capacity, civil or military,
taken oath to support the constitution of the United States and
afterwards “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it, “or given
aid or comfort to its enemies.” The military governors under the Act
were instructed to enroll in each State, under oath, only such citizens
of voting age and of one year’s residence within the State as they
should deem qualified in accordance with the spirit of this prospective
Amendment, the negroes, of course, included. They were to reject as
voters all whom the proposed Amendment disqualified for office. They
were then to order and hold in each State an election for delegates to a
constitutional convention, in which none but the voters on their rolls
should be allowed either to vote or to stand for election. They were to
direct the conventions thus chosen to frame constitutions by which the
elective suffrage should be extended without distinction to all classes
of citizens included within the terms of the enrolment already made;
and were to submit the constitutions thus framed to the same voters for
ratification. When adopted by the voters, the constitutions which this
plan of Thorough had brought into existence were to be sent to Congress,
through the President, for final approval. Each State, it was agreed,
whose constitution Congress should approve was to be readmitted to
representation so soon as its legislature had ratified the Fourteenth
Amendment. Meanwhile, its government was to be deemed “provisional only,
and in all respects subject to the paramount authority of the United
States, at any time to abolish, control, or supersede it.” The houses
had already ordered, by resolution, at their previous session, that the
troops should be kept at their stations in the South until Congress
should direct their recall. They now invested General Grant, the General
of the Army, with powers which made him, and the army itself, practically
independent of the President. He was given sole authority to order
the removal or suspension of an officer, and military commanders were
explicitly excused from accepting the opinion of any civil official of
the government in the construction of their powers.
[Illustration: THE RIOT IN NEW ORLEANS. STRUGGLE FOR THE FLAG]
Many motives had governed the members of Congress in the adoption of
this extraordinary programme. Some had allowed themselves to be driven
to radical courses by sheer bitter feeling against the President, who
insisted so intemperately upon a course more simple, more moderate, more
indulgent to the South; some could reason in statesmanlike fashion enough
upon the premises of action, but could propose no alternative plan which
seemed practicable or likely to command the support of the rank and file
of their party; others were party men, without pretence or refinement
of view, their whole temper hardened and embittered by the war and all
its unpalatable consequences, and were willing to follow those who were
frankly bent upon bringing the South to utter humiliation and penitent
submission. Their leaders wished not only to give the negroes political
privilege but also to put the white men of the South, for the nonce at
any rate, under the negroes’ heels. Every black voter, they cynically
predicted, would once for all become under such tutelage a Republican
voter, and the party which had conquered the South would rule it. Men
who looked more scrupulously to their motives saw no way to withstand
what they disapproved; were themselves convinced that something must
be done to protect the helpless blacks; feared as much as the radicals
themselves to see the real leaders of the South again in control; and,
with misgivings not a few, lent their aid to the revolutionary programme.
[Illustration: ARCHDUKE MAXIMILIAN]
The same months that saw the drastic Act debated and adopted witnessed
a tragic revolution at the further south in which the government at
Washington also played its part. While the war for the Union was being
fought, the emperor of France, looking to see that war rack the United
States to pieces, had sent troops into Mexico and had set up a kingdom
there for the Archduke Maximilian of Austria. He had got his opportunity
in a way which had seemed for a time to make other great powers of
Europe his partners and allies in the conquest. The closing days of
the year 1857 had brought political upheaval and sharp civil war upon
Mexico, which had resulted within two years in making Juarez, a Zapoteca
Indian of singular capacity, master of the country. Juarez had not only
confiscated the property of the church, but had also suspended by decree
the payment of foreign debts, the debt of the Mexican nation itself
included; and that decree had led, late in 1861, to a demonstration
in force upon his coasts by the three nations, England, France, and
Spain, who were Mexico’s principal creditors. England and Spain would
consent to do no more than was necessary to enforce the just claims of
their citizens, and Napoleon had agreed to be governed by the terms
of co-operation which they prescribed: the seizure, it might be, of a
custom house or two, but no serious stroke against the sovereignty of
the country. From the first, nevertheless, he had meant to disregard
his engagements in the matter. He had long dreamed of conquest there in
the south, and saw the time come now, as he thought, when he need fear
no enforcement of the Monroe doctrine against him by the distracted
government at the north. In despite of protests, he sent an army of
conquest to Mexico, and, postponing open possession by France, put the
Archduke Maximilian in the usurped place of authority, keeping his
armies there to secure his throne and the predominance of France. The
government at Washington protested but could do nothing more. The usurped
throne stood, the armies of France remained, until the war for the Union
closed and the hands of the President were free. Then the protests
from Washington took another tone and meaning, which Louis Napoleon
was not self-deceived enough to suppose he could ignore. American
troops began to be massed in the neighborhood of the Mexican frontier,
near the familiar ground of General Taylor’s movements twenty years
before; and the French government saw that it must yield. The French
troops were withdrawn, and Maximilian was left to shape his fortunes
alone. He was a man of high spirit, not apt to yield upon any point of
honor, mindful of what he conceived to be his duty though he mistook
it: a man of character, resolved to stand by his throne even though the
French withdrew. The resolution cost him his life. Though he gathered
a party about him, they were beaten by the partisans of Juarez. He was
court-martialled, condemned, and shot. The melodramatic play which the
histrionic genius of Napoleon had planned turned out a genuine tragedy,
and a noble gentleman made a pitiful ending.
[Illustration: NAPOLEON III.]
The same month that witnessed the withdrawal of the troops of France from
Mexico saw final arrangements made for the withdrawal of Russia from the
Pacific coast of North America. On the 30th of March, 1867, a treaty was
agreed upon between Mr. Seward and the Russian minister at Washington
for the sale of Alaska to the United States for the sum of seven million
two hundred thousand dollars in gold. In May the treaty was ratified;
and in the following October formal transfer of the great territory was
effected. Mr. Monroe had checked the movement of Russian power southward
upon the Pacific coast by his message of 1823, and in the forty odd years
which had elapsed since that notable announcement of the supremacy of the
United States in the western hemisphere the government at St. Petersburg
had grown very indifferent to the retention of the bleak fragment of
America left in its hands,—so far away, so difficult, it might be, of
defence. Informal communications in regard to its sale had passed between
the two governments so long ago as 1859. Russia was anxious to sell; and
the final purchase of 1867 was easily arranged for. There was a certain
dramatic consistency in the association of the purchase of Alaska with
the forced “withdrawal” of the French from Mexico. They stood together
as logical consequences of the Monroe doctrine, whose avowed object had
been to keep the American continents free from the control of European
monarchies.
[Illustration: MAP OF ALASKA SHOWING THE GOLD-BEARING REGION]
The deep effects wrought by Mr. Stevens’s policy of Thorough in the
southern States worked themselves out more slowly than the tragedy in
Mexico, but with no less revolutionary force. Its operation brought on
as profound a social upheaval as its most extreme advocates could have
desired. The natural leaders of the South either would not take the oath
prescribed or were excluded from the right to enroll themselves as voters
by the very terms of the Reconstruction Act. The negroes were the chief
voters. The conventions which they chose and the governments which those
conventions set up were constituted to secure them power. In Virginia,
Mississippi, and Texas, after the conventions had acted, the white voters
rallied strong enough at the polls, as it turned out, to defeat the
constitutions they had framed when they were submitted for ratification;
but they were only kept so much the longer under military government, and
were obliged to accept them at last. In Georgia the new constitution was
adopted; but the statutes of the reconstituted State debarred negroes
from holding office, and Congress would not admit her to representation
so long as those statutes stood unrepealed. In the Carolinas, in Florida,
in Alabama, Arkansas, and Louisiana nothing stayed the execution of
the congressional plan, and by midsummer, 1868, Congress was ready to
readmit those States to representation. But South Carolina, Louisiana,
and Florida were utterly given over in the process to the government of
adventurers.
[Illustration: SLUICE-WASHING FOR GOLD IN THE KLONDIKE]
Negroes constituted the majority of their electorates; but political
power gave them no advantage of their own. Adventurers swarmed out of
the North to cozen, beguile, and use them. These men, mere “carpet
baggers” for the most part, who brought nothing with them, and had
nothing to bring, but a change of clothing and their wits, became the
new masters of the blacks. They gained the confidence of the negroes,
obtained for themselves the more lucrative offices, and lived upon the
public treasury, public contracts, and their easy control of affairs.
For the negroes there was nothing but occasional allotments of abandoned
or forfeited land, the pay of petty offices, a _per diem_ allowance
as members of the conventions and the state legislatures which their
new masters made business for, or the wages of servants in the various
offices of administration. Their ignorance and credulity made them easy
dupes. A petty favor, a slender stipend, a trifling perquisite, a bit of
poor land, a piece of money satisfied or silenced them. It was enough,
for the rest, to play upon their passions. They were easily taught to
hate the men who had once held them in slavery, and to follow blindly the
political party which had brought on the war of their emancipation.
There were soon lands enough and to spare out of which to make small
gifts to them without sacrifice of gain on the part of their new masters.
In Mississippi, before the work of the carpet baggers was done, six
hundred and forty thousand acres of land had been forfeited for taxes,
twenty _per cent._ of the total acreage of the State. The state tax
levy for 1871 was four times as great as the levy for 1869 had been;
that for 1873 eight times as great; that for 1874 fourteen times. The
impoverished planters could not carry the intolerable burden of taxes,
and gave their lands up to be sold by the sheriff. There were few who
could buy. The lands lay waste and neglected or were parcelled out at
nominal rates among the negroes. In South Carolina the taxes of 1871
aggregated $2,000,000 as against a total of $400,000 in 1860, though
the taxable values of the State were but $184,000,000 in 1871 and had
been $490,000,000 in 1860. There were soon lands to be had for the
asking wherever the tax gatherer of the new governments had pressed his
claims. The assessed valuation of property in the city of New Orleans
sank, during the eight years of carpet-bag rule, from $146,718,790 to
$88,613,930. Four years and a half of “reconstruction” cost Louisiana
$106,020,337. The demoralization of affairs in Louisiana had begun in
1862, when General Butler took possession of the city of New Orleans.
The rich spoils of the place had proved too much for the principles of
the men intrusted with the management of her affairs in times when law
was silent; and the political adventurers who came out of the North to
take charge of the new government set up under Mr. Stevens’s plan of
reconstruction found the work they had come to do already begun.
[Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN BUTLER]
Taxes, of course, did not suffice. Enormous debts were piled up to
satisfy the adventurers. The cases of Louisiana and South Carolina were
no doubt the worst, but other States suffered in proportion to the
opportunities they afforded for safe depredation. In 1868 the debt of
South Carolina had been $5,000,000; in 1872 it was nearly $30,000,000.
The debt of Louisiana in 1868 had been between six and seven millions; in
1872 it was $50,000,000. Where the new rulers acted with less assurance
and immunity or with smaller resources at hand, debts grew more slowly,
but the methods of spoliation were everywhere much the same; and with the
rise of debts went always the disappearance of all assets wherewith to
pay them. Treasuries were swept clean. Immense grants were made in aid
of public works which were never completed, sometimes not even begun.
Railways were subsidized, and the subsidies, by one device or another,
converted into outright gifts, which went into the pockets of those who
had procured them, not into the building or equipment of the road. A vast
burden of debt was piled up for coming generations to carry; the present
generation was much too poor to pay anything.
The real figures of the ruin wrought no man could get at. It was not
to be expressed in state taxes or state debts. The increase in the
expenditure and indebtedness of counties and towns, of school districts
and cities, represented an aggregate greater even than that of the
ruinous sums which had drained the treasuries and mortgaged the resources
of the governments of the States; and men saw with their own eyes what
was going on at their own doors. What was afoot at the capitals of
their States they only read of in the newspapers or heard retailed in
the gossip of the street, but the affairs of their own villages and
country-sides they saw corrupted, mismanaged, made base use of under
their very eyes. There the negroes themselves were the office holders,
men who could not so much as write their names and who knew none of
the uses of authority except its insolence. It was there that the
policy of the congressional leaders wrought its perfect work of fear,
demoralization, disgust, and social revolution.
No one who thought justly or tolerantly could think that this veritable
overthrow of civilization in the South had been foreseen or desired
by the men who had followed Mr. Stevens and Mr. Wade and Mr. Morton
in their policy of rule or ruin. That handful of leaders it was,
however, hard to acquit of the charge of knowing and intending the
ruinous consequences of what they had planned. They would take counsel
of moderation neither from northern men nor from southern. They were
proof against both fact and reason in their determination to “put the
white South under the heel of the black South.” They did not know the
region with which they were dealing. Northern men who did know it tried
to inform them of its character and of the danger and folly of what they
were undertaking; but they refused to be informed, did not care to know,
were in any case fixed upon the accomplishment of a single object. Their
colleagues, their followers, kept, many of them, a cooler mind, a more
prudent way of thought, but could not withstand them. They, too, were
ignorant of the South. They saw but a little way into the future, had no
means of calculating what the effects of these drastic measures would be
upon the life and action of the South, and lacked even the knowledge of
mere human nature which might have served them instead of an acquaintance
with the actual men they were dealing with. They had not foreseen that to
give the suffrage to the negroes and withhold it from the more capable
white men would bestow political power, not upon the negroes, but upon
white adventurers, as much the enemies of the one race as of the other.
In that day of passion, indeed, they had not stopped to speculate what
the effects would be. Their object had been to give the negro political
power in order that he might defend his own rights, as voters everywhere
else might defend theirs. They had not recked of consequences; for a
little while they had not cared what they might be. They had prepared the
way for the ruin of the South, but they had hardly planned to ruin it.
[Illustration: AN EXCITING DAY IN THE BOARD OF BROKERS, “ON THE RISE,”
NEW YORK CITY, 1862]
News of what was going on in the South was not slow to make its way to
the ears of the country at large; but the editors of northern newspapers
at first refused to credit what they heard. Men dismissed the reports
with an easy laugh, as simply the South’s cry of exasperation that the
negro should have been given the ballot and the power to rule. But
incredulity grew more and more difficult; the accounts of what was going
on grew more and more circumstantial; proof came close upon the heels of
rumor; and opinion began to veer unsteadily. It shifted not only because
of the disquieting news that came from the South, but also because of
the desperate strain the government itself was put to at Washington by
reason of the open breach and warfare between the President and Congress.
The masterful men who led the congressional majority had not contented
themselves with putting such laws as they chose upon the statute books
despite the President’s vetoes; they had gone much further and taken
steps to make the President a mere figurehead even in administration,
and put themselves in virtual control of the executive _personnel_ of
the government. Along with the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which placed
the governments of the southern States in their hands, they had forced
through, over the President’s veto, a Tenure of Office Act which deprived
the President of the power of removal from office except by the advice
and with the consent of the Senate. It gave even to cabinet officers a
fixed tenure of four years. They could be dismissed within the four years
of the presidential term only by the consent of the Senate. Here was
a deliberate reversal of the constitutional practice of more than two
generations. The debates of the first Congress under the constitution,
the views of the statesmen who had framed the law of the government, the
opinions of lawyers, the unbroken practice of sixteen presidents had been
thought to establish beyond question the right of the chief magistrate
to remove federal administrative officials at his pleasure. Congress, it
seemed, was ready to override law and precedent alike to make good its
mastery.
Mr. Johnson was not the man to decline such a challenge. After fighting
the policy of Congress in matters purely legislative with caustic vetoes
and bitter condemnation he was not likely to submit to have his very
powers of administration stripped away without resistance carried to the
utmost bounds. He had kept Mr. Lincoln’s cabinet; but he had not relished
the attitude of one or two of its members towards him. It had been
hard enough for Mr. Lincoln, even, with his shrewd and kindly insight
into the real nature of the man and his love for the sheer force and
audacity with which he administered his critical office in days almost
of revolution, to endure the wilful arrogance of Edwin M. Stanton, the
Secretary of War; it was quite impossible for Mr. Johnson to endure it.
It was something more than wilfulness that Mr. Stanton showed in his
relations with Mr. Johnson. He became openly a partisan of the radical
leaders in Congress, and set himself to defeat the President at his
own council table. He administered the affairs of his Department as if
he considered it an independent branch of the government; carried out
the instructions of the President with regard to the South in a way to
discredit as much as possible the policy which they embodied; and seemed
bent upon maintaining the Department of War as a sort of counterpoise to
the presidency itself until a man acceptable to the Republican majority
in the houses should come to the head of the government. Mr. Johnson had
wished from the first to be rid of him, but had wished also to preserve
unbroken the tradition of policy handed on to him from Mr. Lincoln, and
had hesitated to ask for his resignation. He determined now to make Mr.
Stanton’s case a case for the test of his prerogative and of the Tenure
of Office Act which sought to curtail it. In August (1867), during the
congressional recess, he demanded Mr. Stanton’s resignation. Mr. Stanton
refused to resign, and the President suspended him from office, as the
terms of the Act itself permitted, putting General Grant in his place.
When Congress reassembled in December the Senate refused to sanction the
removal, and Mr. Stanton resumed his office. The President once again
issued an order for his removal, and Mr. Stanton again refused to quit
his office, appealing to the House for protection. On February 24, 1868,
the House voted to impeach the President for high crimes and misdemeanors.
His only offences were that he had added to his vetoes unmeasured abuse
of the houses and their leaders and that he had disregarded an Act of
Congress in his removal of Mr. Stanton; but the impeachment had been
resolved upon as a political, not as a judicial, process of removal,
in passion, not in cool judgment,—in the spirit of the men who in Mr.
Jefferson’s day had sought to make it a means of party mastery against
the judges of the federal courts. From the 5th of March to the 16th of
May the unedifying trial dragged on. Even while it pended the President
went incorrigibly up and down the country speaking with his accustomed
unguarded passion and open defiance of every one concerned against him
in the long series of controversies which had brought the trial on.
Fortunately there were men among the Republicans of the Senate who put
their consciences as lawyers and their scruples as statesmen before their
allegiance to their party leaders. On the 16th of May the impeachment
broke down. The first test vote was taken; seven Republican senators
voted with the ten Democrats of the upper house against the thirty-five
Republican senators who cast their votes for conviction. The managers had
failed to secure the two-thirds necessary to convict; and a verdict of
acquittal was entered. The Secretary of War resigned his office, and the
contest was over.
It was, it turned out, the President’s noisy, unapplauded exit from
public trust and employment. Four days after the failure of the
impeachment proceedings the Republican nominating convention met at
Chicago which was to name a candidate for the presidential term to begin
on the 4th of March, 1869. It nominated General Grant, unanimously
and with genuine enthusiasm, because he was a faithful officer and no
politician. Mr. Johnson had shown himself a Democrat, not a Republican,
as party lines had been drawn upon the issue of reconstruction; but the
Democrats wanted him for another term as little as the Republicans did.
Their convention nominated Mr. Horatio Seymour, of New York, a man of
high character and unimpeachable reputation in affairs, and went to the
country on the question of reconstruction. The result no one seriously
doubted from the first. Few voters in the Republican ranks at the North
had as yet suffered themselves to see anything in Mr. Stevens’s plan of
Thorough to daunt either their taste or their principles; the votes of
most of the southern States then reconstructed were turned over to the
Republican candidate, as expected, by the negro voters; and Mr. Seymour
obtained but eighty ballots in the electoral college to General Grant’s
two hundred and fourteen. It was a significant thing, nevertheless,
that in a total popular vote of more than 5,700,000 General Grant’s
majority was but a little more than three hundred thousand. Mr. Seymour
had carried New York and New Jersey at the centre of the old Union. A
slight shifting of the winds of opinion might bring weather on which
the policy of reconstruction devised in Congress could not survive. But
a more normal season seemed at hand. The country was to have at least
peace at its capital, a President trusted by the leaders of Congress. Mr.
Johnson’s tempestuous and troubled term was over, and a plain soldier
again at the head of the government.
[Illustration: HORATIO SEYMOUR]