In consequence of the threatening situation which the President's
reactionary policy had precipitated, the belief grew stronger and
stronger in the Northern country that the predominance of the Republican
party was--and would be for a few years, at least--necessary for the
safety and the honor of the Republic; and steps taken to insure that
predominance, even such as would have in less critical times evoked
strong criticism, were now looked upon with seductive leniency of
judgment. Mr. Stockton of New Jersey was unseated in the Senate upon
grounds which would hardly pass muster in ordinary times, to make room
for a Republican successor, and even Mr. Fessenden approved the
transaction. Advantage was taken in the same body of the sickness or
casual absence of some Democratic senator to rush through a vote when a
two-thirds majority was required to kill a veto; and other proceedings
were resorted to at a pinch which were hardly compatible with the famous
"courtesy of the Senate." But there was more thorough and lasting work
to be done to prepare for the full restoration of the States lately in
rebellion. The Republican majority was by no means of one mind as to the
constitutional status of the communities that had been in insurrection
against the National Government. I have already spoken of the theory of
State-suicide advanced by Mr. Stevens and a comparatively small school
of extremists. The theory most popular with most of the Republicans,
which was finally formulated by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction,
was that the rebel States had not been out of the Union, but had lost
their working status inside of the Union, and had to be restored to
their regular constitutional relations to the Union by action of
Congress, upon such conditions as Congress might deem proper.
To meet the dangers which so far had become visible on the horizon, the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction devised the Fourteenth Amendment to
the Constitution, which was long and laboriously debated in both Houses.
In the form in which it was finally adopted it declared (1) that all
persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the
United States and of the States in which they reside, and that no State
shall make or enforce any law abridging the privileges or immunities of
citizens, nor deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without
due process of law, nor deny to any person the equal protection of the
laws; (2) that if in any State the right to vote at any election for
the choice of national or State officers is denied or in any way
abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the
basis of representation in Congress or the electoral college shall be
reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall
bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in
such State; (3) that no person who had taken part in the rebellion,
having previously, as a national or State officer, military or civil,
sworn to support the Constitution of the United States, shall be a
Senator or Representative in Congress or hold any office, civil or
military, under the United States, or any State, unless relieved of that
disability by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress; (4) that the
validity of the public debt of the United States shall not be
questioned, nor shall any debt or obligation contracted in aid of
rebellion, or any claim for emancipated slaves be paid.
_The Fourteenth Amendment_
Thus the Fourteenth Amendment stopped short of the extension of the
suffrage to negroes--a subject which many Republicans were still afraid
to touch directly. But by implication it punished the States denying
that extension by reducing the basis of representation; it excluded from
office, unless relieved of the disability by a two-thirds vote of
Congress, the most influential class of those who had taken an active
part in the rebellion; and it safeguarded the public debt. With only one
of its provisions serious fault could be found;--not with that which
guaranteed to the freedmen the essential civil rights of free men, nor
with that which excluded the freedmen from the basis of
representation--so long as they were not permitted to vote. Only the
advocates of negro suffrage might logically have objected to this
clause; inasmuch as it by implication recognized the right of a State to
exclude the colored people from the suffrage if the State paid a certain
penalty for such exclusion. Neither could the clause safeguarding the
public debt and prohibiting the payment of debts incurred in aid of the
rebellion be objected to. The really exceptionable provision was that
which excluded so large a class of Southern men from public office, and
just that class with which a friendly understanding was most desirable.
The provision that their disqualification could be removed by a
two-thirds vote in each House of Congress mended the mischief thus done
a little, but not enough for the public good.
It was not expressly enacted, but it was generally understood, that
those of the States lately in rebellion, which ratified the Fourteenth
Amendment, would thereby qualify themselves for full restoration in the
Union. Tennessee, where a faction of the Union party hostile to
President Johnson had gained the ascendency, did so, and was accordingly
fully restored by the admission to their seats in Congress of its
Senators and Representatives. The full restoration of the other late
rebel States would probably have been expedited in the same way, had
they followed the example of Tennessee. But President Johnson, as became
publicly known in one or two instances, obstinately dissuaded them from
doing so, and the fight went on. He also vetoed a second Freedmen's
Bureau bill in which some of the provisions he had objected to in his
veto of the first were remedied. But things had now come to such a pass
between Congress and the President that his veto messages were hardly
considered worth listening to, but were promptly overruled almost
without debate by two-thirds votes in each House.
_A Campaign to Destroy a President_
Under such circumstances the Congressional election of 1866 came on. The
people were to pronounce judgment between the President and Congress.
The great quarrel had created excitement so intense as to affect men's
balance of mind. About the time of the assembling of Congress Mr.
Preston King of New York (the same rotund gentleman with whom, in the
National Convention of 1860, I conducted Mr. Ashmun to the chair), who
had been a Senator of the United States and had been appointed Collector
of Customs by President Johnson, committed suicide by jumping into the
North River from a ferry-boat. He had been a Republican of the radical
type, and when he took the office he supposed the President to be of the
same mind; but Mr. Johnson's course distressed him so much that he
became melancholy; his brain gave way, and he sought relief in death.
Another suicide which greatly startled the country a few months later,
that of Senator Lane of Kansas, was attributed to a similar cause. "Jim"
Lane had been one of the most famous free-State fighters in Kansas
Territory. Since then he was ranked among the extreme anti-slavery men
and as a Senator he was counted upon as a firm opponent of President
Johnson's policy. To the astonishment of everybody he voted against the
Civil Rights bill. This somewhat mysterious change of front, which
nobody seemed able satisfactorily to explain, cost him his confidential
intercourse with his former associates in the Senate, and brought upon
him stinging manifestations of disapproval from his constituents. He was
reported to have expressed profound repentance of what he had done and
finally made away with himself as one lost to hope. He was still in the
full vigor of manhood--only fifty-one years old--when he sought the
grave.
[Illustration: JOHN POTTER STOCKTON
THE DEMOCRATIC SENATOR FROM NEW JERSEY WHO WAS UNSEATED IN THE SENATE OF
1866 TO MAKE ROOM FOR A REPUBLICAN SUCCESSOR. HE WAS LATER REELECTED TO
THE SENATE]
The campaign of 1866 was remarkable for its heat and bitterness. In
canvasses carried on for the purpose of electing a President, I had seen
more enthusiasm, but in none so much animosity and bad blood as in this,
an incidental object of which was politically to destroy a president.
Andrew Johnson had not only manifested a disposition to lean upon the
Democratic party in the pursuit of his policy, but he had also begun to
dismiss public officers who refused to coöperate with him politically
and to put in their places men who adhered to him. This touched partisan
spirit in an exceedingly sensitive spot. The so-called "bread-and-butter
brigade" was looked down upon with a contempt that could hardly be
expressed in words.
_Killing of Negroes at Memphis and New Orleans_
But there were more serious things to inflame the temper of the North.
The Southern whites again proved themselves their own worst enemies.
Early in May news came from Memphis of riots in which twenty-four
negroes were killed and one white man was wounded. The conclusion lay
near and was generally accepted that the whites had been the aggressors
and the negroes the victims. In the last days of July more portentous
tidings arrived from New Orleans. An attempt was made by Union men to
revive the constitutional convention of 1864 for the purpose of
remodeling the constitution of the State. The attempt was of
questionable legality, but, if wrong, it could easily have been foiled
by legal and peaceable means. The municipal government of New Orleans
was in possession of the ex-Confederates. It resolved that the meeting
of the remnant of the convention should not be held. When it did meet,
the police, consisting in an overwhelming majority of ex-Confederate
soldiers, aided by a white mob, broke into the hall and fired upon those
assembled there. The result was thirty-seven negroes killed and one
hundred and nineteen wounded, and three of the white Union men killed
and seventeen wounded, against one of the assailants killed and ten
wounded. General Sheridan, the commander of the Department, telegraphed
to General Grant: "It was no riot; it was an absolute massacre by the
police which was not excelled in murderous cruelty by that of Fort
Pillow. It was a murder which the Mayor and the police of this city
perpetrated without the shadow of necessity." A tremor of horror and
rage ran over the North. People asked one another: "Does this mean that
the rebellion is to begin again?" I heard the question often.
The Administration felt the blow, and to neutralize its effects a
national convention of its adherents, North and South, planned by
Thurlow Weed and Secretary Seward, was to serve as the principal means.
This "National Union Convention" met in Philadelphia on August 14th. It
was respectably attended in point of character as well as of numbers. It
opened its proceedings with a spectacular performance which under
different conditions might have struck the popular imagination
favorably. The delegates marched into the Convention Hall in pairs, one
from the South arm in arm with one from the North, Massachusetts and
South Carolina leading. But with the Memphis riot and the New Orleans
"massacre" and Andrew Johnson's sinister figure in the background, the
theatrical exhibition of restored fraternal feeling, although calling
forth much cheering on the spot, fell flat, and even became the subject
of ridicule, since it earned for the meeting the derisive nickname of
the "arm-in-arm convention." The proceedings were rather dull, and much
was made by the Republicans of the fact that the Chairman, Senator
Doolittle from Wisconsin, was careful not to let Southern members say
much lest they say _too_ much. It was also noticed and made much of that
among the members of the convention the number of men supposed to curry
favor with the Administration for the purpose of getting office--men
belonging to the "bread-and-butter-brigade"--was conspicuously large.
Among the resolutions passed by the convention was one declaring slavery
abolished and the emancipated negro entitled to equal protection in
every right of person and property, and another heartily endorsing
President Johnson's reconstruction policy.
No doubt many of the respectable and patriotic men who attended that
convention thought they had done very valuable work for the general
pacification by getting their Southern friends publicly to affirm that
slavery was dead never to be revived, and that the civil rights of the
freedmen were entitled to equal protection and would have it. But the
effect of such declarations upon the popular mind at the North was not
as great as had been expected. Such affirmations by respectable Southern
gentlemen, who were perfectly sincere, had been heard before. In fact,
almost everybody in the South was ready to declare himself likewise, and
with equal sincerity, as to the abolition of the old form of chattel
slavery. But the question of far superior importance was, what he would
put in the place of the old form of chattel slavery. _There_ was the
rub, and this had come to be well understood at the North in the light
of the reports from the South, which the advocates of President
Johnson's policy could not deny nor obscure. The moral effect of the
National Union Convention was therefore very feeble.
[Illustration: _From the collection of Joseph Keppler_