The President of the United States has so singular a combination of
defects for the office of a constitutional magistrate, that he could
have obtained the opportunity to misrule the nation only by a visitation
of Providence. Insincere as well as stubborn, cunning as well as
unreasonable, vain as well as ill-tempered, greedy of popularity as well
as arbitrary in disposition, veering in his mind as well as fixed in his
will, he unites in his character the seemingly opposite qualities of
demagogue and autocrat, and converts the Presidential chair into a stump
or a throne, according as the impulse seizes him to cajole or to
command. Doubtless much of the evil developed in him is due to his
misfortune in having been lifted by events to a position which he lacked
the elevation and breadth of intelligence adequately to fill. He was
cursed with the possession of a power and authority which no man of
narrow mind, bitter prejudices, and inordinate self-estimation can
exercise without depraving himself as well as injuring the nation.
Egotistic to the point of mental disease, he resented the direct and
manly opposition of statesmen to his opinions and moods as a personal
affront, and descended to the last degree of littleness in a political
leader,--that of betraying his party, in order to gratify his spite. He
of course became the prey of intriguers and sycophants,--of persons who
understand the art of managing minds which are at once arbitrary and
weak, by allowing them to retain unity of will amid the most palpable
inconsistencies of opinion, so that inconstancy to principle shall not
weaken force of purpose, nor the emphasis be at all abated with which
they may bless to-day what yesterday they cursed. Thus the abhorrer of
traitors has now become their tool. Thus the denouncer of Copperheads
has now sunk into dependence on their support. Thus the imposer of
conditions of reconstruction has now become the foremost friend of the
unconditioned return of the Rebel States. Thus the furious Union
Republican, whose harangues against his political opponents almost
scared his political friends by their violence, has now become the
shameless betrayer of the people who trusted him. And in all these
changes of base he has appeared supremely conscious, in his own mind, of
playing an independent, a consistent, and especially a conscientious
part.
Indeed, Mr. Johnson's character would be imperfectly described if some
attention were not paid to his conscience, the purity of which is a
favorite subject of his own discourse, and the perversity of which is
the wonder of the rest of mankind. As a public man, his real position is
similar to that of a commander of an army, who should pass over to the
ranks of the enemy he was commissioned to fight, and then plead his
individual convictions of duty as a justification of his treachery. In
truth, Mr. Johnson's conscience is, like his understanding, a mere form
or expression of his will. The will of ordinary men is addressed through
their understanding and conscience. Mr. Johnson's understanding and
conscience can be addressed only through his will. He puts intellectual
principles and the moral law in the possessive case, thinks he pays them
a compliment and adds to their authority when he makes them the adjuncts
of his petted pronoun "my"; and things to him are reasonable and right,
not from any quality inherent in themselves, but because they are made
so by his determinations. Indeed, he sees hardly anything as it is, but
almost everything as colored by his own dominant egotism. Thus he is
never weary of asserting that the people are on his side; yet his method
of learning the wishes of the people is to scrutinize his own, and, when
acting out his own passionate impulses, he ever insists that he is
obeying public sentiment. Of all the wilful men who, by strange chance,
have found themselves at the head of a constitutional government, he
most resembles the last Stuart king of England, James II.; and the
likeness is increased from the circumstance that the American James has,
in his supple and plausible Secretary of State, one fully competent to
play the part of Sunderland.
The party which, under the ironical designation of the National Union
Party, now proposes to take the policy and character of Mr. Johnson
under its charge, is composed chiefly of Democrats defeated at the
polls, and Democrats defeated on the field of battle. The few apostate
Republicans, who have joined its ranks while seeming to lead its
organization, are of small account. Its great strength is in its
Southern supporters, and, if it comes into power, it must obey a Rebel
direction. By the treachery of the President, it will have the executive
patronage on its side,--for Mr. Johnson's "conscience" is of that
peculiar kind which finds satisfaction in arraying the interest of
others against their convictions; and having thus the power to purchase
support, it will not fail of those means of dividing the North which
come from corrupting it. The party under which the war for the Union was
conducted is to be denounced and proscribed as the party of disunion,
and we are to be edified by addresses on the indissoluble unity of the
nation by Secessionists, who have hardly yet had time to wash from their
hands the stains of Union blood. The leading proposition on which this
conspiracy against the country is to be conducted is the monstrous
absurdity, that the Rebel States have an inherent, "continuous,"
unconditioned, constitutional _right_ to form a part of the Federal
government, when they have once acknowledged the fact of the defeat of
their inhabitants in an armed attempt to overthrow and subvert it,--a
proposition which implies that victory paralyzes the powers of the
victors, that ruin begins when success is assured, that the only effect
of beating a Southern Rebel in the field is to exalt him into a maker of
laws for his antagonist.
In the minority Report of the Congressional Joint Committee on
Reconstruction, which is designed to supply the new party with
constitutional law, this theory of State Rights is most elaborately
presented. The ground is taken, that during the Rebellion the States in
which it prevailed were as "completely competent States of the United
States as they were before the Rebellion, and were bound by all the
obligations which the Constitution imposed, and entitled to all its
privileges"; and that the Rebellion consisted merely in a series of
"illegal acts of the citizens of such States." On this theory it is
difficult to find where the guilt of rebellion lies. The States are
innocent because the Rebellion was a rising of individuals; the
individuals cannot be very criminal, for it is on their votes that the
committee chiefly rely to build up the National Union Party. Again, we
are informed that, in respect to the admission of representatives from
"such States," Congress has no right or power to ask more than two
questions. These are: "Have these States organized governments? Are
these governments republican in form?" The committee proceed to say:
"How they were formed, under what auspices they were formed, are
inquiries with which Congress has no concern. The right of the people to
form a government for themselves has never been questioned." On this
principle, President Johnson's labors in organizing State governments
were works of supererogation. At the close of active hostilities the
Rebel States had organized, though disloyal, governments, as republican
in form as they were before the war broke out. The only thing,
therefore, they were required to do was to send their Senators and
Representatives to Washington. Congress could not have rightfully
refused to receive them, because all questions as to their being loyal
or disloyal, and as to the changes which the war had wrought in the
relations of the States they represented to the Union, were inquiries
with which Congress had no concern! And here again we have the
ever-recurring difficulty respecting the "individuals" who were alone
guilty of the acts of rebellion. "The right of the people," we are
assured, "to form a government for themselves, has never been
questioned." But it happens that "the people" here indicated are the
very individuals who were before pointed out as alone responsible for
the Rebellion. In the exercise of their right "to form a government for
themselves," they rebelled; and now, it seems, by the exercise of the
same right, they can unconditionally return. There is no wrong anywhere:
it is all "right." The people are first made criminals, in order to
exculpate the States, and then the innocence of the States is used to
exculpate the people. When we see such outrages on common sense gravely
perpetrated by so eminent a lawyer as the one who drew up the
committee's Report, one is almost inclined to define minds as of two
kinds, the legal mind and the human mind, and to doubt if there is any
possible connection in reason between the two. To the human mind it
appears that the Federal government has spent thirty-five hundred
millions of dollars, and sacrificed three hundred thousand lives, in a
contest which the legal mind dissolves into a mere mist of unsubstantial
phrases; and by skill in the trick of substituting words for things, and
definitions for events, the legal mind proceeds to show that these words
and definitions, though scrupulously shielded from any contact with
realities, are sufficient to prevent the nation from taking ordinary
precautions against the recurrence of calamities fresh in its bitter
experience. The phrase "State Rights," translated from legal into human
language, is found to mean, the power to commit wrongs on individuals
whom States may desire to oppress, or the power to protect the
inhabitants of States from the consequences of their own crimes. The
minority of the committee, indeed, seem to have forgotten that there has
been any real war, and bring to mind the converted Australian savage,
whom the missionary could not make penitent for a murder committed the
day before, because the trifling occurrence had altogether passed from
his recollection.
In fact, all attempts to discriminate between Rebels and Rebel States,
to the advantage of the latter, are done in defiance of notorious facts.
If the Rebellion had been merely a rising of individual citizens of
States, it would have been an insurrection against the States, as well
as against the Federal government, and might have been easily put down.
In that case, there would have been no withdrawal of Southern Senators
and Representatives from Congress, and therefore no question as to their
inherent right to return. In Missouri and Kentucky, for example, there
was civil war, waged by inhabitants of those States against their local
governments, as well as against the United States; and nobody contends
that the rights and privileges of those States were forfeited by the
criminal acts of their citizens. But the real strength of the Rebellion
consisted in this, that it was not a rebellion _against_ States, but a
rebellion _by_ States. No loose assemblage of individuals, though
numbering hundreds of thousands, could long have resisted the pressure
of the Federal power and the power of the State governments. They would
have had no means of subsistence except those derived from plunder and
voluntary contributions, and they would have lacked the military
organization by which mobs are transformed into formidable armies. But
the Rebellion being one of States, being virtually decreed by the people
of States assembled in convention, was sustained by the two tremendous
governmental powers of taxation and conscription. The willing and the
unwilling were thus equally placed at the disposition of a strong
government. The population and wealth of the whole immense region of
country in which the Rebellion prevailed were at the service of this
government. So completely was it a rebellion of States, that the
universal excuse of the minority of original Union men for entering
heartily into the contest after it had once begun was, that they thought
it their duty to abide by the decision, and share the fortunes, of their
respective _States_. Nobody at the South believed at the time the war
commenced, or during its progress, that his State possessed any
"continuous" right to a participation in the privileges of the Federal
Constitution, the obligations of which it had repudiated. When confident
of success, the Southerner scornfully scouted the mere suspicion of
entertaining such a degrading notion; when assured of defeat, his only
thought was to "get his State back into the Union on the best terms that
could be made." The idea of "conditions of readmission" was as firmly
fixed in the Southern as in the Northern mind. If the politicians of the
South now adopt the principle that the Rebel States have not, as States,
ever altered their relations to the Union, they do it from policy,
finding that its adoption will give them "better terms" than they ever
dreamed of getting before the President of the United States taught them
that it would be more politic to bully than to plead.
In the last analysis, indeed, the theory of the minority of the
Reconstruction Committee reduces the Rebel States to mere abstractions.
It is plain that a State, in the concrete, is constituted by that
portion of the inhabitants who form its legal people; and that, in
passing back of its government and constitution, we reach a convention
of the legal people as its ultimate expression. By such conventions the
acts of secession were passed; and, as far as the people of the Rebel
States could do it, they destroyed their States considered as organized
communities forming a part of the United States. The claim of the United
States to authority over the territory and inhabitants was of course not
affected by these acts; but in what condition did they place the people?
Plainly in the condition of rebels, engaged in an attempt to overturn
the Constitution and government of the United States. As the whole force
of the people in each of the Rebel communities was engaged in this work,
the whole of the people were rebels and public enemies. Nothing was
left, in each case, but an abstract State, without any external body,
and as destitute of people having a right to enjoy the privileges of the
Constitution as if the territory had been swept clean of population by a
pestilence. It is, then, only this abstract State which has a right to
representation in Congress. But how can there be a right to
representation when there is nobody to be represented? All this may
appear puerile, but the puerility is in the premises as well as in the
logical deductions; and the premises are laid down as indisputable
constitutional principles by the eminent jurists who supply ideas for
the National Union Party.
The doctrine of the unconditional right of the Rebel States to
representation being thus a demonstrated absurdity, the only question
relates to the conditions which Congress proposes to impose. Certainly
these conditions, as embodied in the constitutional amendment which has
passed both houses by such overwhelming majorities, are the mildest ever
exacted of defeated enemies by a victorious nation. There is not a
distinctly "radical" idea in the whole amendment,--nothing that
President Johnson has not himself, within a comparatively recent period,
stamped with his high approbation. Does it ordain universal suffrage?
No. Does it ordain impartial suffrage? No. Does it proscribe,
disfranchise, or expatriate the recent armed enemies of the country, or
confiscate their property? No. It simply ordains that the national debt
shall be paid and the Rebel debt repudiated; that the civil rights of
all persons shall be maintained; that Rebels who have added perjury to
treason shall be disqualified for office; and that the Rebel States
shall not have their political power in the Union increased by the
presence on their soil of persons to whom they deny political rights,
but that representation shall be based throughout the Republic on
voters, and not on population. The pith of the whole amendment is in the
last clause; and is there anything in that to which reasonable objection
can be made? Would it not be a curious result of the war against
Rebellion, that it should end in conferring on a Rebel voter in South
Carolina a power equal, in national affairs, to that of two loyal voters
in New York? Can any Democrat have the face to assert that the South
should have, through its disfranchised negro freemen alone, a power in
the Electoral College and in the national House of Representatives equal
to that of the States of Ohio and Indiana combined?
Yet these conditions, so conciliatory, moderate, lenient, almost timid,
and which, by the omission of impartial suffrage, fall very far below
the requirements of the average sentiment of the loyal nation, are still
denounced by the new party of "Union" as the work of furious radicals,
bent on destroying the rights of the States. Thus Governor James L. Orr
of South Carolina, a leading Rebel, pardoned into a Johnsonian Union
man, implores the people of that region to send delegates to the
Philadelphia Convention, on the ground that its purpose is to organize
"conservative" men of all sections and parties, "to drive from power
that radical party who are daily trampling under foot the Constitution,
and fast converting a constitutional Republic into a consolidated
despotism." The terms to which South Carolina is asked to submit, before
she can be made the equal of Ohio or New York in the Union, are stated
to be "too degrading and humiliating to be entertained by a freeman for
a single instant." When we consider that this "radical party"
constitutes nearly four fifths of the legal legislature of the nation,
that it was the party which saved the country from dismemberment while
Mr. Orr and his friends were notoriously engaged in "trampling the
Constitution under foot," and that the man who denounces it owes his
forfeited life to its clemency, the astounding insolence of the
impeachment touches the sublime. Here is confessed treason inveighing
against tried loyalty, in the name of the Constitution it has violated
and the law it has broken! But why does Mr. Orr think the terms of South
Carolina's restored relations to the Union "too degrading and
humiliating to be entertained by a freeman for a single instant"? Is it
because he wishes to have the Rebel debt paid? Is it because he desires
to have the Federal debt repudiated? Is it because he thinks it
intolerable that a negro should have civil rights? Is it because he
resents the idea that breakers of oaths, like himself, should be
disqualified from having another opportunity of forswearing themselves?
Is it because he considers that a white Rebel freeman of South Carolina
has a natural right to exercise double the political power of a white
loyal freeman of Massachusetts? He must return an affirmative answer to
all these questions in order to make it out that his State will be
degraded and humiliated by ratifying the amendment; and the necessity of
the measure is therefore proved by the motives known to prompt the
attacks of its vilifiers.
The insolence of Mr. Orr is not merely individual, but representative.
It is the result of Mr. Johnson's attempt "to produce harmony between
the two sections," by betraying the section to which he owed his
election. Had it not been for his treachery, there would have been
little difficulty in settling the terms of peace, so as to avoid all
causes for future war; but, from the time he quarrelled with Congress,
he has been the great stirrer-up of disaffection at the South, and the
virtual leader of the Southern reactionary party. Every man at the South
who was prominent in the Rebellion, every man at the North who was
prominent in aiding the Rebellion, is now openly or covertly his
partisan, and by fawning on him earns the right to defame the
representatives of the people by whom the Rebellion was put down. Among
traitors and Copperheads the fear of punishment has been succeeded by
the hope of revenge; elation is on faces which the downfall of Richmond
overcast; and a return to the old times, when a united South ruled the
country by means of a divided North, is confidently expected by the
whole crew of political bullies and political sycophants whose profit is
in the abasement of the nation. It is even said that, if the majority of
the "Rump" Congress cannot be overcome by fair means, it will be by
foul; and there are noisy partisans of the President who assert that he
has in him a Cromwellian capacity for dealing with legislative
assemblies whose notions of the public good clash with his own. In
short, we are promised, on the assembling of the next Congress, a _coup
d'etat_.
Garret Davis, of Kentucky, was, we believe, the first to announce this
executive remedy for the "radical" disease of the state, and it has
since been often prescribed by Democratic politicians as a sovereign
panacea. General McClernand, indeed, proposed a scheme, simpler even
than that of executive recognition, by which the Southern Senators and
Representatives might effect a lodgment in Congress. They should,
according to him, have gone to Washington, entered the halls of
legislation, and proceeded to occupy their seats, "peaceably if they
could, forcibly if they must"; but the record of General McClernand, as
a military man, was not such as to give to his advice on a question of
carrying positions by assault a high degree of authority, and, there
being some natural hesitation in following his counsel, the golden
opportunity was lost. Mr. Montgomery Blair, who professes his
willingness to act with any men, "Rebels or any one else," to put down
the radicals, is never weary of talking to conservative conventions of
"two Presidents and two Congresses." There can be no doubt that the
project of a _coup d'etat_ has become dangerously familiar to the
"conservative" mind, and that the eminent legal gentlemen of the North
who are publishing opinions affirming the right of the excluded Southern
representatives to their seats are playing into the hands of the
desperate gang of unscrupulous politicians who are determined to have
the right established by force. It is computed that the gain, in the
approaching elections, of twenty-five districts now represented by Union
Republicans, will give the Johnson party, in the next Congress, a
majority of the House of Representatives, should the Southern
delegations be counted; and it is proposed that the Johnson members
legally entitled to seats should combine with the Southern pretenders to
seats, organize as the House of Representatives of the United States,
and apply to the President for recognition. Should the President comply,
he would be impeached by an unrecognized House before an "incomplete"
Senate, and, if convicted, would deny the validity of the proceeding.
The result would be civil war, in which the name of the Federal
government would be on the side of the revolutionists. Such is the
programme which is freely discussed by partisans of the President,
considered to be high in his favor; and the scheme, it is contended, is
the logical result of the position he has assumed as to the rights of
the excluded States to representation. It is certain that the present
Congress is as much the Congress of the United States as he is the
President of the United States; but it is well known that he considers
himself to represent the whole country, while he thinks that Congress
only represents a portion of it; and he has in his character just that
combination of qualities, and is placed in just those anomalous
circumstances, which lead men to the commission of great political
crimes. The mere hint of the possibility of his attempting a _coup
d'etat_ is received by some Republicans with a look of incredulous
surprise; yet what has his administration been to such persons but a
succession of surprises?
But whatever view may be taken of the President's designs, there can be
no doubt that the safety, peace, interest, and honor of the country
depend on the success of the Union Republicans in the approaching
elections. The loyal nation must see to it that the Fortieth Congress
shall be as competent to override executive vetoes as the Thirty-Ninth,
and be equally removed from the peril of being expelled for one more in
harmony with Executive ideas. The same earnestness, energy, patriotism,
and intelligence which gave success to the war, must now be exerted to
reap its fruits and prevent its recurrence. The only danger is, that, in
some representative districts, the people may be swindled by
plausibilities and respectabilities; for when, in political contests,
any great villany is contemplated, there are always found some eminently
respectable men, with a fixed capital of certain eminently conservative
phrases, innocently ready to furnish the wolves of politics with
abundant supplies of sheep's clothing. These dignified dupes are more
than usually active at the present time; and the gravity of their speech
is as edifying as its emptiness. Immersed in words, and with no clear
perception of things, they mistake conspiracy for conservatism. Their
pet horror is the term "radical"; their ideal of heroic patriotism, the
spectacle of a great nation which allows itself to be ruined with
decorum, and dies rather than commit the slightest breach of
constitutional etiquette. This insensibility to facts and blindness to
the tendency of events, they call wisdom and moderation. Behind these
political dummies are the real forces of the Johnson party, men of
insolent spirit, resolute will, embittered temper, and unscrupulous
purpose, who clearly know what they are after, and will hesitate at no
"informality" in the attempt to obtain it. To give these persons
political power will be to surrender the results of the war, by placing
the government practically in the hands of those against whom the war
was waged. No smooth words about "the equality of the States," "the
necessity of conciliation," "the wickedness of sectional conflicts,"
will alter the fact, that, in refusing to support Congress, the people
would set a reward on treachery and place a bounty on treason. "The
South," says a Mr. Hill of Georgia, in a letter favoring the
Philadelphia Convention, "sought to save the Constitution out of the
Union. She failed. Let her now bring her diminished and shattered, but
united and earnest counsels and energies to save the Constitution in the
Union." The sort of Constitution the South sought to save by warring
against the government is the Constitution which she now proposes to
save by administering it! Is this the tone of pardoned and penitent
treason? Is this the spirit to build up a "National Union Party"? No;
but it is the tone and spirit now fashionable in the defeated Rebel
States, and will not be changed until the autumn elections shall have
proved that they have as little to expect from the next Congress as from
the present, and that they must give securities for their future conduct
before they can be relieved from the penalties incurred by their past.