RECONSTRUCTION, LINCOLN-JOHNSON PLAN AND CONGRESSIONAL.
President Lincoln's theory was that acts of secession were void, and
that when the seceded States came back into the Union those who were
entitled to vote, by the laws existing at the date of the attempted
secession, and had been pardoned, should have, and should control, the
right of suffrage. Mr. Lincoln had acted on this theory in Tennessee,
Louisiana, and Texas, and he further advised Congress, in his message of
December, 1863, that this was his plan. Congress, after a long debate,
responded in July, 1864, by an act claiming for itself power over
Reconstruction. The President answered by a pocket veto, and after that
veto Mr. Lincoln was, in November, 1864, re-elected on a platform
extolling his "practical wisdom," etc. Congress, during the session that
began in December, 1864, did not attempt to reassert its authority but
adjourned, March 4, 1865, in sight of the collapse of the Confederacy,
leaving the President an open field for his declared policy.
But unhappily, on the 14th of April, 1865, Mr. Lincoln was assassinated,
and his death just at this time was the most appalling calamity that
ever befell the American people. The blow fell chiefly upon the South,
and it was the South the assassin had thought to benefit.
Had the great statesman lived he might, and it is fully believed he
would, like Washington, have achieved a double success. Washington,
successful in war, was successful in guiding his country through the
first eight stormy years of its existence under a new constitution.
Lincoln had guided the country through four years of war, and the Union
was now safe. With Lee's surrender the war was practically at an end.
Gideon Welles says that on the 10th of April, 1865, Mr. Lincoln, "while
I was with him at the White House, was informed that his fellow-citizens
would call to congratulate him on the fall of Richmond and surrender of
Lee; but he requested their visit should be delayed that he might have
time to put his thoughts on paper, for he desired that his utterances on
such an occasion should be deliberate and not liable to misapprehension,
misinterpretation, or misconstruction. He therefore addressed the people
on the following evening, Tuesday the 11th, in a carefully prepared
speech intended to promote harmony and union.
"In this remarkable speech, delivered three days before his
assassination, he stated he had prepared a plan for the reinauguration
of the sectional authority and reconstruction in 1863, which would be
acceptable to the executive government, and that every member of the
cabinet fully approved the plan," etc.[88]
[88] Gideon Welles in an essay, "Lincoln and Johnson," _The Galaxy_,
April, 1872.
In view of his death three days later, this, his last and deliberate
public utterance, may be regarded as Abraham Lincoln's will, devising as
a legacy to his countrymen his plan of reconstruction. That plan in the
hands of his successor was defeated by a partisan and radical Congress.
That it was a wise plan the world now knows.
Senator John Sherman, of Ohio, was one of the most influential of those
who succeeded in defeating it, and yet he lived to say, in his book
published in 1895,[89] Andrew Johnson "adopted substantially the plan
proposed and acted on by Mr. Lincoln. After this long lapse of time I am
convinced that Mr. Johnson's scheme of reorganization was wise and
judicious. It was unfortunate that it had not the sanction of Congress
and that events soon brought the President and Congress into hostility."
[89] "John Sherman's Recollections," vol. I, p. 361.
And the present senator, Shelby Cullom, of Illinois, who as a member of
the House of Representatives voted to overthrow the Lincoln-Johnson plan
of Reconstruction, has furnished us further testimony. He says in his
book, published in 1911:[90]
[90] "Fifty Years of Public Service," Cullom, p. 146.
"To express it in a word, the motive of the opposition to the Johnson
plan of Reconstruction was a firm conviction that its success would
wreck the Republican party and, by restoring the Democracy to power,
bring back Southern supremacy and Northern vassalage."
The Republican party, then dominant in Congress, felt when confronting
Reconstruction that it was facing a crisis in its existence. The
Democratic party, unitedly opposed to negro suffrage, was still in
Northern States a power to be reckoned with. Allied with the Southern
whites, that old party might again control the government unless, by
giving the negro the ballot, the Republicans could gain, as Senator
Sumner said, the "allies it needed." But the masses at the North were
opposed to negro suffrage, and only two or three State constitutions
sanctioned it. Indeed, it may be safely said that when Congress convened
in December, 1865, a majority of the people of the North were ready to
follow Johnson and approve the Lincoln plan of Reconstruction. But the
extremists in both branches of the Congress had already determined to
defeat the plan and to give the ballot to the ex-slave. To prepare the
mind of the Northern people for their programme, they had resolved to
rekindle the passions of the war, which were now smouldering, and
utilize all the machinery, military and civilian, that Congress could
make effective.
Andrew Johnson,[91] who as vice-president now succeeded to the
presidency, though a man of ability, had little personal influence and
none of Lincoln's tact. Johnson retained Lincoln's cabinet, and
McCullough, who was Secretary of the Treasury under both presidents,
says in his "Men and Measures of Half a Century," p. 378:
[91] The final estimate of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy under
both Lincoln and Johnson, is this: "He (Johnson) has been faithful to
the Constitution, although his administrative capabilities and
management may not equal some of his predecessors. Of measures he was a
good judge but not always of men."--"Diary of Gideon Welles," vol. III,
p. 556.
"The very same instrument for restoring the national authority over
North Carolina and placing her where she stood before her secession,
which had been approved by Mr. Lincoln, was, by Mr. Stanton, presented
at the first cabinet which was held at the executive mansion after Mr.
Lincoln's death, and, having been carefully considered at two or three
meetings, was adopted as the Reconstruction policy of the
administration."
Johnson carried out this plan. All the eleven seceding States repealed
their ordinances of secession. Their voters, from which class many
leaders had been excluded by the presidential proclamation, all took
the oath of allegiance, and reconstructed their State governments. From
most of the reconstructed States, senators and representatives were in
Washington asking to be seated when Congress convened, December 4, 1865.
The presidential plan of Reconstruction had been promptly accepted by
the people of the prostrate States. Almost without exception they had,
when permitted, taken the oath and returned to their allegiance.
The wretchedness of these people in the spring of 1865 was
indescribable. The labor system on which they depended for most of their
money-producing crops was destroyed. Including the disabled, twenty per
cent of the whites, who would now have been bread-winners, were gone.
The credit system had been universal, and credit was gone. Banks were
bankrupt. Confederate currency and bonds were worthless. Provisions were
scarce and money even scarcer. Many landholders had not even plough
stock with which to make a crop.
There was some cotton, however, that had escaped the ravages of war, and
a large part of this also escaped the rapacious United States agents,
who were seizing it as Confederate property. This cotton was a godsend.
There was another supply of money that came from an unexpected source.
The old anti-slavery controversy had made it seem perfectly clear to
many moneyed men, North, that free labor was always superior to slave
labor; and now, when cotton was bringing a good price, enterprising men
carried their money, altogether some hundreds of thousands of dollars,
into the several cotton States, to buy plantations and make cotton with
free negro labor. Free negro labor was not a success. Those who had
reckoned on it lost their money; but this money went into circulation
and was helpful.
Above all else loomed the negro problem. Five millions of whites and
three and a half millions of blacks were to live together. Thomas
Jefferson had said, "Nothing is more certainly written in the Book of
Fate than that these people are to be free; _nor is it less certain that
the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government_.
_Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines between them._"[92]
And it may truly be said of Jefferson that he was, as quite recently he
was declared to be by Dr. Schurman, President of Cornell University, the
"apostle of reason, and reason alone."
[92] "Jefferson's Works," vol. I, p. 48.
What system of laws could Southern conventions and legislatures frame,
that would enable them to accomplish what Jefferson had declared was
impossible? This was the question before these bodies when called
together in 1865-66 by Johnson to rehabilitate their States. Two dangers
confronted them. One was, armed bands of negroes, headed by returning
negro soldiers. Mr. Lincoln had feared this. Early in April of that very
year, 1865, he said to General Butler: "I can hardly believe that the
South and North can live in peace unless we can get rid of the negroes,
whom we have armed and disciplined, and who have fought with us, to the
amount, I believe, of one hundred and fifty thousand." Mississippi, and
perhaps one other State, to guard against the danger from this source,
enacted that negroes were only to bear arms when licensed. This law was
to be fiercely attacked.
The other chief danger was that idleness among the negroes would lead to
crime. It soon became apparent that the negro idea was that freedom
meant freedom from work. They would not work steadily, even for their
Northern friends, who were offering ready money for labor in their
cotton fields, and multitudes were loitering in towns and around
Freedmen's Bureau offices. Nothing seemed better than the old-time
remedies, apprenticeship and vagrancy laws, then found in every body of
British or American statutes. These laws Southern legislatures copied,
with what appeared to be necessary modifications, and these laws were
soon assailed as evidence of an intent to reduce the negro again to
slavery. Mr. James G. Blaine, in his "Twenty Years," selected the
Alabama statutes for his attack. In the writer's book, "Why the Solid
South," pp. 31-36, the Alabama statutes cited by Mr. Blaine are shown to
be very similar to and largely copied from the statutes of Vermont,
Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.
Had Mr. Lincoln been living he would have sympathized with these
Southern law-makers in their difficult task. But to the radicals in
Congress nothing could have been satisfactory that did not give Mr.
Sumner's party the "allies it needed."
The first important step of the Congress that convened December 4, 1865,
was to refuse admission to the congressmen from the States reconstructed
under the Lincoln-Johnson plan, and pass a joint resolution for the
appointment of a Committee of Fifteen to inquire into conditions in
those States.
The temper of that Congress may be gauged by the following extract from
the speech of Mr. Shellabarger, of Ohio, on the passage of the joint
resolution:
"They framed iniquity and universal murder into law.... Their pirates
burned your unarmed commerce on the sea. They carved the bones of your
dead heroes into ornaments, and drank from goblets made out of their
skulls. They poisoned your fountains; put mines under your soldiers'
prisons; organized bands, whose leaders were concealed in your homes;
and commissions ordered the torch and yellow fever to be carried to your
cities and to your women and children. They planned one universal
bonfire of the North from Lake Ontario to the Missouri," etc.
Congress, while refusing admission to senators elected by the
legislatures of the reconstructed States, was permitting these very
bodies to pass on amendments to the Federal Constitution; and such votes
were counted. Congress now proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, Section
III of which provided that no person should hold office under the United
States who, having taken an oath, as a Federal or State officer, to
support the Constitution, had subsequently engaged in the war against
the Union. The Southerners would not vote for a provision that would
disfranchise their leaders; they refused to ratify the Fourteenth
Amendment, and this helped further to inflame the radicals of the North.
After the Committee of Fifteen had been appointed, Congress proceeded to
put the reconstructed States under military control. In the debate on
the measure, February 18, 1867, James A. Garfield, who was, at a later
date, to become generous and conservative, said exultingly: "This bill
sets out by laying its hands on the rebel governments and taking the
very breath of life out of them; in the next place, it puts the bayonet
at the breast of every rebel in the South; in the next place, it leaves
in the hands of Congress utterly and absolutely the work of
Reconstruction."
And Congress did its work. Lincoln was in his grave, and Johnson, even
with his vetoes, was powerless. By the acts of March 2 and March 23,
1867, the reconstructed governments were swept away. Universal suffrage
was given to the negro and most of the prominent whites were
disfranchised.
The first suffrage bill was for the District of Columbia, during the
debate on which Senator Sumner said: "Now, to my mind, nothing is
clearer than the absolute necessity of suffrage for all colored persons
in the disorganized States. It will not be enough, if you give it to
those who can read and write; you will not in this way acquire the
voting force you need there for the protection of Unionists, whether
white or black. You will not acquire the new allies who are essential to
the national cause."
In the forty-first Congress, beginning March 4, 1871, the twelve
reconstructed States, including West Virginia, were represented by
twenty-two Republicans and two Democrats in the Senate, and forty-eight
Republicans and twelve Democrats in the House of Representatives.
Mr. Sumner's "new allies" were ready to answer to the roll-call.
* * * * *
When Congress had convened in December, 1865, its radical leaders were
already bent on universal suffrage for the negro, but the Northern mind
was not yet prepared for so radical a measure. The "Committee of
Fifteen" was the first step in the programme, which was to hold the
Southern States out of the Union and make an appeal to the passions and
prejudices of Northern voters in the congressional elections of
November, 1866. Valuable material for the coming campaign was already
being furnished by the agents of the Freedmen's Bureau. These
"adventurers, broken down preachers, and politicians," as Senator
Fessenden, of Maine, called them, were, and had been for some time,
reporting "outrages," swearing negroes into midnight leagues, and
selecting the offices they hoped to fill.
But the chief source of the material relied upon in the congressional
campaign of 1866 to exasperate the North, and prod voters to the point
of sanctioning negro suffrage in the South, was the official information
from the Committee of Fifteen. Its subcommittee of three, to take
testimony as to Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama,
Mississippi, and Arkansas, were _all Republicans_. The doings of this
subcommittee in Alabama illustrate their methods. Only five persons, who
claimed to be citizens, were examined. These were all Republican
politicians. The testimony of each was bitterly partisan. "Under the
government of the State as it then existed, no one of these witnesses
could hope for official preferment. When this Reconstruction plan had
been completed the first of these five witnesses became governor of his
State; the second became a senator in Congress; the third secured a life
position in one of the departments in Washington; the fourth became a
circuit judge in Alabama, and the fifth a judge of the Supreme Court of
the District of Columbia--all as Republicans. There was no Democrat in
the subcommittee which examined these gentlemen, to cross-examine them;
and not a citizen of Alabama was called before that subcommittee to
confute or explain their evidence."[93]
[93] "Why the Solid South," p. 20.
With the material gathered by these means and from these sources, the
honest voters of the North were deluded into the election of a Congress
that went to Washington, in December, 1866, armed with authority to pass
the Reconstruction laws of March, 1867.
Southern counsels were now much divided. Many good men, like Governor
Brown, of Georgia; General Longstreet and ex-Senator Albert Gallatin
Brown, of Mississippi, advised acquiescence and assistance, "not because
we approve the policy of Reconstruction, but because it is the best we
can do." These advisers hoped that good men, well known to the negroes,
might control them for the country's good; and zealous efforts were made
along this line in every State, but they were futile. The blacks had
already, before they got the suffrage, accepted the leadership of those
claiming to be the "men who had freed them." These leaders were not only
bureau agents but army camp-followers; and there was still another
brood, who espied from afar a political Eden in the prostrate States
and forthwith journeyed to it. All these Northern adventurers were
called "carpet-baggers"--they carried their worldly goods in their
hand-bags. The Southerners who entered into a joint-stock business with
them became "scalawags." These people mustered the negroes into leagues,
and everywhere whispered it into their ears that the aim of the Southern
whites was to reenslave them.
Politics in the South in the days before the war had always been more or
less intense, partly because there were so many who had leisure, and
partly because the general rule was joint political discussions. The
seams that had divided Whigs and Democrats, Secessionists and Union men,
had not been entirely closed up, even by the melting fires of the Civil
War. Old feuds for a time played their part in Southern politics, even
after March, 1867. These old feuds made it difficult for Southern whites
to get together as a race; and, in fact, conservative men dreaded the
idea. It tended toward an actual race war which, for many years, had
been a nightmare; but in every reconstructed State the negro and his
allies finally forced the race issue.
The new rulers not only increased taxes and misappropriated the revenues
of counties, cities, and States; they bartered away the credit of State
after State. Some of the States, after they were redeemed, scaled their
debts by compromising with creditors; others have struggled along with
their increased burdens.
There were hundreds of negro policemen, constables, justices of the
peace, and legislators who could not write their names. Justice was in
many localities a farce. Ex-slaves became judges, representatives in
Congress, and United States senators. The eleven Confederate States had
been divided into military districts. Many of the officers and men who
were scattered over the country to uphold negro rule sympathized with
the whites and evidenced their sympathy in various ways. Others, either
because they were radicals at heart, or to commend themselves to their
superiors, who were some of them aspiring to political places, were
super-serviceable; and it was not uncommon for a military officer, in a
case where a negro was a party, to order a judge to leave the bench and
himself take the place. In communities where negro majorities were
overwhelming there were usually two factions, and when political
campaigns were on agents for these clans often scoured the fields clear
of laborers to recruit their marching bands. In cities these bands made
night hideous with shouts and the noise of fifes and drums. The negro
would tolerate no defection from his ranks to the whites, and negro
women were more intolerant than the men. It sometimes happened that a
bloody clash between the races was imminent when white men sought to
protect a negro who had dared to speak in favor of the Democratic and
Conservative party. In truth, the civilization of the South was being
changed from white to negroid.
The final triumph of good government in all the States was at last
accomplished by accepting the race issue, as in Alabama in 1874. The
first resolution in the platform of the "Democratic and Conservative
party" in that State then was, "The radical and dominant faction of the
Republican party in this State persistently, and by fraudulent
representations, have inflamed the passions and prejudices of the
negroes, as a race, against the white people, and have thereby made it
necessary for the white people to unite and act together in self-defence
and for the preservation of white civilization."
The people of North Carolina recovered the right of self-government in
1870. Other States followed from time to time, the last two being
Louisiana and South Carolina in 1877.
Edwin L. Godkin, who was for long at the head of the _Nation_ and the
_Evening Post_, of New York, is thought by some competent judges to have
been the ablest editor this country has ever had. After the last of the
negro governments set up in the South had passed away, looking back over
the whole bad business, Mr. Godkin, in a letter to his friend Charles
Eliot Norton, written from Sweet Springs, West Virginia, September 3,
1877, said: "I do not see in short how the negro is ever to be worked
into a system of government for which you and I could have much
respect."[94]
[94] Ogden's "Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin," vol. II, p.
114.
Garrison is dead. At the centenary of his birth, December 12, 1904, an
effort was made to arouse enthusiasm. There was only a feeble response;
but we still have extremists. Professor Josiah Royce, of Harvard, in
"Race Questions" (1906), speaking of race antipathies as "trained
hatred," says, pp. 48-49: "We can remember that they are childish
phenomena in our lives, phenomena on a level with the dread of snakes or
of mice, phenomena that we share with the cats and with the dogs, not
noble phenomena, but caprices of our complex nature."