CHAPTER LXXXII.[24

THE WORK OF RESTORATION.

A Year later.—Hopes disappointed.—Position of the Whites of the South.—Treatment of Southern Unionists, Black and White.—Sections where the Hostility was most intense.—Honorable and Noble Exceptions to this State of Feeling.—The most Noisy Supporters of the Lost Cause.—The Effect of President Johnson’s Course in stimulating this Hostility.—Review of his Course so far as it relates to Reconstruction.—Interviews with Southern Men.—Organization of Provisional Governments.—Specimens of the Men appointed by him as Governors.—Defiance of Congress in Advance.—Assurances to South Carolina.—Democratic Conventions indorsing the President’s Policy.—The Message of December, 1865.—Opposition to Congress.—His “White-washing Message.”—Veto of the First Freedmen’s Bureau Bill.—The 22d of February Speech.—Veto of the Civil Rights Bill.—Its Passage over the Veto.—Provisions of the Bill.—The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.—What it was.—Veto of the Second Freedmen’s Bureau Bill.—Passage over the Veto.—Its Provisions.—Admission of Tennessee.—Mr. Johnson signs the Resolution, but protests.—The Memphis Riot.—The New Orleans Massacre.—Mr. Johnson responsible for them.—General Sheridan’s Account of it.—The Philadelphia Convention.—Its Tears.—It proves a Failure.—Mr. Johnson weeps.—Mr. Johnson’s Speeches.—Reply to the Philadelphia Committee.—“Congress hanging on the Verge of the Government.”—“Swinging round the Circle.”—Disgraceful Conduct of Mr. Johnson.—Billingsgate in his Speeches.—Wearisome Platitudes.—The Effect they had on the Elections of 1866.

The hopes expressed by the writer in the preceding chapter were not destined to realize a speedy fruition. The uncertainties arising from the somewhat sudden change in President Johnson’s policy, and the hesitancy manifested by Congress in the adoption of a fixed policy of reconstruction, were already, when that chapter was written, beginning to bear their legitimate fruit. The Southern whites who had participated actively or passively in the Rebellion, and who, when the war closed, were ready to submit without murmuring to such terms as the conquering party saw fit to prescribe, had already begun to put on the airs of equals or superiors, and to dictate the terms on which they would come back into the Union. They scouted the idea that negroes had any rights which whites were bound to respect, or that they themselves had by their rebellion forfeited any rights or powers which they had formerly enjoyed. In short, they insisted upon the _statu quo ante bellum_ as their rightful position. While maintaining that it was their right and privilege to honor the graves and memories of the rebel leaders and soldiers who had fallen during the war, and to glorify the living generals and other officers, who had fought for what they fondly called the Lost Cause, they were intolerant of any honors being paid to the Union dead in the South, or any mention of living Union generals, unless accompanied with some scurrilous epithet. A Southern man or woman who had been loyal to the Union during the war, was an object of bitterest hate. If colored, he was shot down, hung, or beaten to death at the first opportunity, and there were always enough “lewd fellows of the baser sort,” ready for this work. If a white man, his cattle were killed, his horses stolen, his poultry carried off, his barns were burned, and jokes, about their being struck by lightning on a clear night, were whispered; his crops were destroyed, and he was warned to leave the neighborhood. These were common occurrences in the country. In the towns, it was not quite so bad, except when the mob element was roused to activity, because the number of loyal Union men there was larger, and they were able to protect each other, to some extent.

In some sections this bitterness toward Union men was much more intense than in others. In the interior of Louisiana, in Texas, in Southern Alabama, in considerable sections of Mississippi, in Southern Georgia, and along the coast in the vicinity of Charleston, S. C., and in the neighborhood of Richmond, Petersburg, and Norfolk, Virginia, it was specially rife. West Tennessee too had its full share of it, and Kentucky was the most rebellious State in or out of the Union.

It should be remarked, too, that this bitterness did not pervade all classes, even among those who had formerly participated in the Rebellion. The men who had fought most bravely for the South were, very generally, disposed to accept reasonable terms from the victors. They had fought well, but they had been whipped, and there was nothing left but submission, and the endeavor to restore to the South its lost prosperity. In this view of the case, Lieutenant-Generals Longstreet and Johnston, and Major-Generals Forrest, Jeff. Thompson, and many others, coincided; and they, as well as some thousands of the former rebel soldiers, went to work manfully to aid in reconstruction on a fair and liberal basis.

The most noisy and violent of the supporters of the “Lost Cause,” as they styled themselves, were men and women who had taken no active part, except with their tongues, in the Rebellion, often of Northern birth, but thoroughly southernized in feeling; or, if the men had been connected with the Southern army or navy, they had been depredators on unarmed merchant ships, like Raphael Semmes, J. N. Maffit, or Lieutenant Braine; or bushwhackers, guerrillas, or deserters of the Mosby, Gilmor, and Clanton style; while the women were the imitators and admirers of Belle Boyd, Rosa Greenhow, and Sallie Rochester Ford.

Still this class, making up in noise and bluster for what they lacked in numbers and ability, and possessing a sort of recklessness, dash, and _abandon_, which has always been attractive to the excitable and half-educated people of the South, have succeeding in keeping up an excitement, and an explosive condition of society, very unfavorable to the restoration of quiet, industry, and good order. Whether intentionally or not, the course pursued by President Johnson was admirably calculated to foster just this state of feeling. He commenced his administration by a very great blunder,—the refusal to call an extra session of Congress in the summer of 1865. The emergency was one which demanded the assembling of the national legislature, and the harmonious and wise co-operation of the executive and legislative branches of the government in the restoration of law, order, and quiet, throughout the nation. Nothing save the overweening vanity and conceit of Andrew Johnson led him to neglect this obvious duty, and to assume to himself powers which the constitution had never granted to him.

Beginning with this mistake, let us briefly review his subsequent history so far as it relates to reconstruction, and see how it continued to be “a tragedy of errors.”

In June, 1865, delegates from the South were first admitted to private interviews with the President. On the 17th of June, he issued his proclamation, providing for the restoration of civil government in Georgia and Alabama, in which he excluded negroes from the category of loyal citizens entitled to vote. He soon after proceeded to appoint provisional governors for the Southern States,—an entirely unwarrantable proceeding. The character of these appointments may be seen in a sentiment uttered by Governor Perry, one of the number, soon after his installation. “There is not now in the Southern States,” said he, “any one who feels more bitterly the humiliation and degradation of going back into the Union than I do.” He ingratiated himself in the favor of the President, by assuring the people that the death of Mr. Lincoln was no loss to the South, while he had every hope that the accession of Mr. Johnson, an old slave-holding Democrat, would be an advantage.

In Alabama, under the provisional government established by Mr. Johnson, the Convention prohibited negroes from testifying in the courts. Throughout the South, the unrepentant rebels began at once to make their arrangements for taking part in the government. In November, Governor Perry, of South Carolina, made a public demand, that when Congress met, the clerk of the House should place on the roll the names of representatives from the States lately in rebellion.

When South Carolina hesitated to adopt the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, President Johnson assured the Governor, that the clause giving Congress power to enforce it by appropriate legislation, really limited Congressional control over the negro question. After this preposterous assurance, South Carolina accepted the constitutional amendment.

In August and September, 1865, Democratic conventions indorsed the President’s policy, and Democratic papers (even those which six months before denounced him as a drunken boor, and demanded his resignation) began to praise him. The Republican party were yet unwilling to believe that the man whom they had elected to the Vice-Presidency would so grossly deceive and betray them, and hoped that after the assembling of Congress all differences would disappear.

They found very soon, however, that this hope was vain; for when the Thirty-ninth Congress was organized for business, and the message of the President was read, it was seen that he placed himself in direct opposition to the leaders of the Republican party, and utterly at variance with what he had at first avowed as his own policy. He professed his inability to concede the elective franchise to the freedmen in the South, because he must then of necessity have conceded it also to all colored men in the Northern States. A parity of reasoning would have required him to appoint provisional governors over all the Northern States, because he appointed them in the States lately in rebellion. While Congress was in session, and actually employed in legislating for the restoration of the rebel States, Mr. Johnson removed the Provisional Governor of Alabama, and handed the State government over to the officers elected by the people, thus ignoring the right of Congress to exercise any control over the subject.

In reply to the demand of the Senate for information respecting the condition of the rebel States, the President sent a message professing that they were all in a quiet and peaceful condition, and accompanied it by the reports of Generals Grant and Carl Schurz, which disproved his statements. Mr. Sumner denounced this as an attempt to “whitewash” their actual condition, and he was correct, though at the time severely denounced for the use of that term.

The Freedmen’s Bureau Bill was passed by a large majority of both houses of Congress, about the first of February; but was vetoed by the President on the 19th of February; and on the effort to pass it over the veto, six senators who had voted for it at first, receded and sustained the President’s veto. This was Mr. Johnson’s first and last triumph.

Two days later, on the 22d of February (1866), a day most unpropitious in his subsequent history, Mr. Johnson addressed to a noisy gathering which had assembled to serenade him, a most disgraceful speech, in which he denounced Senator Sumner and Representative Thaddeus Stevens by name, declaring that they were seeking to assassinate him, and indulged in the use of grossly insulting epithets toward other prominent men. This speech, for which his friends apologized, on the plea that he was intoxicated, seriously damaged the President’s cause, while it widened the breach between him and the party to whom he owed his advancement. Henceforward Congress moved cautiously but firmly. Every bill relating to reconstruction was carefully considered and thoroughly matured before its passage, and when the inevitable veto came, each bill was triumphantly passed over it.

The first measure to undergo this ordeal was the CIVIL RIGHTS BILL, passed March 13, 1866; vetoed by the President March 27, 1866; and passed over his veto, by 33 yeas to 15 nays in the Senate; and 122 yeas to 41 nays in the House, April 6–9, 1866.

This bill, the first of the permanent measures of reconstruction on the Congressional plan, provided that all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, should be declared and considered citizens of the United States, and that such citizens of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party had been duly convicted, should have the same right in every State and Territory of the United States to make and enforce contracts; to sue, be parties, and give evidence; to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property; and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens, and be subject to like punishment, pains, and penalties, and to none other, any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.

It further provided for the punishment of all infractions of this act, and for its effectual enforcement, through the district courts of the United States and their officers; and authorized the President, or any persons whom he might empower, to prevent the violation of the act, and if necessary to call the land or naval forces of the United States, or the militia, to aid in preventing such violation.

The next measure of Congress looking toward reconstruction, was the passage and submission to the State legislatures of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States. This amendment passed the Senate June 8, 1866, by a vote of 33 yeas to 11 nays; and the House, June 13, 1866, by 138 yeas to 36 nays. The following is the joint resolution and amendment:—

“Joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

“_Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled_ (two thirds of both Houses concurring), That the following article be proposed to the legislatures of the several States as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which, when ratified by three fourths of said legislatures, shall be valid as part of the Constitution, namely:

ARTICLE 14.

“SECTION 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

“SECTION 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a State, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion or other crime, the basis of representation therein 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.

“SECTION 3. No person shall be a senator or representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two thirds of each house, remove such disability.

“SECTION 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations, and claims shall be held illegal and void.

“SECTION 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

On the 2d of July, 1866, the Senate, and on the 3d of July, the House, passed a second Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, continuing in force the original bill of March 3, 1865, for two years from the passage of this act, and providing more definitely for its administration, and the bestowment of its aid upon the freedmen and loyal refugees (the first bill having been somewhat loose in these particulars). It also prescribed in certain emergencies for the exercise of military protection, and jurisdiction to the freedmen, as the wards of the nation, by the commissioner and his assistants.

This bill Mr. Johnson, after repeated pledges that he would not do so, vetoed, on the 16th of July, 1866, and it was passed over the veto in both houses of Congress the same day: in the House by 103 yeas to 33 nays; and in the Senate by 33 yeas to 12 nays. On the 23d of July, Congress passed the following joint resolution to restore Tennessee to the Union:—

“Whereas, in the year eighteen hundred and sixty-one, the government of the State of Tennessee was seized upon and taken possession of by persons in hostility to the United States, and the inhabitants of said State, in pursuance of an act of Congress, were declared to be in a state of insurrection against the United States; and whereas said State government can only be restored to its former political relations in the Union by the consent of the lawmaking power of the United States; and whereas the people of said State did, on the twenty-second day of February, eighteen hundred and sixty-five, by a large popular vote, adopt and ratify a constitution of government whereby slavery was abolished, and all ordinances and laws of secession, and debts contracted under the same, were declared void; and whereas a State government has been organized under said constitution which has ratified the amendment to the Constitution of the United States abolishing slavery, also the amendment proposed by the Thirty-ninth Congress, and has done other acts proclaiming and denoting loyalty; Therefore,

“_Be it resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled_, That the State of Tennessee is hereby restored to her former proper, practical relations to the Union, and is again entitled to be represented by senators and representatives in Congress.”

This joint resolution passed the Senate, 28 yeas to 4 nays; and the House, 93 yeas to 26 nays. As a joint resolution it did not require the President’s signature to make it valid, but he addressed a message to Congress stating that he had signed it, but protesting against what he professed to regard as its anomalous features. With this act, the reconstruction measures of the first session of the Thirty-ninth Congress concluded. They were a good beginning in the work, but were not, and their authors did not regard them as, a complete system of reconstruction. The work was to be perfected in subsequent sessions.

Occurrences were transpiring, meanwhile, which were destined to have an influence on this subject. In May, 1866, a collision took place between some discharged negro soldiers, and the police of Memphis, Tennessee (which was composed to a large extent of rebel soldiers and officers, and of Irishmen, whose hatred of the negro was intense); and this culminated in a riot which lasted two or three days, and resulted in the murder of twenty-four negroes, the serious wounding of more than one hundred, many of whom subsequently died of their wounds, and the destruction of property to the amount of about $120,000, mostly negro dwellings, churches, and school-houses. On the side of the police one white man was wounded, it was alleged by the negroes, but, as was afterward ascertained, by another policeman. The real question at issue here was, the right of the freedman to the same privileges and immunities as the white. For this atrocious massacre of the nation’s wards, Mr. Johnson had no word of censure. On the 30th of July, at New Orleans, the Constitutional Convention of 1864, being revived and reconvened by Governor Wells, commenced its session at the Mechanics’ Institute, when they were set upon by the police (nine tenths of them unrepentant rebels), under the prompting of Mayor Monroe, the same man who was mayor in 1862, when New Orleans was captured, and Attorney-General Herron, another rebel officer. The police first assaulted a procession of colored men, who were marching to the Institute, and by firing upon them, compelled them to attempt their own defence (though not one in ten had any weapons). The police murdered a number, and drove the rest before them into the Institute, when they commenced an indiscriminate firing upon the members of the Convention, who were unarmed, though they raised at once a white flag. Several of these were killed, and others mortally wounded, among the number, Rev. J. W. Horton, who had acted as chaplain of the Convention, and Dr. A. P. Dostie, a prominent Union man. In all, 27 were killed outright, and over eighty wounded, many of them mortally. Of the policemen, and their abettors, forty-two were either killed or wounded. General Sheridan, the commander of the Fifth Military District, was at this time absent in Texas, having been assured beforehand by Monroe and Herron that there would be no disturbance and no violence. General Baird, who was in command at the time, seemed irresolute, and did not attempt any movement until too late to do any good. General Sheridan, on his return, examined into the affair, and on the 2d of August reported to General Grant, that “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 police of the city perpetrated without the shadow of a necessity; furthermore, I believe it was premeditated, and every indication points to this. I recommend the removing of this bad man.”

Monroe and Herron, and their party, insisted that they had the sanction of the President in all their conduct; and the telegraphic despatches of the President to Herron, and to General Baird; his permitting, if he did not direct, the garbling of Sheridan’s despatches; his attempted justification of Monroe and Herron, and his effort to throw the blame on Congress, at St. Louis, and subsequently on Secretary Stanton, gave good reason to believe their statement true.

The attempt to revive this defunct convention may have been injudicious; some of the men who took part in it, especially Governor Wells and R. Cutler King, may have been bad men—demagogues; but it was an honest effort on the part of the great majority of the delegates (whether wise or not) to reorganize the State on a loyal basis, and in accordance with the Congressional plan of reconstruction; and this was sufficient to arouse Mr. Johnson’s hostility to it.

The next act in the drama was the Philadelphia Convention, called, by those who summoned it, the National Union Convention, which met in that city, August 14, 1866, responsive to a call signed by Messrs. A. W. Randall, J. R. Doolittle, O. H. Browning, Edgar Cowan, Charles Knapp, and Samuel Fowler; as Executive Committee of the National Union Club, and indorsed by Senators Norton, Nesmith, Dixon, and Hendricks. The object of this convention was to rally to the support of the President a considerable portion (a majority it was hoped) of both parties upon a so-called conservative platform, which should be sufficiently comprehensive to accommodate the Semi-Republicans, the War-Democrats, Peace-Democrats, and the half-repentant Rebels. General J. A. Dix was chosen temporary, and Senator Doolittle, permanent President of the Convention, and Mr. Henry J. Raymond, of the “New York Times,” was made Chairman of the Committee on Resolutions.

At the opening of the Convention, General Couch, of Massachusetts, a former corps commander in the Army of the Potomac, and Ex-Governor Orr, of South Carolina, came in arm-in-arm, “at which scene,” said the reporters, “every eye was suffused with tears.” The Convention, however, proved a failure. The elements were too discordant to mingle readily; and though Mr. Raymond proposed a very plausible and neatly worded address and series of resolutions, and Messrs. Doolittle, Cowan, and others, spoke very eloquently in favor of harmony and union on the President’s policy, the influence of the affair on the nation was positively nothing, and the prime movers in it, who had been Republicans, found themselves read out of their own party, and not received cordially by the other.

Mr. Johnson had for some months been receiving delegations of all sorts of men, and expressing his opinions on political questions with great freedom, though not always with consistency or coherence. On receiving a committee from the Philadelphia Convention, who, through their chairman, Hon. Reverdy Johnson, presented their proceedings, he made one of his characteristic speeches, full of references to himself, his feelings and emotions, his weeping at the touching scene in the Convention, and allusions to “the humble individual who was then addressing them,” and spoke of Congress in these words: “We have seen hanging upon the verge of the government, as it were, a body called, or which assumes to be, the Congress of the United States, while in fact it is a Congress of only a part of the States. We have seen this Congress pretend to be for the Union, when its every step and act tended to perpetuate disunion, and make a disruption of the States inevitable. Instead of promoting reconciliation and harmony, its legislation has partaken of the character of penalties, retaliation, and revenge. This has been the course and the policy of one portion of your government.”

Such unwarrantable charges against a coördinate department of the government, were not only in bad taste, but tended to bring the two into speedy collision; and it was due rather to the great patience and forbearance of Congress, than to any circumspection on the part of Mr. Johnson, that a revolution was not precipitated.

Then came that journey to Chicago, professedly to lay the corner-stone of the monument to the late Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, but really intended as a political canvass in behalf of what Mr. Johnson called his “policy.” This disgraceful expedition, aptly termed, from one of his own pet expressions, “swinging round the circle,” was to every loyal American the most humiliating exhibition ever made by any public man in this country.

Leaving Washington on the 28th of August, he proceeded northward, accompanied by Secretaries Seward and Welles, Postmaster-General Randall, General Grant, Admiral Farragut, and others, a part of whom, however, left the party some time before it reached its destination. At every point of his progress, which was by way of Philadelphia, New York, Albany, the New York Central and Lake Shore roads to Chicago, and thence to St. Louis, Louisville, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati, he seized upon the opportunity to make a speech, and in many places was speedily involved in a wordy wrangle with the crowd, in which he invariably became angry, and exhibited a proficiency in the use of Billingsgate that might have done credit to a fishwoman, but was simply shameful in the chief magistrate of the United States. We cannot consent to defile our pages with specimens of the venom and abuse, which sometimes was almost blasphemous in its character, with which his twenty or thirty speeches during this tour were so freely interlarded. They are too fresh in the minds of the people, and have formed recently one of the counts in the indictment with which a long-suffering people have visited this public offender.

Yet the abusive portions of these speeches were the only parts of them which were readable. The dreary platitudes about “the humble individual who now addresses you,” the ineffable conceit which on every occasion rehearsed the fact that “he had filled every station from alderman of a small country village to his present exalted station,” the gravity with which he stated at every railway station that he “left the Constitution of the United States, and the flag with thirty-six stars in their hands,” became at last so intolerably wearisome, that nobody could wade through the mass of dullness.

The elections of the autumn of 1866, which immediately succeeded this tour, proved most conclusively the growing disgust of the people for-the man who occupied the presidential chair. The Thirty-ninth Congress had been strongly Republican; the Fortieth was overwhelmingly so; and wherever Johnson had addressed the public, there the Republican majorities were unprecedented. The reconstruction measures which Congress had adopted, were sanctioned by the people, and others of a more decided character completing the work, were urged upon them.

Footnote 24:

This and the following chapters are furnished by the author of _Woman’s Work in the Civil War_, _History of the Civil War_, _Men of Our Day_, etc.