Chapter 4

I was on the point of returning to the West when I received a message from Horace Greeley, the famous editor of the New York _Tribune_, asking me to take charge of the news bureau of that journal in Washington, as its chief correspondent. Although the terms offered by Mr. Greeley were tempting, I was disinclined to accept, because I doubted whether the work would be congenial to me, and because it would keep me in the East. But Mr. Greeley, as well as some of my friends in Congress, persuaded me that, since I had studied the condition of things in the South and could give reliable information concerning it, my presence in Washington might be useful while the Southern question was under debate. This determined me to assent, with the understanding, however, that I should not consider myself bound beyond the pending session of Congress.

Thus I entered the journalistic fraternity. My most agreeable experience consisted in my association with other members of the craft. I found among the correspondents of the press a number of gentlemen of uncommon ability and high principle--genuine gentlemen, who loved truth for its own sake, who heartily detested sham and false pretense, and whose sense of honor was of the finest. This was the rule, to which, as to all rules, there were of course some exceptions; but they were rare. My more or less intimate contact with public men high and low was not so uniformly gratifying. I enjoyed, indeed, the privilege of meeting statesmen of high purpose, of well-stored minds, of unselfish patriotism, and of the courage of their convictions. But disgustingly large was, on the other hand, the number of small, selfish politicians I ran against--men who seemed to know no higher end than the advantage of their party, which involved their own; who were always nervously sniffing for the popular breeze; whose most demonstrative ebullitions of virtue consisted in the most violent denunciations of the opposition; whose moral courage quaked at the appearance of the slightest danger to their own or their party's fortunes; and whose littlenesses exposed them sometimes with involuntary frankness to the newspaper correspondent whom they approached to beg for a "favorable notice" or for the suppression of an unwelcome news item. They were by no means in all instances men of small parts. On the contrary, there were men of marked ability and large acquirements among them. But never until then had I known how great a moral coward a member of Congress may be.

It is probably now as it was then. There were few places in the United States where the public men appearing on the national stage were judged as fairly and accurately as they were in Newspaper Row in Washington.

I remained at the head of the _Tribune_ office in Washington, according to my promise to Mr. Greeley, to the end of the winter season, and then accepted the chief-editorship of the Detroit _Post_, a new journal established at Detroit, Michigan, which was offered to me--I might almost say urged upon me--by Senator Zachariah Chandler. In the meantime I had occasion to witness the beginning of the political war between the executive and the legislative power concerning the reconstruction of the "States lately in rebellion."

_The Beginnings of the Struggle_

I am sure I do not exaggerate when I say that this political war has been one of the most unfortunate events in the history of this Republic, for it made the most important problem of the time, a problem of extraordinary complexity, which required the calmest and most delicate and circumspect treatment, the foot-ball of a personal and party brawl which was in the highest degree apt to inflame the passions and to obscure the judgment of everybody concerned in it. Since my return from the South, the evil effects of Mr. Johnson's conduct in encouraging the reactionary spirit prevalent among the Southern whites had become more and more evident and alarming from day to day. Charles Sumner told me that his personal experience with the President had been very much like mine. When Sumner left Washington in the spring, he had received from Mr. Johnson at repeated intervals the most emphatic assurances that he would do nothing to precipitate the restoration of the "States lately in rebellion" to the full exercise of self-governing functions, and even that he favored the extension of the suffrage to the freedmen. The two men had parted with all the appearance of a perfect friendly understanding. But when the Senator returned to Washington in the late autumn that understanding seemed to have entirely vanished from the President's mind and to have given place to an irritated temper and a certain acerbity of tone in the assertion of the "President's policy."

From various other members of Congress I heard the same story. Mr. Johnson, strikingly unlike Abraham Lincoln, evidently belonged to that unfortunate class of men with whom a difference of opinion on any important matter will at once cause personal ill feeling and a disturbance of friendly intercourse. By many Congressmen Mr. Johnson was regarded as one who had broken faith, and the memory of the disgraceful exhibition of himself in a drunken state at the inauguration ceremonies, which under ordinary circumstances everybody would have been glad to forget, was revived, so as to make him appear as a person of ungentlemanly character. All these things combined to impart to the controversies which followed a flavor of reckless defiance and rancorous bitterness, the outbursts of which were sometimes almost ferocious.

The first gun of the political war between the President and Congress, which was to rage four years, was fired by Thaddeus Stevens in the House of Representatives by the introduction, even before the hearing of the President's Message, of the resolution already mentioned, which substantially proclaimed that the reconstruction of the late rebel States was the business, not of the President alone, but of Congress. This theory, which was constitutionally correct, was readily supported by the Republican majority, and thus the war was declared. Of Republican dissenters who openly took the President's part, there were but few--in the Senate, Doolittle of Wisconsin, Dixon of Connecticut, Norton of Minnesota, Cowan of Pennsylvania, and, for a short period, Morgan of New York, as the personal friend of Mr. Seward. In the House of Representatives, Mr. Raymond of New York, the famous founder of the New York _Times_, acted as the principal Republican champion of the "President's policy."

_Stevens the Dominating Figure of the Struggle_

Thaddeus Stevens was the acknowledged leader of the Republicans in the House. Few historic characters have ever been more differently judged from different points of view. A Southern writer of fiction has painted him as the fiend incarnate; others have spoken of him as a great leader of his time, far-sighted, a man of uncompromising convictions, intellectually honest, of unflinching courage and energy. I had come into personal contact with him in the Presidential campaigns of 1860 and 1864, when he seemed to be pleased with my efforts. I had once heard him make a stump speech which was evidently inspired by intense hatred of slavery, and remarkable for argumentative pith and sarcastic wit. But the impression his personality made upon me was not sympathetic: his face, long and pallid, topped with an ample dark-brown wig which was at the first glance recognized as such; beetling brows overhanging keen eyes of uncertain color which sometimes seemed to scintillate with a sudden gleam; the under lip defiantly protruding; the whole expression usually stern. His figure would have looked stalwart but for a deformed foot which made him bend and limp. His conversation, carried on in a hollow voice devoid of music, easily disclosed a well-informed mind, but also a certain absolutism of opinion, with contemptuous scorn for adverse argument. He belonged to the fierce class of anti-slavery men who were inspired by humane sympathy with the slave and righteous abhorrence of slavery, but also by hatred of the slaveholder. What he himself seemed to enjoy most in his talk was his sardonic humor, which he made play upon men and things like lurid freaks of lightning. He shot out such sallies with a fearfully serious mien, or at least he accompanied them with a grim smile which was not at all like Abraham Lincoln's hearty laugh at his own jests.

Thus Mr. Stevens' discourse was apt to make him appear a hardened cynic, inaccessible to the finer feelings, and indifferent whether he gave pain or pleasure. But now and then a remark escaped him--I say "escaped him," because he evidently preferred to wear the acrid tendencies of his character on the outside--which indicated that there was behind his cynicism a rich fund of human kindness and sympathy. And this was strongly confirmed by his neighbors at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, his home, where on one of my campaigning tours I once spent a day and a night. With them, even with many of his political opponents, "old Thad," as they called him, appeared to be eminently popular. They had no end of stories to tell about the protection he had given to fugitive slaves, sometimes at much risk and sacrifice to himself, and of the many benefactions he had bestowed with a lavish hand upon the widows and orphans and other persons in need, and of his generous fidelity to his friends. They did not, indeed, revere him as a model of virtue, but of the occasional lapses of his bachelor life from correct moral standards, which seemed to be well known and freely talked about, they spoke with affectionate lenity of judgment.

When I saw him again in Washington at the opening of the Thirty-ninth Congress, in December, 1865, he looked very much aged since our last meeting, and infirm in health. In repose his face was like a death-mask, and he was carried in a chair to his seat in the House by two stalwart young negroes. There is good authority for the story that once when they had set him down, he said to them, with his grim humor: "Thank you, my good fellows. What shall I do when you are dead and gone?" But his eyes glowed from under his bushy brows with the old keen sparkle, and his mind was as alert as ever. It may be that his age--he was then seventy-four--and his physical infirmities, admonishing him that at best he would have only a few years more to live, served to inspire him with an impatient craving and a fierce determination to make the best of his time, and thus to intensify the activity of his mental energies. To compass the abolition of slavery had been the passion of his life. He had hailed the Civil War as the great opportunity. He had never been quite satisfied with Lincoln, whose policy seemed to him too dilatory. He demanded quick, sharp, and decisive blows.

Now that the abolition of slavery was actually decreed, he saw President Johnson follow a policy which, in his view, threatened to undo the great work. His scornful anger at Andrew Johnson was equaled only by his contempt for the Republicans who sided with the President. He was bound to defeat this reactionary attempt and to see slavery thoroughly killed beyond the possibility of resurrection, at any cost. As to the means to be employed, he scrupled little. He wanted the largest possible Republican majority in Congress, and to this end he would have expelled any number of Democrats from their seats, by hook or crook. When my old friend and quondam law partner, General Halbert E. Paine, who was chairman of the Committee on Elections in the House, told him that, in a certain contested election case to be voted upon, both contestants were rascals, Stevens simply asked: "Well, which is _our_ rascal?" He said this, not in jest, but with perfect seriousness. He would have seated Beelzebub in preference to the angel Gabriel, had he believed Beelzebub to be more certain than Gabriel to aid him in beating the President's reconstruction policy. His speeches were short, peremptory, and commanding. He bluntly avowed his purposes, however extreme they seemed to be. He disdained to make them more palatable by any art of persuasion, or to soften the asperity of his attacks by charitable circumlocution. There was no hypocrisy, no cant in his utterances. With inexorable intellectual honesty, he drew all the logical conclusions from his premises. He was a terror in debate. Whenever provoked, he brought his batteries of merciless sarcasm into play with deadly effect. Not seldom, a single sentence sufficed to lay a daring antagonist sprawling on the ground amid the roaring laughter of the House, the luckless victim feeling as if he had heedlessly touched a heavily charged electric wire. No wonder that even the readiest and boldest debaters were cautious in approaching old Thaddeus Stevens too closely, lest something stunning and sudden happen to them. Thus the fear he inspired became a distinct element of power in his leadership--not a wholesome element, indeed, at the time of a great problem which required the most circumspect and dispassionate treatment.

_William Pitt Fessenden_

A statesman of a very different stamp was Senator Fessenden of Maine, who, being at the head of the senatorial part of the joint Committee on Reconstruction, presided over that important body. William Pitt Fessenden was a man who might easily have been overlooked in a crowd. There was nothing in his slight figure, his thin face framed in spare gray hair and side whiskers, and his quiet demeanor, to attract particular notice. Neither did his appearance in the Senate Chamber impress one at first sight as that of a great power in that important assembly. I saw him more than once there walk with slow steps up and down in the open space behind the seats, with his hands in his trousers pockets, with seeming listlessness, while another senator was speaking, and then ask to be heard, and, without changing his attitude, make an argument in a calm conversational tone, unmixed with the slightest oratorical flourish, so solid and complete that little more remained to be said on the subject in question. He gave the impression of having at his disposal a rich and perfectly ordered store of thought and knowledge upon which he could draw with perfect ease and assurance. When I was first introduced to him, he appeared to be rather distant in manner than inviting friendly approach. But I was told that ill health had made him unsociable and somewhat morose and testy, and, indeed, there was often the trace of suffering and weariness in his face. It was also remarked in the Senate that at times he was ill-tempered and inclined to indulge in biting sarcasms and to administer unkind lectures to other senators, which in some instances disturbed his personal intercourse with his colleagues. But there was not one of them who did not hold him in the highest esteem as a statesman of commanding ability and of lofty ideals, as a gentleman of truth and conscience, as a great jurist and an eminent constitutional lawyer, as a party man of most honorable principles and methods, and as a patriot of noblest ambition for his country.

Being a man also of conservative instincts, averse to unnecessary conflicts, and always disinclined to go to extremes, in action as well as in language, he was expected to exert a moderating influence in his committee; and this expectation was not disappointed so far as his efforts to prevent a final breach between the President and the Republican majority in Congress were concerned. But regarding the main question whether the "States lately in rebellion" should be fully restored to their self-governing functions and to full participation in the government of the Republic without having given reasonable guaranties for the maintenance of the "legitimate results of the war," he was in point of principle not far apart from Mr. Stevens.

_The President's Logic_

It must be admitted that, if we accept his premises, Mr. Johnson made in point of logic a pretty plausible case. His proposition was that a State, in the view of the Federal Constitution, is indestructible; that an ordinance of secession adopted by its inhabitants, or its political organs, did not take it out of the Union; that by declaring and treating those ordinances of secession as "null and void," of no force, virtually non-existent, the Federal government itself had accepted and sanctioned that theory; that during the rebellion the constitutional rights and functions of those States were merely suspended, and that when the rebellion ceased they were _ipso facto_ restored; that, therefore, the rebellion having actually ceased, those States were at once entitled to their former rights and privileges--that is, to the recognition of their self-elected State governments and to their representation in Congress. Admitting the premises, this was logically correct in the abstract.

But this was one of the cases to which a saying, many years later set afloat by President Cleveland, might properly have been applied: we were confronting a condition, not a theory. The condition was this: Certain States had through their regular political organs declared themselves independent of the Union. They had, for all practical purposes, actually separated themselves from the Union. They had made war upon the Union. That war put those States in a position not foreseen by the Constitution. It imposed upon the government of the Union duties not foreseen by the Constitution; by "military necessity," war necessity, the Union was compelled to emancipate the negroes from slavery and to accept their military services. The war had compelled the government of the Union to levy large loans of money and thus to contract a huge public debt. The government had also, in the course of the war, the aid of the Union men of the South. It had thus assumed solemn obligations for value received or services rendered. It had assumed the duty to protect the emancipated negroes in their freedom, the Southern Union men in their security, and the public creditor from loss. This duty was a duty of honor as well as of policy. The Union could, therefore, not consent, either in point of honor or of sound policy, to the restoration of the late rebel States to the functions of self-government and to full participation in the national government so long as that restoration was reasonably certain to put the freedom of the emancipated slaves, or the security of the Southern Union men, or the rights of the public creditor, into serious jeopardy.

_Lincoln's Policy versus Johnson's_

It was pretended at the time, and it has since been asserted by historians and publicists of high standing, that Mr. Johnson's Reconstruction policy was only a continuation of that of Mr. Lincoln. This was true only in a superficial sense, and not in reality. Mr. Lincoln had, indeed, put forth reconstruction plans which contemplated an early restoration of some of the rebel States; but he had done this while the Civil War was still going on, and for the evident purpose of encouraging loyal movements in those States and of weakening the Confederate State governments there by opposing to them governments organized in the interest of the Union, which could serve as rallying-points to the Union men. So long as the rebellion continued in any form and to any extent, the State governments he contemplated would have been substantially in the control of really loyal men who had been on the side of the Union during the war. Moreover, he always emphatically affirmed, in public as well as private utterance, that no plan of reconstruction he had ever put forth was meant to be "exclusive and inflexible," but might be changed according to different circumstances.

Now circumstances did change; they changed essentially with the collapse of the Confederacy. There was no more organized armed resistance to the national government, to distract which loyal State governments in the South might have been efficacious. But there was an effort of persons lately in rebellion to get possession of the reconstructed Southern State governments for the purpose, in part, of using their power to save or restore as much of the system of slavery as could be saved or restored. The success of these efforts was to be accomplished by the precipitate and unconditional readmission of the late rebel States to all their constitutional functions. This situation had not yet developed when Lincoln was assassinated. He had not contemplated it when he put forth his plans of reconstructing Louisiana and the other States. Had he lived, he would have as ardently wished to stop bloodshed and to reunite all the States as he ever did. But is it to be supposed, for a moment, that, seeing the late master class in the South still under the influence of their old traditional notions and prejudices, and at the same time sorely pressed by the distressing necessities of their situation, intent upon subjecting the freedmen again to a system very much akin to slavery, Lincoln would have consented to abandon those freedmen to the mercies of that master class!

_The Personal Bitterness of the Struggle_

No less striking was the difference of the two policies in what may be called the personal character of the controversies of the time. When the Republican majority in Congress had already declared its unwillingness to accept President Johnson's leadership in the matter of reconstruction, a strong desire was still manifested by many Republican senators and members of the House to prevent a decided and irremediable breach with the President. Some of them were sanguine enough to hope that more or less harmonious cooeperation, or at least a peaceable _modus vivendi_, might still be obtained. Others apprehended that the President's policy, with its plausibilities, might after all find favor with the popular mind, which was naturally tired of strife and excitement, eager for peace and quiet, and that its opponents might appear as reckless disturbers. Still others stood in fear of a rupture in the Republican party, which, among other evil consequences, might prove disastrous to their own political fortunes. Several men of importance, such as Fessenden and Sherman in the Senate and some prominent members of the House, seriously endeavored to pour oil upon the agitated waters by making speeches of a conciliatory tenor. Indeed, if Andrew Johnson had possessed only a little of Abraham Lincoln's sweet temper, generous tolerance, and patient tact in the treatment of opponents, he might at least have prevented the conflict of opinions from degenerating into an angry and vicious personal brawl. But the brawl was Johnson's congenial atmosphere.