American Experiment (158 page)

In the lush green spring of 1865 the Golden Shore seemed to stretch just across the horizon. An intoxicating sense of freedom filled the air. Defeated and despairing Southerners could at least be free of Northern assaults on their homeland and burnings of their cities. Whatever their continued suffering, black people still could hold high hopes for the future. Liberated from military duty and disciplines, soldiers and sailors were returning home by the tens of thousands. Onetime farm boys, having mastered the great engines of war, were drifting back to the simpler tasks and the old rhythms of the arcadian world they had known.

Many Northerners felt free in a more positive sense. They had beaten the enemy on the transcendent moral issue of the time. They could face up to the burdens of freedom not only with enhanced military and economic power, but with a formidable array of leaders. Out of the conflicts of the 1850s and the crucible of war had emerged politicians, generals, agitators, intellectuals, journalists tested by adversity, hardened by experience, committed to making the system work for freedom—a system they now controlled.

In the vanguard of the moral leadership of the nation stood Charles Sumner. After his heavy caning by Preston Brooks and his long, self-imposed exile, the Massachusetts senator had returned to Washington with the somewhat insecure status of minor martyr. But he soon reestablished his moral standing through his burning conviction about the responsibility lying on the Republican party, his absolute commitment to protecting the rights of freed people, and his uncompromisingly radical stand on the central issues. He was fifty-four years old at war’s end, and the mass of nut-brown hair that hung loosely over his massive forehead, shading his deep blue eyes, was turning an iron gray; but he was still a commanding presence in the Senate as he rose to his full six feet two,
broad of chest and a bit heavy of paunch. Many senators loathed the man from Boston for his eternal pomposity, his endless hectoring, his thunderous self-righteousness. Many respected him for his intellectual grasp and political integrity—and for his uncanny capacity for being right several years ahead of others. No one could ignore him.

At the opposite end of the long Capitol building, Thaddeus Stevens led the Radical Republicans in the House of Representatives with the same moral fervor as did Sumner in the Senate. Now seventy-three years old, the Pennsylvanian had climbed to the top after a long career in politics: anti-Mason state representative; two-term Whig member of Congress; an organizer of the Republican party; Republican member of the House of Representatives since 1858; and chairman of Ways and Means, the tax committee. Just as friends of Sumner speculated that the senator’s boyhood inability to meet the demands of an exacting father and unloving mother had left him eternally dissatisfied with his own—and his associates’—endeavors, so people wondered if Stevens’s clubfoot, his early poverty, and his desertion by a jobless and alcoholic father had produced a need both to compensate for a sense of inferiority and to chastise deserters, whether of the Union or of himself. Others had simpler explanations: both men found leadership against slavery morally fulfilling and politically rewarding.

Other congressional leaders were often more effective than Stevens or Sumner in the give-and-take of legislative politics. Benjamin F. Wade, Massachusetts-born and -bred, had moved to Ohio at the age of twenty-one, joined the abolitionist ranks, and after thirty years in politics won his Senate seat in 1851. Now a veteran of the upper chamber, he was still a bit rough in manner and coarse in speech, but politicians liked him for his honesty and affability. Zachariah Chandler of Michigan was another New Englander who had moved west and prospered, in his case as a merchant banker and land speculator. A founder of the Republican party, he seemed to feel no strain between his conservative business interests and his close association with radical Republicanism. One of the ablest leaders of the moderate Republicans was Senator Lyman Trumbull, an old friend and foe of Lincoln in Illinois politics, firmly opposed both to slavery and to a radical reconstruction policy, and a powerful voice on both issues as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. To Trumbull’s right stood Orville H. Browning, the man who had succeeded to Stephen Douglas’s seat—a longtime critic of Lincoln, consistently opposed to abolitionism in the old days and now equally opposed to a strong reconstruction program.

In the House, Stevens had some equally capable associates in such men as George W. Julian of Indiana—successively a Whig, Free-Soiler, and
Republican, but always a firm egalitarian—and William D. Kelley of Philadelphia, a zealous humanitarian who would become an ardent protectionist. Julian was notable among these men for his firm belief in equality between the sexes. These men and the other Republican leaders quarreled with one another and sometimes despised one another but, in Martin Mantell’s words, collectively they “were able to define new basic policy positions that met the needs of rapidly changing times while maintaining the essential unity of their own party organization.” In the forcing house of Reconstruction the Republicans were shaping a party loyalty that would tilt the balance of American politics for decades to come.

The great unknown in the existing balance, in the spring of 1865, was the new President, Andrew Johnson. A Tennesseean who won attention as the only Southern senator to speak out against secession, a slaveholder who boasted that he had never sold slaves but only bought them, the running mate of Lincoln in 1864 but lacking in ties to the Republican party, a believer in both equal rights and states’ rights and hence caught in the tension between them, Johnson had risen to fame outside of the social and political establishments—and he was proud of it. He boasted of his plebeian Carolina origins, though somewhat less of his father, a hotel porter who had died without reward after rescuing two boozing gentlemen from an icy stream. As an impoverished young man, hardly literate, Johnson had moved with his mother and stepfather, their scanty belongings in a two-wheeled cart, to Tennessee, where he had set up as a tailor and moved successfully into politics. Yet his mudsill origins seemed to oppress him, provoking a resentment in particular against the pontificators, like Sumner, who wore their learning on their sleeves. He had had a bad press, especially after he gave a rambling, drunken vice-presidential inaugural speech, in which he had scolded the attending Diplomatic Corps for its “fine feathers and gewgaws.” He had always been, on the national stage, a secondary, even shadowy figure. Now he was President.

What kind of President? On the day after Lincoln’s assassination Wade, Chandler, Julian, and other Radical Republicans met in Washington to reassess the situation and plan strategy. They grieved over the loss of their friend the commander-in-chief, but they seemed to share a sense of relief. Lincoln had brilliantly held the Union together, even while emancipating the slaves, but he had seemed to many Radicals too conservative on the question of postwar Negro rights, too conciliatory toward the South. Johnson appeared to be a different breed: tough, uncompromising, a fiery foe of Southern “aristocrats,” a champion of the small white farmer in the South, a firm and even zealous war governor of Tennessee. Radicals visiting the new man in the White House came away vastly reassured. He
seemed one of them. Even Sumner overrode his usual suspiciousness. Wade was almost euphoric.

“Johnson, we have faith in you,” he greeted the President on one occasion. “By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government!” Responding in kind, Johnson said, “I hold that robbery is a crime; rape is a crime; murder is a crime;
treason
is a crime, and
crime
must be punished.”

Prepared to mobilize behind a firm and comprehensive reconstruction policy was a relatively solid phalanx of Republican radicals and moderates. Often differing over means, they were fundamentally united over ends— to dissolve the old Confederate leadership, to provide national protection for the civil and political rights of freed people, to give the black people a chance to make out on their own. In seeking these goals, Radicals had extensive support among the electorate and powerful support from the intellectual leadership of the day—from thinkers and scholars like Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Lothrop Motley; from editors like Horace Greeley and Whitelaw Reid; from poets like Whittier, Whitman, and Lowell; from theologians and scientists; from leaders of the movement for women’s rights. The Radicals had also the advantage of long reflection over Reconstruction issues. From the start of the war they had been anticipating difficulties, analyzing ways and means, debating political strategies. They had collected extensive information about Southern conditions from newspaper reports, government investigations, military intelligence, the Freedmen’s Bureau, the resources of Northern universities.

The Republican leaders had, it seemed, one other signal advantage in organizing Reconstruction: they could proceed without constitutional constraints to a degree not possible since the founding days. Not only did the Constitution of 1787 authorize and even require the federal government to guarantee basic rights of American citizens, but the Republicans, through their large majorities in Congress and most of the Northern state legislatures, were able to put through constitutional amendments as long as these changes satisfied both moderate and radical Republicans. The Republican Administration and the Republican Congress, in short, possessed an extraordinary battery of military, political (especially party), economic, intellectual, and constitutional resources to make a whole new beginning for democratic republicanism in the South. These advantages were, it is true, offset by grave institutional and intellectual weaknesses. But when Charles Sumner, the political curmudgeon incarnate, could leave the White House beaming over Johnson’s militant posture on Reconstruction, even the most pessimistic could indulge in high hopes for the future.

Within six months these hopes were dimming. Within one year the President and the Republican leadership were at odds. Within three years a President was being impeached, the North was aroused, the South inflamed. Within a decade a great experiment in liberty and equality was coming to an end, the blacks abandoned. By century’s end the freed people were restored to a condition of virtual servitude, Northern blacks were still suffering discrimination, Northern whites had turned away from the quest for equality, Southern whites had won a Pyrrhic victory, the South was still mortgaged to the past, and racism lay like a blight across the land.

What happened in late 1865 and early 1866 to disrupt a Northern leadership apparently united on Reconstruction, and to turn the freed people of the South—and indeed all Southerners—back toward the path leading ultimately to reconstruction of the old racial tragedy? The question has long been debated. Since the first histories are usually written by the victors, the early postwar historians laid the blame largely on Johnson and the men immediately around him, on their alleged ineptness, narrowness, conservatism, vindictiveness, even wickedness. A later generation of historians shifted the blame to the Radical Republicans, accusing them of the same failings, plus extreme fanaticism. Still later, the failure was seen to stem from psychological, economic, institutional, and other complex sources, or even from sheer stupidity—the notion that the politicians of the 1860s happened to comprise a leadership generation of unusual ineptness.

All these factors doubtless had some part to play, for the great wrenching movements of history spring out of a profusion of forces. But the more recent historians, rising above the passions of olden times, have pointed to the psychological and other forces that tend directly to shape the actions of political leadership. The crises of the late 1850s and early 1860s brought to the top leaders of bounding political hopes and expectations and of considerable political skill. Not only had these men learned to operate the machinery of groups and parties, nominations and elections, legislatures and bureaucracies, and to calculate in terms of the arithmetic of nominations and elections; they possessed as well a heightened sense of the geometry of politics—of the new policy that had arisen during the Civil War, of a new nationalized and centralized system that, in Morton Keller’s words, created and allocated power as the economy allocated and created wealth. Even more, they would act openly and boldly on the basis of values and purposes that had been hardened in the fires of civil conflict.

Andrew Johnson possessed more power than any of these men, but less grasp of the strategic factors. In the spring of 1865 he had much the same
political advantage that Lincoln had held four years earlier—he could take the initiative in an unresolved political situation until Congress convened in December. He had an unparalleled political opportunity, if he would but grasp it—to follow a conciliatory mid-course between Radical Republicans and old-time War Democrats, enabling him to “command the center” and isolate his rivals on each flank. Then he could dismantle the old Southern secessionist leadership—men he had long hated—and mobilize a new leadership acting for the people he had always loved, the Southern white yeomanry, at the same time protecting the civil rights of Southern blacks, as he was pledged to do. Ultimately he could reunite South and North on a new basis of popular democracy. “The only safety of the nation,” he said, “lies in a generous and expansive plan of conciliation.”

Perhaps Johnson could have become the “great unifier,” even if this required building a regenerated Union party that would unite moderate Democrats and Republicans, incidentally giving him a presidential term “in his own right” in 1868. It was not clear, though, that he had the comprehensive vision, the political skill of isolating politicians and playing them off against one another, the finesse at political management of his own followers, or the ability to rise above his seething resentments over the slights of “aristocratic” Southerners and of moralizing, condescending Northerners, to bring off such a realignment of parties and leaders.