American Experiment (161 page)

The pseudo-drama was robbed even of a final suspenseful scene, for it was widely expected that the President would win a narrow exoneration. Narrow it was, as the Senate, on the critical eleventh article—whether the President was guilty of high misdemeanors as charged—voted 35 for conviction and 19 for acquittal, one vote short of the two-thirds necessary for removal. Not only was the close acquittal predictable, it was probably contrived; and some senators, favoring acquittal but feeling the pressure to convict, voted against the President in the expectation of acquittal. Nor was there much Senate heroism on display, notwithstanding later efforts to glorify the seven Republican senators who voted to uphold Johnson despite intense constituency pressure. Several of the “Republican Seven” were subsequently denied reelection, but others felt that their political positions had been strengthened by their independent stand.

Thus ended a political struggle masquerading as a judicial performance. Were great constitutional stakes involved? “Once set the example of impeaching a President for what, when the excitement of the hour shall have subsided, will be regarded as insufficient cause,” said Senator Trumbull, one of the “Republican Seven,” “and no future President will be safe who happens to differ with a majority of the House and two-thirds of the Senate
on any measure deemed by them important.” Quoting these words, Kenneth Stampp disputed them, on the ground that Johnson’s ouster, if achieved, would more likely have been a curiosity of American political history than a precedent for future action. In later years, following another struggle between President and Congress, the verdict on impeachment might shift again.

At the time, at least, the struggle left unchanged the paramount question of legislative versus executive authority over policy. It left unchanged even the lesser question of the political and moral authority of a President who had been chosen Lincoln’s running mate as a former Democrat and present Unionist—and who had then come into office by chance—against the authority of a Congress that had very recently been elected to office. But there was little further debate about impeachment in 1868 as politicians turned away from it with relief, to more pressing matters of politics and policy. Many, indeed, would soon repent of their actions, but not Johnson. He served out his term as contentious as ever, but taking care not unduly to provoke Congress. He won his way back to the Senate in 1875—appropriately, as a Democrat—gave one major speech in the Senate against his old enemy Grant, and died the same year. He was buried, as he requested, with his head on a copy of the Constitution. It was his personal copy of the Constitution, very much thumbed and worn—very much his Constitution.

Johnson’s near-removal had left Ulysses S. Grant as the most prominent national figure.

For a man who had hardly known politics before the Civil War, who had failed as a farmer and clerk and had been reduced in the late 1850s to peddling wood in the streets and even to pawning his watch, Grant had shown astonishing talents as a Washington politician following the war that had made him a national hero. He had walked the political tightrope both between Johnson and the congressional Republicans and between dutiful subordination to the commander-in-chief and accommodations with the Radicals. In contrast to his garrulous rivals on Capitol Hill, he had made silence into a political weapon, insisting when it suited him that a soldier must not intrude into politics. He had managed to move toward the winning side by keeping his lines into the congressional party, and he seems genuinely to have shifted toward a more militant posture on Reconstruction as the 1868 election neared. Following a rash of endorsements in the party press, the Republicans, meeting-in Chicago, brushed aside such availables as Chase and Wade and chose Grant on the first ballot.

The old tradition that presidential candidates remain mute Grant found
wholly to his liking; he remembered the summer and fall of 1868 as “the most quiet, pleasant time” since the start of the war. He let the Republican party platform speak for him; but on the paramount question of black suffrage that platform spoke with a delicately forked tongue: “the guaranty by Congress of equal suffrage to all loyal men at the South was demanded by every consideration of public safety, of gratitude, and of justice, and must be maintained; while the question of justice in all the loyal States properly belongs to the people of those States.” In short, black suffrage for the South, but not necessarily for the North. The platform did uphold Reconstruction policy on “equal civil and political rights to all” and railed against Johnson for his “treachery” and “usurpation.”

For President the Democrats nominated Horatio Seymour, a former governor of New York long active in national politics, and as his running mate Frank P. Blair, Jr., of Missouri, a former Union general and Republican party organizer who had turned violently against the Radicals. Soon the parties were locked in combat, the Democrats labeling Grant a drunkard, anti-Semite, military bungler, and potential despot, and the Republicans pillorying their foes as madmen and traitors and bigots. Black voting became a key issue as the Democrats taxed their opponents with favoring Negro equality and pursuing a balance-of-power role for blacks in the South. The Democracy (as Democrats called themselves) encountered such hostility in the North that Seymour and Blair offered to step down and be replaced—and leading Democrats seriously considered the idea in the final weeks of the campaign. But it was too late to switch the donkey’s riders.

Grant swept the .electoral college, 214 to 80, winning all the Northern states save for New York, New Jersey, and Oregon. The popular vote was closer: 3 million to 2.7 million, a majority of 52.7 percent for Grant. Although the Democrats achieved a net gain of eleven seats in the House, the Republicans retained their two-thirds supremacy in that chamber. The North remained loyal to the memory of Lincoln. The Republican party, hardly more than a dozen years old, had already developed a remarkably stable vote of about 55 percent above the Mason-Dixon Line. The Southern and Border states, which divided between the two sides, were more checkered and volatile. Overall, the Republicans had clearly established themselves as the majority party, just as an earlier Republican party had done. But that had been a different brand of republicanism.

Some Radicals now were more optimistic than ever. Grant’s election, they felt, provided a supreme and perhaps final opportunity to reconstruct
the South. Now the Republicans had their own men in the White House; they still controlled both houses of Congress; they had established their supremacy over the Supreme Court; they had considerable influence over the federal military and civilian bureaucracy in the South. They still had the power to discipline the Southern states, by admitting them to the Union or expelling them. The Republicans had pushed through the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. They still possessed the ablest, most experienced political leadership in the nation. Stevens had died during the campaign, but Sumner had been handsomely reelected in Massachusetts. “So at last I have conquered; after a life of struggle,” the senator said.

Other Radicals were less sanguine. They knew that far more than Andrew Johnson had thwarted Reconstruction. The national commitment to black equality was weak, the mechanisms of government faulty, and even with the best of intentions and machinery, the connecting line between a decision in Washington and an actual outcome affecting a black family in Virginia or Mississippi was long and fragile. Time and again, voters had opposed black wrongs without favoring black rights. Before the war, they had fought the extension of slavery but not slavery where it existed. During the war, they had come to approve emancipation only after Lincoln issued his proclamation. After the war, in a number of state elections—especially those of 1867—Northerners had shown that they favored black suffrage in the South but not at home.

Spurred by effective leaders, Americans were moving toward racial justice, but the journey was agonizingly slow and meandering. “It took America three-quarters of a century of agitation and four years of war to learn the meaning of the word ‘Liberty,’ ” the
American Freedman
editorialized. “God grant to teach us by easier lessons the meaning of the words ‘equal rights.’ ” How quickly and firmly Americans moved ahead on black rights could turn significantly on continuing moral and political leadership.

The crucial issue after Grant’s election was the right of blacks to vote. Republican leaders in Congress quickly pushed ahead with the Fifteenth Amendment, which declared in its final form that the “right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It was a noble sentiment that had emerged out of a set of highly mixed motives. Democrats charged, with some reason, that the majority party was far less interested in legalizing the freedman’s vote in the South than in winning the black vote in the North. But the Republican leadership, knowing that countless whites in the North opposed black voting there, were responding to the demands of morality as well as practicality. Senator Henry Wilson reminded his colleagues that the “whole struggle in this
country to give equal rights and equal privileges to all citizens of the United States has been an unpopular one; that we have been forced to struggle against passions and prejudices engendered by generations of wrong and oppression.” He estimated that that struggle had cost his party a quarter of a million votes. Another Republican senator, however, contended that in the long run adherence to “equality of rights among men” had been not a source of party weakness but of its strength and power. Most Republicans, the historian Michael Les Benedict has concluded, did not face a hard choice between expediency and morality, “for to a large extent the political fortunes of the Republican party were best served by fulfilling its liberal ideological commitments.”

If political morality in the long run meant political practicality, the Fifteenth Amendment nevertheless bore all the markings of compromise. To gain the two-thirds support constitutionally required in each chamber, the sponsors were compelled to jettison clauses that would have outlawed property qualifications and literacy tests. The amendment provided only that Congress and the states could not deny the vote, rather than requiring them to take positive action to secure black suffrage; nor was there any provision against denial of vote by mobs or other private groups. And of course the amendment did not provide for female voting—and so the National Woman Suffrage Association opposed it.

Still, radicals in and out of Congress were elated when the Fifteenth cleared Congress, elated even more when the measure became part of the Constitution in March 1870, after Republican state parties helped drive it through the required number of legislatures. Some of the old-time abolitionists were euphoric too. Their prestige and influence now at a peak, they basked in the adulation they received in the press, their mail, and the hundreds of appearances they made every year in cities and towns throughout the country. Wendell Phillips was especially impressive on the lecture circuit. “Impracticable? Fanatical?” an Iowa editor wrote after hearing him. “Why, he is one of the most entirely plain, common-sense, practical and practicable men we ever heard.” Henry Raymond’s moderate
New York Times
had to admit that what the radicals
“propose
today may be
law
tomorrow.” To the Democratic New York
World
the radicals were a marching army: “Mr. Weed lags in the rear; Mr. Raymond is only six months behind Mr. Greeley, and Mr. Greeley is only six weeks behind Thad Stevens, and Thad Stevens is only six days behind Wendell Phillips, and Wendell Phillips is not more than six inches from the tail and the shining pitchfork of the master of them all.”

So euphoric were some abolitionists about the Fifteenth Amendment that they saw their task as done. The Fifteenth, resolved the American
Anti-Slavery Society, was the “capstone and completion of our movement; the fulfillment of our pledge to the Negro race; since it secures to them equal political rights with the white race, or, if any single right be still doubtful, places them in such circumstances that they can easily achieve it.” Other radicals were more cautious, even cynical. Lydia Maria Child feared that the Fifteenth might “yet be so evaded, by some contrivance, that the colored population will in reality have no civil rights allowed them.” Phillips converted his
Anti-Slavery Standard
into
The Standard,
dedicated to racial equality, labor reform, temperance, and women’s rights.

The legal right of blacks to vote soon produced a phenomenon in Southern politics—black legislators, judges, superintendents of education, lieutenant governors and other state officials, members of Congress, and even two United States senators. These, however, made up only a fraction of Southern officeholders: in none of the legislatures did blacks hold a majority, except briefly in South Carolina’s lower house. Usually black leaders shared power with “carpetbaggers”—white Northerners who came south and became active in politics as Republicans—and “scalawags”—white Southerners who cooperated with Republicans and blacks. While many black leaders were men of “ability and integrity,” in Kenneth Stampp’s view, the whites and blacks together comprised a mixed lot of the corrupt and the incorruptible, moderate and extreme, opportunistic and principled, competent and ignorant. The quality of state government under such leadership also was mixed, but on the whole probably no worse than that of many state and local governments of the time. The state governments in the South bore unusually heavy burdens, moreover—demoralization and poverty in the wake of a devastating war, the need to build or rebuild public services throughout the region, the corrupting influence of contractors, speculators, and promoters seeking subsidies, grants, contracts, franchises, and land.

Far more important than the reality of black-and-white rule in the South was the perverted image of it refracted through the distorted lenses of Southern eyes. It was not easy for the white leadership to see newly freed men, some of them illiterate, aggressive, and loutish, occupy positions of prestige and power; and it was perhaps inevitable that they would caricature the new rulers to the world. A picture emerged of insolent boors indulging in legislative license, lording it over downtrodden whites, looting the public treasury, bankrupting the state, threatening white traditions, womanhood, and purity. As sober an observer as Lord Bryce, writing almost a generation later, reported that such a “Saturnalia of robbery and jobbery has seldom been seen in any civilized country”; since “the legislatures were reckless and corrupt, the judges for the most part subservient,
the Federal military officers bound to support what purported to be the constitutional authorities of the State, Congress distant and little inclined to listen to the complaints of those whom it distrusted as rebels, greed was unchecked and roguery unabashed.”