Capitol Men (6 page)

Johnson appeared to view the war as a kind of sibling rivalry gone bad, and he acted on the belief that retribution and further animosity between the sections would only impede a return to normalcy. Where the Radicals sought to strengthen federal authority, Johnson opposed them, concerned that the states, if stripped of their autonomy, would atrophy and become "mere satellites of an inferior character, revolving around the great central power." The former slaves he considered basically helpless. Docile, inclined to inertia, they would require guidance and restrictions imposed by whites. Southern society would demand this—having long regarded free black people as dangerous, whites understandably were alarmed by the sudden mobility of the former slaves.

The result was the Black Codes, a system of laws enacted first in Mississippi in November 1865, then in various forms across the South, giving whites what amounted to police powers over the freed people. These new controls enforced labor contracts, kept blacks from accepting better-paying work of their own choosing, and allowed authorities to put "vagrants"—anyone without a fixed abode—to work in the fields or on municipal projects such as road building. Orphans could be compelled into apprenticeships or made to work as house servants. These
statutes, "little more than warmed-over slavery," established curfews, prohibited blacks from joining militias, and attempted to govern their private conduct with rules for everything from gun ownership to the use of draft animals.

At first this state of affairs seemed unavoidable. Few people, North or South, imagined that emancipation would entail placing blacks on the same legal plane with whites, and to many observers, the sudden freeing of an unlettered people held so long in bondage looked chaotic, even unsafe. Many Southerners, explained a Northerner living in North Carolina, regarded emancipation as a momentary error, a mistake made in haste, the "temporary triumph of fanaticism over divine truth," which would of necessity be corrected.

Some blacks indeed paid dearly for believing the "delusion" that they were now free. "I met four white men about six miles south of Keachie, De Soto Parish," recalled Henry Adams of Louisiana.

One of them asked me who I belonged to. I told him no one. So him and two others struck me with a stick and told me they were going to kill me and every other Negro who told them that they did not belong to anyone. One of [the whites] who knew me told the others, "Let Henry alone for he is a hard-working nigger and a good nigger." They left me and I then went on ... I have seen over twelve colored men and women, beat, shot and hung between there and Shreveport.

The Black Codes, in the end, were likely more offensive than effective; blacks themselves resisted compliance, and federal officers in the conquered South frequently prevented their enforcement. The codes were, however, an accurate gauge of Southern white sentiment and an early sign of the region's will to defy the results of the war.

In Washington, meanwhile, Republicans had grown concerned during the first eight months of Johnson's presidency as he moved to restore the Confederate states to the Union. He pardoned many rebel leaders, appointed Southern men to positions of authority, and ordered that state constitutional conventions be held; often their delegates consisted of former secessionists. When Congress reconvened in December 1865, Republicans called for the dismantling of Johnson's "reconstructed" Southern states and the creation of new state governments in which freedmen would vote and could be elected as representatives of their people. They turned away from Congress's door those Southern Democratic representatives who had been sent to Washington under Johnson's plan.

The bipartisan Congressional Joint Committee of Fifteen was convened to weigh the challenge of Reconstruction—a term that had emerged toward the end of the war and referred to the imperative of restoring the fractured nation, as well as the numerous measures and conditions that would require. The committee was the idea of, and under the control of, Thaddeus Stevens, and despite its alleged bipartisan character it had only three Democratic members. Much of the extensive testimony it heard from 144 witnesses familiar with conditions in the postwar South—including the nurse Clara Barton and the cavalry officer George Armstrong Custer—confirmed the Radicals' suspicion that the rebel spirit had not really been destroyed. Upon deliberating, the group rejected President Johnson's argument that the Southern states were ready to be readmitted to the Union; but the members also spurned a Radical proposal that the states of the Confederacy, having forfeited their rights to sovereignty, should remain under long-term congressional control. The committee, as the historian David Donald explains, came to favor a proposal made by jurist Richard Henry Dana Jr., the so-called "grasp of war" theory, which suggested that Washington use the present, relatively adaptable circumstances of the war's aftermath to "act swiftly to revive state governments in this region and to restore promptly the constitutional balance between state and federal authority."

In early 1866 the committee recommended the passage of two bills—an extension of the Freedmen's Bureau (officially titled the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands), which Lincoln had brought into existence in March 1865 to offer physical aid to war refugees and help establish equitable labor agreements between blacks and their former masters; and the Civil Rights Bill, which would undo the nefarious Black Codes and counter the much-lamented 1857 Supreme Court decision in
Scott v. Sandford,
better known as the
Dred Scott
case, which had denied that black people, slave or free, had standing as American citizens. The Civil Rights Bill, referring to the "fundamental rights belonging to every man as a free man," stated that all citizens and their property were entitled to equal protection under the law and that blacks were empowered to make their own labor contracts and initiate lawsuits. The president vetoed both bills, prompting the political cartoonist Thomas Nast, an ardent New York Republican of German descent who drew for
Harper's Weekly
, to depict an ornery Andrew Johnson kicking a chest of drawers containing terrified freed people—the Freedmen's "bureau"—down a flight of stairs.

CARTOON SPOOFING PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON'S TREATMENT OF THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU, BY THOMAS NAST

That April, the Civil Rights Bill was passed despite Johnson's refusal to sign it, the first time in American history that Congress overrode a presidential veto. Recognizing that Johnson and his states-rights orientation would be more hindrance than help, Congress moved ahead without him and in June proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, which would guarantee the provisions of the Civil Rights Bill and make the federal government the ultimate protector of equal rights and citizenship. The Fourteenth is considered one of the most revolutionary amendments in our Constitution's history, for it redefined notions of individual rights and the balance of states' rights versus federal authority by making personal liberty and equality
federal
guarantees, while empowering the national government to curtail state actions that deprived citizens of these rights.

If Northerners wondered how well the South would comply with these congressional actions, the answer came swiftly. In May, street fighting broke out in Memphis, the culmination of long-simmering tension between white police officers and black soldiers, who had been interfering with arrests of black citizens there. When the troops fired their pistols into the air to keep police from taking a disorderly black man into custody, the police shot back, setting in motion a two-day assault on a black community swollen with war refugees. The so-called Memphis Race Riot, really a massacre of blacks by infuriated white police officers and mobs, killed nearly fifty black men, women, and children, and two whites, and numerous homes, churches, schools, and businesses were looted or set afire.

Even more potent in its effect on Northern opinion was another "riot" in New Orleans, which occurred at the end of July. This city had long seemed a promising one for advances in race relations and the empowerment of black citizens. President Lincoln had begun to view it as "reconstructable" as early as May 1, 1862, when Union army troops, under General Benjamin Butler, took control of the city after Admiral David Farragut completed a successful assault from the sea. Because a substantial Unionist element resided in New Orleans, the president in December 1863 suggested that a form of local reconstruction be started there, based on his Ten Percent Plan. Under this plan, if 10 percent of the men who had voted in the election of 1860 would take an oath of allegiance to the United States, they would be allowed to form a new state government. Subsequently, a state constitutional convention was planned for 1864 to demonstrate Louisiana's willingess to rejoin the Union.

Before the 1864 conclave, more than a thousand New Orleans blacks, and some whites, had petitioned Lincoln to include suffrage for the
gens de couleur,
the free, light-skinned class of Louisiana Negroes, in the new constitution. When Radicals in Congress heard of the petition, they suggested that the franchise be broadened to include all blacks in Louisiana. Formally, Lincoln refused both proposals, but he wrote privately to Michael Hahn, the Unionist governor, to see if certain classes, such as soldiers or intelligent free blacks, might be allowed the vote. Hahn relayed Lincoln's request to the convention, which agreed to grant the state legislature the power to establish limited black voting; but though two such bills were later introduced, neither gained enough support to become law.

Hahn resigned his position in March 1865 and was succeeded by his lieutenant governor, James Madison Wells, a native-born Louisiana Unionist with marked Southern sympathies, who proceeded to evict many leading Radicals from local patronage jobs and appoint ex-Confederates. This encouraged a formidable Democratic power base to grow rapidly, accompanied by the appearance of reactionary political clubs. When in March 1866 President Johnson allowed a city election to take place in New Orleans against the advice of Governor Wells, the forces of Democratic resistance came to power, led by a new mayor, James T. Monroe, who was known as "an unreconstructed rebel."

Governor Wells and the state's Unionists, as well as black leaders agitated by this development, announced in early summer 1866 their intention to reconvene the state constitutional convention of 1864. They
sought reconvocation to secure the vote for black Louisianians and, the Monroe faction suspected, disenfranchise ex-Confederates, shifts that threatened to dramatically realign the state's political anatomy and destroy the white-patronage network that Southern veterans were eagerly establishing.

Mayor Monroe informed the local federal commander, Major General Absalom Baird, of his intention to arrest the convention delegates when they gathered on July 30 at the Mechanics Institute, the temporary state capitol on Dryades Street. "The laws and ordinances of the city," Monroe wrote, "declare all assemblies calculated to disturb the public peace and tranquility unlawful." Stronger language about Republican "niggers and half niggers" ran in the Democratic press, along with threats to hang the convention movement leaders Dr. Anthony P. Dostie, a New York-born dentist who had moved to New Orleans before the Civil War, and Michael Hahn, the former governor. It was declared that no man would leave the convention alive. General Baird cautioned Monroe that he had no right to disrupt or defy "the universally conceded right of all loyal citizens of the United States to meet peaceably and discuss freely questions concerning their civil governments, a right which is not restricted by the fact that the movement proposed might terminate in a change of existing institutions." But Monroe, not Baird, had the sympathy of President Johnson, who notified Louisiana's attorney general that federal forces would "sustain the civil authority in suppressing all illegal or unlawful assemblies ... Usurpation will not be tolerated."

Much as the national policy on Reconstruction remained fluid and unsettled, so officials in New Orleans were left to fend for themselves, with no one—from General Baird to the city police—exactly sure whose rights were to be defended. Baird was "unwilling to assume the attitude of protecting the assembly unless called on by civil authorities" because such activity would only add to local anti-Unionist sentiment, and his superiors likely would not approve of it. Monroe's actions, on the other hand, seemed aimed at making the situation as combustible as possible.

The opening day of the convention was to focus on preliminaries: ascertaining how many vacancies existed in the body, so elections, where needed, could be held. Outside, a cordon of police surrounded the building. Suddenly, a group of approximately two hundred freedmen appeared, marching up Dryades from Canal Street, tooting horns, thumping a big drum, and waving an American flag in support of the convention. Then, according to some reports, a young white bystander insulted one of the parading blacks, who, in anger, drew a gun; when police waded into the column to arrest him, marchers swarmed the officers to free their compatriot. Turning their hatbands around so that they could not be identified, police officers then followed the marchers into the convention. Conventioneers used pieces of furniture to beat back the police, who tried to ram their way through an inner door that had been closed against them. This scenario was enacted four times, as police assaulted the blacks inside with their clubs and were in turn driven back with chairs and sticks. Adding to this scene of disarray, a mob of whites swept into the building behind the police, shooting and clubbing blacks and white Unionists. Policemen were seen on a landing above the meeting hall, firing down indiscriminately.