Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (91 page)

In the November elections, the Republicans crushed Johnson’s moderate and Democratic friends, and, taking no hint from his “swing round the circle,” voters
gave the Radicals a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress—43 to 9 in the Senate, 173 to 53 in the House. Johnson had now lost control not only of his public image but also of his administration. Even Tennessee, to Johnson’s embarrassment, gave up on Johnson and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment as part of a deal that would guarantee the readmission of Tennessee’s representatives and senators to Congress on Congress’s terms. “We have fought the battle and won it,” crowed Parson Brownlow, who was now Tennessee’s Republican governor and the deadly political enemy of Andrew Johnson. “Give my respects to the dead dog in the White House.”
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The results of the congressional in 1866 were an open invitation to the Radicals, with Thaddeus Stevens the dominant Radical of the House and Ben Wade the new president pro tem of the Senate, to take up the reins of Reconstruction from Johnson’s faltering hands and substitute a congressional Reconstruction plan. They moved first on January 22, 1867, by passing a bill that called the newly elected 40th Congress to order on March 4, 1867, immediately after the close of the 39th Congress, rather than the following December, so as to give Johnson no opportunities for mischief during a congressional recess. With that foundation securely under foot, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction turned to the scaffolding of congressional Reconstruction, and on March 2, 1867, Congress enacted the first of three major Reconstruction Acts. Declaring that “no legal State governments or adequate protection for life or property now exists in the rebel states,” the First Reconstruction Act consolidated most of the old Confederacy into five “military districts”: Virginia would constitute the first, the Carolinas the second, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida the third, Mississippi and Arkansas the fourth, and Texas and Louisiana the fifth. Each district would be supervised by an army general appointed by the president, and other army officers and Freedmen’s Bureau agents would act as adjuncts to the civilian administrations in properly registering voters.
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Despite such martial appearances, the “military districts” really did employ most of the civilian procedures associated with organizing territories. Civil governments would exist, but the army would have overall supervision of the civil process and fine-tune the operation of civil government until the state regimes began to look like what Congress wanted. When “the people of any one of said rebel States”—which included all adult males of “whatever race, color, or previous condition,” but not
former Confederate civil officials or military officers—were willing to write a new state constitution embracing the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, Congress would recognize a Southern state and admit its civil representatives as members of Congress rather than mere “delegates.”

President Johnson, of course, vetoed the First Reconstruction Act. The Radicals anticipated this, and Congress overrode the veto without hesitation. In fact, they anticipated more than just a veto. On the same day that Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act, a rider was attached to a military appropriations bill to limit Johnson’s ability to make military appointments and issue orders to military commanders, and to force the president to pass all of his orders through the general in chief (which in this case was Grant). This would ensure, as much as possible, that the new district commanders would see themselves as answerable more to Grant and Congress than to the president. And to make sure that Johnson would not try to circumvent the operation of the Reconstruction Act through his use of civilian patronage appointments, Congress added the Tenure of Office Act in March 1867. The new statute prevented the president from unilaterally removing civilian government job holders until the Senate approved a successor for that office, a step designed to further clip Johnson’s presidential wings. (If the Senate was in recess, the president would be allowed only to “suspend” an officeholder until the Senate reconvened.) Johnson vetoed the act; Congress overrode the veto.
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The third stone in the new edifice of Reconstruction was the Second Reconstruction Act, passed on March 23, 1867, which established the procedures for registering eligible white and black voters—and excluding any Southern participants “in any rebellion or civil war against the United States.” Johnson vetoed this one, too; Congress just as easily overrode the veto. “We must establish the doctrine of National Jurisdiction over all the States in State matters of the Franchise,” warned Thaddeus Stevens, “or we shall finally be ruined.”
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Andrew Johnson’s presidency was by this point so impotent that simply getting rid of him seemed worth considering, especially since Ben Wade, as the president pro tem of the Senate, would be his constitutional successor. Discussions among the Radicals about impeaching Johnson and removing him from the presidency had flickered as early as his veto of the civil rights bill in 1866 (Hannibal Hamlin, whom Johnson had supplanted as vice president in 1864, took up the impeach-Johnson cry that fall, asking, “Did we fight down the rebellion to give the South more power?”). But not until January 1867, when it was clear that the incoming Congress would
give them almost unstoppable momentum, did the Republican caucus in the House begin seriously considering such a move.
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Once considered, however, action quickly followed: on January 7 (the same day as the Senate overrode Johnson’s veto of a bill to extend voting rights to blacks in the District of Columbia), James Ashley, the Radical Ohio representative who had been the floor manager for the Thirteenth Amendment, moved for Johnson’s impeachment on the grounds that he had “corruptly used” the presidential pardoning, veto, and appointment powers. That effort died in the House Judiciary Committee, which found no specific evidence it could use as the basis for impeachment proceedings beyond Johnson’s political truculence. When the 40th Congress began work in March, Ashley tried again, hoping that a new Judiciary Committee would be more favorable to impeaching a conspirator who “came into the presidency by the door of assassination” and who might even have been complicit “in the assassination plot.” But the new committee had no more desire to challenge the president than its predecessor had, and in June the impeachment proposal was dropped again, by a 5–4 vote.
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Emboldened by these failures, Johnson struggled to regain the initiative—and undercut the Reconstruction Acts—by denying military commanders in the five districts the power to invalidate fraudulent registration and voting procedures. This, in effect, liberated Southern civil authorities to create fanciful voting requirements that would invariably disqualify black voters. This was so transparent a maneuver that even some of the military district commandants balked, and when Philip Sheridan, the commander for Texas and Louisiana, ignored an opinion criticizing military intervention in voter registration from Johnson’s compliant attorney general, Henry Stanbery, Johnson dismissed Sheridan on July 31, 1867. This cost Johnson the patience of Ulysses S. Grant, who had regarded Sheridan as a protégé, and who in his role as general in chief advised military commanders that Stanbery’s opinion had neither “language or manner entitling it to the force of an order.” Sheridan’s dismissal set off a new flurry of impeachment demands, this time from Thaddeus Stevens and the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. But once again, no one in Congress could produce any hard evidence that Johnson had broken a law.
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On the other hand, the dismissal of Sheridan was not nearly enough of a victory to sustain the longer reach of Johnson’s counterattack. In July 1867, the Radicals passed a Third Reconstruction Act that transferred all powers of “suspension, removal, appointment, and detail” of the Southern military district commanders into the hands of “the General of the army of the United States.” This was a military counterpart to the Tenure of Office Act, and it made clear that the district military commanders (such as Sheridan) would have all the power they needed to oversee voter registration and “ascertain, upon such facts or information as they can obtain, whether such person is entitled to be registered under said act,” without presidential meddling.
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If Grant was now to inherit most of the military powers that Johnson thought properly belonged to himself, Johnson was determined to control Grant, and to that end he proposed evicting the current secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, and installing Grant in his place. Grant’s reaction was evasive, and with good reason, since Stanton was a friend of the Radicals and such a move would bring Johnson into collision with the Tenure of Office Act. But Johnson had decided that by now he had nothing to lose; besides, the Tenure of Office Act did permit him the power to make, and unmake, appointments during a congressional recess. On August 5, just days after Congress adjourned for its 1867 summer recess, Johnson tartly informed Stanton that “public considerations of a high character constrain me to say that your resignation as Secretary of War will be accepted.” Stanton (who had been secretly warned by Grant of Johnson’s plans) just as tartly refused: “Public considerations of a high character, which alone have induced me to continue at the head of this Department, constrain me
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to resign the office of Secretary of War before the next meeting of Congress.” This Johnson classified as “not merely a disinclination of compliance with the request for his resignation; it was a defiance, and something more.”
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On August 12 Johnson announced that Stanton was now “suspended” and Grant would function as the interim secretary of war. There matters hung until December, while Johnson hoped that the situation could be diverted into the courts, where he could rely on the Supreme Court to rule the Tenure of Office Act unconstitutional. But Congress moved first, and on January 13 the Senate refused to approve Stanton’s removal from office and ordered him back to his post. Grant, who prudently declined an order from Johnson to defy the Senate, obligingly vacated the War Department the next day, allowing Stanton to move back in and barricade himself in his old
chamber. Johnson frantically began casting around for a more willing replacement for Stanton, considering George McClellan, William Sherman, and even a War Department clerk by turns. He finally prevailed on Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to take the job, and on February 21 Johnson officially dismissed Stanton from office.
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The uproar in Congress over this fresh assault on its authority was immediate, and two days later the House voted to impeach Johnson by a landslide vote of 126 to 47. On March 5 the Senate convened itself as a court to begin hearing the testimony that would lead to Johnson’s conviction. The trial itself turned out to be a wearisome affair—Johnson refused to appear personally and carried out his defense through his lawyers, and most of the arguments turned on the constitutional niceties of the Tenure of Office Act and other congressional legislation. Nearly all of the spectators who daily crowded the Senate galleries knew that the decision would be settled by politics rather than evidence. When the Senate at last voted on Johnson’s guilt on May 16, 1868, a critical group of moderate Republicans headed by William Pitt Fessenden pulled shy of condemning the president, and Johnson was saved from conviction by a single vote.
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The victory, however, proved an empty one for Andrew Johnson. Two weeks later, the Republican National Convention met in Chicago and nominated Ulysses S. Grant as the Republican candidate for president. Johnson tried to stimulate some interest among his former Democratic friends about getting the Democratic nomination, but the Democrats wanted no more to do with Johnson than did the Republicans. Instead they nominated Horatio Seymour, the wartime governor of New York who had egged on the draft rioters in 1863. Grant won handily, and the South was made safe for Reconstruction.

The sound and the fury in Washington was only one part of the Reconstruction struggle. An equally critical part was being played out in the South, where the congressional Reconstruction governments were already stripping away whatever they could of the economic and political order of the old Confederacy. Much of the new political leadership of Reconstruction came from white Southern Unionists and from Northern activists and soldiers who had settled in the South after the war. For almost a century after Reconstruction, the conventional view of these Northern reconstructors portrayed them as political vultures, a pack of opportunists and adventurers who hurriedly packed their belongings into cheap carpetbags for the trip South (hence the name “carpetbaggers”) and proceeded to pick the bones of the defeated South
clean, while Southern white Unionists were dismissed as “scalawags” who betrayed the South in return for the corrupt spoils of Reconstruction government.

But the carpetbaggers were a much more diverse lot than the stereotype allowed: some, such as the Gideonites at Port Royal, South Carolina, were idealists and educators who wanted to improve the lives of the freedpeople and turn them into productive models of small-scale Republican farmers; some, such as Lincoln’s secretary John Hay, saw economic opportunities in the South, and for $500 bought a Florida orange grove that was soon producing an annual crop worth more than $2,500; others, like the New Yorker and general George Eliphaz Spencer, were simply following a pattern already established by prewar Northern investors, buying up Southern cotton and brokering its sale to a cotton-starved Europe for a whopping annual profit of $40,000; and still others, such as Captain John Emory Bryant of the 8th Maine, joined the Freedmen’s Bureau and moved from there into Georgia politics as one of the founders of the infant Georgia Republican Party.
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