Penguin History of the United States of America (65 page)

Official charge to new recruits to the Ku Klux Klan, 1867

On the evening of Good Friday, 1865 (14 April), four years after Fort Sumter fell and barely a week after Appomattox, Lincoln went to the theatre. He had invited Grant to go with him, but the General said that he had to return to the army (his real reason for refusing was that his wife had quarrelled with Mrs Lincoln). The play was a favourite comedy of the time,
Our American Cousin
, so attractive that the bodyguard slipped away from the door of the President’s box to watch it himself. The opportunity was seized by John Wilkes Booth, an indifferent actor and a Southern sympathizer, half-crazed with vanity, who for weeks had been organizing a murderous conspiracy. He entered the box, shot Lincoln through the head and jumped down to the stage. One of the spurs that he was foolishly wearing caught in the decorative bunting, so that he fell in such a way as to break his left leg, but he still had sufficient strength and self-control to yell out
‘
Sic semper tyrannisl
’
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before making his escape through the wings and the stage door of the theatre. At the same time one of his associates attacked Seward, who was at home recuperating in bed from a carriage accident. The Secretary of State suffered serious injuries, but eventually recovered. The President was taken to a little house across the street from the theatre, where he lingered unconscious for some hours. Death came at 7.22 in the morning of 15 April. Stanton, watching at his bedside, set the seal on his passing: ‘Now he belongs to the ages,’ he said.

There was an explosion of grief and rage in the North. Lincoln was given the greatest funeral in the history of the United States. Booth was hunted down and killed while resisting arrest. His fellow-assassins were caught, tried and sentenced – in most cases, to death. Nothing could repair the loss. It was not just that Lincoln was a good and great man. His talents had seldom been needed more. The problems of peace would have perplexed even him; his successor was to make them much worse. With Lincoln died the remote chance of a good peace. Booth condemned the South to generations of squalid backwardness and the races in America to a long, unhappy struggle which is not over yet. Some such outcome might well have occurred even if Lincoln had lived; he never pretended to be a miracle-worker; but his prestige, his wisdom, his political guile, would surely have shortened America’s racial agony or mitigated its intensity.

It took a little time for the full measure of the loss to be realized. Lincoln was succeeded in the White House by Andrew Johnson of Tennessee (1808 – 75), his Vice-President. The Republicans rallied to the new man; some even thought he might prove a stronger President than Lincoln. He had an excellent record: he had been the only Senator from the South to stick to the Union in 1861, and he had governed his native state from 1862 to 1865, gaining good marks for the strict manner in which he tried to purge Tennessee of rebel sympathizers (though close observers might have noticed a needless truculence in his behaviour). Disillusion was slow in coming: the war party was very reluctant to break with its chief, even after his pugnacity and contrariness had been demonstrated again and again, even after they noticed that ‘the faces in the ante-chamber of the President look very much as they would if a Democratic administration were in power’. In the end he precipitated one of the biggest political rows in American history. It is an exciting and not very edifying story; it must be told; but its somewhat superficial dramatics shall not be allowed to obscure the underlying difficulty which had the country in its grip. The North had won a mighty victory. How could it make that victory actual and permanent? How, so to speak, could it cash in its chips? How could it prove, to itself and to the future, that the mighty effort had been worthwhile?

True, the Union had been saved. Never again would the South
contemplate secession or rebellion; even the ancient shibboleths of nullification and states’ rights had lost much of their magic. But the North had long ago persuaded itself that it was fighting for something greater and nobler than even the Union: for democracy; for liberty and equality; for the last, best hope of earth. The multitudinous ghosts of the Union dead insistently demanded that this commitment be honoured; so did the living: all the former soldiers and their families. The opportunity seemed promising, for the South was prostrate and passive, curious, perhaps even hopeful, for a moment, so complete was her defeat and ruin. A Northern visitor reported, ‘In North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, we found this state of feeling universally prevalent. The people wanted civil government and a settlement. They asked no terms, made no conditions. They were defeated and helpless – they submitted. Would the victor be pleased to tell them what was to be done?’ And then, there were the African-Americans – the free Negroes of the North, the freed slaves of the South.

In the last analysis, they were what it was all about. The Union could not have been saved without the help of the blacks. The great experiment in liberty and equality might go forward; but it would have little meaning if the whites alone profited from it. The North had won; but the victory would be hollow if the ex-Confederates renewed their system of racial oppression and, on that foundation, once more challenged the dearest interests and beliefs of their fellow-citizens. Lincoln and the rest had surely not died in vain; but it might seem so if justice was not done to the former bondsmen. And should not the South be disciplined? Was it not a just punishment, as well as prudent, to compel her to abandon her old ways?

Besides, the Negroes demanded it. There were four and a half million of them; they were a force to be reckoned with. It was not only that their leaders, such as Frederick Douglass, were articulate and energetic, nor that they had many powerful white friends among the old abolitionists. The rank and file could justly claim that they had won their freedom through their own efforts, once the opportunity had arrived. Douglass had always believed that ‘once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters,
US;
let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States’. It seemed self-evident to many by 1865. Lincoln had said as much in his last public speech. Now was the time to make good that citizenship throughout the country.

Such was the view of the victorious North. Otherwise, she asked little of the South. The debts incurred by the Confederacy and the individual seceding states must be repudiated, of course, and Jefferson Davis was kept in prison for two years; but he was not hanged, and would have been let out sooner – might never have been imprisoned – but for the murder of Lincoln. Otherwise, it was as if the dignified behaviour of Grant and Lee at Appomattox had infected everybody. Lee himself went home and lived
out his last few years in honourable retirement; the other Confederate leaders were also allowed to go in peace. In short, the South having clearly given up secession as a bad job, fair treatment of the Negro was to be both the sufficient symbol of Northern victory, the generally accepted proof that the right side had actually won, and the single real concession exacted from the losers. And there was room for adjustment even on this point. No one, in the spring of 1865, was quite clear how far to go in conceding equal rights to blacks. The North had a long tradition of racial prejudice, particularly in the matter of employment, which the events of the war had done much to weaken but had certainly not destroyed. In several Northern states, for example, Negroes were still forbidden to vote. The situation was delicate, dangerous and volatile; but it also contained a great opportunity. A statesman of Lincoln’s dexterity might possibly have snatched from it a settlement of the great difficulty which would have been tolerable to North and South, blacks and whites, alike; in which case the whole later history of America would have been wonderfully different. But Andrew Johnson was not a dextrous man.

His personal position was difficult. He had been a Jacksonian Democrat all his life, though his pride in his own unaided rise from illiterate poverty to eminence, and in the beliefs and character which had made it possible, always meant more to him than party principles or identifications. His true party was that of Andrew Johnson, and he had always defended it vigorously (often by attack) against the great planters of Tennessee, both as a champion of the poor whites from whom he came and as a staunch Unionist. Lincoln had chosen him as his Vice-Presidential candidate partly because, as a Democrat from a border state, he might enhance the Union ticket’s appeal in the hard-fought election of 1864. With such a record Johnson, unsurprisingly, did not feel at home with the great men and professionals of the Republican party. Even if he had, he would not have taken their advice. He was an incorrigible loner, slightly less flexible than granite. He took decisions in a hurry and refused to alter them.

In some ways he was like the next American President to face impeachment. Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon were both outsiders in Washington and in party politics; both were egotistical, given to self-pity and to maudlin insistence on their humble origins: Johnson was capable of breaking off an important speech to recall fondly that when he was a tailor the coats he made were always good fits, while Nixon tended to drivel about his poor and saintly mother. There were differences, of course – for one thing, Johnson had a much higher standard of personal political conduct than Nixon – but the essential similarity was that neither understood the principles, loyalties and psychologies of normal American politicians. It was on this ground that Lincoln had been supreme; a party politician to his fingertips, he had always known when to stand firm and when to yield, and how, throughout, to win, retain and increase the trust and affection of the men he dealt with. Johnson and Nixon could only see men who disagreed
with them as personal enemies, and attributed the worst motives to them. Johnson was even capable of hinting in a public speech that Republican leaders such as Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner were plotting to assassinate him.
²
Perhaps the moral is that the American political and constitutional system can stand a lot, but it cannot work if the President is neurotically intransigent, for its operating principle is give and take; compromise and moderation.

Blind to these considerations, President Johnson lost no time in laying down the principles on which he meant to proceed, and he stuck to them unyieldingly thereafter. The disastrous results of his policy never made him doubt its correctness; others were always to blame; and the last words he ever spoke in a public speech were ‘God save the Constitution’ – as if he in his time had not been one of the worst dangers that the Constitution faced. The sacred text, as he understood it, was his lodestar. His exposition of the points at issue in 1865 demonstrated his regional origin, and also how little he understood the significance of the great struggle that had just occurred. Within very broad limits, he said, the Constitution respected states’ rights. Once a rebel state accepted those limits, it had put itself in harmony with the law and the nation again and could not be denied re-admission to Congress. Defeat in war proved that the South was wrong in attempting secession; the Confederate debt was therefore illegal and had to be repudiated; the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery was now a part of the Constitution, which the Southern states must explicitly acknowledge. That done, no more could rightfully be demanded of them; nor might Congress legislate on matters affecting their interests while their Representatives and Senators were absent. In practice this meant that the future of the Southern blacks could not be settled until after the white South had regained most of its old political rights and privileges. Johnson never admitted this in so many words; but his actions all tended in that direction. The fact was that as a poor white Southerner himself his feelings towards blacks were, at best, mixed.

He meant to exclude Congress from any part in the process of reconstruction. In this he was following precedent: Lincoln had always done his utmost to keep control of really important political measures, as when he vetoed the Wade-Davis bill. The Emancipation Proclamation itself had been in part a successful bid to pre-empt Congressional action. To begin with, Johnson had a free hand: the thirty-ninth Congress would not assemble before December 1865 unless the President called it into special session, which he had no intention of doing. Much might be achieved in the interval; the more so as the Republicans still expected that they would be able to work with the President. ‘While we can hardly approve of all the acts of
government we must try to keep out of the ranks of the opposition,’ Thaddeus Stevens, a veteran Republican troublemaker, told Charles Sumner in the summer. Johnson saw a chance to settle the whole question of reconstruction (or ‘restoration’, as he preferred to call it). Accordingly, the ex-rebel states were instructed to elect conventions to draw up new state constitutions, which would next be ratified by the voters and under which elections to Congress could be held in the autumn. Johnson had been disappointed to find that he could not hang Jeff Davis; he had been slow to issue pardons to leading rebels; then suddenly he started issuing pardons by the hundred, more to escape embarrassment, it seemed, than for any other reason. Soon it was plain that, armed with their pardons, former Confederate leaders were re-entering politics in force, and after the autumn elections would completely dominate the new Johnson-inspired Southern state governments.

Even that might not have mattered (though it alarmed many Northerners) had the restored South shown greater discretion. In the event she showed as little understanding of the dam-Yankees as ever. Johnson had let it be understood that he spoke for the North as authoritatively as had his predecessor; and the South was all too willing to believe him. The conventions did as he suggested (he would have regarded it as unconstitutional to give orders to states, even to recently rebellious ones), though very ungraciously: they rescinded the secession ordinances, repudiated the Confederate debts and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. Johnson’s silence on all other questions was a hint not lost on them. They began to settle the Negro question in their own fashion. The moment when they might have acquiesced in Northern plans vanished.