This Great Struggle (60 page)

In the aftermath of the Lincoln assassination, however, it appeared that Johnson would get along very well with the most powerful political faction in town, the Radical Republicans. He talked tough about punishing traitors, and leading members of the Radical faction expressed the belief that now that Johnson was in charge, there would be no difficulty about Reconstruction, none of the tension between president and Congress that had shown up in the dispute over the Wade-Davis Bill. They were in for a surprise.

During the seven months between his taking the oath of office as president in April and Congress’s convening for its next session in December, Johnson took several key steps in the Reconstruction process. He issued a proclamation offering amnesty to former Confederates who would take the oath of allegiance. The offer was good for any Rebel except those in certain specified classes, including Confederate civil officials, high-ranking army and navy officers, and those owning more than twenty thousand dollars of taxable property. He also recognized the four state governments Lincoln had established in former Confederate states before the end of the war. Johnson went on and set up similar governments in the remaining seven states of the former Confederacy, stipulating that the new governments must accept emancipation, nullify secession, and repudiate the debts their states had incurred during the rebellion. He also encouraged the restored southern state governments to extend the vote to literate blacks. This was very close to Lincoln’s final announced Reconstruction policy except that it left out the vote for former black soldiers.

As it turned out, the finer points of Johnson’s position on black suffrage were irrelevant since every one of the new state governments ignored his recommendation to extend the vote to at least some blacks. Some southerners cited the
Dred Scott
decision as proof that blacks were not citizens. It was almost as if the preceding decade with its more than half a million war deaths had never happened. No former Confederate state enfranchised a single black man, and some states even declined to repudiate their wartime debts. Rather than reacting as Lincoln always had with increased firmness and severity in the face of defiant white southerners, Johnson tamely acquiesced.

As the summer wore on, Radicals criticized Johnson’s actions, while white southerners flattered him. Gradually Johnson slid more and more into sympathy with the former Rebels. In August he allowed the provisional governor of Mississippi to set up a state militia composed of former Confederate soldiers, and he rebuked two U.S. Army generals stationed in Mississippi who objected to the governor’s ominous move. Meanwhile former Confederates who were members of the special classes excluded from Johnson’s previous pardon flocked to the White House in droves seeking from the president the special, individual pardons that would restore them to full political privileges. Johnson swelled with pride to see members of the southern aristocracy finally treating him with deference, and he granted pardon after pardon—an average of five hundred a day during the month of September. In all, Johnson granted 90 percent of the fifteen thousand or so pardon requests he received.

Meanwhile the amazing political recovery of the recent Rebels was having a direct effect on the former slaves, who were often called freedmen. Congress, on March 3, 1865, had passed a bill for the establishment of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, usually known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Under the leadership of its commissioner, General Oliver O. Howard, the bureau strove to help the former slaves make the transition to freedom. During the tumultuous final days of the war and the early months of peace, the bureau provided emergency food, housing, and medical care to displaced freedmen as well as to white refugees.

Increasingly thereafter, its chief task was helping the freedmen find gainful employment. At first, there were high hopes that this might be accomplished by settling the former slaves as landowning farmers on small parcels carved from the abandoned (during the war) plantations of many of their former owners who had been active Rebels. Johnson quickly put a stop to that and saw to it that the pardoned Rebels got their land back. Next, the Freedmen’s Bureau tried to help the former slaves get fair work contracts to farm on the lands of their former masters, with mixed success. Old attitudes died hard, and many of the former slaveholders tried as much as possible to treat the blacks as if they were still in bondage. The political resurgence of the former Rebels made the task of the Freedmen’s Bureau more difficult.

Keeping the blacks in a subordinate role was the chief purpose of special “black codes” passed by the newly restored legislatures of the former Confederate states. Before the war, every slave state had had, as part of its laws, a slave code, containing the laws that enabled, supported, and protected slavery. Now that slavery was gone, a number of the former Confederate states replaced their slave codes with black codes that provided a separate—and lower—legal status for blacks, a sort of legal netherworld between slavery and freedom. The Freedmen’s Bureau, together with the army occupation forces in the South, suspended the operation of the more onerous portions of the slave codes.

The southern states were by no means alone in an unwillingness to accord legal equality to blacks. That year three northern states—Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—had rejected referenda that would have given the vote to blacks in those states. However, the passage of a specific black code went farther than a mere denial of the vote. It was more blatant, and it smacked of an attempt to continue many of the features of slavery. The southern black codes, combined with a rising tide of violence against blacks and Unionists in the South, helped convince many congressional Republicans that the former Confederate states were rejecting the outcome of the war.

CONGRESS ASSERTS ITS AUTHORITY

In December 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment, banning slavery throughout the United States, received the needed ratification by three-fourths of the states and went into effect. The amendment supported and broadened the impact of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and removed any possibility that the proclamation might be challenged in the courts. Slavery, which had been at the heart of the sectional crisis and the rebellion, was at last dead. It remained to be seen, however, how effective the rebellious states would be in setting aside the result of the war by creating for the blacks a legal status that, if it was not quite slavery, was nevertheless well short of freedom.

When Congress convened in that same December 1865, the Republicans, who controlled both houses, refused to seat the representatives and senators from the former Confederate states. They believed these states were still, in effect, in rebellion though not openly in arms because they were continuing to reject the outcome of the war. To remedy the situation, Congress passed two bills. One broadened the powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau to protect blacks in the South, and the other was aimed at extending civil rights to the blacks, canceling the legal legacy of the
Dred Scott
decision and according blacks citizenship and the “full benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property as is enjoyed by white citizens.” The bill stopped short of requiring states to allow blacks to vote or to sit on juries or of forbidding segregation.

Johnson vetoed both bills. Some of the arguments he put forward in his veto messages would have been sound in ordinary times of peace but ignored the fact that the nation was still in the process of restoring peace and stability after a massive civil war or of working out the war’s chief effect of ending slavery. Regarding the Freedmen’s Bureau Johnson pointed out that the Constitution made no provision for a “system for the support of indigent persons.” He objected to the civil rights bill for infringing on the rights of the states. Both bills, he maintained, were unacceptable because when they were passed, “there was no Senator or Representative in Congress from the eleven States which are to be mainly affected by [their] provisions.” This last argument begged the question of whether the state governments he had set up without congressional authorization were actually legitimate. It also negated any possibility of enforcing the outcome of the war in the southern states.

The vetoes alone would have been enough to incur the wrath not only of the Radical Republicans but of the former moderates as well, virtually uniting the majority party in opposition to Johnson. But the president went farther. In shrill and intemperate speeches Johnson denounced the party that had elected him to the vice presidency as a band of traitors and likened himself to Christ and the Republicans to Judas, plotting his death. This sort of overheated rhetoric had always played well for him on the stump in backwoods Tennessee, but it shocked the nation when coming from the White House. Johnson fell far short of Lincoln’s political skills either in dealing with potential political opponents or in explaining his views to the American people and persuading them to support him. Lincoln would no doubt have needed every bit of his skill to navigate the difficult political waters of Reconstruction. Johnson was lost at sea.

Congressional Republicans, now much closer to unity between Radicals and moderates, overrode both vetoes in the spring and summer of 1866. During that time the congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction hammered out the provisions of another constitutional amendment, the Fourteenth. Meant to address most of the outstanding issues of Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment became a grab bag of different provisions. Section 1, aimed at securing black civil rights on a solid constitutional basis, was at once the most sweeping and the most succinct:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2 was intended to prevent white southerners from experiencing an increase in the congressional overrepresentation they had already enjoyed as a result of the Three-Fifths Compromise. Under that compromise, though no southern state allowed slaves to vote, three-fifths of slave numbers counted toward a state’s representation in Congress. Now that the slaves were free, their whole number would count toward representation of the states in which they lived, but they still could not vote. Whites in slave states were thus over-represented in Congress relative to people living in other parts of the country, and emancipation ironically threatened to make the problem worse. To remedy this, the Fourteenth Amendment reduced the congressional representation of any state in proportion to any segment of its adult male population to which it denied the vote.

Section 3 banned from civil or military office anyone who had previously taken an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States but then had participated in a rebellion. This meant that men who had held civil or military office in the United States before the war but then had supported the Confederacy could not subsequently return to such office in the United States after the war. Its provisions disqualified most of the congressional delegations that Johnson’s hastily reconstructed states had sent to Washington. The section further provided that Congress could make exceptions to the rule but only by a two-thirds vote of both houses.

Section 4 of the amendment guaranteed repayment of the U.S. national debt but forbade repayment of any state debt contracted in support of the rebellion or of any compensation for the loss of alleged property in slaves.

The first section of the amendment has been the subject of much litigation over the past century and a half, much of it unrelated to the purposes for which the amendment was passed. The earnest members of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, as well as those who subsequently passed and ratified the amendment, would have been amazed if they could have seen the interpretations the Supreme Court would make of their words in the twentieth century, but then so would the original framers of the Constitution.

Both houses of Congress passed the amendment by the necessary two-thirds majorities, and it went to the states for ratification.

With the election of 1866 approaching, Johnson and the Republicans campaigned vigorously against each other. Johnson made a whistle-stop campaign speaking tour from Washington to Chicago to St. Louis and back. His behavior was unpresidential, as he traded insults with hecklers and suggested that abolitionists ought to be hanged. Most voters were unimpressed. Johnson’s cause was further discredited by a race riot in New Orleans in July in which former Confederate soldiers attacked a convention that had met to advocate black suffrage. The rioters killed thirty-seven of the blacks and three white supporters of black civil rights. Disturbed by this indication of continued rebellion in the South as well as the president’s repulsive statements, the voters gave Republicans a landslide victory and a three-to-one ascendancy in both houses of Congress.

With the election over, Congress passed a Military Reconstruction Act, providing for military occupation and administration of the still-rebellious states of the South. The act provided that any state could be readmitted to the Union and its representatives admitted to Congress as soon as it ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and adopted a state constitution banning slavery. Johnson vetoed the act, and both houses of Congress overrode his veto the same day.

That day, March 2, 1867, was a busy day in Congress. Both houses also passed, once again over a presidential veto, two additional acts. One was the Tenure of Office Act, stipulating that the president could not dismiss a cabinet member without the consent of the Senate. Congress wanted to make sure that Johnson did not fire Secretary of War Stanton, who supported its policies. The second act was an army appropriations bill containing a rider stipulating that all of Johnson’s orders to the army had to go through the general of the army, Grant, and further requiring that Johnson could not fire Grant without the Senate’s approval. Like many other Americans, Grant had been deeply disturbed by the previous summer’s race riot in New Orleans and by Johnson’s stubborn refusal to recognize the continued rebellion in the former Confederate states. He would see to it that Johnson did not issue orders to the army that would nullify the Military Reconstruction Act. Three weeks later Congress passed a second Military Reconstruction Act, directing the army to begin registering voters, including former slaves, in the occupied states, setting in motion the process of adopting the new constitutions that would restore those states to their proper function within the Union.