A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (77 page)

Left-wing historians often leap to make the land issue solely about race. Two other important considerations, however, guided Johnson as he came to his amnesty (sans confiscation) decision. First, simply put, there were more whites than blacks in the South. At minimum, there were two potential white troublemakers for every disgruntled black. In meting out justice, however unfair, sheer numbers are always a calculation. Second, whites were voters (or in the South, potential voters) whereas blacks were not (at least, realistically, not in large numbers unless escorted by troops). No policy could survive long if Southern whites and those Northerners who feared black social equality formed a political alliance to oust Johnson and the Radicals, even if somehow they formed an unlikely united front. These were not minor considerations. To accuse Johnson of abandoning the Negro, though in essence true, nevertheless obscures the political realities confronting him. Moreover, Johnson’s own preferences were to elevate poor whites, not create black competitors for them.

The Freedman’s Bureau provided a qualified answer to the third Reconstruction question. The South, in an extremely limited way, could be made to comply with some of the Northern Reconstruction agenda through clear direction and, above all, heavy application of force. But in the broadest sense of racial harmony, genuine political equality, and diffuse economic growth, Reconstruction could not change either human nature or historical prejudices. At any rate, the conflict between Johnson and Howard spotlighted the last Reconstruction question: who would direct Reconstruction for the remainder of its life, the legislative or the executive branch?

A War on Four Fronts

Congress, disenchanted with Johnson’s slow pace, had already started to gain control of the direction of Reconstruction. Four concurrent conflicts took place from late 1865 to 1876, and each had the potential to dramatically reshape American life.

The first battle pitted Congress against the presidency for policy dominance. Laments about Lincoln’s untimely death obscure the fact that had the great man lived, it would have made little difference to Radicals in Congress who, although they may have despised the Tennessee tailor, were hardly cowed by Lincoln. A second clash involved Northerners seeking to cement their commercial and political superiority over the South into a permanent hierarchy. Third, the Republican Party intended to emasculate—if not destroy—the opposition Democratic Party. And fourth, a tension between whites and blacks over social, political, and economic equality had only started to play out in both sections, but mostly below the Mason-Dixon Line.

In this last dimension, the Radicals had, for the most part, been open and straightforward in their goals. They had argued for abolition from the beginning of the war, and they were, “if anything, somewhat
less
opportunistic in their purposes and a little
more
candid in their public utterances than the average American politician.”
⁴⁷
George W. Julian of Indiana, for example, lectured fellow Republicans, saying, “The real trouble is that
we hate the negro.
It is not his ignorance that offends us, but his color…. [Let] one rule be adopted for white and black [alike].”
⁴⁸
Other Radicals warned Northerners that the rights of black and white laborers were synonymous, and, above all, they maintained a fever pitch of moral frenzy begun during the war. “
Absolute right
must prevail,” said a Chicago Radical, while editor E. L. Godkin predicted that accepting the doctrine that the United States was subject to only “white man’s government” would make the name of American democracy a “hissing and a byword” among the people of the earth.
⁴⁹
Sentiments such as these refute the notion that the egalitarianism of Radical Reconstruction was merely a facade for Northern economic dominance.

As the new Congress considered Johnson’s Reconstruction program, it became increasingly clear to Radicals that although blacks in the South could not vote, they nevertheless counted 100 percent (instead of 60 percent) toward representation in the House, giving the Southern Democrats even
more
seats in the House of Representatives than they had had before the war. As this incredible reality sank in, the Republican-dominated Congress reacted by refusing to seat the representatives of any of the Southern governments. “I am not very anxious,” wrote Thaddeus Stevens in a moment of great candor, “to see [Southern] votes cast along with others to control the next election.”
⁵⁰
This played a crucial role in the shaping of the subsequent Fourteenth Amendment, in which the Radicals proportionately reduced representation in the House to any state denying voting rights to the freedmen.

Johnson and his Northern Democratic allies, along with the leaders of the reconstructed (neo-Confederate) governments, accepted at the outset that blacks were incapable of exercising citizenship rights. The chasm “between the two races in physical, mental, and moral characteristics,” Johnson wrote in his third annual message to Congress, “will prevent an amalgamation or fusion of them together in one homogeneous mass.” Blacks were “inferior,” and if they gained political power, it would result in “tyranny such as this continent has never yet witnessed.”
⁵¹
In February 1866, Johnson won his last victory over Congress when he vetoed an extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau on the grounds that until the eleven Southern states were restored to the Union, Congress had no authority to pass such legislation. Congress sustained his veto, but the Radicals stepped up their campaign against him. Sumner described Johnson as an “insolent, drunken brute,” and Stevens called him “an alien enemy of a foreign state.”
⁵²
Here was Johnson, who seldom drank, and whose loyalty to the Union was such that he was the only senator from a secessionist state to stay in office during the war, accused of drunkenness and treason.

Arrayed against Johnson and his dwindling alliance, the Radicals saw their influence grow. Thaddeus Stevens best expressed their position when he rejected the notion held by Southerners that the government of the United States was a “white man’s government.” “This is man’s Government; the Government of all men alike,” he countered.
⁵³
He therefore advocated full political equality, though not social equality, calling it a “matter of taste” as to whether people shared their seats at their dinner table with blacks.

Between the Radicals on one side and the former Confederates on the other stood the so-called moderates. Moderates hated the black codes and wanted Republican dominance of the South, but they rejected full political equality for blacks. They agreed with the Radicals, though, that something had to be done about the laws passed by the restored—yet still rebellious—governments in the South, and together the two groups passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, defining blacks as U.S. citizens and promising them “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens.”
⁵⁴
This law made it a federal crime to deprive someone of his civil rights and, in conjunction with a new Freedmen’s Bureau law, established army tribunals to enforce civil rights cases.

Johnson promptly vetoed the bill, citing a number of objections. He disliked the absence of a period of “adjustment” to citizenship that normally occurred with alien immigrants. Social discrimination in areas such as interracial marriage, he thought, also was necessary. His main concerns, though, were over upsetting the balance of power between states and the federal government. Johnson argued that the Civil Rights Act violated the Tenth Amendment. Congress narrowly passed the Civil Rights Act over his veto, thanks to the illness of one pro-Johnson voter who stayed home and the defection of a New York Democrat.
⁵⁵
Aside from Gideon Welles, all of Johnson’s own cabinet opposed him.

It was increasingly clear that Andrew Johnson would not support any law that in any way significantly improved the status of African Americans. During the debate over the Fourteenth Amendment, Johnson’s views would become even more transparent.

Aware that Southerners would immediately bring a court challenge to the Civil Rights Act, Republican legislators moved to make it permanent through the Fourteenth Amendment, stating, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.” This made citizenship
national
rather than subject to state authority, marking a sea change in the understanding of the source of rights in the United States. No state could “abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” or “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Nor could any state “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Subsequently, all state legislation regarding infringements on the Bill of Rights would be subjected to federal review. It was a sweeping accomplishment in defining the rights of all American citizens as equal. Some, however, were more equal than others: while granting citizenship to the freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment simultaneously denied citizenship to high Confederate officeholders.

Meanwhile, from March to June 1866, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction held its hearings, substantially biased against the South. Calling seventy-seven Northerners living in the South, fifty-seven Southerners, and a handful of freedmen, the committee listened to hours of critical testimony, quickly dismissing hostile witnesses. Northern newspapers carried the testimony, which convinced Northern voters of Southern mistreatment of blacks. When the committee delivered its report, it convinced most objective observers that despite the lopsided way in which the committee gathered evidence, serious abuses of the freedmen continued. Worse, the committee concluded that a “state of rebellion” still existed in the South, and recommended Confederate states be denied representation in the Congress. With this report, Congress reasserted its authority over that of the executive to direct Reconstruction. Johnson remained set in his objections that no ratification process for the Fourteenth Amendment could occur until the Southern states were reinstated. He encouraged the Southern governments to reject the amendment, which they did: only Tennessee ratified it. Otherwise, the South held out for the midterm 1866 elections, which it hoped would oust the hated Radicals.

Johnson’s response to the Fourteenth Amendment, combined with a maladroit campaign tour in late August, helped swing the election further to the Radicals. His obstinacy confirmed his Southern loyalties in the minds of many Northerners, and late summer race riots in New Orleans and Memphis seemed to expose the the failure of the president’s program. In the fall campaign Radicals linked support of the reconstructed governments to the treason of the hated wartime Copperheads. Voters agreed, and sent a two-thirds Republican majority to each house, with more Radicals than ever filling their number. Congress had finally gained ascendancy over Reconstruction policy.

With Johnson essentially neutered, Congress proceeded to act on the joint committee’s recommendations by passing the Military Reconstruction Act. Under this law governments formed under presidential Reconstruction were swept away as illegitimate, and instead, the South was divided into five military districts, each commanded by a loyal Republican general. Johnson vetoed the act of March 2, 1867, and Congress overrode his veto. Under the First Reconstruction Act (its very title implying that Johnson had not presided over any legitimate reconstruction), Southern states now had to hold new constitutional conventions. Instead of the 10 percent rule that guided the earlier conventions, these new conventions were to be selected by universal manhood suffrage. Readmission to the Union required that the new state constitutions recognize the Fourteenth Amendment and guarantee blacks the right to vote. Congress would sit as the sole judge of whether a state had complied.

The military commanders, à la the Fourteenth Amendment, prohibited high Confederate officeholders from voting or holding office, and had authority to determine what constituted a legal election. The process ensured that more blacks voted and fewer whites did. Commanders registered voters in large numbers—703,000 blacks and 627,000 whites—and in five states blacks were the majority of all voters. Military tribunals investigated a person’s loyalty, and some estimates suggest as many as half a million whites were disqualified.

Thus emerged the hated triumvirate of scalawags, carpetbaggers, and black Republicans to put the Radical Southern governments in power. Scalawags, or Southerners who chose to ally with the Republicans, acted out of a variety of motivations. (The term “scalawag” was a folk expression for “mean, lousy cattle.”) Many scalawags were prewar Whigs never comfortable within the Democratic Party. Some, such as Confederate General James Longstreet, saw the Republicans as the only hope for Southerners to regain control of their states. Others included Joe Brown, the governor of Georgia (who switched parties only temporarily for financial gain), and the “Grey Ghost,” Virginia Colonel John Singleton Mosby. The term “carpetbaggers” referred to Northerners who came south to impose their views on Dixie. They traveled with their suitcases, or carpetbags, and were scorned by Southerners as do-gooders. Some, if not most, were well-intentioned teachers, missionaries, doctors, and administrators who all flocked to the South to assist both freedmen and the devastated white communities. But more than a few were arrogant and impulsive, caring little for the traditions they crushed or the delicate social tensions that remained. The third leg of the Reconstruction tripod, the black Republicans, were also hated by all but a few progressive Southerners. At best, Southerners saw free blacks as pawns of the Republicans and at worst, a threat to their social order.