Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (41 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
As president after Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson favored Lincoln’s moderate approach to what he called “restoration,” which would readmit states after they had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, which had been passed in December 1865. But Johnson would butt heads with the Radical Republicans, who not only wanted retribution but wanted to maintain the control of Congress they had enjoyed during the war years, when Democrats, mostly southerners, were missing from Congress.
As the southern states gradually returned to the fold, they antagonized northerners by returning to Congress the leadership of the Confederacy, and by passing so-called Black Codes, meant to control former slaves. Obviously designed to circumvent the Thirteenth Amendment, the codes outraged the Republicans, who formed a Committee of Reconstruction that soon heard tales of violence and cruelty toward freed slaves. Congress established a Freedmen’s Bureau aimed at helping the approximately four million freed slaves, and then passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared blacks citizens and denied states the power to restrict their rights. Johnson vetoed the bill, but the Republicans had the votes to override the veto, for the first time in American history. Johnson was left weaker than ever. This override was a symbol of strength, giving Congress the upper hand in the power struggle that followed the war and leading to passage of a series of Reconstruction Acts.
The first of these acts divided the South into military regions under the control of generals. Unlike Lincoln’s proposed plan, statehood could only be attained by adopting a state constitution allowing blacks to vote, and by accepting the Fourteenth Amendment, which extended citizenship to blacks and provided for punishment of any state that denied the vote to any of its adult male citizens. (This still fell shy of barring race as a voting qualification, and women and Indians were still left on the outside looking in.)
Who celebrates Decoration Day and Juneteenth?
On May 1, 1865, a northern abolitionist named James Redpath, who had come to Charleston, South Carolina, to organize schools for freed slaves, led black children to a cemetery for Union soldiers killed in the fighting nearby to scatter flowers on their graves. According to legend, southern women had begun to do the same thing to the graves of fallen Confederate soldiers. This was the beginning of the tradition of Decoration Day, as it was known, a ceremony to honor the fallen of the war. Several towns wanted to lay claim to what would become known as Memorial Day, and Waterloo, New York, was granted the official distinction by Congress for its ceremony on May 5, 1866.
In 1866, Congress created national military cemeteries, foremost of them in Arlington, on the land confiscated from the family of Robert E. Lee. In 1866, the tradition gained new importance when General John Logan founded the Grand Army of the Republic, a powerful veterans’ organization. Logan ordered all GAR posts to decorate graves on May 30. By 1873, New York had made Memorial Day a legal holiday, and every northern state soon followed suit.
But the bitterness of the war carried over even into these solemn ceremonies. In the early days of these ceremonies, the division between North and South remained stark. In the South, women formed Ladies Memorial Associations with the purpose of disinterring soldiers in distant graves and reburying them nearer their homes. Their efforts led to Confederate Memorial Days, which varied in date from April to late May throughout the South. By the 1890s, the United Daughters of the Confederacy had taken over the task. In Arlington Cemetery in 1869, guards were placed around a handful of Confederate graves to prevent them from being decorated. Southern states kept separate memorial days, considering May 30 a “Yankee” holiday. And in 1876, a bill making the date a national holiday was defeated. (By the early twentieth century, as most veterans of the Civil War were dead, the tradition was fading. But following the two world wars, veterans’ groups successfully lobbied for a national holiday on May 30 to honor the dead in all America’s wars. In 1968, Memorial Day was made one of five “Monday” holidays, and many people simply think of it as the first official weekend of the summer vacation season now.)
At around the same time that Decoration Day ceremonies were flowering with much official support, another more grassroots tradition was taking hold. But it has yet to achieve national recognition. On June 19, 1865, Union general Gordon Granger informed slaves in the area from the Gulf of Mexico to Galveston, Texas, that they were free. Lincoln had officially issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, but it had taken two more years of Union victories to end the war and for this news to reach slaves in remote sections of the country. According to folk traditions, many of the newly freed slaves celebrated the news with ecstasy. Many of them began to travel to other states in search of family members who had been separated from them by slave sales.
That spontaneous celebration—commonly called Juneteenth—has become an unofficial holiday celebrating emancipation in many parts of the United States.
Why was President Johnson impeached?
As the first president to take office after an assassination, Johnson encountered his next unfortunate first when he became the first president to be impeached. Under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, “the President, Vice-President, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
What were Johnson’s “high crimes and misdemeanors”? Ostensibly the issue was a law that Congress called the Tenure of Office Act, which prohibited the president from dismissing any official who had been appointed with Senate consent without first obtaining Senate approval. Challenging the law’s constitutionality, Johnson tried to dismiss War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton, an ally of the Radical Republicans. The House promptly impeached him.
The equivalent of a grand jury indictment, Johnson’s impeachment meant he would be tried before the Republican-controlled Senate, with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding. Under the guise of constitutional law, this was a blatant partisan attempt by Congress to fundamentally alter the system of checks and balances. And it came remarkably close to success. On May 16, 1868, the Senate voted 35–19 in favor of conviction, but that fell one vote short of the two-thirds needed for removal of the president.
Four days later, Ulysses S. Grant was nominated by the Republicans to run for the presidency. To face the hero of the war, the Democrats chose Horatio Seymour of New York instead of the incumbent Johnson. For the remainder of his administration, Johnson was politically crippled, and the Republican Congress pressed forward with its more aggressive Reconstruction plan strengthened.
After unsuccessful tries for the Senate and House, Johnson returned to the Senate in 1875, the only former president to serve in the Senate. He survived a cholera epidemic but was never completely well again. He suffered a series of strokes and died in office a few months later. A champion of religious freedom who resented the practice of selling church pews to the wealthy, he had a Masonic funeral and was buried wrapped in an American flag with a copy of the Constitution beneath his head.
The era of Reconstruction would prove to be a very mixed bag. Northern philanthropists opened or revitalized what would become the leading colleges of the South. More significantly, Reconstruction produced the first—albeit limited—black political power in the nation’s history. Indeed, Ulysses Grant’s margin in the popular ballot was based on the large black vote that turned out in his favor. Republican legislators who saw the full impact of the black vote rushed to provide for black suffrage with the Fifteenth Amendment, which would bar race as a condition for voting. The simple idea that blacks had any political power just a few years after they were released from slavery and declared citizens was an extraordinary achievement, if not a revolutionary one.
The underside of this achievement was the corruption of power the period produced, and the backlash it created among whites. Largely uneducated and illiterate, the newly freed blacks were ill prepared for the intricacies of constitutional government. They were ripe for exploitation by whites, some of whom came from the North and were called carpetbaggers because they traveled with all their possessions carried in a carpetbag, a type of soft luggage made of carpet material.
The traditional view has been that these carpetbaggers were charlatans who wanted to acquire power by using black votes to gain office. One such northerner was George Spencer, who made money with contraband cotton and later served in the Senate. Yet the historian Eric Foner dismisses the myth of the carpetbagger in his massive study of the period,
Reconstruction
. Rather than low-class manipulators, Foner demonstrates that many of those northerners who moved to the South were middle-class professionals who saw the South as a means for personal advancement and opportunity, just as others went west after the war. Of the so-called carpetbaggers, argues Foner, quite a few were idealists who had moved south before blacks got the vote.
Another maligned class was the “scalawag,” the southern-born white Republican, even more hated than carpetbaggers by southern Democrats, because they were seen as traitors to both race and region. Again, Foner says, the traditional view of the scalawags as corrupt profiteers exploiting illiterate blacks reflects more postwar antagonism than political reality.
Reconstruction, in the strict political sense of the word, had little to do with the physical rebuilding of the South. Emancipation had undone slavery, which had been the keystone of the southern economy. Now that four million slaves were free, what exactly were they free to do? Senator Thad Stevens, one of the Radical Republicans, proposed breaking up the largest plantations in the South and providing slaves with “forty acres and a mule.” But even the most progressive thinkers of the day still believed property was sacred, and the plan went nowhere. Confusion reigned as many freedmen moved to the towns, looking for work that didn’t exist. The Southern Homestead Act of 1867, which was supposed to open up public lands in the South to blacks and whites loyal to the Union, failed because the poor didn’t have even the small amount needed to buy the land. Instead, most of the land went to big speculators, lumber companies, and large plantation owners.
A gap between intent and reality quickly arose, and the sharecropping system was developed to fill that gap. It was essentially slavery under a new face. Now free blacks worked the land as tenant farmers, splitting the crop with the owner, who also provided the seed and supplies at a price he set, payable in crops. Somehow the sharecroppers never seemed to earn enough to pay off their debts to the landowners.
Another problem was capital. With the end of the war, the West again beckoned to expansionists, and northern banks were sending money west to be spent on building railroads. Without hard cash to finance rebuilding, it was difficult for the South to sustain the growth it needed. Some manufacturing centers slowly came to life, especially around the coal-rich region of Birmingham, Alabama, where steel mills grew, but their development was insignificant compared with the outburst of industrial and railroad growth in the North and West. The fact that Republicans controlled the politics and the banks created a deep distrust and hatred of Republicanism that sent white southerners scrambling for the Democratic Party. By 1877, most southern governments were back in conservative, white, Democratic hands. Those hands kept the South Democratic until Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were able to tap the region’s underlying conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s.
An even more fearful outgrowth of the white backlash to Reconstruction came about as antagonized whites of the South, bitter over their losses, looked for new means of acquiring power. To a large class of white southerners, the idea of blacks in politics, and even controlling southern state legislatures, was simply unacceptable. The need to combat black political power gave rise to secret paramilitary societies dedicated to maintaining white supremacy. Some had names like the Knights of the White Camellia and the Pale Faces, but the most notorious, powerful, and ultimately long-lived was the Ku Klux Klan, which first met in Nashville’s Maxwell House in April 1867.
Organized by former commanders, soldiers, and leaders of the Confederacy as well as southern churchmen, and using a combination of mystical talk, claims of being ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers—hence the white sheets—and outright terror tactics, the Klan gained enormous power in the postwar South. Through lynchings, beatings, burnings, and other forms of political terrorism, it successfully intimidated both blacks and “liberal” white Republicans. As Lerone Bennet eloquently puts it in
Before the Mayflower
, “The plan: reduce blacks to political impotence. How? By the boldest and most ruthless political operation in American history. By stealth and murder, by economic intimidation and political assassinations, by the political use of terror, by the braining of the baby in its mother’s arms, the slaying of the husband at his wife’s feet, the raping of the wife before the husband’s eyes. By fear.”
Northern outrage over these injustices quickly faded as the nation busied itself with other concerns, like the spread westward. The reforms of the Reconstruction Acts, whether truly well intentioned or powered purely by political ambition, faded as the nation turned its attention to building an empire in the West and coping with a depression, so often the aftermath of wartime economies, that followed another stock market panic in 1873.
On balance, the era of Reconstruction created some opportunities, but fell far short of the lofty goals of true freedom for blacks in the South, as the near future would so oppressively prove.
