Penguin History of the United States of America (66 page)

It was scarcely surprising. Southern bitterness ran deep. Defeat was educative to the extent that it induced Southerners to become Americans again (by the twentieth century they would be among the most noisily patriotic of all groups) and persuaded many of them that the section would have to make a serious effort to industrialize: in this way a ‘New South’ might arise. It would be long before anyone would accept that the whole secessionist adventure might have been morally wrong, socially unwise, politically misconceived. Southern women, particularly, remained ferociously loyal to ‘the Cause’. Mourning and commemoration were to be major preoccupations for several generations to come: soon war-memorials appeared in every important Southern town, usually in the form of a statue of a boy in grey, his heroic young face staring resolutely northwards. The Yankees were not forgiven; their protégés, the freedmen, were not accepted. Slavery was dead, but slavery was what the Africans were meant for, and something as near as possible to slavery was what they were going to get. The South might have been defeated in war, but her resources for racial oppression were by no means exhausted.

This response, which gradually crystallized during the late summer and autumn of 1865, had two principal expressions.

One was violent. Very soon the freedmen and their friends found themselves attacked and threatened; but the climax did not come for a year or two, although the Ku Klux Klan was actually founded at Pulaski, Tennessee, on Christmas Eve, 1865. Even so, the struggle between Congress and President over the future of the South from the start took place against a background of brutal conflict. The low points, no doubt, were the race riots in Memphis at the end of April 1866, when forty-six blacks were killed, and the massacre of 30 July in the same year at New Orleans, when approximately forty people were killed and 160 wounded (mostly blacks) by the police force, acting under the orders of the city’s mayor. (Ten policemen were ‘wounded slightly’.) But every day there were lesser incidents: a man shot, or a woman strung up by her thumbs.

The South’s second weapon was not lawlessness, but the law. No sooner were the Johnsonian legislatures elected than they began to pass the so-called ‘Black Codes’: statutes which, far from conferring on the freedmen the right to vote, denied them all but the most rudimentary civil rights and liberties. Provisions varied somewhat from state to state, but on the whole it is true to say that the codes, while at last recognizing the legality of black marriages (though not to white persons), while conferring on blacks the right to sue and be sued in the courts, even to testify against whites, and the right to hold property, and while recognizing their right to be paid wages, in every other respect tried to maintain the slavery laws. For instance, freedmen were required to hire themselves out by the year, and were denied the right either to strike or to leave their employment. Slavery was thus to become an annually renewed institution. Any black found unemployed or travelling without an employer’s sanction would be arrested, fined for vagrancy and turned over to whatever white employer desired his services. (Immediately after the end of the war the former slaves had exercised one of the unfamiliar privileges of freedom by leaving the plantations in droves, chiefly, no doubt, to seek out relations and friends from whom they had been separated by the internal slave-trade, but also from sheer joy at being able to travel and from curiosity to see the world.) Schooling was one of the most passionately cherished ambitions of the ex-slaves, yet no provisions were made for black education. The Louisiana code went into considerable detail about the free labourer’s life, quite in the style of slavery times:

Bad work shall not be allowed. Failing to obey reasonable orders, neglect of duty, and leaving home without permission will be deemed disobedience; impudence, swearing, or indecent language to or in the presence of the employer, his family, or agent, or quarrelling and fighting with one another, shall be deemed disobedience. For any disobedience a fine of one dollar shall be imposed.

The Mississippi code imposed swingeing fines on anyone wicked enough to entice a labourer away from his contracted employer with promises of better pay or conditions. All codes forbade freedmen the use of weapons
of any kind. So much for the Northern crusade for human equality. As a leading Northern liberal, Carl Schurz, remarked, the codes embodied the idea that although individual whites could no longer have property in individual blacks, ‘the blacks at large belong to the whites at large’.

It is doubtful if the Southerners fully realized what an affront these codes would seem: they were more impressed by the differences from slavery than the freedmen and Northerners could be. Even Andrew Johnson realized that they had gone too far: at any rate he did not object when the military commanders in the South nullified the codes. He would have been wiser to take the lead in opposition, but presumably he felt that the states, however unwise, were acting within their constitutional rights. So he said nothing: it was not for him to interfere. It was left to Congress to express the boiling indignation of the North, which that institution, as soon as it assembled, proceeded to do. It denounced the South and set up a joint committee of the two houses to propose a programme of congressional reconstruction. Crucially, it also provided that until such a programme had been worked out, none of the Southern Representatives and Senators chosen under the Johnson-sanctioned constitutions would be allowed to take their seats; for the legality and desirability of those very constitutions was one of the key matters at issue, and the entry of former rebels into Congress would grievously impede, if not entirely frustrate, the Republican programme. This action was, as a matter of fact, perfectly legal under the Constitution,
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and was the North’s last weapon (Andrew Johnson had thrown away all the others); but the President denounced it as unconstitutional, and continued to do so to the bitter last.

The intrigues of the winter and spring of 1865 – 6 need not be described. It is enough to record that the huge Republican majority in Congress settled upon three measures. First, a Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which, among a tangle of provisions for excluding ex-Confederate leaders from politics and repudiating the Confederate debt, did establish, in law at least, the right of all citizens of the United States to equal protection of the laws, and defined a US citizen (it had never been done before) in such a way as to include all African-Americans. Henceforth anyone was a citizen who was ‘born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof. The
Dred Scott
decision was thus at last repealed. Second, an extension of the life and powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the institution which, under the shelter of the army, was doing what it could to ease the transition from slavery to freedom for the Southern blacks. Third, a civil rights law which explicitly stated what was implicit in the Fourteenth Amendment: that citizen rights were to be enjoyed by all persons born in the United States, not subject to any foreign power, ‘of every race and colour, without reference to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary
servitude’. Johnson vetoed both the Acts, which were later re-passed by the necessary two-thirds majority in each house. He could not veto the Amendment, though he could and did denounce it at the same time as he transmitted it, in obedience to the law, to the state legislatures (which quickly ratified it). There was by now a total breach between him and the party which had put him into office. Congressional elections were at hand. Both sides prepared for a decisive struggle: perhaps the bitterest of the kind yet known.

It was for long customary for historians and others to talk as if the issue had lain between the President and the Republican radicals alone. The facts were more complicated, as everyone knew at the time. Johnson’s intransigence had united the Republican party, driving it in mere self-defence to support radical courses in a manner which was inconceivable in Lincoln’s day. The political leaders, the party organizers, the party press, even many of the army commanders – all who had supported the Union cause, in fact, except for Seward and his small surviving following, and the curmudgeon Gideon Welles – had been forced to abandon the President. To do otherwise would have been to give up the commitments of a lifetime, and even the spoilsmen felt the thrilling, unfamiliar call of principle. When they denounced the President’s policy, they were dismissed, and gloried in the fact. ‘I aimed to do my duty,’ said one postmaster, ‘but all the Post Offices in Illinois could not buy me to the support of A. Johnson.’ Nor was Johnson without allies, though they did him little good. The Northern Democrats saw a chance to recover from their wartime errors, such as the Copperhead platform of 1864 which had contributed to their destruction on election day. The quicker the South was restored to Congress, they thought, the sooner the old ascendancy of the Democrats in national politics would be revived. So they brought their Copperhead notions up to date and eagerly offered their support to Andrew Johnson, proposing to settle the reconstruction question by giving the ex-Confederates a free hand in the South. And waiting in the wings were those same ex-Confederates, though one planter declared that they did not really support the President: ‘They prefer him, doubtless, to the so called Radicals, but in their hearts they hate him. They cling with an undying hope to the wretched rebel cause and desire to manifest their hatred for everything which does not immortalize that.’
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Johnson tried in vain to find a middle way between these opposites. He staked everything on rallying the people at large to support their President – vainly, because the prestige of Lincoln’s office had now shifted to Lincoln’s party. The President made matters even worse for himself by his so-called ‘swing around the circle’. This was an immense speaking-tour he undertook
in September 1866 through the Northern and Western states. He carried a cortège of generals and Cabinet officers with him, who had to listen in frozen embarrassment as their leader repeated the same speech over and over again, railing at his enemies with undignified ferocity. He began to be heckled savagely in a way that frequently made it impossible for him to be heard. Johnson had been a very successful stump-speaker in Tennessee, where that art had been prized ever since the days of Andrew Jackson; but now he had lost his touch, or it was not what 1866 and the North required. His experience at Indianapolis was typical:

Fellow citizens –
{cries for Grant)
. It is not my intention –
(cries of ‘Stop’, ‘Go on’)
to make a long speech. If you give me your attention for five minutes – (
‘Go on,’ ‘Stop,’ ‘No, no, we want nothing to do with traitors,’ ‘Grant, Grant,’ ‘Johnson, ‘groans)
. I would like to say to this crowd here tonight –
(‘Shut up! We don’t want to hear from you, Johnson! Grant! Johnson! Grant! Grant!’)

The President gave up and retired from the balcony. At St Louis he compared himself to Jesus Christ and shouted ‘hang Thad Stevens!’ as if he meant it. At Cleveland he rounded on a heckler, throwing grammar and coherence to the winds:

… those men – such a one as insulted me to-night – you may say, has ceased to be a man, and in ceasing to be a man shrunk into the denomination of a reptile, and having so shrunken, as an honest man, I tread on him. I came here to-night not to criminate or recriminate, but when provoked my nature is not to advance but to defend, and when encroached upon, I care not from what quarter it comes, it will find resistance, and resistance at the threshold.

It was a despondent and defeated party which eventually returned to Washington, leaving the field to the demagogues on the other side, who were proving themselves expert at ‘waving the bloody shirt’, as it was called – that is, at asserting that the opposition was in collusion with criminals and rebels and insulting the sufferings of the glorious dead.
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The election was decisive: the Republicans overwhelmed Johnsonians and Democrats alike and were now free to push through whatever legislation they liked. Johnson would veto everything, of course, and did; but there was little difficulty in overriding his vetoes. To be sure, the President retained an ample power to annoy, and it was this that eventually led to his impeachment. He insisted on dismissing Edwin Stanton; Congress was equally intent on keeping this last ally in the executive; eventually, after a chain of discreditable events, which included an episode when Stanton
barricaded himself in the War Department and sustained a siege, the Republicans finally lost their temper and instituted impeachment proceedings, which if successful would have cast the President out of office. The business lasted from March to May 1868 and was abandoned after the prosecution failed, four times, to get the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate. It was soon realized that the failure of the impeachment was the best thing that could have happened, for there was not a shred of evidence that Johnson had engaged in the ‘Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanours’ which the Constitution lays down as grounds for impeachment.
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Had Johnson been ejected, it would have been for nakedly political reasons, and the whole basis of the Constitutional system would have been overthrown: the principle of co-existent, mutually independent powers; of checks and balances; of laws, not men. Instead, America would at least temporarily have got a Parliamentary government without really wanting or planning to; and Congress could not have been made fit to exercise supreme power under such arrangements without radical Constitutional amendments which could probably not have been agreed. In short, a successful impeachment would have badly weakened the federal government for years, if not for decades; the unsuccessful one did damage enough. At least it had the one good result that for the next hundred years all Presidents took warning from Andrew Johnson’s example and did not try Congress too far. For the rest of the nineteenth century the Presidents were indeed almost weakly deferential in their dealings with the legislature: though this was by no means so clearly a good thing.