Mourning Lincoln (35 page)

That Andrew Johnson was a man unworthy of shaping the postwar nation was a view shared by a portion of Lincoln’s mourners, though for entirely different reasons. African Americans and their allies were the first to voice concerns, their political anxieties running concurrent with their faith that God, in his mysterious ways, had taken Lincoln for the good of the nation. Along with the enormous outpouring of joy over Union victory,
some African Americans had in fact expressed reservations about the future even before Lincoln’s death. Recall that just after the fall of Richmond, Frederick Douglass had warned, “Hereafter, at the South, the negro will be looked upon with a fiercer and intenser hate than ever before,” and the editors of the
New York Anglo-African
had explained, just after Lee’s surrender, that their people felt “less disposed to join in the shouts of victory” because “with the cessation of the war our anxieties begin.” Legal freedom, they made clear, still left plenty of room for “oppressions akin to slavery.” Then, after the assassination, Andrew Johnson appeared as an uncertain ally. Freedpeople in a Norfolk classroom had worried right away that the new president “might not be as friendly toward the colored race” as his predecessor.
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Still, most African Americans remained hopeful, at least out loud. Whether sincerely or strategically (or some of each), community leaders offered reassurance, albeit with a dash of circumspection. “As colored men, we have entire confidence in President Johnson,” wrote the editor of the
New Orleans Black Republican
, tempering that statement with the tepid assertion that the loss of Lincoln was “in some degree softened” by the new chief executive. If Lincoln had been Moses, “let us hope for a Joshua in Andrew Johnson,” wrote a black soldier, referring cautiously (
let us hope
) to the biblical figure who ultimately led the Jews across the Jordan River into the Promised Land.
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African Americans addressed President Johnson directly during his first weeks in office as they reflected on the future of a nation in which they now envisioned themselves as full citizens. The founders of the
Colored Tennessean
sent an issue of their newspaper to the White House, calling Johnson “a freind of our ‘
race
,’” even as they counseled the new leader to “sanction our course.” Those who could not speak directly to the president had their voices heard through community spokesmen. John Mercer Langston, lawyer, Union army recruiter, and head of the National Equal Rights League, visited Johnson with a delegation of prominent black men three days after Lincoln’s death. Proclaiming that “our liberty and rights will be fully protected and sustained,” the men made two requests: “complete emancipation” and “full equality before American law.” These demands referred most immediately to the treatment of African Americans in the wake of Confederate defeat, as former slaves became the victims of
stepped-up white violence. For their part, black residents of Alexandria, Virginia, delivered a petition to Johnson requesting that control of their city remain in the hands of the federal government, lest they suffer yet more brutality from the angry white people around them. Here was Frederick Douglass’s prediction of “fiercer and intenser hate than ever before.”
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Long-range political policies mattered in the face of Confederate anger and violence. Notably, in their visions of the reconstructed nation, African Americans looked to the slain president, invoking in their petitions what they imagined Lincoln would have accomplished. To make emancipation and equality effective, freedpeople needed education and land, and to make that a sustainable plan, they needed the franchise. African Americans from New Bern, North Carolina, accordingly petitioned Johnson for voting rights “for all loyal men, without regard to color.” Johnson’s black supplicants in fact repeatedly reminded him that they had been loyal supporters of the Union from the first, displaying “heroic patriotism,” naming in their petitions battles like Fort Wagner and Port Hudson. Pointedly, the North Carolinians drew attention to the injustice of denying the vote to “men who have been fighting for the country” while giving it to “men who have just returned from four years fighting against it,” and that was the crux of the matter: Would disloyal white men be permitted to vote in the states of the former Confederacy while loyal black men would not? Now the men from North Carolina invoked Lincoln, referring to him as a friend and noble agent of liberty, in hopes, they told Johnson, that “the mantle of our murdered friend and father may have fallen upon your shoulders.” These delegates and their allies seized on the Emancipation Proclamation (a cautious legal document that had technically freed slaves only in areas beyond the control of the Union) and the mild April 11 speech, though neither was any guarantee of black freedom and political rights after the war was over.
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“In what new skin will the old snake come forth?” That question served as the title of a speech Frederick Douglass delivered to the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City as the organization was deciding whether to disband at war’s end. It was mid-May, and Douglass’s concerns were precisely those of the freedpeople who had wondered aloud about reenslavement immediately after the assassination. This was no exaggerated anxiety but rather a real legal possibility, one also recognized by Republican lawmakers as the war drew to a close. As long as the word
white
still appeared in southern laws, Douglass told his audience, the work of abolitionists was not done, for those laws could make “a mockery” of emancipation. Citizenship, and in particular enfranchisement, was the answer, and Douglass believed that antislavery organizations must remain active as long as black men could not vote. Douglass went so far as to predict that without black suffrage, white southerners would replicate the very conditions of slavery in the post-surrender nation. Then he and his comrades would see, he told his listeners, “what new form this old monster will assume” and in “what new skin this old snake will come forth next.”
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Radical members of the Republican Party shared these concerns, including Chief Justice Salmon Chase, who met repeatedly with President Johnson to underscore the same point. When Chase toured the southern coastal states in May, he wrote letters to Johnson describing meetings with African Americans in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, all of whom made clear to him the “very great importance to the right of voting.” Stopping in Jacksonville, Chase listened as the city’s white residents made equally clear that they hoped to keep political power out of the hands of black men. “It is curious to observe,” the Chief Justice reported, “how little they seem to realize that any change in personal or political relations has been wrought by the war.” (In his diary, Rodney Dorman noted Chase’s appearance, maligning him for blemishing the “dignity & legal ability” of Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which called African Americans “beings of an inferior order” with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”)
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President Johnson’s answers to his visitors and petitioners proved far from satisfying, offering either vague assurances of a “guaranty of my future conduct toward your people” or dismissals like “It is not necessary for me to give you any assurance of what my future course will be.” Indeed, rather than promising a bright future, Johnson instead referred to the past. He made his most transparent statement at a May meeting with the Reverend Edmund Turney and other black ministers, informing his guests that although he was a native of a slave state and had possessed slaves (he had once owned five), he had never sold one. He then defended slaveholders, who he claimed cared as much for slaves as did any northerner, and lectured the men not to “become loafers and depend upon the Government.” When Johnson deplored the state of “notorious concubinage” in
which, he implied, all four million enslaved people had willfully lived (with not a word about the illegality of slave marriages, the rape of black women by white men, or the breeding of slaves by their masters), he further taunted the men by adding, “You know what I say is true.”
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Finally, in the most galling vision of the post–Civil War nation, Johnson alluded to sending all black people off to Africa: “The time may soon come when you shall be gathered together, in a clime and country suited to you,” is how he put it. When escaped slave William Gould read those words in the newspapers that arrived on his Union navy ship, he was incensed. “We see by the papers that the President in A speech intimates Colinization for the colard people of the United States,” Gould wrote in his diary, a policy that he believed must be firmly resisted, for his people were “born under the Flag of the Union” and would never “know no other.” The policy of shipping freed slaves to colonies beyond the bounds of the United States had offended African Americans before the war. Now, having fought and died for the Union, such a vision constituted a yet graver affront, for not only had they been born in the United States for generations, they had also fought mightily for the nation’s endurance.
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In contrast to Lincoln’s black mourners, only a small portion of white mourners criticized Andrew Johnson’s leadership in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, and the skepticism they displayed was mild at best. “Will he be equal to its responsibilities & duties?” Anna Ferris wondered. “Every body asks the question & none can answer.” An Iowa soldier didn’t trust Johnson to deal justly with the nation’s traitors. “I had rather have seen Lincoln finish them than any man in the world,” he wrote home. Some reserved their chagrin mostly for the commonly held notions that the new president’s wife had taught him to read (not true) and that he had been drunk at Lincoln’s second inauguration (possibly true). “Andrew Johnson, the
drunken
boasting plebian is President of the United States,” scoffed a Washington woman.
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Much more commonly, white mourners who consoled themselves that God had taken Lincoln away because of his kind disposition felt sure that Andrew Johnson was the better man for the task of reconstructing the nation. In marked contrast to African Americans, these mourners looked to the future with confidence. On the day Lincoln died, Washington telegrapher David Homer Bates wrote in his diary with great sorrow for the beloved
president, with whom he had conversed nearly every day for the past four years. But Bates at once conceded that Lincoln’s lenience “may have given the rebels courage & power & at some future time caused another rebellion,” a fate he was convinced would be avoided under Johnson’s rule. James Ward, one of a group of white ministers who met with the new president two days after Lincoln’s death, found himself “most favorably impressed,” sure that the terrible calamity of the assassination would be overtaken by good. Such convictions followed not only from ideas about Lincoln’s lenience but also from Johnson’s own early affirmations of draconian policies toward the defeated enemy (like the speech before the Indiana delegation that made Confederate Kate Cumming so uneasy), coupled with his swift repudiation of the overly indulgent Sherman-Johnston negotiations.
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Where black mourners approached the new executive with caution, most bereaved whites exhibited full trust, envisioning Johnson as “a sterner man,” a “more radical man,” a man of “
less yielding
nature” than Lincoln. He would “give traitors their deserts, a stout rope and a clear swing” and even reward the Copperheads with “a Hemp Nectie,” proclaimed Union soldier John Burrud. Georgia Treadway enthused that he would “put on no
silk gloves
,” for the word
amnesty
wasn’t even “in Johnsons
dictionary
.” Even the most radical white abolitionists trusted the new president at the outset, including the otherwise farsighted Lydia Maria Child, who thought that Lincoln’s departure from earth was “necessary for the completion of the great work.” Never before, she gushed to fellow abolitionist John Green-leaf Whittier, had she known the “finger of God” to be “so plainly visible.” Whittier couldn’t agree more, since beloved President Lincoln would no doubt have gone too far “to smooth the way of defeated rebellion back to allegiance.” When Wendell Phillips declared that God had orchestrated Lincoln’s death at the exact moment “when his star touched its zenith,” he explained that the moment of death was also the moment in which “the nation needed a sterner hand.”
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Andrew Johnson’s roots as a poor white southerner at least in part led black and white mourners to their divergent conclusions. Lincoln’s black mourners, recall, knew that impoverished Confederates (just the same as their better-off compatriots) believed that black people were “made to be slaves,” as one journalist put it, and could not, wrote another, be “emancipated
from negro-hate.” The same could be said, moreover, of many of the South’s white Unionists, for even if they were not Confederates, they were still white. A soldier with the Twenty-Seventh U.S. Colored Troops hence wrote with trepidation that President Johnson might well pardon the “prejudiced loyal white man of the South.”
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By contrast, Johnson’s initially harsh pronouncements struck Lincoln’s white mourners as fully in keeping with his lowly family origins, and led them to the opposite conclusion. “We plebeins, the majority of the U.S. have great confidence in your ability and sympathy,” a Philadelphia man wrote to the new president, since “you were once one of us who toil.” At the other end of the class spectrum, Boston Brahmin Edward Everett Hale took heart that Johnson despised the southern aristocracy as could only “a poor white, from the ranks.” Lydia Maria Child likewise believed that Johnson’s background would work to bring southern poor whites over to the side of the Yankees who were so eager to reform the war-torn region. Karl Marx himself agreed, writing to Friedrich Engels that the murder of Lincoln was the “greatest piece of folly” for Confederates, since Johnson “as a former poor white has a deadly hatred of the oligarchy.” If that kind of optimism was understandable in light of Johnson’s early assertions, his dealings with African Americans in the weeks immediately following the assassination made clear that his dislike for southern oligarchs was overruled by his virulent racism. Indeed, on the all-important question of black suffrage, Johnson would continually read the U.S. Constitution through the lens of white supremacy, professing that the federal government had no power to implement such a policy.
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