Part
5: The Myths of Reconstruction
And
Why Andrew Johnson’s Reputation Has Parallels to
Contemporary
Events
One of the major
stories of Reconstruction that has been discussed ad infinitum by historians,
African Americans and leftists alike is that after the Civil War, there was a
huge opportunity that men, primary under the leadership of Andrew Johnson
squandered. Given a chance to fully bring the South into the modern era and
achieve full and equal rights for African-Americans, there was a period where
it seemed like these things were possible – but Johnson and the men who
succeeded him as President wasted the opportunity by making the term for reunifications
far too loose, not fiercely punishing enough the man who led the insurrection,
and after a decade, abandoning the South to its own devices and abandoning the
freedman for eighty years of Jim Crow.
This myth is not as
widespread as that of the Lost Cause in the South, but it is just as much in
denial of reality and selective omission. And while many Presidents and leaders
are blamed for it, Johnson by far takes the brunt of the abuse. This has led to
his reputation for being one of the worst Presidents in history, remembered
only until the late 1990s as the only President to ever be impeached. Since
most of the time context is removed from the conversation, the implication has
been by most Americans that, like Richard Nixon, he was guilty of high crimes
and misdemeanors and that he only escaped removal because of extenuating
circumstances.
Much of this treats
Johnson unfairly. It is true that he was a Southern Democrat and had been a
slaveowner until the Civil War. It’s also true that while he supported the
passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, he mainly did as an act to preserve the
Union more than any desire of slavery as a moral wrong. This feeling was held
by many people in the North of both parties at the time, and right up until its
abolition.
It’s also true that
Johnson’s approach towards Reconstruction was based more in politics that
Lincoln’s world have been. Johnson was hoping to win the Democratic nomination
in 1868 and he hoped to do so by unifying the Democrat wings of the party
around him. That those policies would be fundamentally different from Radical
Republicans and men like Stevens and Sumner particular should not be shocking.
But one of the great ironies of Reconstruction is that, while Johnson’s
approach was, though too forgiving, far closer to Lincoln’s approach than the
plans that the Radical Republicans had already presented before Congress and
that Lincoln had been refusing to endorse.
We will never know
for certain what Lincoln’s policies for Reconstruction were but based on his
pocket veto of the Wade-Davis Bill and his discussions with Stevens and Sumner
before his assassination, it is clear that he was leaning more towards
forgiveness than punishment. The ideas of loyalty oaths and military governing,
the heart of the Wade-Davis bill, were abhorrent to Lincoln’s basic views of
reconciliation.
A question rarely
posed by historians is whether Lincoln, had he lived, might have faced many of
the same obstacles Johnson did in regards to reconstruction. The Republicans
had overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress after the election. They
had tolerated Lincoln before the war, but with it being over – and Lincoln a
lame duck – they might very well have carried out the same measures they did in
Johnson’s presidency and passed them over whatever vetoes Lincoln might choose
to invoke.
And even had Lincoln
managed a more equitable solution than Johnson ended up with, it is very
difficult to imagine the end result being any different. The South had lost the
war, there would have been military occupation of some form, and even if there
had not been, they would still have to enforce an amendment that they had
seceded from the Union rather than face its existence. The history of
Reconstruction during the Presidency of Grant was filled with outbursts of
violence against the soldiers, the White House sending reinforcements to
suppress it, and the violence resuming once it was withdrawn. During the era of
Black Power, there were chants of getting your rights through the barrel of
gun. One wonders if those children of the era knew that had actually happened
in the South a century before – and it had ended up failing. If the only way to
enforce equality is at gunpoint, then is it really equality?
There’s also the
question that has the clearest parallels to today: the decisions to not try the
leaders of the Confederacy such as Jefferson Davis for treason. Again before
the war ended, Lincoln had made it clear that the best thing for him might be
for “Jeff Davis to leave the country while I wasn’t looking.” Several key
Confederate figures – including Judah Benjamin, who at one point was Secretary
of State for the Confederacy – did just that. But eventually Davis was captured
trying to flee the country and imprisoned
For three years
Johnson’s administration struggled with the question: should they try Davis for
treason and insurrection? Clearly there was an argument to do it; the new
Southern states had just returned to Congress three former Confederate
officials – including Alexander Stephens, the former vice president of the
Confederacy – to the Senate. The idea of returning to the government these men
had actively fought against was clearly repugnant and something needed to be
done.
But it always comes
to the question of how. Who could claim jurisdiction over the crimes that Davis
had committed? Jurisdiction was one of the biggest problems. Where were the
crimes committed? And where could a man like Davis get a fair trial? Certainly
not in the North and at one point Robert E. Lee acknowledged that a trial in a
place like Richmond among its citizens would be impossible to get a trial where
he might be found guilty? At one point, a jury of newly freed slaves was
empaneled to hear the arguments. But if you truly believe that the head of the
Confederacy could get an impartial verdict from the men he had spent a
lifetime saying deserved to be in bondage and led a failed nation based on that
concept, well, you have a better opinion of human nature than I do. Even the
nature of punishment and fairness was held differently by many. Horace Greeley,
the newspaper editor whose paper had been one of the strongest endorsers of
Republican policies during the war, would post bail for Davis before his trial –
an action which caused millions to
consider him a traitor himself.
The trial never took place after it was
empaneled and at the end of his Presidency Johnson issued amnesty for every
major official who’d served in the war. This was regarded with hostility at the
time and still is today. But it’s hard to imagine Lincoln doing anything much
different given the opportunity. He believed in reunification and the national
healing; something that could not have been accomplished by putting the heads
of the Confederacy on trial for weeks, if not months at a time, with the
stories being the subject of the papers and the public, no certainty of a
verdict of guilty and the end result being rejecting by one half of the country
as illegitimate. Trying to find solutions for the present by blaming past
failures is something contemporary historians have absolutely no problem doing
without context. At best if the trial had taken place for men like Davis it
might have served as a model for what to do and what not to do. That its mere
existence would no doubt have made the post war era infinitely worse for a country trying to heal
after so much death and destruction never enters into the mindset of armchair
historians.
And it’s worth noting
at least his first Reconstruction actions – recognition of the government of Virginia,
and amnesty for all ex-rebel soldiers, as well as the ordering of
constitutional conventions in former rebel states – received considerable
public support in the North. Johnson mistook this as unconditional backing for
quick reinstatement of the South and underestimated the Northern public opinion
that the war had not been fought for nothing. Johnson’s theory on reconstruction
was different than most Northerners – he believed that they had never truly
left the Union, and though they should be recognized once loyal citizens formed
a government.
So no matter how much
we might want to blame Johnson for not holding the South more accountable for
their actions, in the interesting of national healing it was almost certainly
the right call. However one has to hold him to a greater accountability for his
other sin – his failure to enforce civil rights in the aftermath of the war.
It’s worth noting
black suffrage – one of the major issues of the Radical Republicans – was less
important for most Northerners. Only a handful of Northern States, mostly in
New England where the lion’s share of Radical Republicans were from, had equal
suffrage. And in late 1865, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Connecticut had voted down
African-Americans proposals to vote by significant margins. The general
Northern opinion of Johnson’s inaction on this issue was mainly conditional,
something to be allowed only if it quickened the Southern acceptance of
defeat. Even for many of the Radical Republicans their belief in
enfranchisement was as much about self-interest as equality – it was thought
that freedmen would vote Republican out of gratitude for emancipation and
therefore keep Republicans in power and Southern Democrats, including the
rebels, out of influence. In fact, that is what happened in the South during Reconstruction;
granted suffrage, African Americans would help Republicans win landslide
victories for Grant both times he ran for office.
Johnson’s support in
the South did embolden them to pass black codes and Johnson was conciliatory his
annual message to the Confederates who were elected to Congress in December of
1865. Congress refused to seat them.
Johnson’s major flaw
came when Congress returned to session in 1866. The President was unhappy about
the South’s provocative actions, but he made no public statements, believing
their actions were right even if he thought them unwise. And then he made his
great mistake, one which his ambitions for the Presidency clashed with what
likely was best for the country. He made a decision that to help him
politically he needed a showdown with the Radical Republicans, so that his
vision of it would prevail and not there’s.
Lyman Trumboll, the
leader of the moderate wing of the Republicans, wanted to reach an
understanding with Johnson. He ushered through Congress a bill extending the
Freedmen’s Bureau beyond its scheduled abolition in 1867 and the first ever Civil
Rights Bill, which granted citizenship to freed slaves. Trumbull was convinced
after several visits with Johnson he would sign these measures into law. But he
was opposed to them because he felt they were infringements on state
sovereignty and because their unpopularity with White Southerners were necessary
to the coalition he was hoping to build.
Johnson vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, angering and puzzling Republican
legislators. When they failed to override in the Senate the following day, he
considered himself vindicated. He believed the Radicals were now isolated and
that the moderates would fall in behind him. He’d misjudged that they too
believed firmly in Civil Rights.
A few day’s later on
Washington’s birthday, Johnson gave an impromptu speech in which he referred to
himself 200 times in nearly an hour and called Radical Republicans such as Sumner
and Stevens as well abolitionist Wendell Phillips, not merely opposed to the
Union, but plotting his assassination. That speech was viewed as a declaration
of war by Republicans and one Democratic ally said it cost the Democrats at least
200,000 votes in the midterms that year.
A month later he
vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, concluding his break with the Republicans.
One of the major objections he had was that it ‘discriminated in favor of
African-Americans’ and against whites. Three weeks later for the first time in
American history, Congress had overridden his veto. This miscalculation set the
tone of perpetual confrontation with Congress for the remainder of his
Presidency. Not long after both Houses of Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau
Act again and when Johnson once again vetoed it, they overrode it this time.
The Fourteenth Amendment went before the states during this period and Johnson’s
home state of Tennessee ratified it despite his opposition.
In the election of
1866, with Southern states not allowed to vote, Johnson campaigned vigorously
throughout the Midwest. It was politically disastrous, with Johnson comparing
himself to Christ and arguing with hecklers. The Republicans gained 23 seats in
the House to the Democrats 14, making their margins 173 to 47 Democrats in the
House. In the Senate, the Republicans now held 37 seats to the Democrats 10. In
both cases, they had more than sufficient margins to override any vetoes he
might invoke. Johnson’s National Union Party – the party he hoped to win
election with – was a nonstarter.
Once Congress reconvened
in December of 1866 the era known as Radical Reconstruction began, passing
legislation that Johnson would veto and Congress would override. While some of
this had less controversial aspects – DC voting act, Nebraska being admitted to
the Union – in January of 1867, Stevens introduced legislation to dissolve the Southern
State governments and reconstitute them into five military districts. In
effect, the Republicans were calling for martial law and conventions in which African-Americans could vote for delegates
and be elected to these offices and Confederates could not participate. But by
far the most controversial act was the Tenure of Office Act in March of 1867 which
required Senate approval for the firing of Cabinet members during the tenure of
the President who appointed them and for one month after.
And it’s worth noting
even before the crisis that led to his impeachment, Radical Republicans were
looking for an excuse on what was fundamentally flimsy grounds. In his first
run for office Benjamin Butler had essentially ran on a platform that the sole
purpose of his election should be to impeach Johnson. Much of the platform he
used was essentially based on the policy differences between the Radical
Republicans and Johnson, rather than any argument that he had committed ‘high
crimes and misdemeanors.
In the next article I
will deal with the reasons for Johnson’s impeachment and that at its core, it
really was a political witch hunt.
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