Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

To meet the dangers which so far had become visible on the horizon, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction devised the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was long and laboriously debated in both Houses. In the form in which it was finally adopted it declared (1) that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States and of the States in which they reside, and that no State shall make or enforce any law abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens, nor deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person the equal protection of the laws; (2) that if in any State the right to vote at any election for the choice of national or State officers is denied or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation in Congress or the electoral college shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State; (3) that no person who had taken part in the rebellion, having previously, as a national or State officer, military or civil, sworn to support the Constitution of the United States, shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or any State, unless relieved of that disability by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress; (4) that the validity of the public debt of the United States shall not be questioned, nor shall any debt or obligation contracted in aid of rebellion, or any claim for emancipated slaves be paid.

_The Fourteenth Amendment_

Thus the Fourteenth Amendment stopped short of the extension of the suffrage to negroes--a subject which many Republicans were still afraid to touch directly. But by implication it punished the States denying that extension by reducing the basis of representation; it excluded from office, unless relieved of the disability by a two-thirds vote of Congress, the most influential class of those who had taken an active part in the rebellion; and it safeguarded the public debt. With only one of its provisions serious fault could be found;--not with that which guaranteed to the freedmen the essential civil rights of free men, nor with that which excluded the freedmen from the basis of representation--so long as they were not permitted to vote. Only the advocates of negro suffrage might logically have objected to this clause; inasmuch as it by implication recognized the right of a State to exclude the colored people from the suffrage if the State paid a certain penalty for such exclusion. Neither could the clause safeguarding the public debt and prohibiting the payment of debts incurred in aid of the rebellion be objected to. The really exceptionable provision was that which excluded so large a class of Southern men from public office, and just that class with which a friendly understanding was most desirable. The provision that their disqualification could be removed by a two-thirds vote in each House of Congress mended the mischief thus done a little, but not enough for the public good.

It was not expressly enacted, but it was generally understood, that those of the States lately in rebellion, which ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, would thereby qualify themselves for full restoration in the Union. Tennessee, where a faction of the Union party hostile to President Johnson had gained the ascendency, did so, and was accordingly fully restored by the admission to their seats in Congress of its Senators and Representatives. The full restoration of the other late rebel States would probably have been expedited in the same way, had they followed the example of Tennessee. But President Johnson, as became publicly known in one or two instances, obstinately dissuaded them from doing so, and the fight went on. He also vetoed a second Freedmen's Bureau bill in which some of the provisions he had objected to in his veto of the first were remedied. But things had now come to such a pass between Congress and the President that his veto messages were hardly considered worth listening to, but were promptly overruled almost without debate by two-thirds votes in each House.

_A Campaign to Destroy a President_

Under such circumstances the Congressional election of 1866 came on. The people were to pronounce judgment between the President and Congress. The great quarrel had created excitement so intense as to affect men's balance of mind. About the time of the assembling of Congress Mr. Preston King of New York (the same rotund gentleman with whom, in the National Convention of 1860, I conducted Mr. Ashmun to the chair), who had been a Senator of the United States and had been appointed Collector of Customs by President Johnson, committed suicide by jumping into the North River from a ferry-boat. He had been a Republican of the radical type, and when he took the office he supposed the President to be of the same mind; but Mr. Johnson's course distressed him so much that he became melancholy; his brain gave way, and he sought relief in death. Another suicide which greatly startled the country a few months later, that of Senator Lane of Kansas, was attributed to a similar cause. "Jim" Lane had been one of the most famous free-State fighters in Kansas Territory. Since then he was ranked among the extreme anti-slavery men and as a Senator he was counted upon as a firm opponent of President Johnson's policy. To the astonishment of everybody he voted against the Civil Rights bill. This somewhat mysterious change of front, which nobody seemed able satisfactorily to explain, cost him his confidential intercourse with his former associates in the Senate, and brought upon him stinging manifestations of disapproval from his constituents. He was reported to have expressed profound repentance of what he had done and finally made away with himself as one lost to hope. He was still in the full vigor of manhood--only fifty-one years old--when he sought the grave.

THE DEMOCRATIC SENATOR FROM NEW JERSEY WHO WAS UNSEATED IN THE SENATE OF 1866 TO MAKE ROOM FOR A REPUBLICAN SUCCESSOR. HE WAS LATER REELECTED TO THE SENATE]

The campaign of 1866 was remarkable for its heat and bitterness. In canvasses carried on for the purpose of electing a President, I had seen more enthusiasm, but in none so much animosity and bad blood as in this, an incidental object of which was politically to destroy a president. Andrew Johnson had not only manifested a disposition to lean upon the Democratic party in the pursuit of his policy, but he had also begun to dismiss public officers who refused to coöperate with him politically and to put in their places men who adhered to him. This touched partisan spirit in an exceedingly sensitive spot. The so-called "bread-and-butter brigade" was looked down upon with a contempt that could hardly be expressed in words.

_Killing of Negroes at Memphis and New Orleans_

But there were more serious things to inflame the temper of the North. The Southern whites again proved themselves their own worst enemies. Early in May news came from Memphis of riots in which twenty-four negroes were killed and one white man was wounded. The conclusion lay near and was generally accepted that the whites had been the aggressors and the negroes the victims. In the last days of July more portentous tidings arrived from New Orleans. An attempt was made by Union men to revive the constitutional convention of 1864 for the purpose of remodeling the constitution of the State. The attempt was of questionable legality, but, if wrong, it could easily have been foiled by legal and peaceable means. The municipal government of New Orleans was in possession of the ex-Confederates. It resolved that the meeting of the remnant of the convention should not be held. When it did meet, the police, consisting in an overwhelming majority of ex-Confederate soldiers, aided by a white mob, broke into the hall and fired upon those assembled there. The result was thirty-seven negroes killed and one hundred and nineteen wounded, and three of the white Union men killed and seventeen wounded, against one of the assailants killed and ten wounded. General Sheridan, the commander of the Department, telegraphed to General Grant: "It was no riot; it was an absolute massacre by the police which was not excelled in murderous cruelty by that of Fort Pillow. It was a murder which the Mayor and the police of this city perpetrated without the shadow of necessity." A tremor of horror and rage ran over the North. People asked one another: "Does this mean that the rebellion is to begin again?" I heard the question often.

The Administration felt the blow, and to neutralize its effects a national convention of its adherents, North and South, planned by Thurlow Weed and Secretary Seward, was to serve as the principal means. This "National Union Convention" met in Philadelphia on August 14th. It was respectably attended in point of character as well as of numbers. It opened its proceedings with a spectacular performance which under different conditions might have struck the popular imagination favorably. The delegates marched into the Convention Hall in pairs, one from the South arm in arm with one from the North, Massachusetts and South Carolina leading. But with the Memphis riot and the New Orleans "massacre" and Andrew Johnson's sinister figure in the background, the theatrical exhibition of restored fraternal feeling, although calling forth much cheering on the spot, fell flat, and even became the subject of ridicule, since it earned for the meeting the derisive nickname of the "arm-in-arm convention." The proceedings were rather dull, and much was made by the Republicans of the fact that the Chairman, Senator Doolittle from Wisconsin, was careful not to let Southern members say much lest they say _too_ much. It was also noticed and made much of that among the members of the convention the number of men supposed to curry favor with the Administration for the purpose of getting office--men belonging to the "bread-and-butter-brigade"--was conspicuously large. Among the resolutions passed by the convention was one declaring slavery abolished and the emancipated negro entitled to equal protection in every right of person and property, and another heartily endorsing President Johnson's reconstruction policy.

No doubt many of the respectable and patriotic men who attended that convention thought they had done very valuable work for the general pacification by getting their Southern friends publicly to affirm that slavery was dead never to be revived, and that the civil rights of the freedmen were entitled to equal protection and would have it. But the effect of such declarations upon the popular mind at the North was not as great as had been expected. Such affirmations by respectable Southern gentlemen, who were perfectly sincere, had been heard before. In fact, almost everybody in the South was ready to declare himself likewise, and with equal sincerity, as to the abolition of the old form of chattel slavery. But the question of far superior importance was, what he would put in the place of the old form of chattel slavery. _There_ was the rub, and this had come to be well understood at the North in the light of the reports from the South, which the advocates of President Johnson's policy could not deny nor obscure. The moral effect of the National Union Convention was therefore very feeble.

SENATOR CARL SCHURZ

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN ABOUT 1879]

_Johnson "Swings Around the Circle"_

If the members of the National Union Convention thought that their conciliatory utterances would pour oil on the angry waves of the campaign, they reckoned without their host. When a committee appointed for that purpose presented to President Johnson a copy of its proceedings, there was rather a note of defiance to his opponents, than of conciliation, in his response. "We have witnessed in one department of the government every endeavor to prevent the restoration of peace, harmony, and union," he said. "We have seen hanging upon the verge of the government, as it were, a body called, or which assumes to be, the Congress of the United States, while, in fact, it is a Congress of only a part of the United States. We have seen a Congress in a minority assume to exercise power which, allowed to be consummated, would result in despotism or monarchy itself." Here was again the thinly veiled threat that, because certain States were not represented in it, the validity of the acts of Congress might be attacked. But worse was to follow. It is a well-known fact that presidents, under the influence of the Washington atmosphere, are apt to become victims of the delusion that they are idolized by the American people. Even John Tyler is said to have thought so. It may have been under a similar impression that President Johnson, who had great confidence in the power of his influence over the masses when he personally confronted them, accepted an invitation requesting his presence at the unveiling of a Douglas statue in Chicago, and he made this an occasion for a "presidential progress" through some of the States. He started late in August. Several members of his cabinet, Seward among others, accompanied him, and so did General Grant and Admiral Farragut, by command, to give additional luster to the appearance of the chief.

SENATOR PRESTON KING

WHOM PRESIDENT JOHNSON APPOINTED COLLECTOR OF THE PORT OF NEW YORK. HIS SUICIDE IN 1865 WAS ATTRIBUTED TO WORRY OVER THE PRESIDENT'S RECONSTRUCTION POLICY]

His journey, the famous "swinging around the circle,"--a favorite phrase of his to describe his fight against the Southern enemies of the Union, the Secessionists, at one time, and against the Northern disunionists, the radical Republicans, at another--was a series of the most disastrous exhibitions. At Philadelphia he was received with studied coldness. At New York he had an official reception, and he used the occasion to rehearse his often-told story of his wonderful advancement from the position of alderman in his native town to the presidency of the United States, with some insignificant remarks about his policy attached. At Cleveland he appeared before a large audience, according to abundant testimony, in a drunken condition. Indeed, the character of his speech cannot be explained in any other way. He descended to the lowest tone of partizan stump speaking. He bandied epithets with some of his hearers who interrupted him. The whole speech was a mixture of inane drivel and reckless aspersion. His visit at Chicago passed without any particular scandal. But the speech he made at St. Louis fairly capped the climax. He accused the Republicans in Congress of substantially having planned the New Orleans massacre. He indulged himself in a muddled tirade about Judas, Christ, and Moses. He declared that all his opponents were after was to hold on to the offices; but that he would kick them out; that they wanted to get rid of him, but that he defied them. And so on. At Indianapolis a disorderly crowd hooted him down and would not let him speak at all.

SENATOR JAMES LANE

ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS FREE-STATE FIGHTERS IN KANSAS TERRITORY. HIS DEFECTION TO THE SIDE OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON WAS BITTERLY CRITICISED BY HIS CONSTITUENTS, AND WAS THOUGHT TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS SUICIDE IN 1866]

_New Congress Overwhelmingly Anti-Johnson_

He returned to Washington an utterly discomfited and disgraced man, having gone out to win popular support, and having earned only popular disgust. The humorists, pictorial as well as literary, pounced upon the "swinging around the circle" as a fruitful subject for caricature or satire, turning serious wrath into a bitter laugh. Andrew Johnson became the victim not only of detestation but of ridicule.

The campaign was then--about the middle of September--virtually decided. There was no longer any doubt that the election would not only preserve, but materially increase, the anti-Johnson majority in Congress. But before President Johnson started on his ill-starred journey, arrangements had been made for the other national conventions. One of them was designed to bring Southern loyalists, that is, Southern men who had stood loyally by the National Government, together with Northern Republicans. It met at Philadelphia on the 3rd of September. Senator Zachariah Chandler and myself attended it as delegates sent there by the Republicans of Michigan. It was a large gathering, the roll of which bore many distinguished names from all parts of the country. Southern members having been permitted to say but very little in the Johnson convention a fortnight before, it was a clever stroke of policy on the part of our managers to give the floor to the Southern loyalists altogether. They availed themselves of the opportunity to lay before the people of the country an account of their experiences and sufferings, since the promulgation of the Johnson policy, which could not fail to stir the popular heart. Their recitals of the atrocities committed in the South were indeed horrible. Over a thousand Union citizens had been murdered there since the surrender of Lee and in no case had the assassins been brought to judgment. But after Mr. Johnson's "swing around the circle" no further exertions could have saved his cause, and no further exertion could have very much augmented the majority against him. I am convinced he would have been beaten without his disgraceful escapade. But his self-exhibitions made his defeat overwhelming. The Republicans won in one hundred and forty-three Congressional districts, the Democrats in only forty-nine. President Johnson was more at the mercy of Congress than ever.

During the canvass I was somewhat in demand as a speaker and addressed large meetings at various places. One of my speeches, delivered at Philadelphia on the 8th of September, was printed in pamphlet form and widely circulated as a campaign document. I have read it again--thirty-nine years after its delivery--and I may say that after the additional light and the experience which this lapse of time has given us, I would now draw the diagnosis of the situation then existing substantially as I did in that speech--barring some, not many--extravagances of oratorical coloring, and the treatment of the disqualification clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

_The Movement Toward Negro Suffrage_

It was in this campaign that the matter of negro suffrage was first discussed on the hustings with a certain frankness. Efforts have since been made, and are now being made, to make the Southern people believe--and, I deeply regret to say, many of them actually do believe--that the introduction of negro suffrage was a device of some particularly malignant and vindictive radicals, to subject the South to the extreme of distress and humiliation. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Admitting that there were people in the North who, before the passions of the War had subsided, wished to see the rebels and their sympathizers and abettors in some way punished for what they had done, negro suffrage never was thought of as a punitive measure. I may say that in all my intercourse with various classes of people--and my opportunities were large--I have never heard it mentioned or suggested, still less advocated, as a punitive measure. It never was in itself popular with the masses--reason enough for the ordinary politicians to be afraid of openly favoring it. There were only two classes of men who at all thought of introducing it generally; those whom, without meaning any disparagement, I would for the sake of convenience call the doctrinaires,--men who, like Mr. Sumner, would insist as a general principle that the negro, being a man, was as a matter of right as much entitled to the suffrage as the white man; and those who, after a faithful and somewhat perplexed wrestle with the complicated problem of reconstruction, finally landed--or, it might almost be said, were stranded--at the conclusion that to enable the negro to protect his own rights as a free man by the exercise of the ballot was after all the simplest way out of the tangle, and at the same time the most in accordance with our democratic principles of government.

WHO WAS SENT, TOGETHER WITH CARL SCHURZ, TO THE PHILADELPHIA CONVENTION OF 1866, BY THE REPUBLICANS OF MICHIGAN]

This view of the matter grew rapidly in popular appreciation as the results of reconstruction on the Johnson plan became more and more unsatisfactory. It gained very much in strength when it appeared that the tremendous rebuke administered to the President's policy by the Congressional elections of 1866 had not produced any effect upon Mr. Johnson's mind, but that, as his annual message delivered on December 3rd showed, he was doggedly bent upon following his course. It was still more strengthened when all the Southern legislatures set up under the President's plan, save that of Tennessee, rejected the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution,--some unanimously, or nearly so,--and even with demonstrations of contemptuous defiance. Then the question was asked at the North with great pertinency: Are we to understand that the white people of the States lately in rebellion will not agree that all persons born or naturalized in the United States shall be constitutionally recognized as citizens entitled in their civil rights to the equal protection of the laws? That those States insist, not only that the colored people shall not have the right of suffrage, but that those people so excluded from the franchise shall even serve to increase the basis of representation in favor of the whites--or in other words, that the white people of the South shall come out of the rebellion politically stronger than they were when they went into it? That all those who engaged in the rebellion and fought to destroy the Union shall be entitled to participate on even more favorable terms than ourselves in the government of the same Union which but yesterday they sought to destroy? That they refuse to safeguard the public debt incurred for saving the Union and wish to keep open the possibility of an assumption of the debts incurred by the rebel States for destroying the Union?

The fact was not overlooked that the great mass of the Southern negroes were grossly ignorant and in other respects ill-fitted for the exercise of political privileges. Many who then favored negro suffrage would have greatly preferred its gradual introduction, first limiting it, as Mr. Lincoln suggested to Governor Hahn of Louisiana, to those who had served as soldiers in the Union army and those who were best fitted for it by intelligence and education. But this would have reduced the negro vote to so small a figure as to render it insufficient to counteract or neutralize the power of the reactionary element. To that end the whole vote was required; and for that reason it was demanded, in spite of the imperfections it was known to possess and of the troubles it threatened--which, however, at that period were much underestimated, as is apt to be the case under similar circumstances.

_Reconstruction Under Military Control_

When the session of Congress opened on the 3rd of December, it was virtually certain that unrestricted negro suffrage would come and that President Johnson's reconstruction policy would be swept out of the way. The Republican majority without delay passed a bill extending the suffrage to the negroes in the District of Columbia, which then had a municipal government of its own. The President put his veto on the bill, but the veto was promptly overruled by two-thirds majorities in both Houses. Then followed a series of legislative measures designed substantially to substitute for the reconstruction work done by the President a method of reconstruction based upon universal suffrage including the negro vote, and to strip the President as much as possible of all power to interfere. The first, upon the ground that life and property were not safe under the existing provisional governments, divided the late rebel States into five military divisions, each to be under the command of a general officer who was to have the power to declare martial law and to have offenders tried by military commission, as the condition of public safety and order might seem to them to require. Under their protection conventions were to be elected by universal suffrage including the negro vote and excluding the disqualified "rebel" vote, to frame new State constitutions containing provision for the same sort of universal suffrage, such constitutions to be subject to the approval of the people of the respective States and of Congress. The State officers to be elected under these new constitutions were, of course, to be elected by the same electorate, and the States were to be regarded as entitled to representation in Congress, after having ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the National Constitution, and after that Amendment had been ratified by a sufficient number of the States generally to make it a valid part of the Constitution. A supplementary reconstruction act gave the military commanders very extensive control over the elections to be held, as to the registration of voters, the mode of holding the elections, the appointment of election officers, the canvassing of results, and the reporting of such results to the President and through him to Congress. In order to strip President Johnson of all power to interfere with the execution of this measure beyond the appointment of the commanders of the various military divisions, a provision was introduced in the Army Appropriation bill which substantially ordained that all military orders and instructions should be issued through the General of the Army (General Grant), who was to have his headquarters at Washington; and that all orders and instructions issued otherwise should be null and void. And when the generals commanding the several divisions had expressed some doubt as to the interpretation of some provisions of the Reconstruction Act, and the President had issued instructions concerning those points which displeased Congress, another act was passed, which, by way of explanation of the meaning of its predecessors, still further enlarged the powers of the military commanders and made them virtually rulers over everything and everybody in those States. In the mean time, to tie the President's hands still farther, the Tenure of Office Act had been passed, which was to curtail or hamper President Johnson's power to dismiss office-holders from their places so as to reduce as much as possible his facilities for punishing the opponents and for rewarding the friends of his policy, and thus, as it would now be called, for building up an office-holders' machine for his use.

_The Public Fear of Johnson_

President Johnson in every case promptly vetoed the bills objectionable to him or fulminated his protests against what he considered unwarrantable encroachments upon his constitutional prerogatives. Some of his messages, reported to have been written either by Mr. Seward or by Mr. Jeremiah Black, a man of brilliant abilities, were strong in argument as well as eloquent in expression. But they were not listened to--much less considered. Mr. Johnson had personally discredited himself to such a degree that the connection of his personality with anything he advocated fatally discredited his cause. The air, not only in Washington, but throughout the country, was buzzing with rumors of iniquities which Andrew Johnson was meditating and would surely attempt if he were not disarmed. He was surely plotting a _coup d'état_; he had already slyly tried to get General Grant out of the way by sending him on a trumped-up diplomatic errand to Mexico. When, therefore, the news came from Washington that Andrew Johnson was to be impeached, to deprive him of his office, it was not only welcomed by reckless partizanship, but as everybody who has lived through those times will remember, it struck a popular chord. There was a widespread feeling among well-meaning and sober people that the country was really in some sort of peril, and that it would be a good thing to get rid of that dangerous man in the presidential chair.

But for this vague feeling of uneasiness approaching genuine alarm, I doubt whether Congress would ever have ventured upon the tragi-comedy of the impeachment.

It explains also the fact that so many lawyers in Congress, as well as in the country, although they must have seen the legal weakness of the case against Andrew Johnson, still labored so hard to find some point upon which he might be convicted. It was for political, not for legal reasons that they did so--not reasons of political partizanship, but the higher political reason that they thought the public interest made the removal of Andrew Johnson from his place of power eminently desirable. I have to confess that I leaned somewhat to that opinion myself--not that I believed in the sinister revolutionary designs of Mr. Johnson, but because I thought that the presence of Mr. Johnson in the presidential office encouraged among the white people of the South hopes and endeavors which, the longer they were indulged in, the more grievous the harm they would do to both races. It can indeed not be said that President Johnson failed to execute the reconstruction laws enacted by Congress by refusing to perform the duties imposed upon him, such as the appointment of the commanders of military divisions. He even effectively opposed, through his able and accomplished Attorney-General, Mr. Stanbery, the attempts of two Southern governors to stop the enforcement of the Reconstruction Act by the legal process of injunction. But the mere fact that he was believed to favor the reactionary element in the South and would do all in his power to let it have its way was in itself an influence constantly inflaming the passions kindled by mischievous hopes.

_The Fatal Bungling of Reconstruction_

The condition of things in the South had become deplorable in the extreme. Had the reconstruction measures enacted by Congress, harsh as they were, been imposed upon the Southern people immediately after the War, when the people were stunned by their overwhelming defeat, and when there was still some apprehension of bloody vengeance to be visited upon the leaders of the rebellion--as was the case, for instance, in Hungary in 1849 after the collapse of the great insurrection--those measures would have been accepted as an escape from something worse. Even negro suffrage in a qualified form, as General Lee's testimony before the Reconstruction Committee showed, might then have been accepted as a peace-offering.

But the propitious moment was lost. Instead of gently persuading the Southerners, as Lincoln would have done, that the full restoration of the States lately in rebellion would necessarily depend upon the readiness and good faith with which they accommodated themselves to the legitimate results of the War, and that there were certain things which the victorious Union government was bound to insist upon, not in a spirit of vindictiveness, but as a simple matter of honor and duty--instead of this President Johnson told them that their instant restoration to their old status in the Union, that is, to complete self-government and to participation in the National Government, on equal terms with the other States, had become their indefeasible constitutional right as soon as the insurgents laid down their arms and went through the form of taking an oath of allegiance, and that those who refused to recognize the immediate validity of that right were no better than traitors and public enemies. Nothing could have been more natural, under such circumstances, than that the master class in the South should have seen a chance to establish something like semi-slavery, and that, pressed by their economic perplexities, they should have eagerly grasped at that chance. No wonder that what should have been as gentle as possible a transition from one social state into another degenerated into an angry political brawl, which grew more and more furious as it went on. No wonder, finally, that when at last the Congressional reconstruction policy, which at first might have been quietly submitted to as something that might have been worse, and that could not be averted, came at last in the midst of that brawl, it was resented in the South as an act of diabolical malice and tyrannical oppression not to be endured. And the worst outcome of all was, that many white people of the South who had at first cherished a kindly feeling for the negroes on account of their "fidelity" during the War, now fell to hating the negroes as the cause of all their woes; that, on the other hand, the negroes, after all their troubles, raised to a position of power, now were tempted to a reckless use of that power; and that a selfish partizan spirit growing up among the Republican majority, instead of endeavoring to curb that tendency, encouraged, or, at least, tolerated it for party advantage.

I have to confess that I took a more hopeful view of the matter at the time, for I did not foresee the mischievous part which selfish partizan spirit would play in that precarious situation. I trusted that the statesmen of the Republican party would prove clear-sighted enough to perceive in time the danger of excesses which their reconstruction policy would bring to the South, and that they would be strong enough in influence to combat that danger. Nothing could have been farther from my mind than the expectation that before long it would be my lot to take an active part in that combat on the most conspicuous political stage in the country.

THE THIRTEENTH MOVE

BY ALBERTA BANCROFT

ILLUSTRATIONS BY M. J. SPERO

Ikey stood on the street corner and fingered her veil to keep passersby from seeing her lips tremble. She was sure that she was going to cry right there in the open, and she was furious about it, because she did not approve of weepy females.

"If you dare," she whispered fiercely, "if you dare, I'll--I'll--you shan't have that nickel's worth of peanut candy, or those currant buns, either."

This threat proving effective, she turned, head held high, and entered the bakery.

There was the usual Saturday afternoon crowd, jostling on the shoddy thoroughfare. To-day the jostling was intensified; for the car strike was on in full blast, feeling ran high, and demonstrations were being made against the company. Now and again a car passed slowly up or down the street, drays and express wagons blocking its progress wherever possible, scab conductor and motorman hooted at by San Francisco men and beplumed ladies for their pains.

Ikey looked at the mob in disgust. Then she hurried around the corner and away from the scene of commotion.

"And to think that it has come to this, that I can't ride up and down in those cars all day long--_just to show 'em_."

The beach was what she really wanted--one of those little sand hummocks with juicy plants sprawling over it, that protect one from the wind and yet reveal beyond ravishing glimpses of cliff and breaker and sapphire shining sea.

But the beach was not to be found in the heart of town. And she was too tired to walk there--not having had any lunch and being very angry besides. And she would lose her "job"--her miserable, wretched, disgusting, good-for-nothing job (Ikey loved adjectives), if she rode. For any and all women connected with any and all union men had been forbidden to use the company's cars. And business houses--who had anything to gain from it--had promised their employees instant dismissal for even one ride. And the firm that employed Ikey would lose three-fourths of its trade if the union boycotted it.

So the sand-dunes would have to wait. But there were some vacant lots, backed by a scraggle of rough, red rock, only half a dozen blocks away. If luck were with her, the loafers might be in temporary abeyance and the refugee tents not unduly prominent.

Luck was with her. And Ikey sat down on the lea of the little cliff, quite alone, spread out her buns,--you got three for ten cents these catastrophe days,--and faced the situation.

The landlady had raised the rent.

Ikey could have screamed with laughter over the situation--if only the matter were not so vital.

"This'll make the thirteenth move for you, Ikey, my love, since the eighteenth of April--and the thirteenth move is bound to be unlucky. But you'll have to go, sure as Fate; for you can't stand another raise. The Wandering Jew gentleman takes the road again."

She pursed her lips as she said it. She had invented the appelation for herself after nine moves in three months. "I don't know what his name really was," she confessed--there was no one else to talk to, no one she cared for, so she talked, sub voice, to herself--"but it must have been Ikey. I'm sure it was Ikey--and that I look just like him." And deriving much comfort from this witticism, she went on her way.

"Ikey, the Wandering Jew, on the move again," she repeated. "But where to move _to_, that is the question. It's funny what a difference money makes"--her eyebrows went up--"or rather, lack of it. I've never considered that until recently."

Then her eyes fell on her shoes.

They had been very swagger little shoes in the beginning--Ikey had made rather a specialty of footgear--but they were her "escape" shoes; and their looks told the tale of their wanderings. Also, she had had no others since.

She wriggled her toes.

"You'll be poking through before long, looking at the stars," she told them severely. "Imagine your excitement."

And her suit.

Ikey looked away so as not to see the perfect cut of it, the perfect fit of it, the utter shabbiness of it. It was her "escape" suit, too. She had slept on the hills in it to the tune of dynamiting and the flare of the burning city. She would never have another like it--never. For her job----

Her job.

She leaned back suddenly and closed her eyes. Her job. The rage of this noon was coming back again; rage, and with it a strange, new sensation--fear. She had never known fear before, not even during the earthquake days. "Only at the dentist's," she told herself, giggling half hysterically behind closed lids.

And back of it all--back of the landlady's unconcealed dislike and latest slap, back of the disintegration of a wardrobe that could not be replaced, and the question as to whether her "job" had not become an impossibility since to-day--and that job simply could not become an impossibility: one had to live--back of all this was the dull hurt, smothered and always coming again, that Bixler McFay had not taken the trouble to look her up when his regiment came through on the way to Manila.

"You may as well face that, too, while you're about it," Ikey observed sarcastically. She opened her eyes with a snap and bit into the first bun.

"The regiment was only here three days," a little voice inside of her whispered fearfully.

"Three days!" Ikey's scorn was unbounded. "If he had cared, he could have found you in three hours--and he always said he cared. It's a thing you've got to live with. It's nothing so unusual. It happens every day. Why can't you treat it like a poor relation?"

And her thoughts went back to Fort Leavenworth, and the gowns on gowns she had worn, all burned up at the St. Francis last spring, with the rest of her things, a week after she had reached the city; and Cousin Mary, suave and elegant and impressive as her chaperon; and herself, petted and made much of on all sides, and incidentally pointed out as the richest girl on the field, and an orphan; and Bixler McFay, handsome, brilliant, devoted, always on hand, always protesting----

A whimsical, sarcastic little smile curved her lips for a moment. The earthquake had certainly made a difference. A vision of Cousin Mary arose--not the suave and elegant chaperon of a wealthy young relative, but a frightened, self-centered, middle-aged woman, who had taken the earthquake as a personal affront put upon her by her young charge and insisted on being the first consideration in no matter what environment she found herself.

Then came another vision. She recalled her parting with Bixler McFay in the late winter, when she had left Leavenworth for the Coast, saying it wasn't decent not to know anything about the place where all your income came from, and he had left Leavenworth to rejoin his regiment in Arizona. How his voice had trembled that morning as he bade her good-bye, declaring he should always consider himself engaged to her, even if she did not consider herself engaged to him; begging that she wear his class pin, or at least keep it for him if she would not wear it, because the thought of its being in her possession would comfort him in his loneliness.

It had comforted her in those first dreadful days after the fire to think that he was alive and on his way to her. It never entered her head but what he would come at once: when friends were looking for friends and enemies were succoring one another, how should he fail her?

And then--not one word. Not even an inquiry in the paper; when that was about all the papers were made up of for days after--column after column of addresses and inquiries, along with the death notices.

And afterwards--not one word----