Chapter X: Part I (10)

The loyal States, indeed, come out of the war separated from the disloyal, not by such thin partitions as the President so cavalierly breaks through, but by a great sea of blood. It is across that we must survey their rights and duties; it is with that in view we must settle the terms of their readmission. It is idle to apply to 1866 the word-twisting of 1860. The Rebel communities which began the war are not the same communities which were recognized as States in the Union before the war occurred. No sophistry that perplexes the brain of the people can prevent this fact being felt in their hearts. The proposition that States can plunge into rebellion, and, after waging against the government a war which is put down only at the expense of enormous sacrifices of treasure and blood, can, when defeated, return _of right_ to form a part of the government they have labored to subvert, is a proposition so repugnant to common sense that its acceptance by the people would send them down a step in the zoölogical scale. Have we been fighting in order to compel the South to resume its reluctant _rôle_ of governing us? Are we to be told that the States which have sent mourning into every loyal family in the land, and which have loaded every loyal laborer's back with a new and unexampled burden of taxation, have the same right to seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives which New York and Illinois can claim? The question is not whether the victorious party shall exercise magnanimity and mercy, whether it shall attempt to heal wounds rather than open them afresh, but whether its legal representatives, constituting, as it was supposed, the legislative department of the United States government, shall have anything to do with the matter at all. The President seems to think they have not; and finding that Congress, by immense majorities, declined to abdicate its functions, he and his partisans appealed to such legislative assemblies as could be extemporized for the occasion. Congress did not fairly represent the people of the whole Union; and Mr. Johnson accordingly unfolded his measures to a body which, in his opinion, we must suppose did, namely, a Copperhead mob which gathered under his windows at Washington. The Secretary of State addressed a meeting in New York, assembled in a hall which is the very symbol of mutation. Some collectors and postmasters have, we believe, been kind enough to take upon themselves the trouble of calling similar legislative assemblies in their respective cities; and Keokuk, it is well known, has won deserved celebrity for the rapidity with which its gathering of publicists passed the President's plan. Still more important, perhaps, is the unanimity with which the "James Page Library Company," of Philadelphia, fulfilled its duty of legislating for the whole republic. This mode of taking the opinion of the people, if considered merely as an innocent amusement of great officials, may be harmless; but political farces played by actors who do not seem to take their own jokes sometimes lead to serious consequences; and the effect upon the South of suggesting that the Congress of the United States not only misrepresents its constituents, but excludes "loyal men" who have a right to seats, cannot but give fierce additional stimulants to Southern disaffection.

We are accordingly, it would seem, in danger of having a President, who is at variance with nearly two thirds of Congress, using his whole executive power and influence against the party he was supposed to represent, and having on his side the Southerners who made the Rebellion, the Northerners whose sympathies were on the side of the Rebellion, a small collection of Republican politicians called "the President's friends," and the undefined political force passing under the name of "the Blairs." But Congress is stronger than the whole body of its opponents, and is backed by the great mass of the loyal people, determined not to surrender all the advantages of the position which has been gained by the profuse shedding of so much loyal blood.

"Constitutional government is on trial" in this contest; and Mr. Johnson seems neither to have the constitutional instinct in his blood, nor the constitutional principle in his brain. The position of the President of the United States is analogous, not so much to that of a Napoleon or a Bismark, as to that of an English prime-minister. In the theory and ordinary working of the government, he is one of a body of statesmen, agreeing in their general views, and elected by the same party; what are called his measures are passed by Congress, because the majority of Congress and he are in general accord on all important questions; and it is against the whole idea of constitutional government that the executive _will_ is a fair offset to the legislative _reason_,--that one man is the equal of the whole body of the people's representatives. The powers of an executive are of such a character, that, pushed wilfully to their ultimate expression, they can absorb all the other departments of the government, as when James the Second practically repealed laws by pushing to its abstract logical consequences his undoubted power of pardon; but a constitutional government implies, as a condition of its existence, that the executive will have that kind of mind and temper which instinctively recognizes the practical limitations of powers in themselves vague; for if the executive can defy the legislature, the legislature can bring the whole government to an end by a simple refusal to grant supplies. In his Washington speech, the President selected for special attack the chairman of the House Committee of Ways and Means, and the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations; but it would be difficult to conjecture how he could carry on the government without the aid of what these men represent, for Mr. Stevens pays him his salary, and Mr. Sumner gives effect to his treaties. Bismark, in Prussia, snaps his fingers in the faces of the Prussian Chambers, and still contrives to get along very comfortably; but an American President does not enjoy similar advantages. He can follow his own will or caprice only by the toleration of the legislative body he defames and disregards. His great power is the veto; but the perverse use of this could easily be checked by the perverse use of many a legislative power which a mere majority of Congress can effectively use. The fallacy of the argument of "the President's friends," in their proposition that Congress should settle the dispute by the easy method of allowing Mr. Johnson to have his own way, consists in its entire oversight of the essential character of constitutional government.

And now what would be the consequences of the yielding of Congress in this struggle? The first effect would be the concession that, in respect to the most important matter that will probably ever be brought before the United States government, the executive branch was everything, and the legislative nothing. The second effect would be, that the Rebel Slates would re-enter the Union, not only without giving additional guaranties for their good behavior, but with the elated feeling that they had gained a great triumph over the "fanatical" North. The third effect would be the establishment of the principle, that they had never been out of the Union as States; that, accordingly, a doubt was over the legality of the legislation which had been transacted in the absence of their representatives; and that, Congress having, for the past five years, represented only a section of the country, that section was alone bound by its measures. The moment it is admitted that the national legislature, as now constituted, is an incomplete body, and that it needs Southern "loyal men" to make its laws operative over the South, a whole brood of deductive reasoners will spring up in that region, eager to carry the principle out to its remotest logical consequences. After two or three of those cotton crops on which some persons rely so much to make the South contented have given it the requisite leisure to follow long trains of reasoning, it will by degrees convince itself that the whole national legislation during the war, including the debt and the Anti-Slavery Amendment, was unconstitutional, and that, as far as it concerns the Southern States, it is void, and should be of no effect. Persons who are accustomed to nickname as "radicals" all those statesmen who do not consider that the removal of an immediate inconvenience exhausts the whole science of practical politics, are wont to make merry over this possibility of Southern repudiation, or to look down upon its fanatical suggesters with the benevolent pity of serenely superior intelligence; but nobody who has watched the steps by which Calhoun's logic was inwrought into the substance of the Southern mind,--nobody who has noted the process by which the justification of one of the bloodiest rebellions in the history of the world was deduced from the definition of an abstraction,--nobody who explores the meaning of the phrase, common in many mouths, that "the South _thought_ itself in the right,"--will doubt that the seeming bugbear may turn out a dreadful reality. It is impossible, in fact, for the most far-sighted mind to predict all the evils which may flow from the heedless adoption of a vicious principle; if the war has not taught us this, it has taught us nothing.

But it is not to be supposed that Congress will yield, for to yield would be to commit suicide. There is not an interest in the nation which is not concerned in its adherence to the principle, that in it the whole legislative power of the United States government is vested, and that it has the right to exact irreversible guaranties of the Rebel States as the conditions of the admission of their Senators and Representatives. They are not _in_ the Union until they are in its government; and Congress has the same power to keep them out that it has to let them in. By the very nature of the case, the whole question must be left to its judgment of what is necessary for the public safety and honor. Its members may be mistaken, but the only method to correct their mistake is to elect other persons in their places, when their limited period of service has expired; and any new Congress will, unless it is scandalously neglectful of the public interests, admit the Rebel States to their old places in the Union, not because it _must_, but because it thinks that a sufficient number of guaranties have been obtained to render their admission prudent and safe. It is in this form that the subject is coming before the people in the autumn elections; and this explains the eager haste of the President's friends to forestall and mislead the public mind, and sacrifice a great party, founded on principles, to the will of an individual, veering with his moods.

We think, if the vote were taken now, that Congress would be overwhelmingly sustained by the people. We think this, in spite of such expressions of the popular will as found vent in the President's meeting at Washington and Mr. Seward's meeting in New York,--in spite even of the resolutions of Keokuk and the address of the "James Page Library Company" of Philadelphia,--in spite, above all, of the perfect felicity in which, if we may believe the Secretary of State, the President's speech left the American people. The loyal men of the loyal States do not intend that the war they carried on for great ends shall pass into history as the bloodiest of all purposeless farces, beginning in an ecstasy of public spirit and ending in an ignominious surrender of the advantages of hard-won victory. They demand such guaranties, in the shape of amendments to the Constitution, as shall insure security for the future from such evils as have scourged them in the past; and these guaranties they do not think have been yet obtained. They make this demand in no spirit of rancorous hostility to the South, for they require nothing which it is not for the permanent welfare of the South to grant. They feel that, if a settlement is patched up on the President's plan, it will leave Southern society a prey to most of the influences which have so long been its curse, which have narrowed its patriotism, checked its progress, vitiated its character, educated it in disloyalty, and impelled it into war. They desire that a settlement shall be effected which shall make the South republican, like the North, homogeneous with it in institutions, as well as nominally united to it under one government,--a settlement which shall annihilate the accursed heresy of Secession by extinguishing the accursed prejudice of caste.

Such a settlement the people have not in the "President's plan." What confidence, indeed, can they place in the professions of the cunning Southern politicians who have taken the President captive, and used him as an instrument while seeming to obey him as agents? There is something to make us distrust the stability of the firmest and most upright statesman in the spectacle of that remarkable conquest. Mr. Johnson, when elected, appeared to represent the most violent radical ideas and the most vindictive passions engendered by the war. He spoke as if the blacks were to find in him a Moses, and the Rebels a Nemesis. It seemed as if there could not be in the whole land a sufficient number of sour-apple trees to furnish hanging accommodations for the possible victims of his patriotic wrath. One almost feared that reconciliation would be indefinitely postponed by the relentless severity with which he would visit treason with death. But the Southern politicians, finding that further military resistance was hopeless, resorted at once to their old game of intrigue and management, and proved that, fresh as they were from the experience of violent methods, they had not forgotten their old art of manipulating Presidents. They adapted themselves with marvellous flexibility to the changed condition of things, in order to become masters of the situation, and began to declaim in favor of the Union, even while their curses against it were yet echoing in the air. They wheedled the President into pardoning, in the place of hanging them; they made themselves serviceable agents in carrying out his plan of reconstruction; they gave up what it was impossible for them to retain, in order to retain what it would destroy their influence to give up; they got possession of him to the extent of insinuating subtly into his mind ideas which they made him think he himself originated; and finally they capped the climax of their skilful audacity, by taking him out of "practical relations" with the party to which he was indebted for his elevation, and made him the representative of the small party which voted against him, and of the defeated Rebel Confederacy, which, of course, could not do even that. The Southern politicians have succeeded in many shrewd political contrivances in the course of our history, but this last is certainly their masterpiece. Its only parallel or precedent is to be found in Richard's wooing of Anne:--

"What! I, that killed her husband and his father,
To take her in her heart's extremest hate;
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of my hatred by,
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
And I no friends to back my suit withal,
But the plain devil, and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her,--all the world to nothing!"

Now can the people trust these politicians to the extent of placing in their hands the powers of their State governments, and the representative power of their States in Congress, without exacting irreversible guaranties necessary for the public safety? Can the people uphold, as against Congress, a President whose mind seems to be so much under the influence of these men that he publicly insults the legislature of the nation? Is the President to be supported because he sustains State Rights against Centralization? The only centralization which is to be feared, in this case, is the centralization of all the powers of the government in its executive branch. Is the President to be supported because he represents the principle of "no taxation without representation"? The object of Congress is to see to it that there shall not be a "representation" which, in respect to the national debt, shall endeavor to abolish "taxation" altogether,--which, in respect to the freedmen, shall tax permanently a population it misrepresents,--which, in respect to the balance of political power, shall use the black freemen as a basis of representation, while it excludes them from having a voice in the selection of the representatives. Is the President to be supported because he is determined the defeated South shall not be oppressed? The purpose of Congress is not to commit, but prevent oppression; not to oppress the Rebel whites, but to guard from oppression the loyal blacks; not to refuse full political privileges to the late armed enemies of the nation, but to avoid the intolerable ignominy of giving those enemies the power to play the robber and tyrant over its true and tried friends. Is the President to be supported because he is magnanimous and merciful? Congress doubts the magnanimity which sacrifices the innocent in order to propitiate the guilty, and the mercy which abandons the helpless and weak to the covetousness of the powerful and strong. Is the President to be supported because he aims to represent the whole people? Congress may well suspect that he represents the least patriotic portion, especially when he puts a stigma on all ardent loyalty by denouncing as equally traitorous the "extremists of both sections," and thus makes no distinction between the "fanaticism" which perilled everything in fighting _for_ the government, and the "fanaticism" which perilled everything in fighting _against_ it. And, finally, is the President to be supported because he is the champion of conciliation and peace? Congress believes that his conciliation is the compromise of vital principles; that his peace is the surrender of human rights; that his plan but postpones the operation of causes of discord it fails to eradicate; and that, if the war has taught us nothing else, it has taught us this,--spreading it out indeed before all eyes in letters of fire and blood,--that no conciliation is possible which sacrifices the defenceless, and that no peace is permanent which is unfounded in justice.

GRIFFITH GAUNT; OR, JEALOUSY.