Chapter III: Introduction (1)

No period of our history better repays perusal by thoughtful readers and good citizens than the political happenings of the three years following the Civil War, culminating in the attempt to “recall” President Johnson. But the subject is so vast that no magazine article can more than suggest its outlines, or sketch the personalities involved in the first efforts to reëstablish civil order in the South.

Probably no actor in that series of passionate events could write of them without some bias; nor would any picture be quite true without the perspective due to individual experience.

Considered in the large, the long fight between Congress and President Johnson must be regarded as a wrestling of political forces, a struggle for major influence in reconstruction, between the executive and legislative branches of the Government.

In the Civil War the Democratic party, which for many years had been dominated by the slave-holding interests of the South, had been dethroned by the new Republican party, which, however, could not have achieved its purpose to save the Union and abolish slavery without the aid of the large body of War Democrats who had been rallied to the support of Lincoln by his defeated rival, Senator Douglas.

At the end of the war, the Republican party was dominated by its Radical wing, whose extreme aims were almost as offensive to the War Democrats as to their old allies of the South; and the latter were not slow to grasp at the political advantage of a reunion which promised Democratic control of the National Government.

A fourth great factor in the war had been the Union men of the South, formerly Democrats, of whom Andrew Johnson had been the forceful leader. It was this prominence which dictated his nomination for Vice-President in 1864. When, at the close of the war, by the assassination of Lincoln he became President, his utterances gave the Republicans hope that as a convert his zeal would equal if not exceed that of the Radicals in their purpose to subject the South to a period of political probation. But it was soon manifest that he would steer the course of conciliation which Lincoln, before the end of battle, had already charted and begun. The tendency of Johnson’s policy was to draw to him men imbued with the old Democratic sentiment. In a little while, the Republican leaders perceived that as soon as the Democrats of the South should be allowed to vote they would unite with the Democrats of the North, and thus Republican ascendancy might come to a sudden end, and some of the results achieved by battle might be reversed at the ballot-box.

The black man had been freed, and, to protect him against the political power of his former masters, the Republicans decided to give him the ballot. This, it was expected, would also offset Democratic votes in the South, and help to perpetuate Republican rule. President Johnson had championed emancipation, but was opposed to immediate Negro suffrage. In the minds of the Radicals that attitude not only stamped him as a traitor to the party which elected him, but also incited an obstinate South. When the efforts to thwart the President by obstructive laws had failed, the Radicals sought to remove him by impeachment.

Each side had abundant legal and moral grounds for its actions, and each believed that the other was reaching for selfish political advantage. Outbreaks of lawlessness in the South, peculiar to the extraordinary conditions, and chargeable to both sides, convinced each that its worst fears were justified.

In the pages which follow, the main motives for impeachment are sketched by General Otis, who fought through the Civil War as a Union soldier, then entered the long political contest as a militant journalist, and finally resumed his place by the flag in the war with Spain. A more conservative view is taken by General Henderson, a War Democrat high in Lincoln’s confidence, and a slaveholder who yet proposed the final edict of freedom in the Senate. He is the only survivor of the seven Republican senators who thwarted impeachment, ex-Senator George F. Edmunds, of Vermont, being the only other surviving member of the court. Out of his personal recollection General Henderson describes his intercourse with Lincoln in securing emancipation, and his part in the impeachment fiasco.

Papers to follow, in the January ~Century~, will include an account of the impeachment trial, largely based on the President’s notes and letters, and an anecdotal sketch of Andrew Johnson, one of the most peculiar characters in American history.

In subsequent papers, after an interval, the later aspects of “Reconstruction” will be treated from the Southern point of view.--~The Editor.~

THE CAUSES OF IMPEACHMENT

BY HARRISON GRAY OTIS

Editor of the “Los Angeles Times”; veteran of the war for the Union; Brevet Major-General in the war with Spain

THE SAVING OF THE UNION

The War of the Rebellion was the offspring of a desire on the part of the South to secure exemption from laws that its people believed would be enacted by a great Northern party, following the election of Abraham Lincoln, and which would put an end to the extension of slavery, and menace its safety in the States where it existed. In vain Republican statesmen protested that slavery would not be interfered with south of the Potomac. Behind Lincoln and Seward the South beheld Garrison and Lovejoy and Phillips. It was the belief of Davis and Breckinridge and Benjamin and Toombs that to exclude slavery from Kansas and Nebraska would be to sound the prelude of its abolition in Virginia and the Carolinas, and that those who commended the raid of John Brown and indorsed Helper’s “Impending Crisis” would sooner or later dominate the Republican party and commit it to universal abolition of the system of servile labor, upon the perpetuation of which depended the industrial life of the South.

It was believed by Southern publicists that the Dred Scott decision would be reversed by a reorganized Supreme Court, and that a Republican Congress would enact laws denying the slaveholders the right to carry their slaves into the territories, and to be protected there by Federal power. As a matter of fact, slave labor could not have been employed profitably in the corn-fields of Kansas and Nebraska, and the cotton States had no slaves to spare. As was wittily said by Charles Francis Adams, “The South seceded because she couldn’t get protection for a thing she hadn’t got, in a place where she didn’t want it.”

In the months between the election and inauguration of Lincoln, during which the Southern Confederacy was organized, members of the Thirty-sixth Congress made futile efforts to avert the coming struggle. Senator Mason of Virginia sneeringly characterized the Crittenden compromise resolutions as “a bread pill.” Senator Douglas rejoined that “hypochondriacs were sometimes best cured of imaginary disorders by the use of bread pills.” Compromise was impossible. The South was determined on separation. Her press and her orators cherished the delusion that Northern men would not fight to preserve the Union. They fired the Southern heart and precipitated the cotton States into a revolution.

The uprising in the North that followed the assault on Sumter amazed the South and astonished the world; but it was not until nearly two years after Sumter that the nation became fully aroused to a sense of its power, its duty, and its destiny. The Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln struck swift and sure at the cause of the war, which was the Southern determination to perpetuate slavery. It enlisted the sympathies of Christian civilization. By the late summer of 1864 it became apparent that the sacrifices, the generalship, and the desperate valor of the Confederates could not much longer hold out against the superiority of the Union forces in numbers and arms, and the financial resources of the Federal government. The one hope of the Confederacy was that, at the ensuing election, the people of the loyal States might decree to end the contest. But the soul went out of the Confederacy on the sixth of November, 1864, when the ballots cast for Abraham Lincoln settled the issue of continuing the war for the Union. Victory succeeded victory, until the old banner, hallowed by the new motive, floated over every Southern stronghold.

AN ELECTION ON THE MARCH

Many of the volunteer troops had been authorized by the laws of their respective States to vote in the field for President of the United States. In the case of my command, this voting was done in the Shenandoah Valley on November 6, about a fortnight after the famous battle of Cedar Creek, the scene of “Sheridan’s Ride.” My brigade was then on the march from Cedar Creek to Martinsburg as guard to a long supply-train. The usual practice on infantry marches was to march fifty minutes and rest ten minutes. Our troops availed themselves of the opportunity offered by these ten-minute rests to go to the polls and cast their ballots. Polling-places had been provided in every regimental line, proper election blanks supplied by the State, and the voting was done not “early and often,” but with honesty and a fair degree of regularity. In my own regiment the care of the rolls fell to me and my associate election judges, who had charge of the polling throughout the day. A bullet through the leg, received in the battle of Kernstown three months before, had deprived me of my full “hiking” powers, compelling me to resort to the “hurricane-deck” of a mule for transportation throughout the march; but I “arrived” all right, and on the following day, in the midst of a snow-storm, I was able to collect the rolls, certify to the results, and officially transmit the papers to the Ohio Secretary of State. The votes cast were almost entirely for Abraham Lincoln’s reëlection, General George B. McClellan, his Democratic, anti-war opponent, securing scarcely more than a “look in” at the hands of this steadfast Ohio brigade. McClellan fared little better at the hands of those Ohio volunteers than had Clement L. Vallandigham when he was a candidate for governor of the Buckeye State.

CIVIC AND MATERIAL DESOLATION

The surrender of Lee and Johnston left the South in a deplorable condition. Its people were without money or credit, and their labor system was destroyed. Its legislators and judges were fleeing or hiding from Federal soldiers. The organic and statutory laws of the South that were in existence before the war had been changed by State conventions and legislatures during the war. Twelve millions of people, white and black, were not only without representation at Washington, but they were without local law, without civil government of any kind, without other protection than the bayonets of Federal troops. Somewhere there must exist the power to create, to adjust, to set the machinery of government again in motion. Clearly the creative power was in the people of each State capable of giving their consent to be governed, and not in a few, or in a class who should assume to govern the others. The adjusting power was in Congress under Section 8 of Article I of the Federal Constitution, which provides that Congress “shall have the power to provide for the general welfare of the United States.”

The national statesmen of those days were confronted with a perplexing problem. They desired to remove the blight from the fair face of the South, to open her seaports to the ships of the world, to restore her marts to commerce, her fields to plenty, her people to prosperity, to citizenship, to equality, and to a place in the councils of the Government. Nothing less than this was intended by those who undertook the task of reconstruction. There was no vengeful outbreak of passion, no proscription of the Southern people, no spirit of retaliation in the hearts of Union men.

The new nation which was to issue from the war began to take form before the surrender of Lee or the assassination of President Lincoln. The Thirteenth Amendment, validating the Emancipation Proclamation and abolishing slavery, had been ratified by eleven of the States which had joined the Confederacy, also by Maryland and Missouri of the border States, and by all the Northern States. Delaware and Kentucky alone had refused to ratify. But it was unfortunate for the Southern people that their leaders in the fighting did not participate in the public affairs of the South and advise the politicians that they could not expect to win from Union statesmen what their armies had failed to gain on the battle-field. Southern soldiers, as a whole, showed the spirit of men who had fought bravely and lost fairly, and recognized the duty, not less than the patriotism, of submitting to the inevitable. Almost without exception, Union soldiers of the line and their officers stood ready to reflect in their acts, attitude, and feelings the sentiments of their great commander General Grant, who had said to the vanquished at Appomattox: “Take your horses home with you; you will need them to put in your crops.” Had the Southern people, the non-combatants among them, taken the attitude of the mass of the Confederate soldiers, the difficulties of reconstruction would have been lessened. But in the first year after the close of the war the country, as already described, was convulsed by disturbing political events, in which the rebellious spirit shown by the Southern people caused deep anxiety and created marked revulsion in the North. There were strong exhibitions of aroused and indignant sentiment in Union conventions and other public assemblies, and there was a tremendous outpouring of protest and warning. At the same time the South was aflame with claims of Southern rights denied and of wrongs suffered.

INCIDENTS OF PROVOST-MARSHAL RULE

Two incidents within my personal knowledge illustrate the inconvenience caused by the total absence of civil law in the South at that juncture. In June, 1865, I was serving as provost-marshal at the town of Harrisonburg, in the Valley of the Shenandoah, with instructions to preserve order, gather up various sorts of United States military property scattered through the country, arrest outlaws and marauders, and receive the surrender of, and give paroles to, bands of scattered Confederate soldiers who had not been “in” at the all-compelling surrender at Appomattox Court House two months before. The country was honeycombed with stragglers, and I was burdened with my unique tasks. Civil government being non-existent, there was not even authority for the issuance of marriage-licenses and for the performance of like civic duties. One day, in this emergency, I received a personal application from an ardent Virginia swain, who announced that he wished to get married, and appealed to me for instructions as to how to go about the tender though untimely task. Rising to the occasion, I told him that I would issue him a license, and accordingly did so in my capacity as a captain of United States Volunteers, and for the time being provost-marshal of that district. I wrote out the necessary authority, observing no forms, empowering any minister of the gospel, or any former justice of the peace under the Confederacy, to perform the ceremony. Then I sent the happy lover on his way rejoicing, and assumed that the knot was tied with due solemnity, that the couple would live happily ever after, and rear a family of Virginia children.

As provost-marshal I imposed a fine on a portly Negro saloon-keeper for violating a military order commanding the closing of all liquor shops in the town. The amount of the fine was fifty dollars in greenbacks, which was promptly, albeit ungraciously, paid by the aggrieved dispenser of firewater. Then, not knowing what to do legally with the money, I transmitted it to the regimental and post commander. He, also, not knowing how to dispose of this exceptional collection under any section of the army regulations, sent it to the Treasury of the United States at Washington, accompanied by an explanatory letter. The treasury officials, likewise “stumped” by the unusual problem, sent the fifty dollars back to the colonel commanding. He in turn threw the money back upon me, with a hint that in the unique dilemma the colored man’s unwilling contribution might not inappropriately be covered into the treasury of a certain regimental fund which was then being raised to promote a permanent, patriotic, and reverent object. Without delay I proceeded to act upon the hint, and to this day I hold among my private military archives the receipt of the regimental quartermaster for the money thus forcibly extorted from that Negro at Harrisonburg who had undertaken to sell Virginia apple-jack without a military license.

OPPOSITION TO THE EDICT OF FREEDOM

The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, which was pending when Lee surrendered, was not acceptable to the South. Almost the first acts of the Southern legislatures which assembled under President Johnson’s proclamation of amnesty, and the provisional organizations provided for by these agencies, breathed antagonism to the abolition of slavery. In November, 1865, Mississippi provided by legislative enactment that any Negro over eighteen years of age found in that State with no lawful employment or business should be deemed a vagrant. Conviction of vagrancy was punished by fine, and for non-payment of fine for five days it was made the duty of the sheriff to hire out the “vagrant” to any person who for the shortest period of service would pay the fine. In March, 1865, three months after the Thirteenth Amendment was declared in force, Georgia enacted a vagrant law authorizing the sale of the black man’s time for a year. The same law provided for the return and punishment by fine and imprisonment of runaway black employees, and authorized the employer to pay the fine and deduct it from the servant’s wages. Alabama, South Carolina, and Virginia had vagrant laws similar to those of Mississippi, and Louisiana had an additional provision requiring employers to pay only half-wages, and giving them the right to keep the remainder if the laborer quit before his time was out; and also the right to complain of a laborer who might quit work, and cause him to be put on the public works, without pay, until he returned to his employer.

Union men who had left their Southern homes during the war came back to find their property, real and personal, in the hands of Confederates, who refused to surrender it. Returning Unionists encountered such persecution as compelled them to leave again. There was, under “the black law,” a virtual reënslavement of Negroes. Confederate sentiment was nearly as dominant from the Potomac to the Gulf as when the Stars and Bars floated from every flagstaff. Georgia elected, or tried to elect, Alexander H. Stephens a United States Senator. Mobile made Raphael Semmes, the captain of the _Alabama_, a probate judge. Monroe was elected mayor of New Orleans, and Robert E. Lee was offered the nomination for Governor of Virginia. National airs were hissed in the theaters, and the national flag was insulted in the streets. The local press extolled the “Lost Cause” and flouted those who had overthrown it. Former Confederate officers were the chosen leaders of public sentiment. Taxation was levied to pay municipal indebtedness contracted to fit out Confederate regiments. The generally expressed Southern opinion was that, if reconstruction was necessary, it was the Confederates who should do the reconstructing.

Northern representatives in Congress, under the leadership of Thaddeus Stevens and Henry Winter Davis, were not hospitable to the Southern claims for immediate and unconditional representation in Congress. In substance they said: The alleged “right” of secession has been trampled under the feet of the Union armies; the Confederate claims of exemption from the consequences of their action is not allowed. The North does not demand punishment of Confederates, nor indemnity for the past, but it will have security for the future. Taxation is a consequence of war which the South must bear with the North. Representation--participation in public rule--is a privilege which, except under satisfactory conditions and guarantees, will not be extended to the people of the cotton States.

THE MILITARY STATE GOVERNMENTS

A law of Congress was enacted authorizing an officer not below the rank of brigadier-general of the United States army to make a list of all the voters in a State which might be under his command as a military district. In making this list, residence and manhood were the only qualifications.[3] The general was authorized and directed to issue a proclamation inviting the listed voters to assemble at the polls and elect delegates to a convention to draft a State constitution to be submitted to a vote of the people, and if ratified and approved by Congress, the State to be placed at once in practical political relations with the other States, and accorded her proper representation in Congress. The only persons excluded from participation in reconstruction were those who before the war had taken an official oath to support the Government and Constitution of the United States, and who had afterward violated that oath by voluntarily bearing arms against the Government of the United States. The class thus excluded from suffrage was perhaps 30,000 in number. The conventions were required to perpetuate the basis of suffrage set forth in the Reconstruction Act and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. That amendment provided that Federal indebtedness should be paid, and that Confederate indebtedness should not be paid; that those who were under disabilities should not be eligible to office until Congress should remove their disabilities; that representation in Congress and in the Electoral College should not be accorded to those to whom the right of suffrage had been or might be denied, and that all persons should be protected in their rights of liberty and property.

The Fourteenth Amendment was opposed both South and North by those who asserted that the Union armies had fought to establish the doctrine that no State could secede from the Union; that the Union victories had established such doctrine; that as no State could secede, therefore no State did secede, and, so being in the Union, every Southern State was entitled to representation without conditions.

To such reasoning it was answered that no statesman and no party had ever claimed that a State might not destroy herself, even as a city might disincorporate, or a county merge itself with another. No State could absolve its citizens from their allegiance to the United States or release them from their obligation to obey Federal laws and their liability for Federal taxes, or deprive them of their right to Federal protection. No State could withdraw her territory or her people from the dominant jurisdiction of the United States. But, nevertheless, a State might destroy her internal government, repeal her local laws, and discontinue her political relations with the other States. She might commit state suicide. If she sent no senators or representatives to the Federal Congress; if through her officers she emptied her treasury, abrogated her courts, disrobed herself of sovereignty, dissolved her legislature, smote her constitution to pieces with anarchic blows, and submitted to military rule or to the sway of a revolutionary central power, she did not take her territory or her people out of the Union, but she took herself out of existence as a State, leaving only her territorial boundaries to mark her place on the map. In such circumstances it became the duty of the Government of the United States to treat such disorganized Federal territory as it would treat unorganized Federal territory acquired by purchase or by conquest.

LINCOLN’S RECONSTRUCTION POLICY IN WAR AND JOHNSON’S IN PEACE

Between the assassination of President Lincoln and the meeting of Congress in December, 1865, an interval of over seven months, there was no authoritative Republican declaration of the party policy as to reconstruction. The murder of Lincoln, hastily and unjustly charged by some Union men against the entire South, was received with an outburst of rage that encouraged Thaddeus Stevens and other leading Radicals to propose that the South should be reconstructed by treating the eleven late Confederate States as conquered territory, wiping out State lines, and organizing the Territory of Grant, the Territory of Lincoln, the Territory of Sherman, the Territory of Sheridan, and other territories to be named after Union officers, which should be governed like the Territories of Idaho, Montana, and Colorado, and in due time admitted to the Union on a satisfactory showing in each case.

President Johnson opposed the program of Thad. Stevens. He called attention to the fact that before the surrender of Lee at Appomattox the white men of Tennessee elected two United States senators and a full complement of congressmen, made Brownlow governor, and gave a majority for Lincoln and Johnson. He reasoned that if Tennessee was in the Union sufficiently to provide a Vice-President who had become President, she was in the Union absolutely, and entitled to have her senators and representatives admitted to seats in Congress. Johnson’s policy was to ignore everything in the past; to readmit senators and representatives from the late Confederate States without guarantees and without delay; to withdraw our armies, and permit the Confederates to reëstablish their local governments to suit themselves. He proposed, in effect, that the Confederates, after four years of fighting, having surrendered to the Union, Union men in turn should, after four weeks of rejoicing, surrender to the Confederacy.

In assuming this position, Johnson claimed that he was carrying out Lincoln’s plan of reconstruction, for Lincoln had said long before the surrender of Lee that his purpose was to save the Union, whether such saving was accomplished by abolishing slavery or by preserving it. But Lincoln was a progressive and constructive statesman, and a policy which he might have favored to obtain peace conditioned on the disbandment of the Confederate armies, while they were still in the field as a mighty force, might not have been his policy after the enforced surrender of Lee and Johnston.

There was no time between the collapse of the Confederacy and the assassination of Lincoln for him to formulate any policy. It may be said, however, that he was not in favor of the plan of Thad. Stevens and Ben. Wade to blot out lines and names in eleven States, and deal with them as conquered territory. Lincoln’s plan was not to destroy the Southern States as existing entities, but to recognize the fact that, as far as government in those entities was concerned, “chaos had come again,” and it was the duty of Congress to provide for a reëstablishment of government there, and to prescribe the conditions on which the people of those States should be accorded national representation.

NEGRO SUFFRAGE

Congress was determined that one of the conditions of reconstruction should be the admission of colored men to the right of suffrage. Most of those who advised this were influenced by politico-economic rather than moral or sentimental considerations. They said to the South, the action of your legislatures and the utterances of your public men and newspapers all evince your determination virtually to restore slavery by establishing peonage. We must either garrison every school district in the South with soldiers at enormous cost in order to protect the Negro, or else we must give him the ballot and enable him to protect himself. If he is made a voter, the struggle of candidates to obtain his vote may protect him.

Congress, as subsequently appeared, was determined to make Negro suffrage an essential part of any plan of reconstruction. Johnson was equally determined to refuse the franchise to the black man, and he had the power to do it.

KU-KLUX OUTRAGES

One of the most potent instrumentalities in discrediting Andrew Johnson was the Ku-Klux Klan. It would be impossible within the limits of this article to give even a brief synopsis of the outrages of this remarkable band of outlaws. The report of the “Congressional Committee on Affairs in the Insurrectionary States,” made to the Forty-second Congress, fills thirteen large volumes. The Ku-Klux organization extended over eleven States. It was estimated that its membership exceeded one hundred thousand, and included men who otherwise were reputable and respected citizens. Its avowed purpose was to exclude from participation in public affairs, either as voters or office-holders, all Negroes, all “carpet-baggers,” as incomers from the North were called, and all “scallywags,” as Southern Union men were designated.

The purpose of the Ku-Klux Klan was not primarily to depredate private property, but for a long period they were merciless in dealing with those who came under their ban. A white man obnoxious to them was ordered to leave the vicinage. If he failed to obey, the torch was applied to his home, and he was openly assaulted or secretly assassinated. If he offered armed resistance, he was murdered. The colored man who attempted to exercise the right of suffrage was called from his cabin at midnight, tied to a tree, and whipped, and his house was burned to the ground. Prosecutions of the members of the Ku-Klux instituted in the Federal courts in North Carolina, in South Carolina, and in other States almost invariably resulted in failure for want of proof, hard to get; and not until the second administration of General Grant were these outlaws finally disbanded and dispersed.

PUBLIC SENTIMENT AGAINST JOHNSON’S POLICIES

Two great national conventions were held in the year 1866, one at Pittsburg and the other at Philadelphia. The latter, beginning on September 3, was made up in large measure of Southern loyalists and other civilians, among whom the tide of patriotism ran high. It made a tremendous impression upon the country and upon the recalcitrant and dissatisfied South. Among the delegates were Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John G. Whittier, eleven governors, and eight United States senators. Among the thousands of Unionists whom I met there was James A. Garfield, who had won his spurs as a major-general in the field, who subsequently served in the House of Representatives, became President, and died that tragic death which history has sadly recorded. In his joyousness and geniality he seemed to me like a great overgrown boy. While masses of shouting, cheering, and singing men were parading through Independence Square, within the sound of the Liberty Bell, that big man passed his arms affectionately about the shoulders of a young soldier, whom he did not know, and strode proudly along as though the latter had been his lifelong friend. It was enough for Garfield to know that the other was a comrade. I was the obscure young soldier.

The object of the convention was to devise means for the protection of the imperiled lives and property of loyal Southerners. The chairman, the Hon. Charles Gibbons, voiced the purpose of the convention when he said: “It is the honest sentiment of the North, held and uttered in the interests of union, of peace, and of Christianity, that when the South returns to her duty she must come in new robes, with new covenants for liberty, equality, and justice, led by her own loyal Unionists, who are free from the guilt of treason.”

The Union Soldiers’ and Sailors’ convention, at Pittsburg, followed the other in the same month. It was equally large, equally serious and determined in its character and utterances. It was attended by hosts of soldiers of all grades, from private to major-general. The speeches and resolutions breathed a sentiment of deep devotion to the restored Union, expressed a fearless determination to prevent the fruits of the nation’s sacrifices from being snatched away or diluted. Revolt against the tendencies in the White House and the South was general among the friends of the Union.

THE FAILURE TO DISLODGE THE PRESIDENT

In 1867 an act of Congress was passed depriving the President of the power to issue an amnesty proclamation, which he overrode. His disposition and his plans to defy Congress and pursue his own method of reconstructing the South caused Congress to deprive him of the command of the army, a bold act, the constitutionality of which might well be disputed at any stage, but which illustrates the almost desperate frame of mind in which Congress then was. Johnson’s continued defiance was met by the enactment into law of the Tenure-of-Office bill, which prevented him from making a change in his cabinet, his own official household.

These strained relations between the President and Congress, which had existed for more than two years, reached an open rupture on February 21, 1868, when the President informed the Senate that he had removed Edwin M. Stanton as Secretary of War, contrary to the Tenure-of-Office act. The House at once adopted a resolution, by a vote of 122 to 47 (not voting 17) to “impeach Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, of high crimes and misdemeanors.” James G. Blaine, in his “Twenty Years of Congress,” says that, in adopting this resolution of impeachment, Congress acted hastily; but it is the opinion of many still living that he did not consider the precedent circumstances, which, as much as the removal of Stanton, led 122 congressmen to cast their votes for impeachment. Still, it was probably fortunate for the nation that Johnson was saved from impeachment by one senatorial vote. If Johnson had been impeached, Ben. Wade of Ohio, a fearless Republican statesman, would have become President. Wade was a Radical of the Radicals, who always had the courage of his convictions. He probably would have given the whole force of his administration to the plan of Thad. Stevens to organize the South into territories and govern it as such, yet granting the States readmission to the Union gradually and on stipulated terms. The people of the North were so enraged over the assassination of Lincoln and the continued efforts of the Southern States to nullify the Thirteenth Amendment that they might then have approved the Stevens plan of reconstruction. At this day, nearly half a century after Appomattox, it seems best that neither the Johnson plan nor the Stevens plan did prevail.

TWO CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS

The failure to impeach Johnson accentuated the need of further constitutional amendment. As early as June 13, 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment, declaring that no State may abridge the rights of citizens of the United States, was proposed in Congress, but it was not finally ratified and declared to be in force until July 28, 1868. California never took final action on this amendment. It was rejected by Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky. New Jersey and Ohio rescinded their ratification of it. Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia at first rejected the amendment, but afterward ratified it.

Notwithstanding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, feud, anarchy, and devastation continued in the Southern country, and the failure to impeach Johnson was an incentive to continued disorder. How to secure peace, justice, and prosperity was the pressing question of the hour. Congress had tried constitutional amendments, and the South ignored them. It had tried civil-rights bills, which were useless without military power to enforce them. Then Congress said in effect to the Southern people: “If you have not a loyal white majority which can be trusted with the administration of civil government, we will enfranchise the black man. We must either garrison every school district with Union troops in order to protect the Negro from a peonage that is practical reënslavement, or we must give him the ballot and let him protect himself.” It was believed that the contending ambitions of office-seekers to obtain the colored man’s vote would cause them to treat him justly.

It was such conditions that produced the Fifteenth Amendment, providing that no State might deprive a citizen of his vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The first draft contained the word “nativity,” which was obnoxious to the Pacific coast because of the apprehension of Chinese suffrage, so the word was eliminated. Nevada was the first State to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment. California, Oregon, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and New Jersey rejected it. Georgia and Ohio at first rejected it, but finally ratified it. New York rescinded her ratification. The amendment was proposed February 26, 1869, and declared in force March 30, 1870.

Half a century ago human slavery had been banished from every civilized nation in the world except the United States. Here it was intrenched behind apparently impregnable fortifications composed of cotton-bales, pulpits, and counting-rooms, of bank vaults and political conventions.

The reverberations of Sumter’s guns changed a majority of the people of the Northern States from conservative indifference to toleration of antislavery sentiments, and, as the war progressed, into active abolitionists; and thus the Emancipation Proclamation was acclaimed by millions who three years before would have scouted such a measure. It is more than forty-seven years since the last gun was fired in the Civil War; it is more than forty years since the last measure of reconstruction was enacted. The generals and statesmen of that historic era have journeyed on. The veterans in the soldiers’ homes grow rapidly fewer in number, and it will not be many years until the last of them will have joined the great majority. The acerbities and rancors of the war have been submerged in Lethean waters, and the Southern States, once desolated, have become prosperous and powerful supporters of the Old Flag.

THE CAPITOL, FROM PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE]

[3] See page 195 for a reference to the Fifteenth Amendment, which
introduced into the fundamental law the phrase, “without
distinction of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

EMANCIPATION AND IMPEACHMENT

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE SENATOR WHO PROPOSED THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT, AND WAS ONE OF THE SEVEN REPUBLICANS WHO THWARTED THE ATTEMPT TO IMPEACH PRESIDENT JOHNSON

BY GENERAL JOHN B. HENDERSON

THE “RECALL” FOR PRESIDENTS

Article II, Sec. 4, of the Constitution provides that “The President, Vice-President, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Thus the principle of the “recall,” in very broad terms, has been written into our fundamental law. Human nature is such that the idea of resorting to this remedy originates first in the minds of political opponents. As applicable to Presidents, the recall was probably much desired by the enemies of John Adams, the second President, and of Andrew Jackson, the seventh. Fortunately it has actually been invoked only against the seventeenth President, Andrew Johnson, who owed his position to the recall by assassination of Abraham Lincoln. His impeachment, I believe, was due mainly to a counter-tide of passion, prejudice, and political revenge. His trial formed a crisis in the life of the nation, the dangerous import of which may not yet be fully understood. His rescue from conviction by the narrow margin of one vote was followed by demands for the recall of the seven Republican senators who voted with the Democrats. I happened to be the youngest of the seven, though not the least berated. By the refusal of a reëlection, all of the seven were retired to private life. Then out of several years of bitterness came the wisdom of reflection. Those who had reviled began to praise and finally to utter words of thankfulness. Even some of the leaders of impeachment, in the calm of reason, have put on record frank confessions of error. Thus it has been my happiness to live to see the keenest disappointment of my public life transformed into its chief honor.

BORDER-STATE INFLUENCE AND WARFARE

In his great wisdom Lincoln early perceived that unless antislavery sentiment could be sustained in the border States, the Federal cause was likely to fail. With that belief he sought information and counsel from those men in Congress who, like myself, had been bred in the shadow of slavery and who yet desired the extinction of the institution. Though born in Danville, Virginia, most of my early life was spent at Louisiana, a town north of St. Louis, on the Missouri side of the Mississippi. There I began to practise law in 1848 and to hear of a lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, located at Springfield, seventy-five miles to the northeast. In that year he was serving his only term in Congress, while I was beginning public life as a member of the Missouri legislature, to which I returned in 1856. Though a member of the Electoral College in 1856 which made Buchanan President, I was strongly opposed to his Kansas policy. In 1860 I was an elector on the Stephen A. Douglas ticket. I had inherited slave property, but was convinced that slavery was an economic drawback in Missouri. On her borders, east and north, white settlers were founding prosperous communities, and avoiding us because white labor would not compete with slave labor. My only purchase of slaves was made on the appeal of a black man who had built the fires in my office. He and his wife and son were sold at auction to pay the debts of their master. I bought them in for about $1400. Thereafter they never served me; but as the law required that they should be in regular employ, I hired them out, they taking the wages.

Civil war was an actual fact in Missouri before the sword and the torch were at work in the other border States. Early in 1861 our legislature, which was secessionist in sentiment, provided for a state convention to join, as they hoped, the other seceding States; but, to their great surprise, a majority of Union delegates were chosen at the special election, I being among that majority. Ex-Governor Sterling Price, then classed with the opponents of secession, became president of the convention which assembled soon after Lincoln’s first inaugural made it plain that a conflict was inevitable. As Jackson, our governor at that time, was disloyal, the life of the convention was prolonged by adjournment, during which the secession element ranged itself under Jackson and Price, and the Union element, with the continuing authority of the convention, grew strong enough to organize and to elect Governor Gamble. Under the arrangements for home defense, I organized a brigade, and in General Schofield’s command operated against the raiders who burned bridges and disturbed northeastern Missouri during the first year of the war. The conditions were such that no man could safely remain neutral. Unless he was openly for one side or the other, he was suspected by both, and doubly liable to pillage and arrest.

THE TREND TOWARD EMANCIPATION

From the field I was sent to the United States Senate in January, 1862, to fill the unexpired term of Trusten Polk, who had joined the South. In March, President Lincoln sent to Congress his message asking for a joint resolution favoring the gradual abolishment of slavery with compensation. A few days later he asked the border States delegations to a conference at the White House in which he urged that policy without gaining much encouragement. On July 12 he made a second direct appeal to the same delegations, in conference, and urged that if the border States would adopt measures of compensated emancipation, the war must shortly end, since then, and not till then, would the South realize that slavery was doomed. Twenty of them signed a written qualified refusal to urge his recommendation; seven assented in a prepared address; and Horace Maynard and I wrote individual replies. I had been absent from the conference on business relating to my duties as senator, but I gave the President my view that, while I had supported the measure when first introduced, I did not share his belief that it alone would bring the war to an early termination. But I added that in such a period of national distress I knew of “no human institution too sacred for discussion, no material interest belonging to the citizen that he should not willingly place upon the altar of his country, if demanded by the public good. The man who cannot now sacrifice party and put aside selfish considerations is more than half disloyal. Pride of opinion, based upon sectional jealousies, should not be permitted to control the decision of any political question. These remarks are general, but apply with peculiar force to the people of the border States at present.”

THE FAILURE OF PLANS TO PURCHASE EMANCIPATION

These sentiments indicated that I was drifting toward Lincoln’s position that emancipation was indispensable to the saving of the Union. After the July conference at the White House, a general bill offering aid to the border States if they would adopt compensated emancipation was introduced in Congress, but not brought to final action. In the autumn, at Mr. Lincoln’s request, I went to Missouri to take part in the agitation of the question, and the reversal of sentiment shown at the November election seemed altogether favorable. So, on December 10, I introduced a bill in the Senate appropriating twenty millions of dollars to aid Missouri if her people would adopt compensated emancipation. At the same time Congressman Noell, in the House, gave notice of a similar bill, but reducing the aid to ten millions. His bill passed the House on January 6, 1863, and was sent to the Senate, where, on February 7, a compromise of fifteen millions was adopted; but the pro-slavery members from Missouri gathered enough strength to prevent action by the House. Meantime Lincoln’s proclamation of freedom to all slaves in rebellious territory had gone into effect on the first of January.

The idea of compensated emancipation for the border States made no further progress in Congress, and probably lost ground in the North, for a reason humorously stated by Senator Jacob Collamer of Vermont. During the recess he addressed a meeting of several hundred neighbors and stated that the measure would call for the payment of about $300 each for four million slaves. He asked them to go home and consider what they would advise their representatives to do. An old leader in the town waxed eloquent over the fact that the North shared the responsibility for slavery and ought to help settle the bill, and, though poor, he declared himself willing to pay his share. But in a day or two he was back again with a different opinion.

“Senator,” he exclaimed, “me and wife and the boys figure that our share would be just about all we’ve got; so I guess you might as well let that damned Negro question alone.”

THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT

A year later the distress of the nation had enforced a more united sentiment, and on January 11, 1864, I offered in the Senate a joint resolution to abolish slavery in the United States. After a good deal of discussion over the wording of the resolution, Senator Sumner offering one form, and Senator Trumbull suggesting the terms of the ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in all the Northwest, the latter was favored. Though the requisite two-thirds vote was obtained in the Senate, the House did not acquiesce until after a whole year of discussion. The bill became a law on January 31, 1865. A hundred guns announced the event, and the rejoicing was great and spontaneous.

LINCOLN AND THE LIQUOR HABIT

At the second inauguration of Lincoln I was chairman of the committee which escorted the President to the Capitol, and sat by his side while Andrew Johnson, after taking the oath as Vice-President, harangued the crowded senate chamber. During the painful ordeal, Mr. Lincoln’s head drooped in the deepest humiliation. As I offered him my arm for the procession to the steps of the Capitol, where he delivered the Inaugural, he turned to the marshal and said, “Don’t let Johnson speak outside.”

Senator Doolittle, who had escorted the Vice-President elect to the Capitol, told me that when they went into Mr. Hamlin’s room Johnson said to the retiring Vice-President:

“Mr. Hamlin, I have been feeling very ill. Can you give me some good brandy?”

A bottle of French brandy was found, and to brace his nerves for the task before him, he poured out the full glass that wrought the mischief. His reputation was that of a temperate man; and this was his only show of inebriety; but the scene was so deeply humiliating that a caucus of senators a few days afterward seriously considered the propriety of asking him to resign as their presiding officer.

Mr. Lincoln’s aversion to liquor and tobacco was well known. He once told me with relish of a rebuke for his abstinence given by a friendly stage-driver. During the time that he was a circuit lawyer, he sometimes walked from one county court to another. While on such a tramp a stage overtook him and the driver invited him to take a seat on the box. After they had chatted for a while the driver produced a whisky-flask, saying:

“Stranger, won’t you take a drink?”

“No, thank you,” Lincoln replied; “I never drink.”

A little later the driver drew some tobacco from his pocket and said:

“Stranger, won’t you have a chew?”

Lincoln answered:

“No, thank you, I never chew.”

After a period of reflection the driver said:

“Stranger, do you smoke?”

Lincoln replied:

“No, I never smoke.”

Looking at him quizzically, the driver exclaimed:

“So you’re one of those men I’ve heard of who have no small vices.”

To which Lincoln answered:

“It is true that I don’t use liquor or tobacco.”

Then the driver turned on him with the conclusive remark:

“Stranger, I’ll tell you what I think: those men who have no small vices seldom have any large virtues.”

I once heard Mr. Lincoln tell of another liquor experience, this time at the expense of Senator David Davis, who was present and enjoyed it as much as the rest of the company. While attending a session of court presided over by Judge Davis, the latter overtook him one morning on the road, and asked him to get into the Davis carriage, which was drawn by a pair of spirited horses, driven by a trusted coachman. They traveled at a rate which made Lincoln uneasy, and soon entered on a piece of new road abounding in ruts and stumps. As the carriage bumped and swayed, Lincoln, in much alarm, turned to the judge and asked:

“Mr. Davis, isn’t your driver drunk?”

GENERAL JOHN B. HENDERSON]

“No,” replied the judge, “Michael is a sober man and never takes anything.”

After a jar which nearly upset them, Lincoln asked that the carriage should be stopped, so that he could get out. The judge expostulated, but when they struck another stump, Lincoln exclaimed:

“Mr. Davis, your driver _is_ drunk!”

Thereupon Davis loudly demanded of the coachman that he should stop, and, observing him closely, saw the whole truth in the wild gleam of his eyes. The judge indignantly exclaimed:

“Michael, you are drunk!”

And Michael, with an approving leer, answered:

“Judge Davis, that’s the correctest decision you’ve rendered in the last twelve months.”

LINCOLN’S CLEMENCY

My last interview with Mr. Lincoln occurred after the adjournment of the extra session of the Senate about the middle of March, 1865. I went to the White House to ask the President to pardon a number of the men who had been languishing in Missouri prisons for various offenses, all political. Some of them had been my schoolmates, and their mothers, sisters, and sweethearts had persisted in appeals that I should use my influence for their release. Since it was evident to me that the Confederacy was in its last throes, I felt that the pardon of most of these prisoners would do more good than harm. I had separated them according to the gravity of the offense into three classes, and handing the first list to him, I said:

“Mr. President, the session is closed, and I am about to start for home. The war is virtually over. Grant is pretty certain to get Lee and his army, and Sherman is plainly able to take care of Johnston. In my opinion, the best way to prevent guerrilla warfare at the end of organized resistance will be to show clemency to these rebel sympathizers.”

Lincoln shook his head and said:

“Henderson, I am deeply indebted to you and I want to show it, but don’t ask me at this time to pardon rebels.”

Then I offered new arguments, but he replied in a grieved tone:

“I can’t do it! People are continually blaming me for being too lenient. Don’t encourage such fellows by inducing me to turn loose a lot of men who, perhaps, ought to be hanged.”

I answered:

“Mr. President, these prisoners and their friends tell me that for them the Rebellion is over, and it will surely have a good influence now to let them go.”

He answered:

“Henderson, my conscience tells me that I must not do it.”

But I persisted:

“Mr. President, you _should_ do it. It is necessary for good feeling in Missouri that these people should be released.”

“If I sign this list as a whole, will you be responsible for the future good behavior of the men?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then I will take the risk and sign it.” He wrote the word “pardoned,” signed the general order of release, and returned the paper to me.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” I said, “but that is not all; I have another list here.”

“You are not going to make me let loose another lot!” he exclaimed.